“The road to the lesbian nation is not an easy one”: “us” and “them” in Diva magazine

摘要

The present paper discusses Diva, Britain's only mainstream lesbian magazine. Using critical discourse analysis, the article explores Diva's importance to its readers and the pertinence of critical discourse analysis techniques to analysing the magazine. Looking at six consecutive issues, the study focuses on a close textual analysis, backed up by content analysis, of how the groups “us” and “them” are constructed. The paper concludes that the magazine's use of these categories in ways that bemoan yet bolster the distance between the two reflects Diva's position as the voice of an “oppressed group”.