Last week was spent in at Witwatersrand (Wits) University in Johannesburg where I had been invited to give a workshop on corpus methods, as well as a talk on some of my own research. The week was topped off by the first Discourse, Gender and Sexuality South-South Dialogues Conference which was organised by Tommaso Milani. Many of the papers at the conference used qualitative methods (analyses of visual data seemed particularly popular) but there were a few papers, including my own, which used corpus methods.
These included a paper by Megan Edwards who combined a corpus approach with CDA and visual analysis to examine a small corpus of pamphlets found around Johannesburg – these pamphlets advertise remedies for sexual and relationship problems and Megan demonstrated that embedded within the adverts were gendered discourses – relating to notions of ideal masculinity and femininity. This is probably one of the few corpora in existence where the top lexical word is penis.
Another interesting paper was by Sally Hunt who examined corpora of articles about sex work in two South African newspapers, focussing on the period when SA hosted the World Cup. She found that while there was a more balanced set of representations of sex workers than expected, they were still largely represented as immoral and criminalised for their actions while the agency of their clients was largely obscured. Sally is a lecturer at Rhodes University, Grahamstown, and has recently completed the construction of a 1 million word South African corpus, using the Brown family sampling frame.
During the workshop that I hosted at the university I got participants to use AntConc to examine a small corpus of recent newspaper articles about feminists, and a number of interesting patterns emerged from the analyses of concordances and collocates that took place. For example, a representation of feminists as war-mongers or vocally annoying/fierce e.g. shrill, strident etc was very prevalent and perhaps expected, although we were surprised to see a sub-set of words which related feminists to Islam like feminist Taleban and feminist fatwas (killing two ideological birds with one stone). Additionally, it was interesting to see how these negative discourses shouldn’t always be taken at face value. They were sometimes quoted in order to be critical of them, although it was often only with expanded concordance lines that this could be seen. In all, a productive week, and it was good to meet so many people who were interested in finding out more about corpus linguistics.
