Representations of LGBT people in Vietnamese online newspapers: A corpus-assisted critical discourse study

While corpus linguistic research on gender and sexuality is prevalent in English-speaking media contexts, it remains underexplored in others, such as in the Vietnamese media. This study employs a c.390,000-word corpus of Vietnamese online news articles to investigate the discursive representation of LGBT individuals. We first discuss the methodological challenges of working with a corpus of Vietnamese and how these may be overcome. Then, through the synergy of corpus linguistics and critical discourse analysis, we explore the thematic representation of the Vietnamese LGBT community. Our findings show that LGBT individuals are often depicted negatively, for example, through associations with HIV/AIDS and risky gender-affirming surgeries. However, our study also reveals a shift towards more inclusive representations, through a positive focus on diverse gender and sexual identities. We conclude by discussing the ideological implications of these representations and some methodological insights for corpus-based research on the Vietnamese language.