Gender and sexuality

I have a long-standing interest in issues of gender and sexuality, particularly those of queer genders and sexualities. One strand of research, with Dr Alon Lischinsky (Oxford Brookes University), uses a 1.4 billion word corpus of online erotica to explore relationships between genres, reader responses, character roles and agency, and depictions of consent, negotiation, and sexual practices. A key component of this research is problematizing the relationship between “real world” identities, activities and practices and textual representations and constructions of these.

The other strand focuses on the media representation of transgender people. I have published on the media representation of a trans woman named Lucy Meadows; I focus on the practice of misgendering through quotation of key interviewees through triangulating discourse analysis and corpus linguistic approaches.