Feminist Discourse Analysis Research Articles

Disciplining Professionals: A Feminist Discourse Analysis of Public Preschool Teachers

Educational reforms across the globe have had implications for the work of preschool teachers and thus their professional identities. This article draws on a feminist discourse lens to examine data collected from a recent narrative inquiry focused on understanding the professional identities of five public preschool teachers in the USA. This analysis identifies two discourses (the discourse of professionalism and the discourse of the caregiver), bringing to light the discursive tensions that existed within this context, and examines how dominate discourses construct a double bind that leaves preschool teachers with conflicting identities as they navigate professional expectations.

Constructions and experiences of sexual health among young, heterosexual, unmarried Muslim women immigrants in Australia

Minority ethnic immigrant women are frequently vulnerable to poor sexual health outcomes, due to poor use of sexual health services, lack of knowledge and social stigma associated with the discussion of sexuality. This paper explores the sexual health accounts provided by a group of young, unmarried heterosexual Muslim women immigrants residing and studying in Sydney, an under-researched group in the Australian context. Ten semi-structured interviews were conducted, focusing on sex before marriage, spouse selection and contraceptive use. Feminist discourse analysis identified ‘purity versus corruption’ as the primary construction of women's sexuality, where women positioned their sexual behaviour as that of purity and uninvolvement or corruption through unwedded participation. The subthemes ‘maintaining ignorance and naivety’, ‘remaining virginal’, ‘sex segregation’ and ‘the fallen woman’ capture women's personal sexuality-related experiences and values within the context of their religious and cultural communities. Additional research with this community is needed to examine the effects of negative social constructions of sex on young sexually active Muslim women, as well as further research on young women's sexual health within immigrant communities.

The Absent and Silenced Voice in Media Representations of FilipinaVictims of Homicide in Australia

This article explores the absent and silenced voice in Australian newspapersthrough case studies of two Filipino women – Nenita Westhof and MarylouOrton – who were victims of homicide in Australia. It draws on a feministdiscourse analysis of newspaper articles and interviews conducted with theirfamilies and friends. The method used is one way of enabling people to hear thestories of those who do not have a voice in the present. Analysing newspaperrepresentations in light of the interviews provides an entirely different, moreaccurate and just reconstruction of the women's lives. Mediarepresentations of Nenita and Marylou bore little resemblance to their‘lived reality’. In most instances, journalists did notacknowledge that the women were victims of domestic violence. Furthermore,sexist, racist and class-based discourses constructed Nenita and Marylou inaccordance with dominant representations of Filipino women in Australia. Theywere held accountable for their own deaths, while their abusive male partnerswere frequently portrayed as victims of women who abused them. The articleargues that such representations sensationalize the issues, misrepresentviolence as the women's fault and shift responsibility from theperpetrator to the victim. In the process, they silence women'svoices.

Bristol Palin: the pedagogical media spectacle of a sexual abstinence ambassador

This paper explores the public political media spectacle of Bristol Palin's teenage pregnancy and her status as a single mother through the lens of a critical feminist discourse analysis. The author explores how cultural anxieties over teenage sexuality and unintended pregnancy in America are constructed when the pregnant teen is the daughter of an ambitious politician who is White, upper-middle class, and holds evangelical Christian beliefs. From pregnant teen thrust into the media spotlight by her politically ambitious mother to ambassador of sexual abstinence, the pedagogical media spectacle of Bristol Palin promoting abstinence is unique and can be understood as part of a broader postfeminist media culture in which the articulation of feminist empowerment principles, such as female agency and reproductive choice, is subverted within the neoliberal discourse of personal responsibility and financial independence.

Practices in home–school cooperation – a gendered story?

Based on 30 interviews with teachers and parents conducted in a Swedish compulsory school, this article discusses the current growing body of research on home–school relations that stress the importance of parents’ engagement and involvement as a key factor that influences pupils’ academic performance. The focus is on gendered practices in home–school relationships. Thus, cooperation between home and school is paramount as questions of what type of community programs that promote family–community partnerships are explored. The study analyzes the construction of a cooperation practice that operates in two versions and affects performativity practices in both home and school, emphasizing a joint teacher–mother responsibility discourse as it draws on feminist poststructural theories and discourse analysis. The results indicate that both parents and teachers express attitudes that may raise questions whether they, despite the mission to counteract traditional gender patterns, in fact are dependent and rely on a cooperation practice in which mothers are made particularly responsible and thus contribute to asymmetric gender patterns.

