Articulating Sexuality, Desire, and Identity: A Case Study of Heteronormativity in Taiwanese Dating Websites

The present thesis aims to examine heteronormativity in the discourse collected from two same-sex dating websites popularized in Taiwan, Top1069 and 2Girl, in hope of analyzing how the heteronormative ideologies influence Taiwanese gays’ and lesbians’ linguistic construction of sexual desires, dating preferences, and forms of queer relationships. Meanwhile, a synergy between Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) and Corpus Linguistics (CL) is employed to investigate how Taiwanese gays and lesbians are heteronormatively portrayed on the two non-heterosexual online communities. Heteronormativity has been the core concept heatedly investigated and discussed in Queer Linguistics (Motschenbacher & Stegu 2013). Defined as all the organizational patterns of thought, awareness, and belief around the presumption that heterosexuality is normal, natural, and desirable, heteronormativity is intensively analyzed with an aim of revealing problems on social inequality related to sex, gender, and sexuality (Warner 1993; Chamber 2003; Cameron & Kulick 2006). However, queer linguistic studies have long been culturally-biased because few data have been collected except the observation of queer language in Western societies. Moreover, most of the linguistic studies on heteronormativity are still conducted merely by qualitative textual analysis even if revealing ideologies in a discourse through the combination of qualitative and quantitative methods of linguistics has been advocated as a promising attempt (Baker 2004; 2008; Milani 2013) Thus, the present study not merely adds new empirical data from Taiwan to a body of scholarship that has thus far privileged Western-based discourses, but also analyzes the linguistically strengthened heteronormativity with the synergetic perspective of CDA and CL. By scrutinizing four statistically salient groups of keywords in the corpora – IDENTITY-BASED ATTRIBUTES, APPEARANCE, INTEREST/ACTIVITY, and RELATIONSHIP, the results reveal that there are power relationships among, respectively, Taiwanese gays and lesbians who seek for love online, which are formed by heteronormative ideologies on body and gender in the scope of homosexuality. Firstly, the keywords in IDENTITY-BASED ATTRIBUTE contain a large number of binary roles which illustrate the conventionalized interactional modes for Taiwanese homosexual couples, which show great similarity to those in a heterosexual relationship, in terms of overt imitation of husband and wife, and several types of gender classification affected more or less by heteronormativity: dominance and submission in terms of sexual positions, appearance, the concept of protection and dependence, or in personality. Secondly, the salient mechanism of binary identity distinctions works not only in the semantic and concordant relations within the pairs of roles but also in the correlations between the descriptions of website users and their mate preferences. Thirdly, the nan/nü collocations and the keyword studies on APPEARANCE, INTEREST/ACTIVITY and IDENTITY-BASED ATTRIBUTES indicate that masculinity and femininity play a decisive role in mate matching but in different ways on Top1069 and 2Girl. While there are many cases indicating that Taiwanese gays and lesbians adore, respectively, heteronormative masculinity and femininity and reject queer features, some lesbians still embrace female masculinity in themselves or in other women. Nevertheless, the female masculinity on the website has been tightly connected with a relationship between a T and a P (or pó), making some lesbians who identify themselves as T feel anxious about whether or not their appearance, personalities, and behaviors fit in the norms on lesbian manliness in Taiwan. The language in personal profiles reflects how Taiwanese gays and lesbians present themselves and expect their ideal mates diversely. In many cases, however, the strict conventions in pairing binary roles and privileging heteronormative masculinity/femininity may strengthen the influence of gender hierarchy and undermine the value of gender equality, which LGBTQIA activists have been endeavoring to advocate. While gays and lesbians in Taiwan have been striving to advocate the public respect of their sexual and gender identities, the problems which derive from heteronormative power relationships within the queer community are still waiting to be revealed and discussed; the majority on the dating websites still embrace heteronormative values at the expense of the freedom for a person to perform sexuality and gender.