Penetrating language

Meer over het boek

This study conducts a corpus-based Critical Discourse Analysis of pornography, addressing the contentious issue of whether it leads consumers to objectify individuals, particularly women. Objectification is categorized into fragmentation (reducing people to body parts), physicalization and visualization (focusing on physical attributes), deSubjectification (overlooking perspectives), and passivization (viewing individuals as passive). The analysis qualitatively and quantitatively examines a corpus of pornographic short stories, comparing it with erotica, and emphasizes linguistic details that contribute to these conceptualizations. It explores the frequency and variation of lexemes for body parts (fragmentation), descriptors (physicalization and visualization), thematic elements (deSubjectification), and verb patterns in intercourse (passivization). The findings indicate that pornography does objectify women through fragmentation, passivization, and physicalization, though the differences in objectification between genders are not extreme. This suggests that while men are also objectified, the societal impact is more severe for women in a patriarchal context. DeSubjectification appears less central to pornography's objectification. The study enriches the discourse on pornography's effects and innovatively merges qualitative Critical Discourse Analysis with quantitative corpus methods, revealing both the advantages and limitati