Exceptionalising intersectionality
a corpus study of implied readership in guidance for survivors of domestic abuse
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.1558/genl.35094Keywords:
corpus analysis, feminist discourse analysis, pronouns, domestic abuse, intersectionalityAbstract
Groups who experience multiple marginalisation are more likely to experience domestic abuse, but appear to be the least represented in materials designed to support survivors. This paper uses corpus methods and feminist discourse analysis to examine a guidance text produced by a British organisation that supports women survivors of domestic abuse. The analysis examines the discursive practices used to construct solidarity between the implied reader, implied author and broader imagined community. While many of the practices employed in these texts to construct solidarity are exemplary – such as centring survivors’ experiences and addressing survivors directly by using first- and second-person pronouns – the texts also construct multiply marginalised survivors as distal by using third-person pronouns in discourses which represent multiple marginalisation as ‘exceptional’. The paper concludes by suggesting ways to improve guidance for survivors of domestic abuse.
References
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Prince, Ellen F. (1986) On the syntactic marking of presupposed open propositions. In A. M. Farley, P. T. Farley and K. E. McCullouch (eds) Papers from the Parasession on Pragmatics and Grammatical Theory at the 22nd Regional Meeting 208–22. Chicago, IL: Chicago Linguistic Society.
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Rayson, Paul (2003) Matrix: a statistical method and software tool for linguistic analysis through corpus comparison. PhD thesis, Lancaster University, UK.
Russell, Bertrand (1905) On denoting. Mind 14: 479–93.
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Skelton, John R. Wearn, Andy M. and Hobbs, Richard F.D. (2002) ‘I’ and ‘we’: a concordancing analysis of how doctors and patients use first person pronouns in primary care consultations. Family Practice 19(5): 484–8. https://doi.org/10.1093/fampra/19.5.484
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Spelman, Elizabeth V. (1988) Inessential Woman: Problems of Exclusion in Feminist Thought. Boston, MA: Beacon Books.
Stark, Evan (2007) Coercive Control: The Entrapment of Women in Personal Life. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Strawson, Peter F. (1950) On referring. Mind 59: 320–44.
Talbot, Mary (1995) A synthetic sisterhood: false friends in a teenage magazine. In Kira Hall and Mary Bucholtz (eds) Gender Articulated: Language and the Socially Constructed Self 143–65. London: Routledge. https://doi.org/10.1017/s0047404599232095
Thiara, Ravi K. (2015) Providing services to minority women and women with disabilities. In Holly Johnson, Bonnie S. Fisher and Véronique Jaquier (eds) Critical Issues on Violence against Women: International Perspectives and Promising Strategies 142–53. Abingdon: Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203727805
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Women’s Aid (2015b) Women’s Aid Annual Review 2014–2015. Bristol: Women’s Aid Federation of England.
Women’s Aid (undated) The Expect Respect Educational Toolkit. Bristol: Women’s Aid Federation of England.
Wuest, Judith and Merritt-Gray, Marilyn (1999) Not going back: sustaining the separation in the process of leaving abusive relationships. Violence against Women 5: 110–33. https://doi.org/10.1177/1077801299005002002
Anderson, Benedict (2006) Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, revised edition. London: Verso.
Anthony, Laurence (2014) AntConc (version 3.4.3m). Computer software. Japan: Waseda University.
Archard, David (1998) Sexual Consent. Oxford: Westview Press.
Baker, Paul (2005) Public Discourses of Gay Men. Abingdon: Routledge.
Baker, Paul, Gabrielatos, Costas, and McEnery, Tony (2013) Discourse Analysis and Media Attitudes: The Representation of Islam in the British Press. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1177/0957926515612861
Belnap, Nuel D. (1966) Questions, answers, and presuppositions. The Journal of Philosophy 63: 609–11.
Brezina, Vaclav, McEnery, Tony and Wattam, Stephen (2015) Collocations in context: a new perspective on collocation networks. International Journal of Corpus Linguistics 20: 139–73. https://doi.org/10.1075/ijcl.20.2.01bre
Cameron, Deborah (2007) The Myth of Mars and Venus: Do Men and Women Really Speak Different Languages? Oxford: Oxford University Press. https://doi.org/10.1177/09593535090190011204
Candelas de la Ossa, Abigaël (2016) ‘Talk, listen, think’: discourses of agency and unintentional violence in consent guidance for gay, bisexual and trans men. Discourse and Society 26(4): 365–82. https://doi.org/10.1177/0957926516634549
Connell, R. W. (2005) Masculinities, 2nd edition. Cambridge: Polity Press.
Crenshaw, Kimberlé (1989) Demarginalizing the intersection of race and sex: a black feminist critique of antidiscrimination doctrine, feminist theory and antiracist politics. University of Chicago Legal Forum 1989: 139–67. ttps://doi.org/10.4324/9780429500480-5
Crenshaw, Kimberlé (1991) Mapping the margins: intersectionality, identity politics, and violence against women of color. Stanford Law Review 43: 1241–99. https://doi.org/10.2307/1229039
Dobash, R. Emerson and Dobash, Russell P. (1992) Women, violence and social change. London: Routledge. https://doi.org/10.1177/096466399200100312
Donovan, Catherine, Barnes, Rebecca and Nixon, Catherine (2014) The Coral Project: Exploring Abusive Behaviours in Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and/or Transgender Relationships. Interim report. Sunderland: University of Sunderland and University of Leicester. Retrieved from www2.le.ac.uk/departments/criminology/documents/coral-project-interim-report.
Dunn, Jennifer L. (2005) ‘Victims’ and ‘survivors’: emerging vocabularies of motive for ‘battered women who stay’. Sociological Inquiry 75: 1–30. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1475-682x.2005.00110.x
Ehrlich, Susan (2001) Representing Rape: Language and sexual consent. New York: Routledge.
