LAVENDER LANGUAGE 2000
TEXT ANALYSIS WORKSHOP
American University, Washington DC
Friday, September 22, 2000
Organizers:
Birch Moonwomon-Baird
Jay L. Lemke
"Tangling Texts and Methods: Analyzing Gay Identities in Media and Discourse Data"
Join us in hands-on analysis of samples of different types of discourse data. We’re looking to see how each other’s methods can be adapted to our own data, and how different kinds of data (interviews, recounts, letters, popular media texts, etc.) can be combined to understand the discursive construction of gay identities under specific social, historical, and cultural conditions.
FORMAT
There will be a Morning and an Afternoon session, the first chaired by Birch, the second by Jay. In each session the invited participants listed below will act as Guides, introducing a sample text and the methods we use in analyzing it. All participants will be encouraged to practice using each method of analysis on the texts supplied, or on your own texts (bring 20 copies; keep to one page if possible). We will all join in discussing the issues of how to apply the methods, their uses and limitations, combining methods, assumptions behind them, and how methods relate to types of texts and to research questions. Inevitably, we will also wind up discussing questions of identity, culture, media, and discourse ... but our main focus in the Workshop is the practical side of doing research, the devilish details!
GUIDES AND TEXTS
Hardcopy of sample texts will be distributed at the Workshop. To the extent possible, we are also trying to make the material available here on the web ...
Birch Moonwomon-Baird: Introduction and Transcript of Interview
Norman Labrie and Marcel Grimard: Introduction, Interview Transcripts and Translations
Jay Lemke and Caspar van Helden: Introduction, Excerpt, and Images from XY Magazine
Denis Provencher: Introduction and Excerpts from Tetu Magazine
Joe Hawkins: Introduction and Transcripts of Two Japanese Roundtable Conversations
BACKGROUND
Notes and Links on Evaluative Semantics and Lavender Language (Jay Lemke)