scholarly journals Depicting Women Through Transitivity Choices: A Comparative Analysis

2021 ◽  
Vol 28 (1) ◽  
pp. 41-59
Author(s):  
Tazanfal Tehseem ◽  
Humera Iqbal ◽  
Saba Zulfiqar

The study aims at depicting how male and female authors portray female characters and how their core ideologies and social influences affect these depictions. This study is based on the feminist stylistic approach, proposed by Sara Mills (1995), embedded with the literary theory of feminism. It is an overlapping field that has its roots in critical discourse analysis. This stance is significant as it allows to critically look at the substance to uncover the ideology related to women. From a feminist stylistic perspective, the notion of presenting the distorted image of the female entity is associated with male authors leading to the point that female authors portray female characters positively as compared to their male counterparts. By employing Halliday’s transitivity framework (2004) in Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) as an analytic tool, the utterances of the female protagonists from both the novels: The Blithedale Romance by Nathaniel Hawthorne and Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte, have been analysed into the process, participants and circumstances. Social influence, mostly in the form of male domination, on ideologies and linguistic choices in the depiction of women in both the writers’ work has been found on almost equal grounds.

Author(s):  
Wan Faizatul Azirah Ismayatim ◽  
Sridevi Sriniwasss ◽  
Nadiah Thanthawi Jauhari

This paper reports on a study on Experiential meaning particularly the main process types used in the reporting of the airstrike event launched by Malaysian security forces on March 5, 2013 during the intrusion of “Sulu Sultan” followers in Lahad Datu. Data for the study comprised text reports pertinent to the airstrike event published in four different English newspapers which are The News Straits Times (NST), The Star (TS), The Philippine Daily Inquirer (TPDI) and The Philippine Star (TPS). A total of 8 texts were analysed. Various methods have been developed to study newspapers representation and stance of controversial issues which include content analysis, critical discourse analysis, lexical cohesion, the use of metaphors, transitivity and thematic analysis among others. However, the framework of transitivity has not been widely used. Hence, Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL), in particular, the System of Transitivity propounded by M.A.K. Halliday (1994) was used to bridge the gap in research and the methodology of text analysis was deployed. The study revealed that NST was the only newspaper which highlighted the sorrow and the grief of Malaysians and its Prime Minister in which this newspaper accounts for the most in employing the Mental Processes, while TS, TPDI and TPS highlighted more on the physical actions and the resoluteness of both countries in handling the Lahad Datu conflict when Material Processes were dominant in these newspapers.


2021 ◽  
pp. 1326365X2110485
Author(s):  
Kaifia Ancer Laskar

Most of the studies on children’s programming conducted in America or India, indicating an unbalanced and stereotypical gender representation, remain limited to those on older children. The present study explores if cartoon shows for preschoolers resort to the counter-hegemonic portrayal of male/female characters, and if thereby have any scope for representation of gender fluidity within it. Consequently, it also attempts to discern the ways in which interpersonal relationships between the protagonists, and between the protagonist(s) and the secondary character(s) portray any ‘dominant/submissive’ dichotomies. Drawing on Bandura’s ‘Social Learning Theory’ and de Beauvoir’s notion of the social construction of women as the ‘other’, this study presents the results of textual analysis and Critical Discourse Analysis of a popular Russian cartoon show ‘Masha and the Bear’ (M&TB) telecast on Nick Jr. The study findings indicate more gender-sensitive representation in the show for preschoolers than those for the older children. Bearing the tropes of Soviet Russian egalitarian and cultural traits, the characters of M&TB portray non-binary gender roles compared to their American or Indian counterparts.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Brooke Richardson

This study provides insight into the wide and chronic gaps between childcare research and policy in Canada. More specifically, connections are made between how childcare policy was discussed in newspapers between 2008 and 2015, power relationships in society and policy outcomes. The theoretical ideas and methodological tools of political scientist Carol Bacchi and Norman Fairclough inform a what-is-the-problem-represented-to-be (WPR) and critical discourse analysis (CDA) respectively. The data was broken up into two periods: Period A (Jan 2008-Oct 2014) when childcare policy was peripheral on the federal policy agenda and Period B (Oct 2014-Nov 2015) when childcare policy re-emerged on the agenda. Data from both periods was analysed using WPR while only Period B data were analyzed using CDA. The findings reveal low levels of coverage of childcare policy during Period A, though coverage that did exist included a variety of problematizations. In Period B, when the volume of coverage of childcare coverage notably increased, the diversity of problematizations was much more limited and polarized. Childcare was most frequently represented as a private/family problem, a free market problem and/or a public problem – though the CDA revealed that the latter problematization was often superficially treated. The CDA revealed ideological tensions through a tendency of authors to dichotomize parental and non-parental care of children (care as a barrier/support to parenting). Gendered differences to reporting on childcare policy were also observed whereby male reporters asserted stronger modal claims than female authors, although female authors appear to have made a more concerted effort to contextualize their muted claims. Overall it is concluded that representation of childcare policy problems was limited to ideological ideals that perpetuate gendered, hegemonic power relations in society. It is suggested that this has contributed to a continuation of the status quo – with no significant shift in childcare policy at the federal level. A closer analysis of selected texts published in the year leading up to the 2015 election revealed that several text and discourse processes allowed dominant discourses not in the interests of those most affected by childcare (i.e., women, children and families) to remain largely unchallenged.


