Doctoral Degrees (General Linguistics)

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Browsing Doctoral Degrees (General Linguistics) by Author "Mongie, Lauren Danger"

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    The discourse of liberation: the portrayal of the gay liberation movement in South African news media from 1982 to 2006
    (Stellenbosch : Stellenbosch University, 2013-12) Mongie, Lauren Danger; Anthonissen, Christine; Southwood, Frenette; Stellenbosch University. Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences. Dept. of General Linguistics.
    ENGLISH ABSTRACT: This dissertation reports on a study that straddles the applied linguistic fields of discourse analysis, critical discourse analysis and a sociolinguistic field recently referred to as “queer linguistics”. The study investigated the linguistic construction of gay mobilisation in South African media discourses across a period of almost 30 years. It aimed to identify characteristics of the Discourse that topicalised the gay liberation movement, considering specifically the linguistic means used in articulating on the one hand the need and the right to gay liberation, and on the other hand the public opposition to acknowledging gay rights. It invoked a social theory identified as ‘framing theory’ in analysing the different kinds of views, attitudes, social positions and arguments motivating for or agitating against the institution and protection of gay rights in post-apartheid South Africa. The project takes Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA), particularly its applications in considering features and functions of media discourses, as its primary theoretical framework. First, following the insistence of the Discourse-historical approach put forward by Wodak (1990), it gives an overview of the social and historical context against which the recognition of gay rights in South Africa developed. It follows the analytic methodology suggested by van Dijk (1985) in considering issues of ‘language and power’, and the ways in which the access of elites to media attention is drawn on to support and give credence to particular ideologies. Supplementary to the application of CDA methods, an analytic approach from the fields of Social Movement Theory and Collective Action Framing is introduced to make sense of the discursive strategies implemented in the Discourse thematically tied to the South African gay liberation movement, particularly from the early 1980s up to 2006. This period was marked by the movement’s pursuit of social mobilization. Attention went to the ways in which arguments for and against gay rights were instantiated in the media using a variety of different frames. Such analysis could disclose the extent to which the "anti-apartheid" master frame was utilised by actors of the gay liberation movement. Based on their circulation demographics, two local South African weekly newspapers, City Press and Mail & Guardian, were screened in order to identify articles and letters to the editor relevant to the gay liberation discourse. The full complement of published items topicalising homosexuality directly and indirectly were collected as two corpora in order to assess the ways in which they contributed to public discourses of gay liberation. Two analytic exercises were done: first, the content of the full data-set was “tagged” and categorised according to the textual nature of the newspaper item, and the kinds of frames used in its presentation; second, a number of articles and letters were selected from the corpora for detailed analysis that would illustrate the use of the various strategies and frames found to characterise the Discourse. The first more quantitative analysis provided an overview of patterns, trends and editorial practices typically used in the media representations. The second more qualitative analysis provided insight into the finer details of media presention of ideas aimed at affecting the knowledge and attitudes of the intended and imagined readers. The findings of these analyses were presented in terms of quantifiable results as well as detailed descriptions. In broad strokes, the quantifiable findings showed that the Mail & Guardian corpus was significantly more outspoken in advocating for gay rights than the City Press corpus, and that both publications frequently framed homosexuality in terms of “tolerance”, “religion” and “rights”. The quantifiable findings also showed that in their discourses of gay tolerance and gay rights, both the City Press and the Mail & Guardian made significant use of frames typically and widely used by the media in the discourse of political change at the time. The detailed analyses investigated the textual reproduction of the authors’ ideologies, drawing attention to their regular reliance on certain types of arguments used for and against gay rights in the selected newspapers.