Approaches to discourses of marriage

As part of the Discourses of Marriage Research Group (DoM) founded by Dr. Lucy Jones (University of Nottingham) in 2012, we have been thinking, talking, and writing about the language of marriage for some time; to date the group has published four papers, focusing particularly on same-sex marriage debates in the UK. When in 2016 the British Association of Applied Linguistics (BAAL) put out a call for events in a series in conjunction with Cambridge University Press (CUP), the idea of an interdisciplinary seminar dedicated to discourses of marriage seemed a good one. As a group, we knew we were not the only people looking at the topic – globally, the socio-political landscape was, and still is, shifting all the time. We expected it would be fascinating to bring a range of scholars together, but we were pleasantly surprised nonetheless by the diversity and the scope of the abstracts we received, and those papers that we were able to accommodate in two days of presentations. By the end of the event on September 2017, over coffee in the wood-panelled library in the University of Liverpool's School of the Arts, this special issue of Critical Discourse Studies had been conceived.

The collection here moves far beyond the scope of DoM, bringing together researchers from across the globe: there are contributions from scholars working in Belgium (via California) and Taiwan, as well as papers from UK-based researchers looking at international contexts, such as Turkey and Germany. Our contributors are not all linguists or discourse analysts but include psychology scholars, and we are extremely pleased that the papers herein draw on a range of analytical frameworks and methods, including corpus linguistics, linguistic landscapes, ethnography, and reflective practice. Their foci, too, are diverse, from the language of the powerful – government legislation and mass media – to the relatively powerless or less often heard, such as former child brides, and women who have never married. Not all of the authors here use precisely the same notion of discourse(s), but each paper offers some guidance as to how the term is operationalised.

Beginning this issue, Ursula Kania's paper on same-sex marriage legislation in Germany adds to a growing body of literature on media representations of same-sex/equal marriage debates in different national contexts. Focusing on two key periods from 2000 to 2017, Kania draws upon corpus linguistics and critical discourse analysis to investigate German press coverage of marriage equality legislation. She evidences the different discourses drawn upon by the German media, considers whether pro- or anti-marriage equality voices are given space, and demonstrates how colloquialisms such as Homo-Ehe (homo-marriage) came to be accepted and used across media texts as legislation changed. The examples taken from her corpora demonstrate an understanding in the press that to label same-sex partnerships and opposite-sex marriage as different things suggests a fundamental difference between the two and leaves ‘a basis for discrimination’. Furthermore, Kania notes a shift from Homo-Ehe to the phrase Ehe fuer alle (marriage for all), with the latter – a slogan chosen for pro-equality campaigns – being seen as a more equal and inclusive term. Kania's work is a strong addition to the scholarship on same-sex marriage debates and their relationship to equality. There are similarities between her findings and the work of other scholars in this field of enquiry, such as the presence of the slippery-slope metaphor (see, for example, van der Bom et al., 2015) and the foregrounding of the perceived relationship between marriage and family (e.g. Turner et al., 2018). However, there are also points of divergence – such as the relative absence of religious discourses – and thus her work facilitates cross-linguistic, cross-national, and cross-cultural comparisons of what marriage is and who can enter into it in the twenty-first century.

Eric Ku's analysis of Taiwanese protests at the end of 2016 further expands the scope of same-sex marriage research, both by bringing a new national context and language to this special issue and with his focus on the campaign signs used by protestors. After providing a detailed overview of same-sex marriage debates legislation in Taiwan, he considers the different primary positions taken up by LGBTQ individuals and their representative institutions noting that, whilst some see same-sex marriage as equality, others see it as enforcing heterosexual norms onto LGBTQ couples. Ku analyses the interplay between identity (labels)/identification with particular social groups and the position that sign holders take on same-sex marriage. He groups his data into a four-way split between for/against same-sex marriage and LGBTQ/not-LGBTQ identities to emphasise that not all LGBTQ individuals were pro-same-sex marriage, nor were all non-LGBTQ individuals at the protests anti-same-sex marriage. Ku draws on the concept of linguistic landscapes to show how protesters who were pro-same-sex marriage used their signs to emphasise the similarity between opposite-sex and same-sex couples. For example, some men who were in same-sex relationships used traditionally feminine Chinese characters or invoked the concept of ‘housewife’. For all protesters, these signs were a way to have their voices seen and/or heard in a public setting. Given that existing linguistics-based research on same-sex marriage debates has largely been restricted to analysing texts produced by those with institutional power, such as the mass media or legal bodies (e.g. the UK parliament (Bachmann, 2011; Findlay, 2017)), Ku's paper thus emphasises the importance of researchers engaging with the language used by those who do not hold legislative power or access to traditional global communication networks.

Mieke Vandenbrouke's paper focuses on the role that government employees can play when enacting marriage legislation, focusing on the investigation of and judgements made about sham marriages (or marriages of convenience) in Belgium. In particular, she focuses on cases where couples including a Belgian national and a non-Belgian national have had their relationships scrutinised by government representatives in order to determine if that relationship is genuine or not. She considers the role that language plays in assessing potential sham marriage cases, but also critically evaluates how the language used in legislative documentation sets out a normative interpretation of what a loving relationship should look like. Vandenbrouke argues that, as a result, the legislation (and the practices associated with it) perform a gatekeeping function. She demonstrates how interviews with marriage applicants are reformulated through language and mode to transform from a spoken interaction between two (sometimes three) participants speaking combinations of Dutch, English, French, and Armenian, into a single document written entirely in Dutch. Furthermore, the extracts from her ethnographic study demonstrate how some civil servants conducting interviews with marriage applicants were guided not only by their knowledge of legislation, but also let their own personal views about marriage (and gender roles more broadly) colour their interpretation of the applicants, potentially influencing the outcome of their claims.

