Time to celebrate!

(image from http://www.stonewall.org.uk)

On Wednesday 17th July 2013, the Marriage (Same-Sex Couples) Bill was officially made law when it received Royal Assent from the Queen. We're delighted to be able to carry out our discourse analysis of the equal marriage debate from this perspective, though remain as motivated as ever to reveal the linguistic strategies of homophobia used by many opponents of the Bill during their discussions in the media.

Key issues that we're focusing on, in our analysis of the Moral Maze broadcasts, include the following:

- How is indirectness used as a strategy to produce 'disembodied' arguments? Opponents of the Bill are often reluctant to speak directly about the nature of same-sex relationships or why same-sex couples shouldn't have the same rights as heterosexuals, and so make quite significant use of imaginaries and imagery in order to produce what appears to be a more objective stance. In doing so, explicitly anti-gay statements can be avoided, though the implicit message remains clearly homophobic. For example, the likening of same-sex relationships to incest or bestiality.

- How is metaphor used to define marriage as fundamentally heterosexual, thus 'simply not an option for gay couples'? Marriage is represented as a frail, vulnerable object which is at risk of being 'unravelled' or 'eroded'; what weight does this offer to the argument that straight marriage should be 'protected' from homosexuals?

- What argumentation structures and tactics are employed by those who are anti-marriage equality? We believe stance-taking to be central to this, and that indirectly homophobic stances in particular are enabled by the use of imaginaries and metaphor. By investigating these stances via discourse analysis, we hope to show the means by which implicitly homophobic messages are presented as logical, moral, and normal. In turn, we hope to examine how such messages continue to carry weight in our society.

A moral maze...

The UK government is a significant step closer to marriage equality for same-sex couples, now that the Marriage (Same-Sex Couples) Bill has passed through Parliament. It now has to be passed by the Lords to become law. The day after the Bill was overwhelmingly won in Parliament, there was a second edition of the BBC panel show The Moral Maze . We're now beginning to analyse this, as we've already been looking at the first edition, broadcast in February 2012 when the government put out a public consultation on the matter. In particular, we're hoping to find whether the themes that emerged in the 2012 debate are strengthened or modified in the 2013 one, particularly given that it is now apparent that there is significant public and political support for the change.

The case against same-sex marriage can largely be characterised, in the 2012 edition of The Moral Maze, by the following arguments:

• It's risky to try to redefine marriage - we don't know what it will lead to, and it could be a 'slippery slope'
• Marriage is fundamentally about biological complementarity, i.e. two people who are of the opposite sex to one another
• Marriage is the sacrosanct place where children are created

In contrast, the case for same-sex marriage 2012 debate can be characterised by the following:

• Society has changed, and so should the institution of marriage - we ought to extend it to same-sex couples to be a truly equal society
• Marriage is fundamentally about love and commitment
• Civil partnerships do not represent true equality

It is noteworthy that overtly homophobic discourses are avoided by those who oppose same-sex marriage in the 2012 debate - at no point is language used which characterises gay people as 'unnatural' or 'deviant'. Similarly, though religious discourses are consistently drawn upon throughout the debate, biblical language is never used and 'God's will' is never referred to. This is in quite a stark contrast to some of the discussions that were reported in the media at the time, such as the attack on the plans by Cardinal Keith O'Brien. In order to draw solid arguments from a logical, defendable standpoint, those against marriage equality in the first debate evidently avoid rhetoric that could be interpreted as extreme, archaic or bigoted.

We look forward to analysing the latest debate to see how the argument might have shifted, and are hoping to employ aspects of Fairclough and Fairclough's approach to assist us in doing this.

In other news...we're continuing to compile news articles since the debates surrounding marriage equality began, and will eventually be employing corpus analysis to analyse these.

Work in progress...

It's an exciting time for those interested in how marriage equality is being discussed in the media; the coalition government have recently announced that they are preparing a Bill which would allow same-sex couples the same marriage rights as straight couples. Importantly, religious institutions won't be forced to marry same-sex couples if the Bill is successful.

As one might expect, there are arguments being made very loudly for and against the proposal. We're currently collecting data from British newspapers as the story develops, and will be building a corpus to enable us to analyse these coherently. We think it might be interesting to see which authors refer to 'gay marriage' as opposed to 'marriage equality', for example, and to see how religious discourses are used both in favour of equality and against it. The sorts of articles we're interested in include 'Why to be against gay marriage is not bigoted' and 'These equal marriage reforms are historic, because in 21st century Britain the meaning of family goes beyond man, woman and child'.

We're also currently analysing an edition of The Moral Maze which was broadcast in March 2012, when the government first put out a public consultation on equal marriage, using Evaluation framework (Thompson and Huntson 1999) to establish how contributors on both sides of the marriage equality argument use language to  frame same-sex marriage as healthy, deviant, positive, dangerous, natural or immoral (amongst other things!). We'll be updating this blog as we get further on with our research.

If any readers come across articles, blogs or other material that they think we should include in our analysis, do let us know!

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Thompson, G. and Huntson, S. (1999) 'Evaluation: An Introduction' in Huntson, S. and Thompson, G. (Eds.) Evaluation in Tests: Authorial Stance and the Construction of Discourse. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1-26.

Welcome to our blog!

This is the blog for the Discourses of Marriage research group. We are a sub-group of the North and Midlands Language and Gender Research Group, and are based at a number of universities across England. We are: Laura Coffey (Huddersfield), Lucy Jones (Hull), Sara Mills (Sheffield Hallam), Laura Paterson (Leeds) and Isabelle van der Bom (Sheffield).

We're particularly interested in the media discussion and debate surrounding the UK government's current proposals to change the civil marriage laws to include same-sex couples. At the moment, 'civil partnerships' exist for same-sex couples. Heterosexual couples may not have a civil partnership and, crucially, same-sex couples may not have a 'marriage'. The two partnerships are equal in most legal senses, yet remain distinct from one another. There is considerable debate at the moment around whether marriage should be available for same-sex couples as well as heterosexual couples, and we are interested in discovering how the language used within these debates positions gay and lesbian relationships in contrast to heterosexual ones.

In this blog, we will post about the approach we're taking towards the analysis of discourses which surround the issue of marriage equality. We hope that this blog will be of use to other linguists and academic researchers, but also to anybody who is interested in how the debate is unfolding and how the language used in the media and by social commentators is impacting on how gay and lesbian people are being represented.