“The warrior princess raised an eyebrow, while the pimp dangled his nuts below his trousers”. The narrative co-construction of homoeroticism on the web

Abstract

Combining core concepts of sociology and Freudian psychoanalysis with the corpus linguistics methodology, this paper follows in the wake of previous quantitative queer studies on the social production and regulation of sexuality and gender (Baker, 2004, 2005, 2014, 2018; King, 2015; Milani, 2013), in order to explore the role of language in the construction of the erotic imaginary of a Spanish-speaking gay community on the Web. Using Sketch Engine, the keywords of a corpus of amateur gay and lesbian erotica were analyzed to shed light on the symbolic representations and discursive mechanisms that guide the co-construction of homosexual erotic desire on the Web. Adding significant nuances relevant for the Hispanic culture, the results of the analysis confirm the thesis maintained by Baker (2005), according to which internet homosexual communities continue to reproduce and perpetuate ancestral heteronormative archetypes in their narratives of highly idealized sexual encounters.