Using the social networking site Facebook as a corpus, I collected 1,500 random samples of interactions between friends. I tracked the use of jokes and disparaging humor between same- and opposite-gender pairs to discover that there is a strong correlation between the style of joke-making evoked by the speaker and the gender of both the speaker and the hearer. The men in the study were about eight times more likely to make insulting or degrading jokes with other men than the women were with each other. Following the study is a discussion where I address methods of politeness across genders, approaches to humor, and how sex, culture, and gender expectations influence our communicative choices. Though the discussion is based in our linguistic choices, the results of the study reflect trends that are present in countless aspects of society, and the issues that are raised go far beyond the spoken word. / text

published_or_final_version / Language Studies / Master / Master of Arts

published_or_final_version / abstract / toc / Curriculum and Educational Studies / Doctoral / Doctor of Philosophy

This study quantitatively and qualitatively examines honorific usage in casual first-encounter conversations between two relatively young people from similar backgrounds. The issues of concern are the frequency of use of addressee and referent honorifics, different types and forms of referent honorifics, reasons behind speech style shifts between honorific and non-honorific forms, and gender differences in honorific usage.Overall, addressee honorifics were predominantly used compared to plain forms, while the use of referent honorifics was limited in the data. The rate of honorific usage ranged greatly depending on the speaker and the conversation. Using too few addressee honorifics, however, has a possibility of offending the addressee in this speech context.Additionally, it was found that female speakers did not necessarily speak more politely (i.e., use more honorifics) than male speakers. The addressee's gender seemed to influence the rate of use of honorifics. Female speakers' use of addressee honorifics was higher in mixed-sex conversations than in single-sex conversations while the opposite was true with male speakers. As for referent honorifics, both genders tended to use more of them in single-sex conversations.As for speech style shifts between honorific forms and non-honorific forms, several contexts in which these were observed are reported. Self-directed questions and expression of feelings, thoughts, and opinions were the two most likely contexts for speech style shifts between addressee honorifics and plain forms. It appears that such style shifts occur to separate the utterances from the main course of conversation to signal that the utterance is not deliberately addressed to the addressee, that the focus is on meaning, or that the utterance constitutes a subspace embedded in the main floor rather than the main floor itself. Additionally, utterance type, increased familiarity with the addressee, speech style adjustment, and the introduction of new topics are suggested as possible contexts for speech style shifts between referent honorifics and non-honorific forms.

Abstract Title: Cancer in media from a gender perspective Number of pages: 33 (49 including enclosures) Author: Emma Kreü Tutor: Amelie Hössjer Course: Media- and Communication science D Period: Spring 2007 University: Division of Media and Communication, Department of Information Science, Uppsala University Purpose/Aim: The aim of this thesis is to investigate if there are differences between the picture given in media of women with cancer and of men with cancer. The result is aimed to give a deeper picture of how gender is represented in media. Material/Method: The method used in this thesis is discourse analysis, applied on twenty articles which contained personal interviews with women and men who have or have had breast or prostate cancer. Ten of the articles contain interviews with women and ten interviews with men. The articles were selected from criteria based on where and when they were published. They were picked from the two largest papers in Sweden, Dagens Nyheter (DN) and Aftonbladet (AF), ten from each paper, of which five were interviews with women and five with men. The articles were found through two search engines, Presstext (where DN is filed) and Mediearkivet (where AF is filed) and the articles which were published most recently were picked. Main results: The main result is that there is a difference between the representation of men and the representation of women in media, to a certain point. The image of women and men who have survived the cancer is different from each other. In the representation of women there is focus on parenthood and the women’s relations to her surroundings and how the disease has effected that. In the representation of men there is more focus on sexuality and impotence and how that has effected their self-confidence. The images of women and men who still are critically ill or even dying are more similar to each other, the focus here is on the fear of dying and the wish to stay alive. Keywords: media, gender, discourse analysis

Talk of violent crime in South Africa abounds, with criminal violence as a topic of discussion on many social platforms - from the President‟s State of the Nation address to conversations between people on the street. This study aims to explore the discourses that South Africans use in their accounts of violent crime, what presentation of violent crime is constructed through the use of these discourses, and the effects of such constructions. Using Wetherell and Potter‟s (1992) approach to discourse analysis, the transcripts from in-depth, semi-structured interviews with fifteen participants were analysed to identify and examine the discourses that participants drew on to construct an account of violent crime. Seven central themes were identified in the transcripts. These pertained to the causes of violent crime, the effects of violent crime, prevention and deterrence, victims, responsibility, perpetrators and categorisation of „good‟ and „bad‟ criminals. In the study each of the themes is examined in turn to explore the discourses that are drawn on in the construction of each theme and the presentation of violent crime that is constructed through the use of these discourses. Analysis of the discourses shows that the construction of crime, criminals and victims is complex and that this is often done in such a way as to manage the threat of violent crime. It also shows that race „colours‟ the way we see, understand and construct violent crime. Yet this is not only about the identification of others as particular kinds of people but also about self-identifying, as people actively construct their own identity when constructing violent crime. The way in which we construct violent crime therefore has important implications for the way in which we experience others as well as ourselves. It also has important implications for the interventions that are used and proposed for managing violent crime. An understanding of these discourses and constructions of violent crime will allow us to more effectively evaluate the assumptions on which these interventions are based and thus improve the interventions themselves. / Thesis (M.Soc.Sci.)-Univesity of KwaZulu-Natal, Durban, 2010.

