Problematizing Motherhood

Glimpse ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 22 (2) ◽  
pp. 166-171
Author(s):  
Duygu Onay-Çöker ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Male Gaze ◽  
Discursive Strategies ◽  
Representations Of Women

In this paper, I focus on the representation of motherhood from a two-fold perspective by choosing the bestselling Turkish baby diapers advertisements as a case study of broadcasting in Turkish media. The first perspective analyzes the representation of motherhood by applying the concept of “Male Gaze” by Laura Mulvey, according to whom a woman is objectified by the male gaze and becomes a bearer of meaning rather than a maker of meaning. Further, the themes emerging from a careful reading of representations of women in advertisements of baby diapers are discussed. The second perspective consists of looking at discursive strategies of the term “motherhood” by problematizing the fact that baby diapers are always identified with women, thereby also reducing them to commodities in the market. The second perspective applies Julia Kristeva’s “The Semiotic Chora” to reveal the myths about motherhood created by the ruling ideology of the males, and to seek possible alternatives through that perspective.

scholarly journals Discursive Strategies and Sequenced Institutional Change: The Case of Marriage Equality in the United States

2021 ◽  
pp. 003232172110205
Author(s):  
Giulia Mariani ◽  
Tània Verge
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Institutional Change ◽  
The United States ◽  
Marriage Equality ◽  
Agent Based ◽  
Discursive Strategies ◽  
Policy Debates ◽  
The Status ◽  
Private Actors

Building on historical and discursive institutionalism, this article examines the agent-based dynamics of gradual institutional change. Specifically, using marriage equality in the United States as a case study, we examine how actors’ ideational work enabled them to make use of the political and discursive opportunities afforded by multiple venues to legitimize the process of institutional change to take off sequentially through layering, displacement, and conversion. We also pay special attention to how the discursive strategies deployed by LGBT advocates, religious-conservative organizations and other private actors created new opportunities to influence policy debates and tip the scales to their preferred policy outcome. The sequential perspective adopted in this study allows problematizing traditional conceptualizations of which actors support or contest the status quo, as enduring oppositional dynamics lead them to perform both roles in subsequent phases of the institutional change process.

Relacyjno-symboliczne aspekty ubóstwa w dyskursie politycznym na temat programu „Rodzina 500+”. Przypadek tygodnika „Newsweek Polska”

1970 ◽  
Vol 20 (274) ◽  
pp. 26-42
Author(s):  
Maciej Kostecki
Keyword(s):  
Political Discourse ◽  
Lower Class ◽  
Public Institutions ◽  
Social Program ◽  
Poor People ◽  
Social Politics ◽  
Unemployed People ◽  
Discursive Strategies ◽  
Neoliberal Ideology

The article shows relational-symbolic aspects of poverty in polish political discourse about flagship Law and Justice’s Party social program called “Family 500+”. Based on the case study of weekly newspaper Newsweek Polska the author stressed main discursive strategies such as demoralization, humiliation of poor people, lower class and unemployed people as a examples of individual blame explanations of poverty. Moreover article presents efforts of justifying inequalities as a result of neoliberal ideology and the vision of profligacy of public institutions due to social politics expenses.

scholarly journals Digital Environmentalism: A Case Study of PM2.5 Pollution Issue in Chinese Social Media

2017 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
pp. 76
Author(s):  
Yanshuang Zhang
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
Air Pollution ◽  
Environmental Discourse ◽  
Social Actors ◽  
Discursive Strategies ◽  
The Social ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
Civil Discourse ◽  
The Common

The emergence of social media over the last decade has substantially altered not only the means people communicate with each other but also the whole online ecosystems. For the common public in particular, social media enables and broadens the social conversation that anyone interested can engage in on urgent social problems such as environmental pollution. In China, the ever-thickening air pollution smothering most urban cities in recent years has provoked a nationwide discussion, and popular social media like Weibo has been fully utilised by various social actors to participate in this “green speak”. This paper examines the civil discourse about the deteriorating air pollution on China’s largest microblogging platform-Sina Weibo, and seeks to understand how different social actors respond to and reconstruct the reality. Through a discourse analysis aided by a text analytics/ visualisation software—eximancer, this paper investigates the civil discourse from three angles: the demographics, the discursive strategies and the potential social effect. The result suggests that proactive civil engagement in this issue has produced an environmental discourse with a wide range of topics involved, and that the benign interactions between social actors could give rise to a proactive interactional mode between Chinese state and civil society which would definitely be beneficial to the democratisation process in contemporary China.

