French Same-Sex Marriage as a Litmus Test for British Gender(ed) Identities: Applying an Integrated Analytical Model to Online News Discourse

Adopting a multidisciplinary analytical framework that primarily draws on the theoretical tenets of Cultural Studies, Multimodal Critical Discourse Analysis (MCDA) – applied to the language of journalism – and Gender Studies in its interweaving with Post-structuralism, this article intends to examine the discursive strategies employed in constructing homosexual identities in selected news stories from the online British press, specifically those reporting on the first French same-sex marriage celebrated in Montpellier in May 2013. Against this theoretical backdrop, the digital articles examined act as a barometer of British discourse on gender identities at a time when Great Britain was about to introduce same-sex marriage into its own legislation. Also, they prove to be indicators of the specific ideological positioning of the newspapers in which they were published. Consequently, they help demonstrate how the press, while ostensibly reporting facts and events in objective terms, in reality serves as a vehicle for subtle discursive manipulations capable of shaping public opinion due to its ideological nature.