Queer theorists have argued that we should move beyond sexual labelling in the social sense. For this thesis I have conducted audience research to explore the liberatory potential of the representation of fluid sexuality in the BBC television series Torchwood (2006-) through my own and my participants' interpretations. I evaluate how Torchwood can be seen as potentially liberating in terms of sexual identity and what the implications might be for wider debates around fluid versus stable gendered sexual identities in queer politics. I suggest Torchwood should be seen as liberatory in the sense that it challenges rigid notions of sexual identity in the first two seasons of the series. However through the analysis, I argue that in two important ways we cannot suggest that the series is challenging heteronormativity, as some academics have proposed. Firstly, as part of the process of channel hopping from niche to mainstream television, the liberatory sexual agenda is watered down. Secondly, through readings of the series from the perspective of gender I suggest that the portrayal of masculinity in particular is heteronormative. In terms of my participants, I also note the tension that exists between their aspirations for fluid sexuality, exercised through their readings of Torchwood and the need for stability of identity, also notable when analysing their responses. In this way, I suggest that in terms of the period now often termed the ‘post-gay', perhaps we need a more fluid approach to identity, where we aspire to a fluid notion of gendered sexual identities, but keep in mind the need for stability as part of that process.

The interaction between news production and reception realised by written hard news texts is generally characterised as implicit. However, under the pressure of marketisation, news companies, by using multimodal resources and the internet, produce various types of semiotic effects to make their news texts more interactive and entertaining while maintaining the traditional informative and authorial stances. In this research, I will examine crime news texts as a discourse type and investigate how news companies in Japan and the UK establish an interpersonal relationship with their readers through news reports, juxtaposing images in page-based multimodal news provided online. My main aim is to discuss the interpersonal meanings realised in the data based on three analytical and methodological tools: Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL), a semiotic approach to language proposed by Halliday and Matthiessen (2004), the visual grammar, an application of SFL to the visual mode, devised by Kress and van Leeuwen (1996) and corpus linguistics. This analysis shows that in the process of news production, facts are interpreted and recontextualised in order to maximise discoursal values. It also shows that the British and the Japanese press realize criminal meanings according to their contextual and cultural values and practices.