Philosophiae Doctor - PhD / In 2006 South Africa extended marriage rights to gay and lesbian citizens, further signposting their legal inclusion in the post-apartheid order. This inclusion is marked by homophobic murder, signifying the continued social exclusion of those at the sexual margins. The spectre of murder is a political pressure point that has come to dominate local and global imaginaries of queer life in South Africa. This study of violence, sexuality and politics is located in the marriage-murder moment, which signals the paradox of being queer in contemporary South Africa. Against this backdrop, the study explores how lesbian subjectivities are constituted in the discourse of ‘violence against lesbians’; what this reveals and conceals about sexual, gender, race and class identities in post-apartheid South Africa; and what such discursive arrangements render (im)possible in relation to how homophobia-related violence might be politically resisted. Violence against lesbians is approached as a discursive surface for the production of meanings, identities and power, with a focus on its productive dimensions in constituting subjectivity and politics. The contending ways of knowing ‘lesbians’ and the violence they encounter produce the imaginable actions against it. Grounded in feminist post-structuralism, and queer and post- colonial theories, a discourse analysis was undertaken of data from focus groups with lesbian-identified women, media texts, and ‘official’ texts from activist organisations and public institutions. The findings show that homophobia-related violence is a contested discursive terrain wherein normative power relations of sexuality, gender, race and class are both reproduced and resisted. Largely staged around black women as victims and black men as perpetrators, violence is understood in highly sexualised, racialised, classed and gendered registers that draw on apartheid and colonial tropes. In particular, the discourse of sexuality articulates with a politics of race within homophobia-related violence as a knowledge regime. This is seen in the ‘blackwashing’ of homophobia and its discursive mobilisations to make racial attributions – intersected with sexuality, class and gender – about the causes and characters of, and ‘cures’ for, violence. Discursive investments in the spectacle of violence against lesbians, as a particularised form of black and queer suffering, deflect attention away from the social conditions in which violence – as an instrument of power – finds form. The spectacularisation of violence against black lesbians legitimises the ‘naturalness’ of homophobia, disarticulating it from the multiple modes of violent othering with which it is imbricated. In exploring the discursive resources for political agency against violence, the study finds divergent forms of agentic possibility. Some subject positions seek to adapt or regulate gendered behaviour through the promotion of feminised self-care strategies that individualise and depoliticise violence. Others assume homonormalising discourses that bolster gender, race and class hegemonies and their associated queer ascendancies. At the same time, the normalisation of violence and the regulatory practices that seek to constrain lesbian subjectivities are contested. A politics of law and order provides a dominant frame through which violence and conceivable actions against it are constructed. Through a discourse of hate crime, the cause of violence is individualised, and the law and the state are positioned as central to its prevention and punishment. In contrast, activist discourses locate the causes of violence within prevailing power relations that continue to render queers racially and economically precarious. The findings point to how violence against lesbians operates as a marker of queer inclusion and exclusion. Violence against lesbians does the work of race, gender, sexuality and class hierarchisation within the dominant social order. It both settles and unsettles apartheid rationalities, and, in doing so, exposes the contingency and precarity of queer subjectivity in post-apartheid South Africa. The findings suggest that homophobia-related violence charts a story of differentiation, both amongst queers themselves and in their relationship to others. These differentiations have race, gender, sexual and class coordinates which, together and apart, assert particular views of what constitutes queer livability on the one hand, and queer violability on the other. Whilst some discursive frames for countering violence provide liberatory potential, others constitute new forms of regulation, scrutiny and disciplining of queer subjects. The study aims to contribute to the production of knowledge that might, in the face of violence, re-imagine power and advance the political aspirations of marginalised subjectivities.

French immersion is a program that some non-native French parents in Canada choose for their children. Some time allocation models for French immersion programs mean that students in French immersion classes will study mathematics in French and in English at different times during their educational careers. This study follows an elementary class of French immersion students from grade three, when the language of mathematics instruction is French, to grade four, when the language of mathematics instruction changes to English. Using Sfard’s four categories of discourse: routine, endorsement, visual mediators, and word use, transcripts of audio recordings of teacher and student language in the classroom were analysed. The characteristics of the teacher and student discourse, as well as the similarities and differences between mathematical discourse in the French language and English language mathematics classrooms were described. The data was characterised by two routines: a question-response-endorsement routine, and an exploratory routine. Although both routines were found in both the French language and the English language classrooms, there were differences as well as similarities in the routines, as well as in word use, visual mediators, and endorsement, between the teacher and the student language, as well as between the two language settings. Limitations to this study, as well as the role of talk in the mathematics classroom, are discussed.

