Language, Sex and Social Structure offers a cutting edge, empirically driven approach to critical discourse analysis, challenging the text and language-based bias that most applications of CDA adopt. Drawing upon rich conversational data collected during a year-long ethnographic study of a community of practice (a university-based sports team), it introduces a method for uncovering nuanced correlations between homophobic attitudes and the concepts and social structures that sustain these attitudes. Situated within seminal work in discourse theory, practice theory, relevance theory and sociolinguistics, it presents a fresh perspective on recent debates in the field of language and sexuality.

The book provides a thorough critique of CDA together with a new methodology for critically analysing discourse, one which enables more sophisticated and contextualised analyses of ethnographic data than current models allow. Through a rigorous and insightful application of this methodology, it exposes subtle variations on discourses of sexuality in a community and offers new perspectives on the emancipatory potential of CDA.