Patriarchal Discourse Research Articles

Gender, Resistance, and Identity: Women’s Rewriting of the Self in Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni’s Before We Visit the Goddess

The image of Indian women has often been associated with the act of obedience and submission. Previous studies on gender and sexuality in India’s literary tradition and culture point to the dominance of heteropatriarchal normativity and the scarcity of the image of a powerful woman capable of contesting and dismantling such impositions. In this study, we argue that Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni’s Before We Visit the Goddess (2016) presents a more nuanced image of the Indian women who constantly problematize the mainstream prescriptions of gender roles and boundaries. In pursuit of the argument, this study aims to explore the novel to examine the multiple ways in which the leading female characters contest, negotiate, and reconstruct pre-existing definitions of gender identities. As an analytical framework, we draw upon the poststructuralist feminist Hélène Cixous’s notions of “the feminine,” “the other,” and “écriture féminine” (feminine writing) to shed light on female characters’ struggles against submission to patriarchal discourses. The findings reveal that the three female characters—i.e., Sabitri, Bela, and Tara—resist discourses of masculinity through empowerment in their unique ways: establishing a business, getting a divorce, and having an abortion. Through such practices, the female characters demonstrate the will of both a woman and a mother and a strong sense of love that works as a key factor in their resistance to patriarchy and rewriting identity relations.

Mixed Messages: Māori/Pasifika Masculinities and Aotearoa/New Zealand Identity in Television Advertising, 2000–2019

There is an ongoing association between masculinity and New Zealand identity which can be traced in popular culture and television advertising. Until the early 2000s, white (Pākehā) men/homosocial “Kiwi blokes” predominated but television advertising has since featured a steady increase in Māori/Pasifika men and boys, which also reflects their greater prominence in local popular culture (in comedy, for example). Similar to representations of African American men, Māori/Pasifika masculinities are subject to binary stereotyping: generally more positive in advertisements for commercial products and more negative in anti-drug public service advertisements. These categories relate to the incorporation of non-white subjects into colonial, patriarchal discourse (and shift according to its imperatives). One important shift internationally is the emergence of non-white fatherhood as a way of signalling ethnic diversity while also reaffirming colonial and neoliberal values. There is a related shift from the male “hard bodies” of the 1980s and 1990s towards a more relational, “softer” masculinity; locally, there is a shift away from the “hard” Kiwi bloke (or non-white sporting “warrior”) towards “postfeminist fatherhood.” This features kindly, often humorous paternalism and “magical” scenarios, including literal and metaphorical father/son relations, which may, in the local context, take on connotations of tāngata whenua welcoming manuhiri (Pākehā) into “their land.” A “progressive” discourse of positively imaging Māori/Pasifika men as implicit “fathers of the nation” (and clearly there is a slippage here between Māori and Pasifika through the use of ethnically ambiguous actors) justifies heteronormativity and reconfirms the homosocial emphasis in New Zealand identity as well as neoliberal values.

Women Frame in Media Discourse

This research is motivated by high public attention in the case of online prostitution Vina Garut, which is reporting about her the case brings up gender discrimination, and the media that actively contribute to these cases is suara.com. In this study, the authors pick nine news the period 15 August to 21 September 2019, which are then analyzed using Sara Mills's critical discourse analysis. From the results of the analysis, Vina is a woman who is at the same time is displayed as a negative character in this case. Apart from that, Vina is also positioned as an objectified party. This is seen in the way the media features news that highlighted gender discrimination. Researchers see that patriarchal discourse in Indonesia still positions women as people who have high news values but are also vulnerable to being positioned unevenly. Researchers also see that the media of the object of this article's research has tried to choose diction and arrange sentences in a balanced manner. But patriarchal ideological discourse is still seen in several narratives and readings of the production and consumption of public discourse in news portals in particular and discourse in public in general.