Longstanding political, social, and academic debates surrounding women’s anger have followed a distinct pattern. On one hand, critics disparage women for writing and speaking in an angry voice, casting them as bitter, irrational, or they assign them the pejorative “angry feminist”. Women often respond to these critiques by defending their anger, and reframe this emotional response as a legitimate response to oppression. Despite the utility of this intervention, this debate has given rise to a binary structure where a woman’s anger is either a legitimate response to oppression, or an irrational emotional response. As a result, the alternative functions to women’s anger remain largely unexplored. Working against binary logic, this dissertation aims to reframe this debate, and answer the following questions: what are the alternative functions for women’s anger outside of the binary terms of this debate? How can literary representations of anger complicate this conversation? Drawing from affect theory, intersectional feminist theory, discourse analysis, feminist discourse analysis, philosophical discussions about emotion, feminist literary theory, and ongoing debates surrounding nostalgia, this dissertation explores the function of anger within contemporary Canadian and American women’s literature. Before undertaking literary analysis in subsequent chapters, this dissertation first develops a methodology of “imperfect alignment” to account for the tensions between affect theory and discourse analysis, the theories and methods that guide this research project. The second chapter explores the ways anger allows liminal subjects to come into view in Feinberg’s Stone Butch Blues and Morris’s A Dangerous Woman. Chapter three explores the ways anger can interrupt and complicate compassionate reader responses to gender based abuse in Sapphire’s Push and Mosionier’s In Search of April Raintree. Chapter four explores the ways anger and nostalgia allow subjugated groups to link anger to domestic violence in Joyce Carol Oates’s Foxfire and We Were the Mulvaneys. Finally, this dissertation concludes with a brief analysis of feminist critiques of reason, and locates the findings of this project in relation to this scholarship. Ultimately, this research project nuances debates surrounding anger, and poses alternative readings of this emotional response.

A country’s international reputation has profound implications for its citizens; given that national image or reputation is built and circulated using language on a global scale, translation is necessarily involved. This project draws on bilingual corpora of government and media texts to examine how Canada was framed in the discourses and narratives in circulation in its two official languages at the time of the 2010 G8 and G20 Summits, using concepts and techniques from Critical Discourse Analysis, narrative theory, and corpus linguistics. Examining some aspects of language in use such as collocation, semantic relations, and metaphor, several of the ways in which Canada was framed in the two contexts and languages were compared. The project concludes that discourses and narratives may differ between sources and languages, thereby highlighting the importance of recognizing the impact of translation on the variety of national representations within discourses and narratives.

A law proposal was passed by the Danish parliament in 2018 prohibiting the wear of niqab and burqa in all public spaces. This study aims to analyse the discourse of the debate in the parliament leading up to the passing of the law by using Fairclough’s method of critical discourse analysis. The analysis focusses on the construction of Muslim women in the Danish parliament’s debate regarding the ban on niqab/burqa in public spaces, thereby centering the gendered role of islamophobia. Fairclough’s method of critical discourse analysis is used in the analysis in conjunction with perspectives from postcolonial theorists such as Said, Spivak, Yeğenoğlu and Mohanty. The study concludes that the discourse of the debate can be understood as a form of cultural violence. By drawing on orientalist and white feminist discourse it reproduces a cultural hegemonic relation between Western societies and their “Others”. Culture and religion are used as explanations for gender oppression, placing the fault on the “Other”. This not only stigmatizes anyone who is understood as an “Other” but also obscures gender oppression among the majority Danish population making it harder to address.

