Gender and Critical Discourse Analyses

This book comparatively examines the gendered discourses in the novels of the writers of different sexes/genders, Robert Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land, Ursula Le Guin’s The Left Hand of Darkness, Joanna Russ’ The Female Man and Samuel Delany`s Trouble on Triton: An Ambiguous Heterotopia. It investigates how writers linguistically construct their characters as gendered/sexed beings as an effect of certain identity politics, ideologies and power structures. For this purpose, critical discourse analyses are applied to the extracts chosen from different parts of the novels under consideration. Butler’s performativity theory of gender and Foucault’s theory of discourse/power/knowledge and his conceptualization of subjectivity are also employed in the critical discourse analyses of the novels. The book argues that there is a close relationship between discourse, ideology and the constitution/representation of gender/sex as contingent on a particular sociocultural and historical context. Thus, writers’ linguistic choices for the constructions and descriptions of their characters are not ideologically or politically innocent but imbued with sociocultural and ideological meanings.