(Bio)Političke strategije rasprave o „mješovitim brakovima“ u Ljiljanu 1994. godine

In her paper, the author presents an analysis of the debate on „mixed marriages“ initiated in June 1994 by Džemaludin Latić, editor-in-chief of the Bosniak national weekly Ljiljan. The research focus of the paper, however, is not on „mixed marriages“ as a „phenomenon of socialist past“ but on discourse in Ljiljan as a linguistically constructed social reality/past that is produced through discussion. That discourse aimed at creating a new narrative and ideological basis for group bonding, i.e. at completing the process of national homogenization. Media elite gathered around Ljiljan was part of the Bosniak political elite – that emerged during the „democratization“ period in the late 1980s and early 1990s - which shaped political paradigm of „the new ethnonational order” and in that sense Ljiljan represented „ideological apparatus” of post-socialist political and social power structures. Main feature of the discourse produced in Ljiljan, through the bitter dispute with Oslobodjenje, newspaper which narratively and ideologically shaped reality in the socialist period, was dramatic revision and simplified stigmatic presentation of the socialist past, victimization of Bosniak nation, and stigmatic collective categorizations of Others. Discussion in Ljiljan was aimed at defining and pointing at both the external and internal enemy of the Bosniak nation, with the latter being represented by those who were considered to be the carriers of the ideological values of the overthrown socialist system. They were to be isolated within the new political order, silenced and pushed towards the social margins, and the values from the social past were re-evalueted and proclaimed to be lie and illusion. Thus, the Internal Others included members of „mixed marriages“ who, with their „multicultural” matrimonial association, were perceived as the ones that violated symbolic boundaries of traditional Islamic collective identity. The Serbs were, on the other hand, defined as the main External Other, and this collective categorization included even those who remained 1992-1995 in besieged Sarajevo, and they were, as well, equated with Chetniks and Communists through discussion in Ljiljan. It is important to stress that the debate in Ljiljan was marked by strong ideological repulsion toward the secularism and civic conceptions, especially European secularism, which relied on the Christian cultural tradition as hegemonic. Source of the hostility and animosity for the main political and social protagonists of the recent socialist past was in the personal traumatic experience of the Young Muslim Group, since 1990 new political elite, which went through the rigged Sarajevo process in 1983, as well as in their ideological repulsion toward the modernization and secularization processes of transformation through which Bosniaks and Bosniak family passed during socialist period. Since the debate erupted in the war year 1994, which was preceded by dense period of brutal violence, concentration camps, mass rapes, and the passivity of European diplomacy towards all these horrific happenings, the author believes that all mentioned contributed to the radicalization of discourse in the national media and that, also, suffered violence was misused by the media and new political elite in order to complete the process of homogenization of the Bosniak collective on the basis of the exclusive ideology of „cultural fundamentalism“. The author also shows that Džemaludin Latić, Ljiljan’s editor-in-chief, tried to use the discussion to encourage the restoration of institutional power and control of the Islamic Community over the matrimonial union of members of national and cultural collective. Namely, within the patriarchal discourse in Ljiljan, the „monocultural matrimonial union“ was perceived as a framework within which the Bosniak national society should be revived and renewed on the basis of Islamic traditional and cultural principles. Within the private sphere, woman as mother played a key role in the process of primary socialization and therefore the focus of a significant part of the discussion within Ljiljan was on her body and life and her responsibility for the postwar biological and cultural revival of the collective. Therefore, the ban on mixed marriages applied primarily to her, Bosniak/Muslim woman. This in fact presented a biopolitical strategy that stood behind the discussion, focused on the bare lives of national subjects, ie. on their subjectivization and socialization within the new political order. Political and social protagonists of that order wanted to ensure „valid“ biological, cultural and ideological reproduction of the new political system and therefore permanent legitimacy of their political, social and economic power. This could be achieved only by directing collective identity self-understanding of national subjects through the monoperspective culture of remembrance and through their social and cultural practices.

