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Language, normativity, and sexual orientation obsessive-compulsive disorder (SO-OCD): A corpus-assisted discourse analysis

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  21 August 2019

Elvis Coimbra-Gomes  and
Heiko Motschenbacher
Elvis Coimbra-Gomes*
Affiliation:
Queen Mary University of London, UK
Heiko Motschenbacher
Affiliation:
Western Norway University of Applied Sciences, Bergen, Norway
*
Address for correspondence: Elvis Coimbra-Gomes, Arts Research Centre, Linguistics Department, Queen Mary University of London, Mile End Road, London E1 4NS, UK[email protected]
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Abstract

This article presents a case study of the discursive construction of sexual orientation obsessive-compulsive disorder (SO-OCD) as it surfaces in posts to an online mental health forum. SO-OCD is an anxiety disorder that involves having unwanted, intrusive thoughts as a consequence of conflict with normative sexual beliefs. The study focuses on the way normativity regulates communication about sexual identities, desires, and practices in a corpus of online posts by heterosexual men who pathologically doubt their sexual identity. Drawing on quantitative and qualitative corpus linguistic methods, we investigate how writers linguistically orient to normativity in their posts. More specifically, analyses of keywords, n-grams, and concordances are used to uncover linguistic mechanisms that play a central role in users’ orientation to normativity and in the obsessive-compulsive behaviours associated with SO-OCD. (Sexual orientation obsessive-compulsive disorder (SO-OCD), heterosexuality, masculinity, normativity, heteronormativity, critical discourse analysis, corpus linguistics)

Type
Articles
Information
Language in Society , Volume 48 , Special Issue 4: Navigating Normativities: Gender and Sexuality in Text and Talk , September 2019 , pp. 565 - 584
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2019 

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