As the title suggests, this is a collection of feminist work carried out within the paradigm of Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA), which Michelle Lazar glosses in her editor's introduction as “a critical perspective on unequal social relations sustained through language use” (p. 1). It does not seem to be a goal of the book to develop a distinctively feminist variant of CDA, or to engage in dialogue with its leading theorists (most of whom are men, and tend to be politically pro-feminist but not deeply influenced by feminism in a theoretical sense). Rather, contributors use established CDA methods to address questions about gender as one case of “unequal social relations sustained through language use.” That in itself is not a new endeavor – gender features as one topic in most books and edited collections of CDA, and it is also the theme of numerous journal articles – but this, perhaps surprisingly, is the first book-length volume specifically dedicated to the subject.
A valuable feature of the collection overall is the diversity of the societies and domains of social practice from which discourse data are drawn, in most cases by analysts who are members of the society concerned. That gender identities and relations are differently articulated in different times and places is now axiomatic in language and gender studies, and there are regular calls for the field – historically a rather Anglocentric one – to adopt a more explicitly comparative perspective. Feminist Critical Discourse Analysis illustrates the benefits: Though the range of languages considered is not large (together, English, Portuguese and Spanish account for seven of the nine chapters), most contributions come from outside the dominant U.S.-U.K. nexus, and the juxtaposition of case studies dealing with broadly comparable discursive phenomena in societies as different as, say, Singapore and Hungary, Brazil and the United States, or Spain and New Zealand yields some interesting insights, as I will discuss in more detail below.
Lazar has organized the material in two sections. The first, “Post-equality? Analyses of subtle sexism,” contains five chapters examining the discursive construction of gender inequality in societies and settings – workplaces in New Zealand and Spain, the institutions of the European Union, U.S. college classrooms, family life in Singapore – where the “official” discourse proclaims that men and women are no longer unequal. The second, “Emancipation and social citizenship: Analyses of identity and difference,” contains four chapters dealing largely with situations in which there are still questions about the entitlement of women and of sexual minorities to full “social citizenship.” Dividing a collection of articles into neat thematic packages is often a problem for editors (in a book with fewer than a dozen chapters, one wonders if it is really necessary), and I have to say I did not find this section division particularly illuminating. Rather, the theme I found most thought-provoking cuts across the two sections.
That theme, in a nutshell, is the effect of globalization on the way gender relations are represented and lived in different parts of the world – or more exactly, the interaction between “global” and “local” influences, which is interestingly displayed in some of the discourse data presented here. For example, in two chapters dealing with gender and power in the workplace, both the New Zealand linguist Janet Holmes and the Spanish researchers Luisa Martín Rojo and Concepción Gómez Esteban discuss the hegemonic status in the international business world of a “modernizing” discourse on management, according to which the ideal modern manager should eschew the traditional “command and control” model and instead adopt a “relational” style, which emphasizes teamwork and interpersonal communication skills. Symbolically, this is also a shift from a more “masculine” to a more “feminine” norm, which is seen therefore as opening up opportunities for women to succeed in managerial roles: to be recognized as equal to, if not better than, men. But whereas the New Zealand women managers are able, up to a certain point, to profit from this discourse, their Spanish counterparts seem to have far more difficulty, because the global norm conflicts more markedly with local perceptions of both gender and proper workplace relations. These women cannot win: The “authoritative” linguistic behavior that is accepted in male managers is seen in women as unfeminine and dictatorial, but more “relational” styles are read by co-workers of both sexes as manipulative and inappropriately personalizing.
Another interesting example of the local impact of global or Western discourses is discussed by Michelle Lazar in her analysis of an advertising campaign produced on behalf of the Singapore government and extolling the joys of family life. The campaign targeted men and made extensive use of a discourse on “parenting” that is now very familiar in Western societies. “Parenting” is an equal-opportunity activity in which mothers and fathers are partners; this also entails portraying fathers as “new men,” in touch with their emotions and skilled in caring for their children. Lazar shows, however, that this discourse of gender equality and similarity is undercut in the Singapore advertisements by a competing discourse that recycles traditional norms of gender hierarchy and difference. Arguably, much the same could be said about the discourse of “parenting” in its original Western heartland (see, e.g., Sunderland 2000). What is more distinctive to the Singapore case, however, is the underlying motivation for the family life campaign. The government is concerned that the competitive, high-skill economy they have created, which demands a steady supply of educated and committed workers of both sexes, is discouraging young professionals from starting families and causing young professional men, in particular, to look for wives who are less educated and career-oriented than themselves. This worries the authorities for overtly eugenic reasons: They want to ensure a maximally intelligent population by getting people with “smart genes” to marry each other. Men therefore need to be persuaded to make concessions to intelligent women's need – and the state's need for them – to be active outside the domestic sphere. So whereas in the West, men's greater involvement in “parenting” is presented as a means of individual self-fulfillment and liberation from restrictive gender roles, in Singapore it becomes just as much a matter of collective duty, demanded by an authoritarian state whose pro-natalist and eugenicist views are by most Western standards highly illiberal.
In the Hungarian press, whose representation of feminism is the subject of Erzsébet Barát's chapter, we find a different relationship between “global” and “local.” Rather than being appropriated and reinflected for local purposes, as in Singapore, global discourses championing gender equality are rejected by mainstream press commentators as threatening to local interests. Feminism is rhetorically identified with two totalizing global movements: the communism of the recent past, and the American or Western cultural imperialism of the present. Anti-feminism (which in some of Barát's textual examples amounts to outright misogyny) is thus presented as in keeping with, or even necessary for, the development of an indigenous Hungarian democratic politics. In post-communist societies generally, the fact that a form of feminism was part of the official ideology of state socialism remains a significant influence on discourse about gender; this is one illustration of the important point, well made in this volume overall, that global processes are in practice always shaped by local histories.
It may seem that in this account of Feminist Critical Discourse Analysis I have said rather little about language; and indeed, I would have to say that this is faithful to the book itself. The dominant strand in current CDA tends to concern itself primarily with relating discourse in the linguist's sense (i.e., organized stretches of spoken or written text) to the more abstract “orders of discourse” theorized by Foucault and his followers. This can lead, and in the present volume often does lead, away from fine-grained linguistic analysis. While some contributors (e.g., Holmes) look carefully at the interactional structure of their data, and others (e.g., Lazar) use categories derived from Hallidayan systemic functional grammar to uncover patterns in the semiotic organization of texts, many contributions are more akin to content analysis, paying relatively little attention to formal details. For readers who are linguists, and not strongly committed to the CDA framework, this may be something of a drawback. Nevertheless, I think that scholars with an interest in language and gender will find this collection informative and interesting, not least for the many striking textual examples reproduced in it. And for practitioners of CDA, whether or not they count gender among their primary interests, the book is an essential reference. Though theoretically it is not particularly ambitious or ground-breaking, in bringing together this range of international perspectives on both the topic and the method, Feminist Critical Discourse Analysis is long overdue – the first book of its kind, but I hope not the last.
