The South African news media and representations of sexuality

Abstract

The South African media are arguably characterised by greater variation in terms of the cultures and first languages of their readership than the English language media in many other countries. Thus, variation is to be expected in terms of how sexuality is represented to index the different worldviews of the readership. The most read local national daily paper (SAARF 2016), the Daily Sun, while published in English, reflects its multilingual, largely working-class, audience by using lexical items from local languages. In this chapter I investigate the representation of sexuality in a corpus of over ten years of reporting in the Daily Sun, from 2006 to 2017. Corpus linguistics is ideal in combination with critical discourse analysis for research which seeks to explore broad patterns of usage in a corpus of many texts. However, when the data include ‘equivalent’ terms from various languages, and when there is considerable variation in spelling and morphology with the same word, classic corpus techniques like simple frequency searches or concordance sorts need some adaptation. In this study, I have made creative use of wild cards and lemmatisation to explore patterns in the representation of sexuality, and thereby build up a picture of how sexuality is viewed in South Africa.