Week 1: Critical Discourse Analysis.

Critical Disourse

CDA

o Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) is a multidisciplinary approach that aims to understand

how social power is created, maintained, and reproduced through language use. It focuses
on analyzing social discourse, which refers to the ways in which people communicate about
and construct their understanding of social issues and events.
o When looking at CDA we typically involves analyzing the language used in different types
of texts, such as news articles, political speeches, or social media posts. The goal is to
identify how language use reflects and reinforces social beliefs, values, and power
dynamics.
o CDA also pays close attention to the context in which language is used, as this can
influence the meanings and interpretations of language use. For example, the same word
or phrase may have different connotations in different contexts, and CDA seeks to identify
these nuances in language use.
o Additionally, CDA aims to identify the underlying ideologies and power relations that are
communicated through language use. This involves examining the ways in which language
use is influenced by and reinforces dominant social beliefs and values, and how this can
contribute to social inequality.
o Overall, CDA is a valuable tool for analyzing social discourse and belief, as it provides a
systematic and rigorous approach for identifying how language use reflects and reinforces
social power relations and ideologies. Through this analysis, CDA can help to reveal the
underlying dynamics of social issues and contribute to efforts to address social inequality.

Bhaskar's Four Stages of Explanatory Critique

o Bhaskar's four stages of explanatory critique are integral to CDA, as they provide a
framework for critically examining social phenomena and uncovering the underlying power
dynamics. The four stages include:

Stage 1: Focus upon a social wrong, in its semiotic aspects.

Stage 2: Identify obstacles to addressing the social wrong.

Stage 3: Consider whether the social order ‘needs’ the social wrong.

Stage 4: Identify possible ways past the obstacles.

Stage 1: Focus upon a social wrong, in its semiotic aspects.

 CDA is a form of critical social science geared to the better understanding of the nature and
sources of social wrongs, the obstacles to addressing them, and possible ways of
overcoming those obstacles.

‘Social wrongs’ can be understood in broad terms as aspects of social systems, forms or
orders that are detrimental to human well-being and could in principle be ameliorated if not
eliminated, though perhaps only through major changes in these systems, forms or orders.
Examples might be poverty, forms of inequality, lack of freedom or racism.

• Step 1: Select a research topic that relates to, or points up, a social wrong and that can
productively be approached in a trans-disciplinary way, with a particular focus on dialectical
relations between semiotic and other moments.

• Step 2: Construct objects of research for initially identified research topics by theorizing
them in a trans-disciplinary way.

Stage 2 - Identify obstacles to addressing the social wrong

This stage approaches the social wrong in a rather indirect way, by asking what it is about
the way in which social life is structured and organized that prevents the social wrong from
being addressed.

This requires bringing in analyses of the social order, and one ‘point of entry’ into this
process can be semiotic, which entails selecting and analysing relevant ‘texts’ and
addressing dialectical relations between semiosis and other social elements.

• Step 1. Analyse dialectical relations between semiosis and other social elements: between
orders of discourse and other elements of social practices, between texts and other
elements of events.

• Step 2. Select texts, and points of focus and categories for their analysis, in the light of, and
appropriately to, the constitution of the object of research.

• Step 3. Carry out analysis of texts – both interdiscursive analysis and linguistic/semiotic
analysis

Stage 3 - Consider whether the social order ‘needs’ the social wrong
Stage 3 leads us to consider whether the social wrong in focus is inherent to the social order,
whether it can be addressed within it, or only by changing it.

Stage 3 is a way of linking ‘is’ to ‘ought’: if a social order can be shown inherently to give rise to
major social wrongs, that is a reason for thinking that perhaps it should be changed.

This stage also connects with questions of ideology: discourse is ideological in so far as it
contributes to sustaining relations of power and domination.

Stage 4 - Identify possible ways past the obstacles

Stage 4 moves the analysis from negative to positive critique: identifying, with a focus on
dialectical relations between semiosis and other elements, possibilities within the existing social
process for overcoming obstacles to addressing the social wrong in question.

This includes developing a semiotic ‘point of entry’ into research on the ways in which these
obstacles are tested, challenged and resisted, be it within organized political or social groups or
movements or, more informally, by people during their ordinary working, social and domestic lives

Week 2: Gender and Discourse Analysis

Language and Gender

 One of the most striking phenomena in language study in the 1970s and 1980s was the
development of the field of research known as ‘language and gender’.
 This area of research continues to grow: the International Gender and Language
Association was founded in 1999 and holds biennial conferences, and a new journal –
Gender and Language – was launched in 2007, dedicated to the publication of research in
this area.
 The language and gender field consists of two main strands.
 The first developed as part of quantitative sociolinguistics:
- sociolinguists analysing the co-variation of language and variables such as social
class began to notice that their data also revealed gender differences.