“We must unite now or perish!”

2019 ◽  
Vol 18 (2) ◽  
pp. 252-271 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mark Nartey
Keyword(s):  
Discourse Analysis ◽  
Critical Discourse Analysis ◽  
Critical Discourse ◽  
Historical Approach ◽  
Discursive Strategies ◽  
Kwame Nkrumah ◽  
Pan African ◽  
The World ◽  
Discourse Historical Approach

Abstract This paper presents a discourse-mythological analysis of the rhetoric of a pioneering Pan-African and Ghana’s independence leader, Kwame Nkrumah, drawing on Ruth Wodak’s discourse-historical approach to critical discourse analysis. The thesis of the paper is that Nkrumah’s discourse, in its focus on the emancipation and unification of Africa, can be characterized as mythic, a discursive exhortation of Africa to demonstrate to the world that it can better govern itself than the colonizers. In this vein, the paper analyzes four discursive strategies employed by Nkrumah in the creation and projection of his mythology: the introduction or creation of new discourse events, presupposition and implication, involvement (the use of indexicals) and lexical structuring and reiteration. This study is, therefore, presented as a case study of mythic discourse within the domain of politics.

Discursive strategies for disinformation on WhatsApp and Twitter during the 2018 Brazilian presidential election

First Monday ◽  
2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Raquel Recuero ◽  
Felipe Soares ◽  
Otávio Vinhas
Keyword(s):  
Discourse Analysis ◽  
Mixed Methods ◽  
Critical Discourse Analysis ◽  
Presidential Election ◽  
Critical Discourse ◽  
Conspiracy Theories ◽  
Mixed Methods Approach ◽  
Discursive Strategies ◽  
Rational Explanation

This paper aims to analyze and compare the discursive strategies used to spread and legitimate disinformation on Twitter and WhatsApp during the 2018 Brazilian presidential election. Our case study is the disinformation campaign used to discredit the electronic ballot that was used for the election. In this paper, we use a mixed methods approach that combined critical discourse analysis and a quantitative aggregate approach to discuss a dataset of 53 original tweets and 54 original WhatsApp messages. We focused on identifying the most used strategies in each platform. Our results show that: (1) messages on both platforms used structural strategies to portray urgency and create a negative emotional framing; (2) tweets often framed disinformation as a “rational” explanation; and, (3) while WhatsApp messages frequently relied on authorities and shared conspiracy theories, spreading less truthful stories than tweets.

scholarly journals Conflict Resolution Strategies in Media Discourse: The Case Study of: “Ɂəl xayT ləbyəD” “The Mediator”

2018 ◽  
Vol 6 (5) ◽  
pp. 24
Author(s):  
Ilham Malki
Keyword(s):  
Conflict Resolution ◽  
Conversation Analysis ◽  
Rhetorical Strategies ◽  
Interpersonal Conflicts ◽  
Discursive Strategies ◽  
Video Recordings ◽  
Conflict Resolution Strategies ◽  
Discourse Strategies ◽  
Tv Show

This study examines the way discourse can contribute to conflict resolution. The study focuses on the discourse strategies used by the disputants in ‘the Mediator’ TV show to resolve their interpersonal conflicts. It also identifies the different tactics that the disputants in ‘the Mediator’ TV show use to negotiate their conflicts collaboratively and hence reach joint outcomes. Taking into consideration the significant role argumentation plays in the management of conflict, the study also seeks to underline the different rhetorical strategies and argumentative fallacies through which the contestants in ‘the Mediator’ TV show achieve their goals.Within a data corpus based on video-recordings of disputants in ‘the Mediator’ TV show, a number of interactional exchanges are phonetically transcribed, translated into English and qualitatively analyzed. The study analytical approach includes conversation analysis (Sacks (1974) Jefferson & Schegloff (1974)) as the methodological framework to investigate the contestants’ discourse strategies during conflict resolution process. The qualitative analysis of the selected data reveals different discourse and negotiating strategies adopted by the disputants to reach a resolution. These strategies contain discourse strategies of integrative conflict resolution, discourse strategies of cooperative competing conflict resolution, avoiding discursive strategies to conflict resolution, and finally discourse strategies of compromising conflict resolution. Strikingly is the fact that the results of the study identify accommodating, as the only style that has not been adopted by the disputants in ‘The Mediator’ TV show during the process of resolving their conflict.

