Emancipatory Discourse Research Articles

Constructing a Discourse of Hope and Inspiration: A Positive Discourse Analysis of Joko Widodo’s Press Statements on COVID-19

ABSTRACT Using positive discourse analysis as a framework, this article examines Indonesian President Joko Widodo’s press statements on the COVID-19 pandemic, with a focus on how he constructed a message of hope and inspiration. The analysis demonstrates that Widodo used his language to encourage the people of Indonesia to be resilient, remain positive, and collaborate with the government to overcome the challenges posed by the pandemic. The findings reveal that metaphor, lexicalisation, and rationalisation were the three main strategies that helped Widodo to construct his message of hope and inspiration and to formulate an emancipatory discourse intended to liberate the people of Indonesia from the difficulties of the pandemic and chart a way forward in the post-pandemic period. The study underscores the crucial role of language as a resource for hope and as a response strategy during a crisis as well as its significance in helping individuals, communities, nations, and societies make sense of their experiences and (re)imagine a positive future despite their present predicament.

Muslim Women Emancipation Discourse: Analyzing the Legal Thoughts of Muhammad Quraish Shihab

This article aims to analyze several issues on women in Muhammad Quraish Shihab's fatwās (legal opinions) contained in several of his works in the form of questions and answers. This study departs from the existing studies on Muslim women's emancipation movements, particularly which have become a common trend in the modern Muslim world, including in Indonesia. Shihab's thoughts on Muslim women are worth studying because he attempts to unravel the primary Islamic religious texts that deal with women's issues within their initial context to provide religious instructions for Muslim women today without necessarily renouncing the traditional methods of reasoning. This article argues that Shihab's articulation of Indonesian women's fiqh (jurisprudence) using exegetical logic opens a broader space and provides an alternative for more emancipatory interpretations of religious texts operating within the grand corridor of Islamic religious and intellectual tradition.

Conversion practices in Aotearoa New Zealand: Developing a holistic response to spiritual abuse.

Research arising from conversion practices, also known as conversion therapy and sexual orientation and gender identity change efforts, has generally been underpinned by an emancipatory discourse that has evolved to counter harmful practices by evidencing associated harms and estimating prevalence. Little attention, however, has focused on what is required to support survivors, inclusive of those currently or those having previously experienced conversion efforts. Within a context of Aotearoa New Zealand having recently criminalised conversion practices, this study adopted an in-depth qualitative research design, informed by a dual adherence to life history and an empowerment methodology. Twenty-three religious conversion practice survivors, who had experienced religious conversion practices across a range of Christian identified faith settings, were interviewed. Participants had a median age of 34 and the majority identified as New Zealand European, cisgender, and gay. Participant narratives were discursively analysed. Three primary discourses were identified that inform the needed development of interventions and supports: 1) pervasive framing of conversion practices as harm, rather than spiritual abuse, has minimised the impacts of conversion practices. Rather, conceptualising conversion as spiritual abuse positions conversion practices as requiring urgent intervention and ongoing support, inclusive of the development of policy and operational responses; 2) the coercive nature of spiritual abuse needs to be appreciated in terms of spiritual, social, and structural entrapment; 3) the metaphor of a pipeline was enlisted to encapsulate the need for a multidimensional array of interventions to ensure those entrapped within spiritual abuse have a "pipeline to safety". Holistic survivor-centric conversion-related responses to spiritual abuse are required. These need to be informed by an understanding of entrapment and the associated need for holistic responses, inclusive of extraction pathways and support for those entrenched within abusive religious settings, support immediately after leaving abusive environments, and support throughout the survivors' healing journeys.

Identifying and interpreting gendered violence: Visual literacy in an audience reception study of Issa López' Casi Divas

AbstractWe present an audience reception study of participant reactions to gender‐based violence in Issa López' 2008 film, Casi Divas, chosen for its nuanced depiction of women grappling with several violences. Over three focus groups with 15 adult participants, we used Galtung's conflict theory to explore what participants identified as violence, and how victims should respond to violence in various forms. We find that participants have a narrow definition of violence, seeing it as an individualized act and therefore neglecting to consider its cultural or structural foundations. The participants' responses to violence largely reflected neoliberal values of personal empowerment and choice, resilience, and “leaning in.” We recommend critical visual literacy as a tool in the educational context to identify and address violence, to fight inequity, and to establish emancipatory discourses.