The second strand of language and gender research, which will be the subject of this paper,
focuses not on phonological, morphological, or lexical features of language but on language as a
‘concrete living totality’ (Bakhtin, 1981) – in other words, on discourse

Approaches to Discourse

Over the last thirty odd years, there have been three main approaches to language and gender
research:

The dominance approach -

• The idea that a certain group places dominance within discourse to show a higher level of
power.

• The core tenet of the theory is thatsocial cognition (including the deontic advantage)was
shaped by the continual need to survivewithin dominance (or status) hierarchies, thesocial
organization that is ubiquitous in the soci-eties of humans and nonhuman animals through-
 out evolutionary time. High-status individualsare essentially authorities in this type of
socialorganization, monitoring and controlling thebehavior of subordinates in order to
maintain pri-ority of access to competitive resources (such asfood and mating
opportunities).

The difference approach -

• The thought that different genders view communication in a different way and thus
communicate ineffectually with each other.

The social constructionist approach -

• The idea that gendered speech is a social construct that people place upon themselves due
to environmental norms.

Intercultural communication

STRATEGIES THAT CAN HELP TO PROMOTE MUTUAL UNDERSTANDING

The factors or strategies that can help to prevent misunderstandings or can promote mutual
understanding.
Most of those that have (e.g. Bremer et al., 1996; Sunaoshi, 2005; Mauranen, 2006; Chiang,
2009a, b) have concentrated on the management of the linguistic code.

The negotiation of comprehensible input ([Link], 1983; Varonis and Gass, 1985).
For example, Chiang (2009a) analyses the corrective and preventative strategies that international
teaching assistants and American college students use when interacting with each other, and
identifies and illustrates the following: clarification requests, confirmation requests, self-
reformulations and other-reformulations.

Spencer-Oateyand Stadler give the following authentic example to illustrate its successful use,
and also to point out that effective language adjustment is not always as easy to carry out as it
might superficially appear.

MANAGING RAPPORT IN INTERCULTURAL DISCOURSE

Many studies of intercultural discourse (e.g. Bailey, 1997, 2000; Tyler, 1995; Spencer-Oateyand
Xing, 2003, 2004; Ryoo, 2005, Gınthner, 2008) have analysed how people manage their
relationships in social/professional encounters.
A large number of theoretical frameworks have been used for such purposes, and one of the most
influential concepts has been the notion of ‘face’.
This was defined by Goffman (1967: 5) as ‘the public self-image that every member wants to claim
for himself’.
Brown and Levinson (1987) built on this concept in their classic theory of politeness, in which they
attached central importance to the notion of face-threatening acts (FTAs).

These a reacts that risk damage to speakers’ and hearers’ face wants: their negative face wants
that their actions are not impeded by others and their positive face wants that their
qualities/characteristics are desirable to others.
In social interaction,people are said to manage their social relationships by avoiding imposition on
andthreat to each other’s positive and negative face wants.
Example page 577

Queer linguistics

Queer linguistics posits that gender is the normative reference in this discussion, recognising that
a society’s statements about ‘who men and women are’ are ideological formations.

They constitute a representation of the imaginary relationship of individuals to their real conditions
of existence.

The Queer Linguistics subscribes to the idea that gender is a social construct and that we choose
through our own ideological formation what gender and thereby gendered language we use.

The Discourses of Sexuality Queerly: an example

Taken at face value, the example falls within a familiar genre of gay narrative: it is a coming out
story, nested within a story of sexual/spatial discovery.

When we look further into the context behind the language we can note specific ideologies and
communicate methods that show a divergence from the norm in ideology as this example was
done in the years 1990 – 1995 whereby homosexuality was still considered taboo.

Queer linguistics as a part of a broader ‘queer project’

The previous example’s continual weaving of sexuality, race, and responses to apartheid
regulation can also be read as instances of subversive repetition whose effects call into question
the regulatory practice of identity.

Queer theory is also interested in the uneven inflections between sexuality, discursive practices
and structures of power. And, like queer linguistics, queer theory pays attention

-not just what is said, but also the context within which narratives unfold-

Not content merely to produce discussions of the sexual, queer theory began by taking note of the
ways that ‘sexuality’, as a named category, imposes meaning on, and thereby helped to regulate,
other dimensions of human experience.

