Positioning Gender in Discourse: A Feminist Methodology

Positioning Gender in Discourse: A Feminist Methodology introduces a newly emerging approach to the analysis of talk. Feminist Poststructuralist Discourse Analysis (FPDA) offers a means of analyzing the ways in which speakers construct their gendered identities within a complex web of power relations. The FPDA approach challenges the traditional feminist view that females are often disempowered within mixed-sex settings. The FPDA approach to analyzing talk shows that both male and female speakers constantly shift between positions of powerfulness and powerlessness--even within the same conversation. The methodology is demonstrated through a study of teenagers' conversations in class and a study of senior managers' discussions in business meetings, concluding with suggestions that while female speakers are often "silenced" by dominant social discourses, they are far from being uniformly powerless.

JUDITH BAXTER is Research Fellow in Linguistics at The Reading and Language Information Centre, University of Reading, UK. She has written a number of school textbooks and contributed to books for teacher education in language and literature. Among her recent publications is Speaking Out: The Female Voice in Contexts, also published by Palgrave Macmillan.