Diplomats’ Wives and the Foreign Ministry in Late Imperial Russia, in Four Portraits

The infrequent publications about women’s agency in European diplomacy have concerned themselves with either the early modern age or the post-World War I period, but women remain virtually absent from the diplomatic history of the long nineteenth century. To determine their place in the European political world of this period, this article examines the experiences of four Russian diplomats’ wives. The biographical approach reveals contradictions in patriarchal discourse: it required a diplomat’s wife to be worthy of her role as a representative of the Russian Empire, yet effectively dismissed her from politics. From this another contradiction ensued: as a diplomat’s wife played no political role, the ministry turned a blind eye if her actions challenged traditional social and gender norms, even when such actions led to the neglect of her duties as her husband’s helpmeet.

Sexsation and the Neo-New Woman in Sarah Waters’s Fingersmith (2002)

Marie-Luise Kohlke’s concept of neo-Victorian ‘sexsation’ characterises the project of contemporary novelist Sarah Waters to explore sensational representations of the Victorians’ sexual lives. In Fingersmith, Waters re-imagines patriarchal Victorian pornography rife with masculine stereotypes of male domination and female subjugation embodied in the pornographic archive of Mr Lilly. Subverting the structures of subjugation, however, she describes Maud and Susan’s own discovery of lesbian sexuality; a sexual awakening accompanied with Maud’s journey towards literary creativity for she eventually emerges as a writer of erotica in her own right, thus recalling New Woman figures of the 1890s. The aim of this essay will be first to explore how such a sexsational narrative enables a radical revision of patriarchal discourses on sexuality. Then we shall examine to what extent Waters’s plot of lesbian creativity is indebted to the artist’s novel of the 1890s and to the late-Victorian New Woman novel. With its emphasis on ‘dissident’ sexualities and woman’s emancipation through writing, can Waters’s Fingersmith be considered as neo-New Woman fiction?

“Cuando yo quiera has de volver”: Configuraciones de masculinidad y feminidad en las canciones de Juan Gabriel para Rocío Dúrcal

Recent studies about the popular Mexican singer Juan Gabriel have contributed to understanding his artistic proposal as a hybrid mixture: traditional patriarchal discourse combined with ambiguous, avant-garde performance. These studies have positioned his work as a field of study in academia, also exploring his compositions for female singers. One of them, perhaps the most relevant given her long personal and professional bond with Juan Gabriel, is the Spanish singer Rocío Dúrcal. This article focuses on the configurations of masculinity and femininity present in the construction of a female character in song and her experiences of love. Whereas Juan Gabriel’s songs are originally influenced by Mexico’s traditional concept of masculinity, it is unclear whether this ultimately transfers to the lyrics created for Dúrcal. To clarify this point, this article aims to answer the following: To what extent is Mexico’s hegemonic masculinity present in this repertoire? And can these female protagonists emancipate themselves, or do they remain submissive to male authority?

(De) Constructing Patriarchal and Sexist Discourses: Re-Reading Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye and Sula

Patriarchal and sexist discourses have come under scorching attacks from most feminist writers since the advent of modern feminism. This work analyses Toni Morrison’s attempt at deconstructing patriarchal and sexist discourses in The Bluest Eye and Sula. It adds its voice to the ever vibrant conversation on the issue of patriarchy and sexism especially as portrayed in the works of African American female writers who see their stories as twice-told tales - victims of both racism and patriarchal dominance. Tony Morrison challenges patriarchal and sexist values which she sees as monolithic discourses that hold no ground. She portrays female characters whose never-say-die attitudes go a long way towards deconstructing this monolithic system. By showing her male characters as weak, irresponsible, and social misfits, and her female characters as dynamic, strong, and hardworking individuals on whom their different families rely for security and sustenance, Morrison is not only rejecting the prevailing patriarchal values of our society, she is as well on a crusade towards its deconstruction. In so doing, she does not try to paint spotless alabaster heroines, but rather she shows ordinary women in their struggle for survival in an indifferent and often times cruel environment.

