“Queer strange, or queer gay?" : a diachronic mixed-method perspective on linguistic representations of queerness in scripted North American television shows

Due to the carefully planned, practiced, and edited nature of scripted television shows, their use of language can be assumed to be purposeful and self-aware to a very high degree (Marshall and Werndly 2002, 78). As such, “TV dialogue” (in the sense of Bednarek 2018, 7) can be assumed to allow us to understand “how language used in television texts connects to a world outside the text” (Marshall and Werndly 2002, 94). With this presumed “culture–media dialectic, where TV dialogue both constructs and reflects cultures and their ideologies” (Bednarek 2018, 3), the question arises of if and how real-life sociopolitical changes may be mirrored in TV dialogue. Meanwhile, the influence that behaviours witnessed on TV may have on the behaviours and opinions of a viewer has long been documented (e.g., Bandura 1977). Moreover, recent studies have found indications that this may be especially true with regards to the representation of marginalized groups on television, both in terms of self-image, as well as in terms of their perception by the general public (e.g., Pugh 2018, Battles and Hilton-Morrow 2002). Accordingly, this thesis project investigates linguistic representations of the queer community in scripted North American television shows in the TV Corpus (Davies 2021) from a diachronic perspective and using a mixed-method approach in two stages. Both stages feature elements of qualitative and quantitative analysis, so as to “provide a systematic analytical framework and empirical data for talking about the expression of ideology through dialogue in episodic television” (Bednarek 2015, 227). This project thus aims to account for some of the great complexity inherent to the phenomenon of queer “representation” (in the sense of Hall 1997, 1) in TV language. Stage 1 is comprised of a large-scale diachronic analysis of selected current terms for queer identities in the TV Corpus via quantitative frequency measures, collocates, and extensive manual annotation for semantic meaning that “applies a rather deductive methodology in selecting specific words which are relevant for analysis, but also offers concordance lines as a basis for further (qualitative) interpretation” (Wodak and Meyer 2009, 30). Taking into account the interplay between alternative meanings of the selected terms and whether they are, for instance, “regularly used in contexts of good news or bad news or judgement” (Tognini-Bonelli 2001, 111), this stage offers a bird’s eye view on how certain terms for queer identities are used in scripted TV dialogue across time. Stage 2, on the other hand, is focused on a more fine-grained comparison of the linguistic behaviours and the construction (e.g., Bednarek 2010) of prominent queer and non-queer characters. For this stage, a total of 60 episode transcripts from six shows contained in the TV Corpus were extracted and annotated with speaker information using the UAM CorpusTool (O’Donnell 2008). Said episodes were then examined further using both quantitative measures and a qualitative analysis aiming to understand “the conditions of the speakers’ or characters’ experience as located within structures of power” (Leap 2015, 661). As such, these analyses take complementary perspectives in an in-depth comparison of the language use and power conditions of queer and non-queer characters both within the same show, as well as across shows, TV genres, and different times of production. Taken together, the two stages thus aim to provide insight into the complex interplay between scripted TV dialogue, its ways of representing selected queer identities in general (Stage 1), individual queer characters and their power conditions in particular (Stage 2), and real-world sociopolitical change. As such, this thesis also argues for an understanding of queer representation that is more nuanced than a binary distinction of “represented” vs. “not represented”, as such a more simplistic view cannot account for the whole range of ways in which the queer community may be represented on TV, as has also been noted by Baker (2005, 225).