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BIO
Mark McGlashan is Lecturer in English Language and Associate Director of Research in the Birmingham Institute of Media and English at Birmingham City University.
Before joining BCU, he held research positions at Lancaster University's Centre for Corpus Approaches to Social Science and Security Lancaster, as well as in the WMG Cyber Security Centre at The University of Warwick. He held an ESRC-funded PhD in Applied Linguistics from Lancaster University, and he is a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy (FHEA).
His research interests predominantly centre on the synthesis and application of methods from Corpus Linguistics and (Critical) Discourse Studies to study a broad range of social issues, including nationalism, racism, sexism, and homophobia. His recent work has focused on combining his interests with computational methods for the collection and analysis of large amounts of online social media, forum, and news data to analyse the language of rape threats, far-right nationalism, and antisemitism.
Further information can be found in his personal website: https://sites.google.com/view/mark-mcglashan/home?authuser=0
Same-sex parents in children’s picturebooks: examining representations using corpus-assisted multimodal critical discourse analysis
Same-sex parents in children’s picturebooks: examining representations using corpus-assisted multimodal critical discourse analysis
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.
References
Duggan, L. (2002). The new heteronormativity: the sexual politics of neoliberalism. In: R. Castronovo & D. D. Nelson (eds.). Materializing Democracy: towards a revitalized cultural politics. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. pp. 175–194.
Duggan, L. (2003). The Twilight of Equality? Neoliberalism, Cultural Politics, and the Attack on Democracy. Boston, MA: Beacon Press.
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