A Foucauldian and Feminist Reading of The Tenant of Wildfell Hall

Anne Brontë, in her novel The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, criticizes the power of the patriarchal society in the nineteenth century and the practices that legitimize the actions of men considered superior to women. Helen, the female protagonist of the novel, shows that by running away from home with her child due to her cruel and neglectful husband, she can both stand on her own feet and raise her child well without a father like Arthur, and thus opposes the patriarchal order and discourse of the period. In order to illustrate male oppression on women represented in the novel, this study employs critical theories of Michel Foucault as well as feminist criticism. In this respect, the study claims that the novel subverts patriarchal order while implying that women like Helen should be equal with men in social life and before the law. In the light of the protagonist’s portrayal as a rational, creative, hardworking and self-confident woman contrary to Victorian conceptions, this study reveals that the superiority of men over women stems from the patriarchal discourse created in the bourgeois society.

English Teachers Gendered Identities Constructions in their Doings, Sayings and Relatings

This is a research report of a feminist poststructuralist discourse analysis study carried out in a private University in Tunja, Boyacá, Colombia. This study intended to explore the relation among two EFL university teachers’ pedagogical practices and their gendered identities constructions. Pedagogical practices were framed in the practice architectures: doings, sayings and relatings proposed by Kemmis & Mutton (2012)
 It was unveiled that doings, sayings and relatings were sites for and outcomes of teachers´ gendered identities construction. Additionally, teachers´ gendered sayings, doings and relatings were interweaved, juxtaposed, complemented, and contrasted sites where teachers performed different masculinities and femininities based on their capacities to adapt, resist, contest and oppose to heteronormative and patriarchal discourses such as gender roles and normative masculine and feminine features. Those gendered constructions were identified to have possible consequences upon students´ English language leaning and gendered identities construction.

NEWS TEXT DISCOURSE ANALYSIS MODEL SARA MILLS AT MEDIA ONLINE DETIK.COM (GISELLA ANASTASIA PORN VIDEO CASE)


 The news of the viral pornographic video case involving Gisella Anastasia in the detik.com news portal received high attention from the public. The comments column on news portals is filled with various kinds of public opinion. The researcher chose 2 corpus of news from detik.com news portal on the day of the incident. The data obtained were then analyzed using the Sara Mills discourse analysis method. From the discussion, the researcher sees that Gisella Anastasia as a woman and a public figure is shown as a negative character in this case. In addition, Gisel is also positioned as an object in several sentences in the 2 selected news corpus. The researcher sees that the patriarchal discourse in Indonesia still positions women and public figures as figures who have high news value, and are vulnerable to being positioned unequally. The discourse of patriarchal ideology is still visible in several narratives and readings of the production and consumption of public discourse on news portals in particular and public discourse in general.

Rereading the Zimbabwean “Land Question”: Gender and the Symbolic Meanings of “Land”

As the source of all food production, land in southern Africa has been highly contested. Using a variety of texts that express themes relating to land, I show that in Zimbabwe, in the face of massive political competition, land became the foundation for reform and national sovereignty in dominant nationalist, patriarchal and gendered discourses. I demonstrate that cultural texts centred on land have been embodied and generated in familial troupes, revealing dominant gendered and sexualised overtones that naturalise land ownership and particular land uses. At the same time, these texts reveal symbolic violence meted out on particular bodies. This discursive analysis of texts examines the gendered and sexualised discourses associated with Zimbabwe’s national reforms and security, where the imagining of the security, protection and sanctity of land has been driven by nationalist ideas about its centrality in the healthy (re)production of obedient social and national subjects.

Isabelle Eberhardt, Rachilde and Queer Sexualities: Pygmalions Nécromanciens and Mortes amoureuses

The myth of Pygmalion and the motif of the morte amoureuse pervade the Francophone literature of the nineteenth century. From Romantic ghosts to Decadent female corpses, male authors spin tales of necrophilia. Animated by the male lover's thoughts and desires, women are often simply ventriloquized through the male narrator, a sort of Pygmalion nécromancien. Within this patriarchal discourse of silenced females, Isabelle Eberhardt and Rachilde innovate the genre by giving a voice to their female characters, whether as subject (Pygmalion) or object (morte amoureuse). At a time when women were expected to write about marriage and motherhood, these quintessential rebel female figures revisit common masculine tropes through a feminist lens.