“Something Was Going to Change”

The subject of the article is a critical presentation of aspects of the Democratic Transition period (Metapolitefsi) in Greece through interviews and e-mails exchanged by subscribers to the mailing list of the magazine Disability Now, collected from April to July 2000. At the heart of these dialogues lies the discourse about the lifting of accessibility barriers for disabled people in Greece during the 1990s. Through the use of contemporary political theories on populism, the author explains that the discourse on accessibility barriers becomes “a place of political opportunity.” The participants develop a kind of populist discourse inspired by the ideology of the political theory of Modernization, as well as by the possibilities and disadvantages of Greece within the politico- economic framework of the EU. These elements imbue the meaning of the disabled self with a dual content: They connect and unite disabled individuals by producing the expression of an emancipatory discourse which, however and at the same time, is maintained through traces of an ablenationalistic rhetoric, activated by notions of Greekness and Europeanness.

Epistemic translation: towards an ecology of knowledges

ABSTRACT Responding to a challenge raised by Douglas Robinson in the conclusion of his book Translationality (2017, pp. 200–202), the recently launched EPISTRAN project uses concepts, methods and theories from Translation Studies to investigate the semiotic processes (verbal and nonverbal) involved in the transfer of information between different ‘epistemic systems’. Drawing on research from different disciplinary fields, it studies not only the various textual transits occurring when scientific knowledge is repackaged for non-specialist consumption, but also the more complex multimodal operations taking place between the dominant epistemologies of the global North (or West) and the informal knowledges of the global South (including East), and the vertical (diachronic) translation processes involved in the construction of modern knowledge. This paper offers an overview of the project's aims, methods and preliminary results, framed within the emancipatory discourse of an ecology of knowledges.

Salvation Through Womanhood: The Doctrine of Woman Leadership and Portrayal of Ko P'allye as the Great Mother in Chŭngsando

Abstract: The South Korean religion of Chŭngsando places pronounced emphasis on women by teaching that their emancipation is a precondition for surviving an apocalyptic transition, whereafter gender inequities will end. It further highlights the role of historical personage and mother, Ko P'allye (1880–1935), in the early history of the Chŭngsan movement as having been an active subject and the religious successor to male founder, Chŭngsan Kang Ilsun (1871–1909). This doctrine, and Chŭngsando's scriptual portrayal of Ko are explicitly challenging to traditional and contemporary patriarchy, yet it is Chŭngsando's current male leader, An Kyŏngjŏn, who has elevated these elements to a greater degree than any other sect. This article examines representations of womanhood and motherhood within Chŭngsando's current scripture through a close reading of the gendered aspects of the doctrine and portrayal of Ko P'allye. While addressing the textual history, it approaches the scripture as a cultural text for which the most recent version offers the richest elaboration. It analogizes to popular culture to interpret a core characteristic of the text: interplay of the mundane (historical reality) and the extraordinary (religious content). It meanwhile historicizes the tensions with structural patriarchy by situating the Chŭngsan religion as a subaltern salvationist movement. I argue the doctrine and portrayal are neither invention nor contradictory to the movement but trace to two historical forces: emancipatory discourse(s) of women, and Ko's own lived reality as a subaltern.

The Gospel of Pura Luka Vega: Queer Love, Irreverent Life, and Indecent Faith in the Margin

In this particular historical epoch described by many as a time of hypermasculinity and fascist populism, how do we think of emancipatory resistance and decolonizing spirituality that disrupts the patriarchal logic and destabilizes imperial structures that supply blood to the capillaries of our neoliberal order? Where do we locate and source the nerve impulse for our theological task to animate emancipatory praxis of our time? Moving away from the heterosexual theological discourse of emancipation, I suggest that queer life in the margin offers us a different theological vision and, importantly, better provides us with a theological voice that talks back to the system of domination and embraces the marginalized collective selves excluded in our time. Taking lessons from a drag performance, here I argue for a queer spirituality of resistance, one that is particularly angled at the hetero-patriarchal system. Channeling the blasphemous and rebellious spirit of Pura Luka Vega, a Filipino trans drag performer, I lay out a picture of why and what this could mean for people’s theology and I conclude this paper with a proposal for a new theological militant subject: an indecent and irreverent outlaw/outlawed.

