The everyday life of sexual politics: A feminist critical discourse analysis of herbalist pamphlets in Johannesburg

Abstract

This article investigates a corpus of herbalist pamphlets -fairly common, everyday texts found in (South) African cities -which promote the services of traditional healers and promise solutions to a plethora of ailments and life problems. The article's multi-pronged approach brings feminist critical discourse analysis (FCDA), corpus linguistics (CS) and multimodal critical discourse studies (MCDS) into dialogue with each other. Encompassing both quantitative and qualitative components, this eclectic framework illustrates the ways in which dominant gendered discourses reproduce a patriarchal and heteronormative order by positioning men and women differently. This dominant form of gendered representation, however, co-exists with more resistant discourses which positively thematise same-sex desire. Essentially, the article demonstrates that herbalist pamphlets are key sites of 'entanglement' (Nuttall 2009) where complex identity nexuses of gender, sexuality, race, age and culture intersect and compete with each other within the larger regime of representation in South Africa.

Fundamentalist and tolerant islamic discourse in john updike’s terrorist and jonathan wright’s translation the televangelist: a corpus-based critical discourse analysis of semantic prosody

“…Freake et al, 2011;Jaworska & Krishnamurthy, 2012), examining key function/grammatical words (e.g. Pearce, 2014), and using other analytical models and/or theories; for example, functional theory (El-Falaky, 2015;Lee, 2016;Lindayana et al, 2018), translation theory (Murphy, 2013), social theory (Mulderrig, 2008;, critical stylistics (Jeffries & Evans, 2013), contrastive analysis (Schroter & Storjohann, 2015), sociolinguistics (Chiluwa, 2012), critical literacy pedagogy (Abid & Manan, 2015), multimodality (Edwards & Milani, 2014), topic modeling (Tornberg & Tornberg, 2016;Iswanto et al, 2018;Jurgaitis, 2018), pragmatics (Triebl, 2015), genre theory (Skalicky, 2013), theory of governmentality (MacDonald & Hunter, 2013) and theory of argumentation (Lippi & Torroni, 2016;Azhari et al, 2018). Nevertheless, as note, "It seems ... that the main aim of many studies in combining corpus methods and CDA is to arrive at more accurate, insightful, objective, and generalizable findings rather than contributing to a specific discourse-oriented theory" (11).…”

Depiction of Self & Others: A Corpus-Based Study of Personal Pronouns in Autobiographies

“…This work takes help from corpus linguistics at the quantitative level with the focus on linguistic analysis of tailored made corpora of autobiographies. The analyses of the linguistic devices from the larger corpus bring to light the predominant patterns in any social set up or identity groups (Edwards & Milani, 2014). Therefore, the methods of corpus linguistics have been employed by many scholars (Obaid et al, 2017, Villanueva et al, 2018, Yoon et al, 2015).…”

“…Both corpus linguistics and CDA takes interest in social problems and real-life data. Therefore, CDA and corpus linguists have begun to see the potential of a cross-fertilisation of their respective methodologies, leading to what Partington (2008) calls Corpus-Assisted Discourse-Studies (Baker et al 2013, Edwards & Milani, 2014.…”

“…For this analysis, the corpus size is 212, 507 words. Most commonly in corpus analysis, the wordlists are lists of frequencies of the words in the corpus (Edwards & Milani, 2014). The word lists of pronouns were obtained with the help of sketch engine which is a web service and a corpus software (Kilgarriff, et al, 2014).…”

Governing bodies?

“…This paper is not necessarily concerned with whether the advertised services work, but with the ideological consequences which these texts exert on society, bodies and lives. To our knowledge, Edwards and Milani (2014) have conducted a feminist critical discourse analysis of herbalist pamphlets in Johannesburg about these ideological effects. In their article, the two scholars demonstrate how herbalist pamphlets are sites where "complex identity nexuses of gender, sexuality, race, age and culture intersect and compete with each other within the larger regime of representation in South Africa" (2014:461).…”