Approaches to Discourses of Marriage

How do people talk about marriage? Who gets to do the talking? When, why, where and how do these things change?

From the experiences of women forced to marry as children to those of older women who never married, from investigations of cross-border marriage applications to Christian pastors’ sermons on divorce, from oppositional media discussions of same-sex marriage to pro-marriage equality protest signs: this collection presents research from across the globe addressing the often shifting, context-specific ways that we talk about marriage.

Developed from the work of the UK-based Discourses of Marriage Research Group and a two-day conference drawing together scholars interested in talk of marriage and related topics, this interdisciplinary volume brings together linguists, psychologists, and film makers and draws on data from the UK, Germany, Taiwan, the US, Belgium, and Turkey. It is intended both as a survey of some contemporary trends in research on marriage and as a foundation for further research.

The chapters in this book, except for chapters 1 and 7, were originally published as a special issue of the journal Critical Discourse Studies. This volume comes with a new introduction.

Laura L. Paterson is Senior Lecturer in Applied Linguistics and English Language at The Open University, UK. She is a corpus-based discourse analyst who specialises in analysing the representation of marginalised groups. She has published work on UK poverty, benefits receipt, and marriage, and is editing the Routledge Handbook of Pronouns.

Georgina Turner was previously Senior Lecturer in Media at the University of Liverpool. Her work is primarily qualitative with a focus on LGBT+ and specifically lesbian representation and its audiences. She has published critical analyses and histories of queer magazines, explorations of Sapphic fandom, and media debates about same-sex marriage. She is now a researcher in the third sector.