The Muslim Women’s Question and the Emancipatory Potential of Nafija Sarajlić’s Literary Work in South Slavic and European Context

The birth of modern identity in the field of literature can be found in the topics elaborated by the first Bosnian Muslim woman writer, Nafija Sarajlić (1893-1970). Set at the onset of World War I, in a cultural milieu in which the values of the Ottoman and Austro-Hungarian Empires intermingled and confronted each other, these topics represented the growth and functioning of the concept of a woman. A comprehensive and emancipatory discourse and the writer’s awareness have been defined in light of the impact of Europeanization and also as essentially deductive content, reflecting the fluidity between self-preservation and destruction as well as rejection by (traditional) society. The author’s work is read through the prism of its correlation to writers from Serbian and Croatian cultural circles, with whom she shared not only a social experience, but also her vocation (teacher), as well as literary descriptions of the resistance to the emancipatory practices that they promoted. Sarajlić established herself as a writer who, in her biography and prose work, bore witness to the processes that accompanied the rise of the Muslim women’s question. This paper’s focus is on the issue of Muslim women’s education at that time, which was not only a crucial question inside the Muslim community, but also a problem that official Austro-Hungarian policies were supposed to address in Bosnia. To that end, an interpretation of the writer’s intimate experiences, as one of the first formally educated teachers, and her exclusion from her profession, her writing and narrative style, as well as her approach to specific motifs, will be examined with regard to how they underscored the modes and avenues for the emancipation of Muslim woman. Despite traditionalisation and patriarchal and clerical processes, which reasserted themselves in the Muslim community, particularly after World War II, it is crucial to emphasize the tremendous importance of Sarajlić’s work. The latter, for all the reasons noted above, with its text and context, functions as a starting point in the real path towards shaping a model of a modern South-Slavic and European Muslim woman.

Utilising Mythopoetic Paradigms for Subverting Prescriptive Linguistic Colonial Supremacies

Post-colonial scholars often confront the dual nature of colonial languages. While these languages provide pivotal communication avenues, especially for diverse marginalized groups like certain Indigenous communities, they simultaneously embody colonial biases, making them challenging mediums for emancipatory discourse. This paper proposes mythopoeticism to leverage the extensive reach of such languages, circumventing their constructive norms. We spotlight this through the prism of the Chiapas Mesoamerican communities' mythopoetics during the 1994 National Army of Zapatista Liberation (EZLN) uprising. This investigation aims to enrich contemporary post-colonial thought, presenting Mesoamerican perspectives on mythopoetics as a dynamic instrument for post-colonial dialogue. The discussion first examines the formative influence of colonial languages on meaning and power dynamics. It then transitions to a detailed textual analysis of the Zapatista mythopoetic narratives. Lastly, it considers the assimilation of Mesoamerican insights into current post-colonial frameworks, endorsing mythopoetics as a rejuvenated mechanism for post-colonial endeavors.

“The Greatest Pariah of the Human Race is the Christian Woman” (?) Church and Religion in the Emancipatory Discourse

The topic signaled by the title is presented on the basis of several journalistic texts: the controversial book Thalitha kumi and articles by “fighting” women, including Cecylia Walewska, Kazimiera Bujwidowa, Iza Moszczeńska, Maria Turzyma, and Maria Czesława Przewóska. The fate of women over the centuries presented in them forms the “history of injustice,” which was blamed on, among other things, Christianity, which had distorted the teachings of Jesus. In the name of fighting forces hostile to progress, emancipatory journalism repeatedly attacked the institutional Church, seen as a bedrock of conservatism, backwardness, and dogmatism.

A war like no other: Russia’s invasion of Ukraine as a war on gender order

ABSTRACT Russia's full-scale war against Ukraine represents a critical juncture for the role gender plays in European security. We argue that the Russian invasion of Ukraine is not only gendered in the way other conflict are, but the war's essential novelty lies in the fact that it is explicitly fought for the so-called traditional values, against gender and sexual equalities. Drawing on local decolonial insights and theoretical concepts of liberal/illiberal gender orders, we contrast the Russian neo-traditionalism with the Ukrainian account of the Russian invasion, while seeking to uncover how an imagination of Europe is constitutive for these gendered discourses. We show that the construction of the narratives is a circular process of ever more pronounced neo-traditionalism by Russia which sees Europe as its decadent Other. We demonstrate that these discourses have real consequences as the Russian illiberal gender order justifies and wages real war against Ukraine and gender is turning into the central battlefield both in the figurative and the literal sense of the word. Russian accounts contrast with Ukraine's hybridised, but increasingly emancipatory discourses and practices which have been playing a fundamental role in Ukraine's resistance to the Russian invasion.