Kan Prateepjinda Terrorism in Popular Culture: A Discourse Analysis of the Portrayal of IRA Terrorism in Films Abstract The paper begins by asserting that -terrorism‖ is a social construct based on discourse from a particular historical context, and that our understanding of terrorism is fashioned by that discourse. It goes on to argue that film, as a powerful medium of popular culture, generates meaning of social events and gives filmgoers a feeling of reality; film functions as a second view on the world, guiding audiences from reel to real. The study shows how the forty-year long (1968-2008) history of IRA terrorism is portrayed through a selection of eight films, and the -articulation‖ and -interpellation‖ are studied empirically through the portrayal of terrorism in these films. The discourse on terrorism is analyzed in terms of discourse productivity, and the study uses Foucault's genealogy to trace the -history of present-day IRA terrorism.‖ The findings show that discursive formations are displayed as four different features of IRA terrorism constructed by film language and textual language. These different features reveal the discontinuity of the discourse that is framed by particular time periods. The paper concludes that IRA terrorism (and the acts of IRA terrorists), as portrayed in the eight...

This paper aims to show how people use and understand metaphorical language in conversational discourse. Specifically, I examine how metaphorical language has the potential to be either effective or ineffective in its usage, and how they are bound to the contextual environment of the conversation. This particular setting is a conversation between a researcher and a participant involved in a therapeutic program. Metaphorical language is shown to be helpful for understanding difficult subjects; however, I found most metaphorical occurrences ineffective in meaning-making. Often these ineffective metaphors are elaborated or repeated throughout the discourse event, creating problems with cohesion and understanding. Metaphor use in conversation is an effective rhetorical tool for creating meaning, but it is also a problematic device when it comes to aligning participants' conversational goal.

Based on a psychoanalytic perspective, the article develops a new theoretical framework with which to examine organizational spirituality. Proponents of spirituality claim that it leads to the experience of an authentic self at work, one that is connected to others and a higher order, fully integrated, balanced, complete and ultimately fulfilled. This article suggests that these current definitions rest on conceptualizations of the self that capture little more than the imaginary function of the ego and the empty speech in which it engages. The article reconstructs core dimensions of spirituality in organizations as full speech, that is, as a discourse in which true subjectivity can emerge.

Building on existing research on self-referencing persuasion and narrative health communication, this study examined the persuasive effects of a linguistic message strategy-narrative point of view-and assessed the effects of first-person point of view as compared to third-person point of view. Web-based experimental results (N = 222) showed that the first-person point of view brought about higher levels of character identification and perceived susceptibility than third-person point of view, while the two points of view were equally effective in evoking transportation, self- referencing, and perceived severity. The results also indicated that self-referencing fully mediated the positive relationship between transportation/identification and perceived susceptibility. Yet self-referencing showed no significant impact on perceived severity, whereas more transportation/identification directly led to more perceived severity. Theoretical and practical recommendations are provided for health practitioners, and social media health campaigns

This study explored how socio-cultural and contextual factors influence construction of identity of self-as-principal. Bakhtin's theories of intertextuality, self and other, and utterance and the theories of Mead, Dewey, Bruner, and Cherryholmes regarding the social construction of the self provided a context for examining self-as-principal as described through retrospective narratives. Discourse analysis was used to examine transcripts of 83 oral history interviews with retired Virginia principals whose careers spanned the 1920;s to the 1990's.(see footnote) Focus was on construction of the identity of self-as-principal through examination of structural metaphors (Lakoff & Johnson, 1980), descriptions of others, storying of self as protagonist, storying of conflict situations and how stated opinions and philosophy are reinforced/contradicted by examples provided within the texts (Potter & Wetherill, 1987). Certain socio-cultural factors such as race, gender, and religion, and certain contextual factors, such as level of school (i.e., elementary, middle school, high school), era, school size, open space schools, career track, special education, school district emerged as determiners of cohorts sharing discourse features about self-as-principal. The most profound discourse contrasts about self-as-principal resulted when the cohorts analyzed took into account both race and gender. Very different structural metaphors for each cohort by level and race/gender regarding self-as-principal emerged during the analysis. Age, years of tenure as principal, educational background, rural vs. urban locations, and areas of the state did not seem to generate defined discourse cohorts. The findings of this narrative/discourse analysis provide insight into how self-as-principal is constructed, understood and primarily influenced and confirm that this is a rich approach to better understanding how socio-cultural and contextual factors influence role definition for educators. Footnote: These interviews were collected as part of the Oral History of the Principalship project, directed by Dr. Patrick Carlton, here at Virginia Tech. / Ph. D.