Issues of exceptionality, gender, and power: exploring Canadian children’s award-winning literature

This article explores the gendered ways in which issues of ability and exceptionality are presented in Governor-General award-winning Canadian children’s literature. In much of contemporary feminist thought, there is a strong focus on intersecting oppressions with gender as a central analytic lens. However, ability is still largely absent. Our aim is to bring ability to the forefront in an analysis of gendered representations in children’s literature. We therefore discuss gender, inclusion, and children’s fiction; detail our use of feminist discourse analysis; and present findings from our literature analysis, making connections to societal discourses of inclusion and gender. We conclude that educators must assist students in becoming aware of gendered and abled discourses, discussing their meanings, and deconstructing their hegemonic ideals. Without such critical discussions, the marginalisation of girls and individuals with exceptionalities will continue to be pervasive in children’s literature and, by extension, society.

"Quietly Stripping the Pastels": The Undergraduate Gender Gap

The "new" gender gap refers to women as the majority of the undergraduate student population, and the national newspaper discourse on this trend represents a value system that translates into societal implications and potential policy. The media portrays a "boy crisis" with male students as the victims of female students' enrollment success. The guiding objective in this feminist discourse analysis is to identify and analyze the rhetoric used in three national newspaper sources to highlight the gendered stereotypes that shape public and higher education opinions and is harmful to the success of both men and women students.

New Public Management, care and struggles about recognition

New Public Management (NPM) is usually perceived as a homogeneous discourse. However, when we examine it by looking at micro-politics in municipalities and understand its consequences drawing on the voices of home helpers, the picture is more complex and ambiguous. NPM is seen as disciplining paid public elderly care by limiting and forming the understandings applied through two combined but different logics: a usually dominant logic of details and a usually minor logic of self-governance. The bottom-up study presented here investigates the translation — the understanding and application — of these two logics in two different Danish municipalities that are strategically chosen to illustrate differences along the continuum of NPM translations. It asks which logic the home helpers feel is most dominant and relates the results to feelings of recognition and misrecognition as well as to strategies of resistance. The analysis applies feminist theories of recognition and care, and its findings are based on focus group interviews and feminist discourse analysis.

A Feminist Discourse Analysis of Popular-Press Accounts of Postmaternity

Feminist research has examined a broad range of women's experiences as mothers. However, relatively few studies exist on postmaternity, colloquially the `empty nest'. The present study is a feminist discourse analysis of the variable ways postmaternal experiences were described in popular-press accounts. The analysis identified individual differences as an ideological albeit commonsense notion for interpreting different responses to the departure of adult offspring. Two discourses of womanhood, `modern' and `traditional', produced an ideological dilemma where the subject position `fit adult' conflicted with that of `good mother'. `Adjustment' was used rhetorically to manage that dilemma. The analysis also considered the ways gender differences were managed and the significance of `empty nest' as a pervasive metaphorical colloquialism for postmaternity. The results show that longstanding cultural beliefs about women as mothers still exert a powerful discursive force. However, women can now be represented as having lives beyond the domestic sphere. A dilemma arising in accounts of contemporary women at postmaternity is the conflicting identities of socially fit, well-adjusted adults and good mothers who mourn the loss of their children.

Ageing Lesbians: Marginalising Discourses and Social Exclusion in the Aged Care Industry

SUMMARY The provision of services for ageing lesbians in Victoria, Australia, appears, at an initial reading, to be equitable and inclusive. Government polities suggest recognition and respect for diversity, with a focus on equitable provision of all social services. The reality, however, turns out to be both problematic and exclusionary. The researchers explored how dominant discourses around aged care facilities fail to take into account the identities and needs of ageing lesbians. The advertising brochures of aged care facilities were subjected to a critical and feminist discourse analysis, which was then compared with the perceived needs of a group of ageing lesbians from the same region as the aged care facilities. The data revealed marginalizing of non-heterosexual identities through the absence of representation in the brochures and their exclusion in the construction of aged care space. Further, a review of aged care policies that underpin the provision of services found that lesbian needs and identities were not included or mentioned in the special need groups. This limits the potential of the aged care industry to provide services that are culturally sensitive, safe, and inclusive.

What Is Third‐Wave Feminism? A New Directions Essay

What Is Third‐Wave Feminism? A New Directions Essay

Beyond psychiatry: How social workers conceptualise women and self-starvation

In the present study, I outline how four social workers, with experience in working with women who self-starve, commonly known as anorexia nervosa, conceptualise this phenomenon. I conducted single, in-depth interviews with each worker and feminist discourse analysis was chosen as the method of text interpretation. Alternative (non-psychiatric) ways of understanding women's self-starvation were explicitly privileged. Hence, the alternative discourses of feminist and poststructural theories were used to design the research and analyse the data. The literature review outlines the historical ‘discovery’ of ‘anorexia nervosa’ as a discrete illness category. Contemporary and dominant ‘pathological’ perspectives and marginalised ‘cultural’ perspectives are presented. Three dominant themes emerged from the interviews. They were ‘control and perfection’, ‘femininity’ and ‘self-destruction/self-preservation’. These themes are presented, as are their critical implications for social work.

