Revolutionary and Lesbian: Negotiating Sexual Citizenship in Cuba 389
How Ideology Works in the Text: “Defend” and the Military/
Struggle MetaphorThe tools used in corpus linguistics to analyze discourse are especially
useful for identifying “evidence of linguistic patterns and trends that
reveals something about societies or ‘identity groups’” (Koller, 2004:
76). By looking for collocations, words that tend to co-occur in pat-
terns, it is possible to undercover examples of how ideology works in
a text (Koller, 2004: 77). In analyzing the life story narrative I discuss
here, I found that the verb defend (defender) occurred several times
throughout the thread of the narrative. By looking at the way that the
verb was conjugated (i.e. who is doing the defending) and the direct
object of the verb (i.e. who or what was being defended) the speaker’s
concern for defending her homeland, Cuba, and socialism, is reiter-
ated, a quality that she attributes to other gays in lines 525, 526, 546
and 867. She also uses the verb to speak about defending “my cause,”
the right to live as lesbian (line 233) and expressed her approval for
gay youth’s defense of their rights (line 730).Further analysis showed that the use of the verb defend (defender)
was part of the greater military/struggle metaphor used in the text to
speak about both the nation’s struggle and her own personal fight for
inclusion/acceptance within her family and society at large (line 233-
defend, line 234-betray, line 237-my path, line 238-battles, line 288 and
294-fight their fight).Table 3. Collocate “defend” with subjects and direct objects
233 I defend my cause (lesbianism)
515 I defend my homeland
516 I defend it (my homeland)
516 I defend her (my homeland)
520 I defend that idea (socialism/social system)
525 We (gays) defend our Cuban soil
526 We (gays) defend any other (sister country)
546 He (gay) defend his land where he was born
730 the (gay) youth defending its rights
867 One defend your homeland