Hungarian Emancipation as a Model Central European Expropriation: How Discourses of Serfdom Argued for Takings

ABSTRACT Due to the moral stakes involved, current scholarship on modern expropriation tends to separate nineteenth-century takings, such as emancipation, from twentieth-century ones, such as Aryanization. This article reconnects Central European expropriations across the fin de siècle by demonstrating how emancipation in Hungary served as a model for later takings. The main subject of this analysis is a press debate in upper Hungary (today’s Slovakia) in 1896, roughly fifty years after the Hungarian emancipation and fifty years before the Holocaust and the building of the Soviet Bloc. I show how Christian Socials, Political Antisemites, and Social Democrats in 1896 repurposed emancipation to further their own desired expropriations. This was a critical inner logic of the practice: because the case for emancipation had been persuasive, it now served to legitimate new expropriations. I then demonstrate how emancipatory discourse over the next half century helped to fuel a series of new takings in the area, including land reform, Aryanization, and socialist nationalization. Thus, socially-beneficial takings contributed to later, often criminal ones. Considering that one result of this dynamic was genocide, it behooves scholars to take seriously these linkages.

Disability Activism: Emancipatory Discourse for Women

Disability Activism: Emancipatory Discourse for Women

"If there is a Declaration of War, We Welcome the War": Undi-18, TikTok Election and Normalisation of Violence

Malaysia's democracy has come under attack due to the radicalisation of young and first-time voters on social media platforms. The widespread usage of TikTok as a primary campaign battleground by the political parties during the 15th General Election (GE-15) marks the anomaly pattern of first-time youth voters. Moreover, having social media influencers courting youth voters as a pawn in the electoral war is considered an accentuation of provocation of hate speech, endangering the prospect of moderate democracy in Malaysia. This commentary studies such anomalies by interviewing youth from varying socio-economic standing and educational backgrounds across Malaysia. Our research note highlights two crucial areas of unexplored terrain for future research. The first is the immediate need to invest in an emancipatory discourse of civic and political education and unabated expansions of democratic space and rights. Secondly, alarming concerns of electoral terrorism and hate speech via social media unravelled the under-research angles or assumed organic political divisions between analogue generations of corrupted warlords versus digital politics of technocratic youth savvy. Inadvertently, our observation of the 15th GE has discerned an increasing political worrisome pattern of widespread manipulative tendency by politicians, including using Industrial Revolution 4.0 (IR 4.0) technology to predict the voting pattern and understand the population sentiment through social media. We also concluded that tactics employed by the cyber troopers of political parties have significantly manipulated and poisoned the neutrality and perspectives of first-time youth voters.

Awaiting Revolution: Performing Chile’s Hierarchies in Ernesto Orellana’s Inútiles

In response to the 2019 social uprising in Chile that resulted in several casualties, trauma, and an eventual plebiscite where the nation decided to rewrite its constitution, scholars are tracing what led to this social outburst. This study examines Ernesto Orellana’s Inútiles (2016) to show how theater crystallized the desires and need for change prior to the estallido social of October 2019. In this sense, the play is a prelude to the uprising. As a cultural product, it dismantles the racial and gender hierarchies that have been sustaining the nation and materializes a discourse of emancipation embodied by Mapuche characters. By analyzing the hierarchies unveiled by the 2016 play along with images that emerged during and post-October 2019, this study makes the case for art as intuitive toward social change and that art can help to eradicate the oppressing powers of a nation.

Depiction of Shifting Identities in Yvonne Owuor’s Dust and The Dragonfly Sea

Individuals in culturally plural environments form and shift their identities in various ways to co-exist and survive in new localities. These identity changes, especially in the diaspora, result from intermingling culturally diverse individuals in a quest for self-emancipation. This paper seeks to explore how contemporary travelling writers depict the complicated process of identity formation and shifting identities of various characters in new physical and non-physical spaces. This study relies on data from Yvonne Owuor's works, The Dragonfly Sea and Dust. As advanced by Fanon and Bhabha, post-colonial literary theory – cultural hegemony and counter emancipation discourse, cultural hybridisation, and exploration of the third space of cultural enunciation underpin this literary analysis. The study, through Ajany and Ayaana, the protagonists in Dust and The Dragonfly Sea, respectively, concludes that individuals in culturally plural environments are constantly involved in shifting their identities to fit in.