Doing feminist discourse analysis: domestic violence in the women-friendly welfare state of finland

doing feminist discourse analysis: domestic violence in the women-friendly welfare state of finland

Mars and Venus Collide: A Discursive Analysis of Marital Self-Help Psychology

Relationship self-help advice often blames women for relationship difficulties and endorses relatively traditional gender roles. Its appeal to female consumers is thus somewhat puzzling. This paper uses critical feminist discourse analysis to explore two Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus relationship self-help texts. Both these texts construct gender as a set of natural dichotomies, claim that women and men are fundamentally different in relationship needs, and hold women responsible for maintaining relationship harmony. Thus, they reproduce a discourse that historically has been oppressive to women. However, like all texts, these afford multiple readings. I argue that their rhetoric may be deployed to voice dissatisfaction with inequality and to encourage change in a partners behavior. By affording openings for marital negotiation, these self-help texts and others like them may undermine the ideology of fixed gender differences in relationship orientation and may serve to hold both partners accountable for maintaining marital satisfaction.

Discourses on Discourse: Theorizing Woman in Psychology

Tseëlon presents an ambitious analysis of gender display that draws upon historical, empirical, psychoanalytic and cultural studies approaches. WiLkinson and Kitzinger offer discussions of empirical work (e.g. on sexual harassment) and considerations of discourse analysis as theory and method. The works address and exemplify the tensions between language as discourse and as situated utterance, and between relativism and commitment to political change. Reflexivity and the status of the extra-discursive emerge as central issues in the dialogue between postmodernist feminist psychology and discourse analysis.

Rewriting Menopause: Challenging the Medical Paradigm to Reflect Menopausal Women's Experiences

My subject is not physical illness itself but the uses of illness as a figure or metaphor ... it is hardly possible to take up one's residence in the kingdom of the ill unprejudiced by the lurid metaphors with which it has been landscaped. It is toward an elucidation of those metaphors, and a liberation from them, that I dedicate this inquiry. -Susan Sontag, Illness As Metaphor As Susan Sontag argues, we need to move toward a greater understanding of the metaphors of illness in order to liberate ourselves from them. If, as she suggests, illness is a metaphor for larger social issues and political conditions, what are the metaphoric meanings of menopause? How did this natural aging process in women become defined as a serious illness? The purpose of this paper is to examine the metaphors and meanings associated with menopause and to examine how menopause has been socially constructed as an illness and medicalized.' Because menopause is a gendered subject associated with femininity, sexuality, and aging, we must analyze the physical, social, and ideological implications of defining menopause as illness. Feminist discourse analysis offers one way to examine lay and medical language of menopause and to explore its social implications. Prior to the 1980s little medical consideration was given to menopause. In fact, just twenty-five years ago, medical discussions of menopause were rare, as Sonya M. McKinlay and John B. McKinlay state in their review of the biomedical literature: Despite the possibilities of hormone therapy, the ubiquity of menopause as an event in the woman's life, and the apparently common occurrence of accompanying physiological symptoms, causing considerable discomfort, this subject has received relatively little attention in the medical literature.2 Yet, today, the psychological, physiological, and social aspects of menopause have become common subjects in both the popular and the academic press.3 Three circumstances have prompted the recent proliferation of mainstream, medical, and feminist

The Problematics of the Body in Clarice Lispector's "Family Ties"

Feminist readings of Clarice Lispector's collection of short stories, Family generally focus on preponderance of women protagonists in stories and their? mostly short-lived?attempts to assert themselves as autonomous human beings by escaping narrowly defined roles imposed upon them by a male-dominated society. Thus A. M. Wheeler, in his article Animal Imagery as Reflection of Gender Roles in Clarice Lispector's Family Ties, states that stories primarily relate struggle of women to realize themselves as subjects and to escape their role as objects (125), and Magda Velloso Fernandes de Tolentino, in a comparative analysis of story Imitation of Rose, asserts that Lispector denounces fact that women cannot indulge in their own search for self-fulfillment, but rather act as instruments of their men's comfort (75). Marta Peixoto, in a similar vein, affirms that through plots of stories and inner conflicts of heroines, Lispector challenges conventional roles, showing that allegiances to others those roles demand lead to a loss of selfhood. The protagonists' efforts toward recuperating self emerge as dissatisfaction, rage, or even madness (288-89). Focusing on women characters' difficulties in verbalizing their thoughts in story Daydreams of a Drunk Woman, Naomi Lindstrom concludes that the total result is Lispector's fictional critique of woman's difficulties with verbal expression?a critique that parallels concerns of feminism (Feminist Discourse Analysis 9). 34