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.

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.

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.

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

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This present study examines the structural impact of language contact on discourse information marking in narrative. It focuses on the surface patterns and underlying linguistic principles used to describe the foregrounding events in traditional and modem short stories, written in Indonesian (the official language of Indonesia) and Sundanese (the native language of West Java province). These two languages have been in an intensive contact since 1945.The data indicate that aspect sets apart background from foreground, whereas tense distinguishes ordinary from significant within the background and foreground levels. Cross-linguistically, the ordinary background information appears in existential, stative, and progressive constructions, marked by the underlying past-tense and imperfective aspect; the significant background and significant foreground types occur in a direct speech and/or direct quote, with the underlying Historical Present. Besides signaling a switch from the past-tense to the HP, the direct speech or direct quote also marks a shift in deixis, distal to proximal. The ordinary foreground information, containing events that advance the story, appears in the underlying past-tense and perfective aspect.The surface markings of the ordinary foreground events, however, are different. In the traditional and modern Indonesian data, these events are dominantly depicted in the active-voice structure. The traditional and modern Sundanese texts, on the other hand, show two different dominant surface marking patterns: the KA (particle) and the active-voice constructions respectively. This appears as a shift in the surface marking strategy attributed to the Indonesian structural influence. The KA- to active voice surface-marking strategy shift indicates the change from the KA + Topic – Comment pattern to the Subject – Predicate structure, suggesting the adoption of the SVX word-order pattern. This affects not only the pragmatic relations of the constituents in an utterance, but also the marking of given-new information distinction.The study demonstrates that the KA to active-voice marking shift in the modern Sundanese data is mitigated by the long-term language contact with Indonesian. Follow-up investigations with varied narrative themes and oral speech data are warranted. Since the shift also appears to indicate the authors' unbalanced bilingual skills, it raises an issue pertinent to the current teaching of Sundanese in the West-Javanese provincial curriculum. / Department of English

abstract: This study tests the hypothesis and assumption of much critical scholarship that the discourse of mass media news transmits prejudicial ideologies to news consumers, influencing the way they think about social justice issues and non-dominant groups in American society, including immigrants, women, and African-Americans. Taking off from the motivations and premises of Critical Discourse Analysis concerning language, power, and ideology, this study aims to extend that paradigm in several ways by applying the analytic techniques of cognitive and critical linguistics to uncover implicit representations in biased discourse. This study also goes beyond previous work by examining the reader comments on media texts to understand how the media’s discourse was received and interpreted, with a focus on the covert transmission of ideological messages. The results reveal how ideologies of prejudice are communicated implicitly through media discourse and how readers’ own ideologies influence that process, as evidenced by their comments. As a study in Critical Discourse Analysis, this study uncovers abuses of power impacting social justice – in this case, the power of writing for the mass media to mold American minds, and therefore influence Americans’ behavior, including elections. Specific news articles from the American networks CNN and Fox were chosen on each of two topics for their relevance to current sociopolitical issues of prejudice and social justice: the US Supreme Court June 2018 decision to uphold the Trump administration “travel ban” and the January 2019 Gillette advertisement, considered controversial for its seemingly feminist criticism of male behavior. / Dissertation/Thesis / Doctoral Dissertation English 2019

Thesis (M.A.)--State University of New York at Binghamton, Department of English, General Literature and Rhetoric, 2006. / Includes bibliographical references.

How do the Swedish police get represented in news media and how does that representation differentiate from other media channels where the police have full control over what is said? Through a discourse analysis of news texts and extracts from the police own webpage and Facebook page, we claim that the discourse in newspapers and the discourse on the webpage and Facebook page is pretty much the same, only packaged differently.