Gender Status Women

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TOPIC: INFLUENCE OF GENDER STATUS ON DISCOURSE BEHAVIOUR OF WOMEN.

ABSTRACT
The focus of this paper is on the role of language as a powerful tool in representing and structuring the world. We will explore how language can help construct stereotype identities and human relationships. Gender being a socially constructed definition of women and men, it is determined by the conception of tasks, functions and roles attributed to women and men in society, in public and private life; whereas power is reflected in every aspect of communication from what the actual topic of the communication is to the ways in which it is communicated. Most researches have focused on the spoken aspect of language giving little attention to the written discourse; this …show more content…

These studies show how patterns of interaction between men and women reflect the dominant positions. Some studies however, have taken a different approach by looking not so much at power in mixed-sex interactions. This paper considers power or status in same-sex interactions more specifically, in the written discourse in the already stated magazine. The purpose of this paper is to examine how gender status influences the discourse of women in the selected articles from the Saturday Magazine. Our objectives are: to examine the linguistic forms used by women and determine whether their discourse reinforces or transforms gender status. The scope of this paper will be limited to the textual discourse analysis of the ‘Girl Talk’ in the Kenyan Daily Nation …show more content…

Gender intersects with and is shot through by other categories of social identity such as sexuality, ethnicity, social position and geography (Lazar, 2008). Butler (1990) provides a Critical Discourse Analysis to gender and discusses the concept of performativity whereby gender is constructed through learned behavior governed by the cultural norms that function within a wider discourse. Constantly, gender has to be reaffirmed and publicly displayed by repeatedly performing particular acts. Any language act is viewed as a performance by the speaker or author who is both working to function within the wider discourse which shape the expectations of gender and within specific contexts of utterances or text and its continuing consequences for the position of women in

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