JURNAL BASIS ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
pp. 1
Author(s):  
Andri Fernanda ◽  
Ranto Ranto

The goal of this study was to break down gender issues and stereotypes towards women constructed in Bangka Belitung society from the perspective of female authors. In analyzing the data, researchers carried out a qualitative descriptive method with feminist theory. The researchers also conducted critical discourse analysis on writings that have been published by Bangka Belitung’s female authors. The results showed that there were still gender inequality and inferiority of women in society. The identity crisis faced by women when they are not married since marriage is seen as an ideal as well as a complement to their life as real women in society. On the other hand, the picture of how women had no rights over themselves was demonstrated in a situation when matchmaking and marriage were performed one-sidedly and suddenly, women did not have enough power to question these, even refused them. Besides, how strong a patriarchal system and culture was shaped by women, their closest people and the community was proven in the novels of the Bangka Belitung’s female authors.


Author(s):  
Martin Reisigl

Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) has entered the mainstream of linguistic and social science research with a strong transdisciplinary orientation and social engagement. This chapter introduces six variants of CDA: (1) Fairclough’s approach, which is strongly social theoretically embedded and informed by systemic functional linguistics; (2) van Leeuwen’s and Kress’s social semiotic and systemic functional approach; (3) van Dijk’s socio-cognitive approach; (4) the form of CDA promoted by the Duisburg Group around S. and M. Jäger, who keenly draw on Foucault’s approach to discourse analysis and Link’s discourse theory; (5) the Oldenburg approach, which is upheld by Gloy, Januschek, and others; and (6) the “Viennese” and “Lancaster” traditions of CDA, often termed the “discourse historical approach” and sometimes “discourse sociolinguistics.”


2021 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-14
Author(s):  
Karina Clemente-Escobar

Nowadays, comedy shows like Saturday Night Live (SNL) have become popular and entertain many people around the world. For this study, a fake commercial for GE Big Boys Appliances, aired on YouTube in 2018 is analyzed to explore how discourse is used to represent gender roles and stereotypes. To conduct this multimodal discourse analysis, some elements of Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) proposed by Halliday (1978), some notions of critical discourse analysis, and some features of the Machin’s (2010) visual semiotic framework are employed. The findings portray that the sketch shows a change concerning gender roles through time, but it still promotes the transmission of some classical gender stereotypes. Therefore, it is valuable to study comedy sketches to understand how traditional gender roles and stereotypes are still transmitted in social media.


2018 ◽  
Vol 6 ◽  
pp. 94-105
Author(s):  
Edna Cristina S. Santos

Adolescents all over the world have communicated with one another through the Internet by means of personal sites called Blogs, in which they say what they think and feel about life, and interact electronically with people from different places. This is a new mode of literacy which is leading adolescents to writing spontaneously about diverse topics. They use multimodal texts in which they integrate different types of semiosis. In this paper, we will examine the language of this new genre according to critical discourse analysis (Fairclough, 1992), genre analysis (Bakhtin, 1992) and systemic functional linguistics (Halliday, 1985).


2020 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
pp. 5-17
Author(s):  
Marianna Alfonsi

Giving a right place to literature for children in the context of general literature means to recognizing its roots and influences in a wider landscape. Charlotte Brontë work inserted in this context has a double meaning both because it links adult and child female characters (The italian society of literates has defined them «personagge»), and because it brings us back to the roots of a literature written by women with female protagonists able to undermine the socially approved traditional rules. Recovering Jane Eyre is the first step to be taken to trace a new way of writing about women and telling about “the becoming” of women, delineating a parallel path to bildungsroman, in which the feminine youth has not found full consideration. To define an itinerary for women and girls it is then necessary to analyze the studies of feminist literary criticism that has investigated the relationship between women and literature since 70s, both from the writer’s and reader’s point of view. The objective thus becomes the one to recover the history of that link that unites the presence of women and girls in literature and their search for an autonomous space of imagination, thought and action. Inserting Jane Eyre in the children’s literature allows us to trace the birth of the authentic female child, and the beginning of an emancipatory process that poses important questions about the role of reading and literature in social and educational contexts.


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