scholarly journals From the unbelievable to the undeniable: Epistemological pluralism, or how conspiracy theorists legitimate their extraordinary truth claims

2019 ◽  
pp. 136754941988604
Author(s):  
Jaron Harambam ◽  
Stef Aupers
Keyword(s):  
Social Theory ◽  
Western Culture ◽  
Epistemic Authority ◽  
Multiple Sources ◽  
Conspiracy Theories ◽  
Discursive Strategies ◽  
Truth Claims ◽  
Epistemological Pluralism ◽  
Mainstream Culture

Despite their stigma, conspiracy theories are hugely popular today and have pervaded mainstream culture. Increasingly, such theories expanded into large master schemes of deceit where ‘everything is connected’. Moving beyond discussions of their truthfulness, we study in this article how such ‘super conspiracy theories’ are made plausible. We strategically selected the case study of David Icke – a true celebrity in conspiracy circles and main proponent of such all-encompassing narratives – to analyze his discursive strategies of legitimation: How does he support and validate his extraordinary claims? It is our argument that Icke succeeds by exploiting multiple sources of epistemic authority; he draws eclectically on ‘experience’, ‘tradition’, ‘futuristic imageries’, ‘science’ and ‘social theory’ to convince his audience. In a Western culture without any full monopoly on truth, and for a people wary of mainstream authorities, it proves opportune to draw on a wide variety of epistemic sources when claiming knowledge.

Gender, Power, and the Gamic Gaze

Gamer Trouble ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 99-136
Author(s):  
Amanda Phillips
Keyword(s):  
Video Games ◽  
Test Subject ◽  
The Other ◽  
Male Gaze ◽  
The Gaze ◽  
Scientific Experiment ◽  
Gender Power ◽  
Patriarchal Power ◽  
Brown Body ◽  
Representations Of Women

This chapter argues that the interpretation of games like Bayonetta, Portal, and Tomb Raider rests on an implementation of the theory of the male gaze that isolates visuality from a greater context of computation, procedure, race, and history. It challenges the prevailing interpretations of Chell as “good” and Bayonetta as “bad” representations of women in video games. First, it situates the struggle between Chell and GLaDOS as an antifeminist one in which the player uses the power of the gaze, located in Chell’s voiceless brown body, to subdue the powerful bodiless voice of GLaDOS. This reduces Chell, a brown woman who is the test subject of a scientific experiment, to an instrument of patriarchy. On the other hand, Bayonetta, who is widely criticized as a hypersexual fantasy figure, performs what micha cárdenas calls queer femme disturbance, an excessive performance of femininity that disrupts heteronormative and patriarchal power. These two women offer more context to the case of Lara Croft, who has become more violent and less sexy over the years, and who has ascended to the position of brutal white colonizer while courting a feminist audience.

Revolutionary dreams: Future essentialism and the sociotechnical imaginary of the fourth industrial revolution in Denmark

2019 ◽  
Vol 50 (4) ◽  
pp. 542-566
Author(s):  
Kasper Schiølin
Keyword(s):  
Public Reason ◽  
Industrial Revolution ◽  
National Level ◽  
Original Material ◽  
Discursive Strategies ◽  
Fourth Industrial Revolution ◽  
The World ◽  
World Economic ◽  
To Come

In 2015, the World Economic Forum announced that the world was on the threshold of a ‘fourth industrial revolution’ driven by a fusion of cutting-edge technologies with unprecedented disruptive power. The next year, in 2016, the fourth industrial revolution appeared as the theme of the Forum’s annual meeting, and as the topic of a book by its founder and executive chairman, Klaus Schwab. Ever since, the Forum has made this impending revolution its top priority, maintaining that it will inevitably change everything we once know about the world and how to live in it, thus creating what I conceptualize as ‘future essentialism’. Within a short space of time, the vision of the fourth industrial revolution was institutionalized and publicly performed in various national settings around the world as a sociotechnical imaginary of a promising and desirable future soon to come. Through readings of original material published by the Forum, and through a case study of the reception of the fourth industrial revolution in Denmark, this article highlights and analyses three discursive strategies – ‘dialectics of pessimism and optimism’, ‘epochalism’ and ‘inevitability’ – in the transformation of a corporate, highly elitist vision of the future into policymaking and public reason on a national level.

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