Reimagining Witches in Contemporary Hindi Cinema: A Study of “Bulbbul” and “Roohi”

Witch-hunting, an age-old practice in India, survives in a myriad of avatars in rural and urban areas. These avatars of witch-hunting have often been trapped in the binary of Indian modernity and Indian traditions, with the latter often embracing unchallenged superstitious beliefs. Herein we study the way the binary is handled in two recent telefilms, namely Bulbbul and Roohi, as they aim to revolutionise the portrayal of witches in Hindi cinema. The paper looks at how the films in question subvert the genesis of witches and witch-hunts, and how in the process of undermining superstitious belief, they situate witches as embodiment of an emancipatory discourse that resists the silencing of women, a practise still serves the patriarchal standards of a heteronormative, bourgeois society. In so doing, our reading of the films engages with questions such as: How have witches been defined in Indian culture? How are these witches being imagined in the films in question? What implications do these redefinitions have in terms of the feminist movement in India, or in terms of the larger portrayal of Indian women in Hindi cinema?

THE (DE)CONSTRUCTION OF PATRIARCHAL VALUES IN TEXTBOOKS: A COMPARATIVE STUDY OF ITALIAN AS A FOREIGN LANGUAGE AND SERBIAN AS A FOREIGN LANGUAGE TEXTBOOKS

In this paper, foreign language textbooks are interpreted from a social constructivist perspective, as sociocultural products that contain not only specific subject knowledge, but also social norms, cultural values and ideologies (Curdt-Christiansen 2). From the point of view of critical discourse analysis ideology is a construct based upon assumptions and beliefs that reinforce, reproduce and legitimate asymmetrical power relations between different social groups. In line with this, we employ CDA to examine the presence of patriarchal ideologies in the depiction of the private sphere in a corpus composed of five textbooks of Italian as a Foreign Language and four textbooks of Serbian as a Foreign Language. Since the issue of patriarchal legacy in FL textbooks in previous research is primarily addressed in relation to English FL textbooks, one of the objectives of the present study is to shed a light on Italian FL textbooks that are insufficiently explored, and to compare them to Serbian FL textbooks, that are especially relevant as they were until now never approached from the perspective of gender. All the textbooks are employed in the specific educational context of foreign language teaching and learning in the post-secondary education in Republika Srpska, Bosnia and Herzegovina. The importance of the critical analysis of FL textbooks is emphasized because foreign language acquisition includes not only the development of communicative competence in the target language, but also represents a complex process of acculturation, during which students learn and incorporate the cultural values and customs of other countries. In this vein, we argue that FL textbooks used in class should not contain outdated gender stereotypes that convey the message that Italy and Serbia are places where patriarchal cultural values and inequalities are commonly accepted as undisputed societal norms; instead, it is argued that textbooks should promote a more emancipatory discourse and support the transformation of traditional gender roles that has occurred in the past decades in both Serbian and Italian society.

Menopausal rage, erotic power and gaga feminist possibilities

This study focusses on discourses on menopause through a critical reading of a selection of nine self-help books on the topic in the context of Dutch-speaking Belgium and the Netherlands. The aim is to explore whether self-help books constrain or facilitate the development of emancipatory discourses on menopause. We combine feminist critiques that identify the experience of menopause as a site of potential for revolt with insights from queer and critical new-materialist theorisation to probe the books’ emancipatory capacity. Our analysis identifies three prominent discursive repertoires: a medical, psycho-therapeutic and spiritual repertoire. Anger and erotic power emerge as important themes, albeit differently framed dependent on the discursive repertoires that the books employ. We conclude that none of the books succeed in disrupting prevailing oppressive discourses that devalue ageing women. There are two important constraints, notably (1) the books’ individualistic and depoliticised stance and (2) their reductionist view on the biological body. As a way out, we propose a gaga feminist reading of menopause that looks at anger and erotic power as sites of ‘biopossibilities’ that may open space for overthrowing oppressive models of gender, sexuality and desire.