As time passed, the ‘broad critique’ engaging the production of sexual meanings and its attendant
multiple social antagonisms has assumed a variety of formats, including

• Critical race theory

• Queer critique of colour

• Crip theory (queer disability studies)

• Transgender studies

• New statements of post-colonial theory

• Migration/diaspora studies

• Studies of (homo)phobia/ hate speech

Queer linguistics on its own trajectory: Beyond identity to performativity and desire

Work in queer linguistics began in the late 1990s by as a critique of studies that conflates what
some -again, usually white, middle-class, educated- gay men says in some contexts with a
general “Gay English” and of other studies that assumed that linguistic practices indexed the fact
of gendered identity and/or sexed body.

As Barrett notes, the performer has adopted a white-woman style of speaking, modelled after the
white female behavior and its attendant discursive practices.

Use of white-woman style discourse while in drag persona encodes the performer’s intention to
present herself as a woman of middle-class refinement while on the stage. But part of the point of
drag is to be larger than life, to surpass and critique rather than imitate the object of performance.

The contradiction between the performer’s African American embodiment and her white-lady
verbal practice reflect this point: if a black man can ‘be’ a white woman on the drag club stage,
than someone else can ‘pass for white’, and thus the category ‘white woman’ begins to lose its
appearance of authority.

Intentionality, (inter)subjectivity, belonging, and citizenship

Implied in these discussions of transgender and language was some degree of speaker
intentionality. This was a fundamental theme in early discussions of language and gay identity and
in the initial queer critique of performativity as well.

But intentionality was anathema to the interrogation of language and desire as Cameron and
Kulick originally proposed it, since the willful decisions that the individual speaker might make
during textual practice can always be upstaged by failure, forgery, misuse, or other ensuing
feature of iteration.
Barrett’s discussion of African American drag queen performance (the previous example) provides
a rich illustration of how ‘tactics of inter subjectivity’ unfold, particularly how tactics of
intersubjectivity gain representation in linguistic practice through polyphonous connections
between specific forms of linguistic genre, including African American vernacular and ‘white
woman speech’.

Homophobia in Discourse

Discourse related to homophobia are rapidly becoming a site of interest in queer linguistics. Like
nationalism, these discourses are broadly cast, in this case assigning meanings of disdain,
disgust, or hatred to certain experiences of sexual sameness that immediately draw connections
with other forms of social marginality.

Homophobia can be described as ‘a socially produced form of discrimination located within

relations of inequality’, making no reference to its connections to sexuality at all.

For Bryant and Vidal-Ortiz, such an erasure of the sexual may be a problematic move. They find
that violent acts directed against identified same-sex subjects are sometimes described as
homophobia, other times described as assault or robbery, and sometimes not reported at all.

Contrary to its ‘taken-for-granted understandings and uses’, homophobia is not a static,

predetermined formation, but a discursive position whose uses have ‘unintended and sometimes
less than liberatory consequences’ and often carry their ‘own forms of violence’ (discursive and
material).

Visibility and tacit subjects

A particularly important new direction in queer linguistics has emerged from Carlos Decena’s
discussion of tacit subject formation, a discursive position.

What is tacit is neither secret nor silent’, although it may already be understood or assumed and,
‘if people have the requisite skills to recognise and decode [the] behavior’, the tacit message may
not require explicit statement.

It is tempting to think of Gabriel’s reluctance to name to his social status explicitly as an enduring
allegiance to ‘the closet’. But what is at stake here is an entirely different discursive stance, one
that sets the French example apart from the mainstream US-based expectations of ‘out and proud’
sexual subject and aligns it with the public mediation of sexual sameness associated with a
responsible Dominican sexual sameness in diaspora

Paradoxes of visibility: a queer linguistics of colour, globalization and shame

Until recently, queer linguistics has largely been predicated on discursive practices that were
visible and accessible to audiences and to researchers, or on discursive practices that, for
particular reasons, were deliberately withheld.

This is not a question to be debated in the abstract, but must be explored at the site. Here
emerging work in queer linguistics overlaps with new projects in radical cartography and
experimental geography. Queer linguistics intersects with the body of work associated under the
general rubric, the queer of colour critique.

Queer of colour critique notes how long-standing ascriptions of whiteness and privilege dominate
the categories of reference in vernacular and scholarly discourses, especially so where discourses
pertain to sexual sameness.

That ‘queer’ acquires its meaning from its oppositional relation to the norm which has additional
significance, if the ‘norm’ is a privileged discursive terrain embracing heterosexuality as well as
whiteness, and if the ‘oppositional relation’ includes a range of positions only some of which are
explicitly articulated in discursive practice.

Work in queer linguistics is also exploring these yearnings of desire through studies that connect
textual practices with broader discourses of gay shame and queer trauma.