키츠의 「무자비한 미녀」와 「라미아」에서의 남/여성의 목소리

This essay shows how Kaja Silverman’s theory on female voice may explain the tendency to divest the female voice of any authority in John Keats’s poems, “La Belle Dame sans Merci” and “Lamia.” This study focuses on male voices that define and posit the mysterious and enigmatic female identity and unreliable female voices in Keats’s poems. According to Silverman, while women may cry, scream, prattle, or murmur sweetly in the course of any film, they have little or no authoritative voice in the narrative. Keats places the male subject on the side of symbolic Law and discursive authority. In these two poems, the female voices are deprived of authoritative speech. The narratives of the poems are saturated with conventional masculine ideologies that silence the female voice. The lady moans, weeps, and sighs, and Lamia moans, sighs, weeps, and lisps. By appropriating a woman’s voice while denying its integrity, Keats shows how patriarchal discourse suppresses women’s voices.

Leftover or Individualised? Representations of Chinese Single Womanhood in Western English-language News Media

ABSTRACT Since 2007, Chinese state-run media has used the term ‘leftover women’ to describe single women who are 27 or above. While considerable research has examined patriarchal discourse surrounding China’s ‘leftover women’ in the Chinese state-run media, very little scholarship has explored the female individualisation discourse that emphasises independence and self-actualisation in Western English-language news outlets. To fill this gap, this study employed feminist critical discourse analysis to examine how the female individualisation discourse is constructed in a bid to advocate gender equality in 55 articles collected from the Western English-language news media. The analysis found three predominant themes underlying the female individualisation discourse: critiques of patriarchal social practices; pursuit of true love and self-actualisation; and advocacy of single women’s reproductive rights. These themes are formulated by various discursive strategies – specifically, membership categorisation, scientific rationalisation, authorisation and metaphor. This study sheds light on the discursive construction of the female individualisation discourse that endeavours to empower single women in the Western English-language news media.

INVASION OF THE SYMBOLIC BY THE SEMIOTIC IN ORANGES ARE NOT THE ONLY FRUIT: A KRISTEVAN ANALYSIS

It can be argued that Oranges are Not the Only Fruit, Jeanette Winterson’s debut novel, subverts the two main patriarchal institutions, the family and Church, by laying bare how they accommodate the motherly in their fatherly discourse. These subversions emerge especially in the problematic mother-daughter relationship, family and religion as a result of their confusing nature, centrality in the novel and formative effects on Jeanette’s life. The two main domains in the novel, which are the family and the Church, require further analysis as they are mingled with the mother-daughter relations, and Kristeva’s register theory would yield a deeper psychoanalytic insight into the family and Church. In “Stabat Mater,” Kristeva’s discussions of Virgin Mary as a “return of the repressed” and a subversion of the semiotic within the symbolic order of monotheistic religion can offer insight into the construct of the family and the Church. This study aims to find out workings of the family and Church in Oranges in the light of Kristevan register theory and the maternal in “Stabat Mater.” It is claimed that the family and Church entail the maternal at their paternal heart despite the mother’s efforts to protect and perpetuate their patriarchal discourse and role in the symbolic order. Invasion of the symbolic by the semiotic is noteworthy because it brings about problematizations of binary oppositions, totalizing truths and the myth of development, which is found in Bildungsroman genre, upon which patriarchal constructs and the symbolic order depend.

Contaminating the Binaries: The Rhetoric of Resistance in Women’s Autobiographical Narratives in the Bamabodhini Patrika (1863-1922)

