Feminist Discourse Analysis

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To answer my research question I will undertake a qualitative discourse analysis of news media reports of harassment of women in Alberta politics. This project will be guided by the aims of feminist critical discourse analysis, which aims “to examine how power and dominance are discursively produced and/or resisted in a variety of ways through textual representations of gendered social practices, and through interactional strategies of talk” (Lazar 2004). These aims are reflected directly in my research question, as I wish to examine whether the social phenomenon of harassment is discursively connected to gendered power relations. Additionally, to develop my understanding of the data I may undertake an initial content analysis of the news coverage …show more content…
The discourse plane I wish to analyse, the news media, and the discourse strand, stories on the harassment of women legislators in Alberta, are clearly expressed in my research question. To operationalize depoliticization, my discourse analysis process will be guided by the questions below, which are informed by my previous research on the mediation of harassment and literature on theories of depoliticization. Discourse analysis research on the mediation of sexual harassment and media depoliticization suggest that examining the framing of the news stories will be the key discourse fragment that signifies depoliticization. The framing of a news story refers to the common understandings and values reflected in the internal structure of the story, used to organize the narrative in a recognizable way (Trimble and Trieberg 2015, 238). Therefore, an analysis of the framing of the news stories would be well complimented by noting the syntactical structure of the news coverage as well as any ideological

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