The USAL-UVA Linguistics Research Seminars 2021-2022 (2)

About the event

12/17/2021 16:30

Salamanca, España

Organized by Javier Ruano-García (USAL), Laura Filardo-Llamas (UVA)

Categories:: Humanities and sociocultural

Keywords:: Corpus Linguistics; critical discourse analysis; multimodality

Same-sex parents in children’s picturebooks: Examining representations using                                                                                   corpus-assisted multimodal critical discourse analysis

Mark McGlashan (Birmingham City University)

Children’s picturebooks featuring same-sex (lesbian and gay) parents/caregivers have been historically rare yet extremely controversial – in their short history of publication they have become some of the most requested-to-be-banned books of modern times. Despite there being few of these picturebooks in existence, frequent and consistent requests have been made to ban books such as And Tango Makes Three (a true story about two male penguins who ‘adopt’ a lone egg in New York Central Zoo) and King and King (a fairy tale about two princes getting married). This talk begins by outlining some of the relationships between language, gender, sexuality, childhood, and children’s literature in relation to picturebooks featuring same-sex parent families (SSPFs) before discussing corpus-assisted multimodal critical discourse analysis as an approach to the analysis of a corpus of over 50 picturebooks, including a discussion of methods for interpreting multimodal collocation, which I call collustration. Following this, findings are discussed which concentrate on the discursive constructions and representations of parenthood, family, and gay and lesbian sexualities with reference to the wider social situation of gay and lesbian people. Findings suggest that the representations of SSPFs in this picturebook corpus are underpinned by discourses of homonormativity (Duggan 2002; 2003) and attempt to position families with same-sex parents as ‘a different kind of family’ rather than as something radically different from families with heterosexual parents.

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