Normal straight gays: Lexical collocations and ideologies of masculinity in personal ads of Serbian gay teenagers

Abstract

This paper is aimed at contributing to the sociolinguistic study of gender and sexuality by investigating collocation patterns in a corpus of Serbian gay teenagers' online personal ads. Lexical collocations of words denoting masculinity and non-masculinity are found to index the dominant values among the ad writers, revealing strong associations of masculinity with positive characteristics, and effeminacy with a range of negative properties. It is argued that in such subtle but salient ways the ideological construct of hegemonic masculinity is perpetuated by these teenagers, while the cultural stigma associated with homosexuality is discursively shifted only to non-masculine gay men. A process here termed recursive marginalization is used to account for these patterns. The article also aims to make a methodological point by demonstrating that corpusbased collocation analysis offers a productive means for understanding ideology, as lexical co-occurrence may shed new light on complex webs of identities, discourses and social representations in a community. © 2013, equinox publishing.