IFA GAL group - a talk by mgr Ewa Glapka, Department of Sociolinguistics and Linguistic Pragmatics IFA UAM

In this paper I draw on the idea that identity is an on-going, discursive development and that gender is a vital part of it. Additionally, I see it as produced through participation in social life and, hence, mediated by many social discourses. The social discourses whose relevance to gender identity I shall investigate are the media discourse and the ‘lifeworld’ discourses which people use in their narratives of self. In the paper, I present the discursive construction of gendered narratives in the context of a single event of media reception. The data come from a CDA-based analysis of a wedding magazine and from interviews with its readers – women at different points in life. I do not assume that there should be any explicit, one-to-one relations between the media representation of gender and the women’s own accounts of femininity. By cross-examining them, I seek to show the ways in which discourse can be seen as salient in people’s attempts to construct their own sense of (gendered) self.