This research study reviewed several disciplinary fields and their conceptualizations of conflict. The primary guiding question was, what is the best conflict education that is required for youth and adults to live in the world of a "culture of violence" in the list century? The general purpose of the study was to provide a critique that would initiate an expanded conflict imaginary, as educators and lifelong learners face a world of growing complex social and cultural conflicts. The "case" under specific critical analysis was identified as conflict management education (CME). CME provided the primary subject (text) for a critical discourse analysis of its conceptualizations of conflict. The main purpose of the study was to determine the hegemony of discourse in the text of a "representative" sample of 22 contemporary CME handbooks and manuals for youth and adults. CME was found to be a new social movement with a powerful "social technology" to change attitudes and behaviors, in order to diminish or eliminate violence. This study found there are virtually no systematic critiques of CME and no significant critiques that focus on the conceptualization of conflict itself. The discourse of CME's conceptualizations of conflict tended toward an ideological bias of consensus, unity, cooperation, 'peace and harmony;' and located within a politically conservative, pragmatist, social psychological discourse. The entire domain of conflict knowledge from critical pedagogies and the sociological conflict theory tradition was largely ignored in CME text. This has significant political and sociocultural implications in the biased shaping of conflict knowledge and the concomitant power relations of teaching, learning, and the constructing of 'democracy' itself. Without a critique of its own discourses, CME has limited means, as a discipline of knowledge, to establish how it may be perpetuating the very violence it is attempting to eliminate. 'Conflict' pedagogy is offered as an alternative to constructing a critical conflict education as counterhegemonic to CME. This report closes with a discussion of reflections on the study and recommendations for further research.

Between 2006 and 2008 the German television series “Türkisch für Anfänger“ (Turkish for Beginners) about the life of a multiculturally blended family in Berlin was aired on the television network ARD. This thesis analyzes the gender construction of the six main characters in order to find out which concepts of gender they mirror, and how they perform their gender identities. This analysis of gender is carried out in close interaction with other categories of identity such as ethnicity or age. The theoretical foundation for the study is feminist post-structuralist discourse analysis (FPDA), which is interested in the multiple power relations in which individuals are embedded in their social interactions. These structures of power are reflected in their gender constructions. The approach assumes that in each situation several competing discourses are available for individuals within which they need to position themselves. With the help of the FPDA this master’s thesis investigates these discoursive structures subjects adopt to negotiate their relationships and identities. In addition, the thesis relies on Erving Goffman’s concept of face-work and his metaphor of playing a role in social interaction which is meant to be a theatrical stage. His work is applied to the gender construction of the subjects mainly to underline that gender also needs to be performed. The gender construction of the six characters is analyzed on three different levels: their language use, their nonverbal behaviour, and camera editing. Therefore the analysis focuses on verbal communication, nonverbal behaviour and paralinguistic features, and the media components. The analysis of eleven selected scenes shows that the gender constructions of the characters and the performance of those constructions are not stable, but rather fluid. They continuously shift between different gender identities, sometimes positioning themselves at the same time as powerful and powerless within and towards varying discourses. Thus each character constructs a number of different gender identities during the course of the series, as well as within particular scenes.

Despite being a strong advocate for children’s rights in the international community, Sweden has received critique from the Committee on the Rights of the Child regarding the high number of children who have been removed from their families and that are currently living in foster homes. Previous research has not dealt with the issue of children’s rights in foster care placement processes in Sweden, nor has it included Sweden in discourse analyses on children’s rights, or sufficiently explored the relationship between discourse and implementation of the UNCRC. I use theories on discourse and translation in order to provide a comparative analysis of the articulations of children’s rights relevant for foster care placement processes in the UNCRC, and on the national and local level in Sweden. The analysis points to both similarities and differences in the discourses and identifies six aspects of the Swedish discourse that make certain activities in foster care placement processes possible, desirable and inevitable.

Sexual violence remains a pervasive and persistent social problem. In 1996, Congress enacted Megan’s Law, dictating mandatory community notification and potential civil commitment for those deemed by the State to be “dangerous sexual offenders.” In 2013, Megan’s law continues to influence the treatment of sexual offenders under law and the social construction of a highly publicized, yet statistically rare, sexual crime—the rape and murder of a young female child by a depraved male stranger. This influence highlights the extent to which this personalized crime bill shapes the social construction of sexual violence in terms of sex and gender systems. This project examines how sex and gender shape media discourses of the sexual offender and victim that are mobilized in the legislative debate on Megan’s Law. Drawing on theoretical ideas from cultural studies and feminist legal scholarship, I employ discourse analysis to analyze the legislative debate on Megan’s Law.