Choice in Language - Applications in Text Analysis - Gerard O'Grady

Choice in Language - Applications in Text Analysis - Gerard O'Grady

1 ‘Busty babes and passionate pleasures’: A systemic functional linguistic analysis of sex worker discourse in a South African city

Choice in Language - Applications in Text Analysis - Gerard O'Grady

Ralph Adendorff
Kiran Pienaar [+-]
Curtin University
View Website
Kiran Pienaar’s research focusses on the social constitution of addiction, the body in society, and the biopolitics of health and illness. She has a multidisciplinary background in Gender Studies, Sociology and Applied Linguistics. Previously, she was a lecturer in Linguistics at Rhodes University, South Africa. She has also worked in the Faculties of Arts, and Medicine, Nursing and Health Sciences at Monash University. Her doctoral research – an analysis of HIV/AIDS in South Africa under the Mbeki government – was concerned with the role of politics in materialising HIV in specific, sometimes damaging ways. The analysis offers a unique recasting of the political conflict over HIV that emerged under former President Mbeki, and a novel approach to understanding some of the most intractable challenges posed by the South African epidemic. Kiran’s current research program focusses on experiences of addiction, treatment and recovery in Australia. The research will inform the development of an online resource for those affected by addiction, health professionals and policymakers. Kiran is an invited reviewer for several international journals. She is also a member of the Australian Women’s and Gender Studies Association (AWGSA) and Nexus: Monash Social Science, Humanities and Medicine Network.

Description

This chapter draws on a corpus of one month’s newspaper advertisements for commercial sex published in the ‘Social’ column of The Herald, a provincial, South African, English-language daily newspaper with a liberal reputation, and a reader base of over 245,000. It reports on the way sex workers construct their identities and the services they offer in these entries. It also considers the inferencing work that readers must do to interpret the entries.

Notify A Colleague

Citation

Adendorff, Ralph; Pienaar, Kiran. 1 ‘Busty babes and passionate pleasures’: A systemic functional linguistic analysis of sex worker discourse in a South African city. Choice in Language - Applications in Text Analysis. Equinox eBooks Publishing, United Kingdom. p. 31-54 Jul 2013. ISBN 9781908049551. https://www.equinoxpub.com/home/view-chapter/?id=21901. Date accessed: 28 Mar 2024 doi: 10.1558/equinox.21901. Jul 2013

Dublin Core Metadata