Alon Lischinsky's research
Are you a femboy?
We are conducting the first-ever research project to
explore and understand femboy identities.
We would love to hear
from you if you:
- use the term “femboy” to describe yourself (or have
used it in the past)
- are 18 or older
- live in the UK
- can communicate fluently in English
Full list of my publications, including full-text versions.
I do research at the intersection of corpus linguistics
and discourse analysis. In terms of methods, I am
interested in linguistic approaches to digital humanities;
critical discourse analysis; and narratology.
The fields I
primarily work on are gender and sexuality studies,
especially porn studies; branding, corporate and
organisational communication; environmental communication
and sustainability; and the language of the
professions.
I am happy to supervise research students working on any
of these topics. If you are interested in undertaking a
Master's or Ph.D. project at Brookes, feel free to contact me.
Gender and sexuality
Together with Dr Kat Gupta (Roehampton), I have been
working for some time on linguistic approaches to porn
studies. Discussions about porn in politics, the media and
even academic scholarship are very quick to claim that porn
is violent, misogynistic and just plain depraved, but these
claims are rarely backed up by systematic evidence of what
porn films or stories actually say and show.
We are currently looking at a 1.4-billion-word corpus of
online erotica to explore its depictions of various sexual
practices (such as how the negotiation of consent happens
in porn stories, or how different characters are shown as
having agency over what happens during sex) and sexual
identities (especially queer, trans and
gender-nonconforming people). A key component of this
research is problematising the relationship between porn
text and the “real world” identities, activities and
practices of authors and users.
Branding and organisational
communication
My doctoral research focused on popular management books
— the kind that infest the shelves at Heathrow — and
especially how the authors of these books build up an
authoritative image drawing on personal experience,
cautionary tales and anecdotes. This interest in the
persuasive aspect of corporate communications has extended
since into how organisations construct an
environmentally-friendly image for themselves, and more
broadly into the language aspects of public relations and
branding.
I have also worked as a consultant in this last field,
advising charitable organisations on how to develop a tone
of voice that matches their goals and identity, and how to
implement it consistently across different media platforms
and interactions with clients.