While most papers in this issue have focused specifically on marriage, Valerie Hobbs's study brings to this collection a focus on religious conceptualisations of divorce (and its relationship to church attendance). Her paper breaks new ground by focusing on the discourses drawn upon in (primarily) American preachers' sermons about divorce and, in doing so, expands the field of the linguistic enquiry of Christian preaching and religious language. By analysing the key semantic fields present in her corpus of sermons, Hobbs demonstrates how divorce is portrayed as unacceptable (although some narrow and specific Biblical grounds for divorce are acknowledged). Similarly, remarriage is only deemed acceptable in limited circumstances (by some) after the death of a spouse. She also evidences that the process of divorce is gendered, with men occurring as the ‘primary social actors’ in descriptions of divorce: men divorce their wives, women do not divorce their husbands. This does not reflect divorce statistics in the US, which suggest that women are the primary initiators of divorce. Thus, the female agency is backgrounded in the sermons. Hobbs relates this backgrounding to the fact that the most common reason for women seeking divorce in the US is given to be some form of spousal abuse. However, when the pastors delivering the sermons did reference reasons for divorce, they were far more likely to focus on infidelity (citing supporting Bible passages) than abuse, a finding that Hobbs claims makes the sermons ‘antithetical to the reality of divorce’.

Another group not usually considered in research on marriage are women who have never married; Sergio Silverio and Laura Soulsby's paper, therefore, targets a hitherto under-researched population. Situated within psychology, but using language as the primary target of analysis, they focus on interviews with 12 women in the UK who never married. Their work draws on feminist poststructural approaches to interrogate how these women see themselves and how they believe society perceives them. The authors concentrate on four key areas: the women's thoughts on being never married; society's perception of never-married women; notions of femininity; and the individual self and life transitions. They draw on the concept of double voicing to demonstrate how some of the women both accepted their life choices and celebrated their agency while simultaneously downplaying their achievements, because they were aware that they had not followed a ‘normative life course’. One important element of this paper is that Silverio and Soulsby's research allowed women the space to reflect on their own identity and have their voices heard in some form of institutional setting. Thus, their research has potential to empower their participants by encouraging them to define their own identities and reflect on their own choices, reasoning, and practices.

This potential is also evident in the closing paper in this issue. In it, Eylem Atakav reflects on the production and impact of her documentary film Growing Up Married, which was screened at the Discourses of Marriage BAAL/CUP seminar. In her short film, Atakav used unstructured interviews to provide a space for four women who were child brides in Turkey to tell their own life stories. Her paper includes multiple extracts from the film, providing a snapshot of the topics it covered. In analysing the interviews through a critical feminist lens, Atakav notes the importance of acknowledging and reflecting on the position of the researcher within research. She considers the power differentials between researcher and researched and how these can potentially be minimised but never completely eradicated. Her paper is a thought-provoking read for any researcher considering moving from analysing media texts to creating them. Atakav concludes her paper by documenting the real-world impact that her film has made and how she has used it to reach audiences beyond the boundaries of academia, including government officials and the police force.

In compiling this issue, we regret that we could not, due to space constraints, include contributions from all the delegates who presented their work at the Discourses of Marriage BAAL/CUP seminar. However, we wish to thank all of the delegates (some of whom offered to act as peer-reviewers for this issue) for their contributions to the seminar. We would also like to thank Dr. Lucy Jones, who was our plenary speaker and gave an excellent overview of the Discourses of Marriage Research Group's work to date. We hope that this special issue introduces new audiences to marriage-based research and provides a push-off point for future work. Marriage, ideas about marriage, and the component parts of marriage, are not static. Rather, the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries have seen much debate about what marriage is, who has access to it, and how it has changed over time and in different places. These changes are still ongoing: following a Supreme Court ruling in October 2018, the UK is set to open up civil partnerships to heterosexual couples; in the same month a referendum in Romania failed to establish a mandate for explicitly excluding same-sex couples from the legal definition of marriage. Same-sex marriage legislation is still being debated in countries all over the globe including (at the time of writing) Chile, Ghana, and Japan. There is also further scope for language-based research on cross-cultural marriage practices, divorce (proceedings, legislation, justification), forced marriages, and, fundamentally, there is still much debate about whether same-sex marriage semantically and/or legally constitutes equal marriage.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

Laura L Paterson is a Lecturer in Applied Linguistics and English Language at the Open University. She is a corpus-based discourse analyst and a member of the Discourses of Marriage Research Group. She has published work on epicene pronouns, public responses to Benefits Street, and the geographical text analysis of newspaper coverage of UK poverty (Representations of Poverty and Place, Palgrave 2019). She is also editor of the Journal of Language and Discrimination. School of Languages and Applied Linguistics, Faculty of Wellbeing, Education, and Language Studies, Walton Hall, Milton Keynes MK7 6AA, UK

Georgina Turner is Lecturer in Media at the University of Liverpool. Her primary interest is in media representation, with a particular focus on gender and sexuality. She is interested in magazines and print subcultures, recently collaborating with participants to create a zine during recent work focused on a romance between two older women on the BBC medical drama Holby City and its impact on queer viewers’ mental health and wellbeing. Her book, Lesbian Magazine Discourse, is due to be published by Bloomsbury in 2020. Department of Communication and Media, School of the Arts, 19 Abercromby Square, Liverpool L69 7ZG, UK

ORCID

Laura L. Paterson http://orcid.org/0000-0002-4832-2629