Browsing by Author "Bailey, Aimee"

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    “Fairness versus inclusion”: Representations of transgender athletes in British newspaper reports
    (De Gruyter, 2023-11-20) Bailey, Aimee; Jones, Lucy
    Following the increasing visibility of successful trans athletes and the rise of anti-gender movements such as ‘gender critical feminism’, policies concerning trans women’s participation in elite women’s sport have sparked intense debate in online and traditional media. Although policies about trans inclusion have been in place at the highest levels of sports, such as the Olympics, for decades, the perceived disruption of long-standing categories which are rooted in the concept of sex as a binary and immutable fact has proven deeply controversial. The issue also relates to broader discourse around the inclusion of trans women in female spaces more generally; this has become highly divisive, as gender critical voices argue that trans inclusion threatens women’s ‘sex-based rights’. We investigate the discourse surrounding this debate via a specific case study: representations of the American swimmer and trans woman Lia Thomas, whose win at a women’s 500-yard freestyle event in March 2022 led to widespread news coverage. We conduct corpus-assisted critical discourse analysis of British newspaper coverage of this story, taking a queer and feminist approach to the data. We find that news coverage of trans inclusion in elite sport typically reproduces cisnormative assumptions about binary sex, and that implicitly transphobic language is often used to frame trans identities as abnormal. In this way, the inclusion of trans women in sport is framed as being fundamentally unfair to cisgender women. We argue that this discourse suppresses any serious consideration of how trans women could be included in elite sport, and advocate for media coverage which is informed by - and which represents - a more balanced range of perspectives.
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    Girl-on-girl culture: Constructing normative identities in a corpus of sex advice for queer women
    (John Benjamins, 2019-08-20) Bailey, Aimee
    This article investigates the construction of sex advice for queer women as it features on the world’s most popular lesbian website, Autostraddle. Based in the United States, the website is a “progressively feminist” online community for lesbian, bisexual and other queer women. Using multimodal critical discourse analysis and corpus linguistics, this article explores how representations of sexual and gender identity facilitate the construction of homonormativity on the website. It argues that these representations involve a tension between exclusivity and inclusivity. On the one hand, Autostraddle wants to construct an exclusive markedly lesbian subjectivity and a subcultural model of lesbian sex, which is lacking in mainstream culture. On the other hand, it aims to be inclusive of transgender and bisexual women, and to deconstruct the idea of sexual homogeneity. Findings show that Autostraddle discursively negotiates these competing goals to construct a distinctly “queer female” normativity centred on young cisgender feminine lesbians.
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    ‘Go home to the second wave!’: Discourses of trans inclusion and exclusion in a queer women’s online community
    (Elsevier, 2022-11-12) Bailey, Aimee
    As the visibility of trans movements has increased in recent years, so too has the antagonism between trans rights supporters and some sections of the feminist and lesbian communities (Phipps, 2016; Hines, 2017, Pearce et al., 2020). This antagonism is especially pronounced in digital spaces, where online discussions have fuelled an increasing polarisation of the debate (Hines, 2017). This paper examines the representation of trans identities on Autostraddle: a popular entertainment, news and lifestyle website for lesbian and bisexual women. It focuses on the longest and most controversial comment thread in the 2-million-word Queer Women’s Advice Corpus. The thread is a response to a guide to dating trans women for cis women. Using a combination of critical discourse analysis, sociocultural linguistics and corpus linguistics, I unpack the argumentation strategies (Fairclough and Fairclough, 2012) that commenters use to construct stances on the inclusion of trans women in the queer women’s online space. The major strategies include persuasive definitions of lesbian, imaginaries about trans women’s hypothetical bodies and the illegitimation of trans-exclusionary commenters as bad feminists and community outsiders. I find that that trans inclusion is successfully negotiated on a community level, but that trans women are still problematised on an intimate level due to their (imagined) genitalia. Trans women are ‘hyperembodied’ in the data, with the presence or absence of a penis acting as the focal point for inclusion and desirability.
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    Support group or transgender lobby? Representing Mermaids in the British press
    (Taylor and Francis, 2023-12-18) Bailey, Aimee; Mackenzie, Jai
    This article examines representations of Mermaids, a charity that supports trans young people and their families, in the British press. Using corpus-assisted critical discourse analysis, we identify and chart patterns in reporting between Mermaids’ inception as a charity in 2015, and 2022, a turbulent year for both the charity and trans people in the UK more generally. The findings show that, in the early years, there is relatively little attention to Mermaids in the press. Where they are mentioned, the charity is represented as a useful source of advice and support, and their service users as happy and united. However, 2018 represents a turning point, with increasingly negative and misleading portrayals of Mermaids coinciding with a rise in public interest and funding. By 2019, media interest in the charity has surged and the impression of Mermaids as a support group for families is supplanted by the image of a powerful, dangerous and controversial organisation. We argue that the increasingly excessive, negative and polarised reporting around Mermaids is a strategy for indirectly delegitimising and attacking the lives of trans young people themselves. In a burgeoning culture war, Mermaids is used as a weapon against the very people they seek to support.