‘Is this normal?’

Examining sex education in a corpus of magazine advice columns

Bibliographic Data

ID21458397
AuthorsGeorgia Carr (0000-0003-2481-3375, The University of Sydney, corresponding author)
Year2020
Volume43
Issue2
Pages145-168
Publication date2020-07-03
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueAustralian Review of Applied Linguistics (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0155-0640 • E-ISSN: 1833-7139
PublisherJohn Benjamins Publishing Company (PUBLISHER • NL)
DOI10.1075/aral.00030.car
OpenAlexW3039689950
LanguageEN
Citations received1
References cited41

To properly understand sex education, it is important to consider the informal education that takes place outside the classroom. Students often seek out other resources to supplement the education they receive in school, especially to cover topics which are absent or underdeveloped in the formal sex education curriculum. A key resource for this, especially among young women, is the magazine advice column. Advice columns create a direct interaction between the reader and the magazine and encourage the disclosure of intimate, confidential information, making them a ready medium for the production and consumption of sex education. This study uses the advice columns in Dolly , a popular Australian magazine, to investigate adolescents’ concerns about normality. This research is based on a corpus of 88,000 words, with data from advice columns published 20 years apart (mid-1990s and mid-2010s), which is analyzed using keywords and concordancing. This is a unique corpus study in that it considers similarity as well as difference in the data by investigating the recurring concern with normality that is evident in both decades of the corpus

Confidentiality · Curriculum · Normality · Pedagogy · Political science · Social science · Sociology · Adolescent Sexual and Reproductive Health · Computer Science · Gender, Feminism, and Media · Law · Psychology · Sex work and related issues · Social Psychology

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