Affiliation:
1. University of North Carolina at Charlotte
Abstract
Abstract
Over the last two decades, there has been an increasing coverage of transgender people in Latin American and
Spanish media. However, there are very few research studies that thoroughly examine the increasing use of terms such as
transgender “transgénero” and trans in Spanish-speaking press. This contribution studies the
linguistic representation of transgender people in Spanish-speaking quality press produced in Colombia and Spain. Within the
framework of Queer Linguistics and Corpus-based Discourse Analysis, this article explores the linguistic choices employed by the
Spanish-speaking press to name transgender people and examines the main differences in the linguistic choices made by newspapers
in the two countries. Unlike in English, the findings suggest that trans and transexual are the
most commonly used labels in Spanish. Although the semantic categories of representation are seen to differ between the two
countries, the linguistic choices observed seem to be closely linked to sociopolitical and ideological preferences.
Publisher
John Benjamins Publishing Company
Subject
Linguistics and Language,Anthropology,Language and Linguistics,Gender Studies