The nineteenth century Bhadralak attempted to recast women and model them into the Bhadramahila (“respectable woman”). This was done as an attempt to establish themselves as a class and propagate the ideologies of liberal nationalism. I look at this recasting project through the reading of the Bamabodhini Patrika, a periodical for the upper-middle-class Bengali women started by Umesh Chandra Gupta in 1863. The Bhadralak introduced the antahpur education, which featured extensively in the Bamabodhini, as a mean to emancipate the women from the clutches of Hindu patriarchy. This project, however, was circumscribed by its own limitations. In analysing the serialized publications in the Bamabodhini Patrika (‘Gayanada, Sarala and Abala’ and ‘Strir Prati Swamir Upadesh, ‘Kanyar Prati Matar Upadesh’, and ‘Swami Strir Paraspar Sambandha’) I bring out how the Bhadralak tried to curb curiosity and tame female self-subjectivity. Therefore, in construction of the Bhadramahila, the Bhadralak reorganised some of the tenets of the older order of patriarchy and placed her in a newer and reformed patriarchy dictated by a distorted concept of ‘emancipation’. However, viewing the patrika solely in terms of hegemony is, reductionist and one-dimensional; it provided one of the first platforms for the self-expression of the women. Although the patrika’s strict editorial policies did not align with radical self-expression, towards the end of the nineteenth century and the twilight years of the Patrika the editorial policies were relaxed. The task I have undertaken in this dissertation is to collect the scattered voices of resistance and unpack them as challenges to the new formed patriarchal discourse. Periodicals like the Bamabodhini Patrika contaminated the public sphere with personal narratives of the Bhadramahila, and problematised the nineteenth century nationalists’ attempt to resolve the woman’s question. My reading further complicates the conclusions drawn by critics such as Partha Chatterjee regarding the dichotomies of the inner and the outer domain of nationalist discourse. His contention that women’s autonomous struggles were tucked away in the private tracts of autobiographies shall also be disproved by my thesis. Finally, I propose that the Bamabodhini Patrika offered a space for women’s writings to leak into the public sphere, and stands as a mean of obfuscation of lines that tried to neatly compartmentalize women’s resistance in the private.

The Witch in His Head: Rupturing the Patriarchal Discourse in Eichendorff's Ballad "Waldgespräch"

The Witch in His Head: Rupturing the Patriarchal Discourse in Eichendorff's Ballad "Waldgespräch"

Empower or disempower? The Cunning Patriarchal Consumerism and Female Representation in the Chinese Online Shopping Festival Queens Day

Chinese online shopping festival has become increasingly important to research on cultural and societal issues related to gender. This paper focuses on the Chinese online shopping festival 3.8 Queens Day, investigates the relationship between female empowerment and patriarchal consumerism power embedded in Queens Day in context of Chinese society. This paper analyses the reason of the popularity of Queens Day through the historical and societal perspective, and by critical discourse analysis of the advertisements and slogans in Queens Day, the patriarchal power presented by dominant male aesthetics and patriarchal discourse have been found. Then, through renaming Womens Day and the word Women ( in Chinese) to Queen, it can be seen that patriarchal consumerism discourse has done alienation towards female by deconstructing the historical and societal meaning of the Womens Day. This paper uncovers the cunning of patriarchal consumerism as inconspicuous male power seemingly empowers but actually disempowers female through ads that advocate female independence.

Discourse Analysis from the Perspective of Austin’s Speech Act Theory and Searle’s Taxonomy of Illocutionary Acts: A Case Study of Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s The Yellow Wallpaper

A focus on discourse analysis, this study presents a particular interest in the power relationship artfully constructed by Charlotte P. Gilman in three dialogue instances in her most memorable short narrative, The Yellow Wallpaper. With the awareness of gender differences in mind in terms of how men and women use language, Gilman evinces the ways in which language could be a medium of silencing the other. Consequently, this paper carefully examines the protagonists’ discourses through J. L. Austin’s speech act theory and John Searle’s taxonomy of illocutionary acts. The corpus of the study consists of the utterances of the husband/doctor and of the wife/patient, and both the quantitative and qualitative research methods have been employed for the data analysis. The results have shown that the patriarchal discourse, originally dominated by representatives (opinions, facts) and directives (commands, orders, advices, and refusals), produces utterances meant to fabricate reality (erroneous diagnosis) and generate refusals, whereas the discourse of the other consists mainly of representatives- true statements and opinions -which contradict men’s reality in the journey to achieving self-assertion and selfexpression.