Discursive shifts associated with coming out: A corpus‐based analysis of news reports about Ricky Martin

AbstractThis study seeks to shed light on the discursive effects of a public sexual identity declaration as they surface in the language used to construct the social actor in question. Subscribing to queer linguistically informed critical discourse studies, it builds on and advances the theoretical discussion of coming out in language and sexuality studies. The investigation analyses a corpus of news reports about Ricky Martin, comparing two sub‐corpora, one with texts published before and another with texts from after Martin's public coming out as a gay man in 2010. A keyword analysis is performed to identify linguistic traces of central discourses manifesting in the two corpora. The quantitative analysis is complemented by an in‐depth qualitative analysis of the discursive construction of ethnicity and sexuality in two sample texts. The findings are discussed in the light of discursive shifts between pre‐ and post‐coming‐out phases and clashes between coming‐out stereotypes and the coming‐out experiences of Latino gay men.