Ehrlich, Susan (2007) Legal discourse and the cultural intelligibility of gendered meanings. Journal of Sociolinguistics 11: 452–77. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9841.2007.00333.x
Estrich, Susan (1987) Real Rape. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Evert, Stefan (2005) The statistics of word cooccurrences: word pairs and collocations. PhD thesis, Universität Stuttgart, Germany.
Fairclough, Norman (2001) Language and Power, 2nd edition. Harlow: Pearson Education.
Goffman, Erving (1979) Footing. Semiotica 25: 1–29.
Gries, Stefan Th. (2008) Dispersions and adjusted frequencies in corpora. International Journal of Corpus Linguistics 13: 403–37. https://doi.org/10.1075/ijcl.17.1.08lij
Jaworska, Sylvia and Krishnamurthy, Ramesh (2012) On the F word: a corpus-based analysis of the media representation of feminism in British and German press discourse, 1990–2009. Discourse and Society 23: 401–31. https://doi.org/10.1177/0957926512441113
Kelly, Liz (1988) Surviving Sexual Violence. Cambridge: Polity Press.
Kelly, Liz and Westmarland, Nicole (2015) Domestic Violence Perpetrator Programmes: Steps towards change. London: London Metropolitan University and Durham University.
Kitzinger, Celia and Frith, Hannah (1999) Just say no? The use of conversation analysis in developing a feminist perspective on sexual refusal. Discourse and Society 10: 293–316. https://doi.org/10.1177/0957926599010003002
LGBT Youth Scotland (2011) Voices Unheard: Domestic Abuse: Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Young People’s Perspectives. Edinburgh: LGBT Youth Scotland. https://doi.org/10.1080/19361653.2011.519181
Lijffijt, Jefrey and Gries, Stefan Th. (2012) Correction to Stefan Th. Gries’ ‘Dispersions and adjusted frequencies in corpora’. International Journal of Corpus Linguistics, 13: 4 (2008), 403-437. International Journal of Corpus Linguistics 17: 147–149. https://doi.org/10.1075/ijcl.17.1.08lij
Munson, Peggy (2011) Seeking asylum: On intimate partner violence and disability. In Ching-In Chen, Jai Dulani and Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha (eds) The Revolution Starts at Home: Confronting Intimate Violence within Activist Communities 115–34. Boston, MA: South End Press. https://doi.org/10.1177/0886109912475175
National Institute of Justice and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (2000) Full Report of the Prevalence, Incidence and Consequences of Violence against Women: Research Report. Washington, DC: US Department of Justice. https://doi.org/10.1037/e491852006-001
Pennebaker, James W. (2011) The Secret Life of Pronouns: What Our Words Say about Us. London: Bloomsbury.
Prince, Ellen F. (1986) On the syntactic marking of presupposed open propositions. In A. M. Farley, P. T. Farley and K. E. McCullouch (eds) Papers from the Parasession on Pragmatics and Grammatical Theory at the 22nd Regional Meeting 208–22. Chicago, IL: Chicago Linguistic Society.
Puar, Jasbir K. (2007) Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. https://doi.org/10.1080/00045608.2010.485487
Rayson, Paul (2003) Matrix: a statistical method and software tool for linguistic analysis through corpus comparison. PhD thesis, Lancaster University, UK.
Russell, Bertrand (1905) On denoting. Mind 14: 479–93.
Russell, Bertrand (1957) Mr. Strawson on referring. Mind 66: 385–9.
Skelton, John R. Wearn, Andy M. and Hobbs, Richard F.D. (2002) ‘I’ and ‘we’: a concordancing analysis of how doctors and patients use first person pronouns in primary care consultations. Family Practice 19(5): 484–8. https://doi.org/10.1093/fampra/19.5.484
Smith, Andrea (2006) Without bureaucracy, beyond inclusion: re-centering feminism. Left Turn Magazine 38. Retrieved from www.leftturn.org/without-bureaucracy-beyond-inclusion-re-centering-feminism.
Spelman, Elizabeth V. (1988) Inessential Woman: Problems of Exclusion in Feminist Thought. Boston, MA: Beacon Books.
Stark, Evan (2007) Coercive Control: The Entrapment of Women in Personal Life. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Strawson, Peter F. (1950) On referring. Mind 59: 320–44.
Talbot, Mary (1995) A synthetic sisterhood: false friends in a teenage magazine. In Kira Hall and Mary Bucholtz (eds) Gender Articulated: Language and the Socially Constructed Self 143–65. London: Routledge. https://doi.org/10.1017/s0047404599232095
Thiara, Ravi K. (2015) Providing services to minority women and women with disabilities. In Holly Johnson, Bonnie S. Fisher and Véronique Jaquier (eds) Critical Issues on Violence against Women: International Perspectives and Promising Strategies 142–53. Abingdon: Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203727805
Women’s Aid (2015a) Our history. Retrieved on 29 October 2015 from www.womensaid.org.uk/about-us/history.
Women’s Aid (2015b) Women’s Aid Annual Review 2014–2015. Bristol: Women’s Aid Federation of England.
Women’s Aid (undated) The Expect Respect Educational Toolkit. Bristol: Women’s Aid Federation of England.
Wuest, Judith and Merritt-Gray, Marilyn (1999) Not going back: sustaining the separation in the process of leaving abusive relationships. Violence against Women 5: 110–33. https://doi.org/10.1177/1077801299005002002
Published
2019-07-31
Issue
Section
Articles
How to Cite
Candelas de la Ossa, A. (2019). Exceptionalising intersectionality: a corpus study of implied readership in guidance for survivors of domestic abuse. Gender and Language, 13(2), 224-250. https://doi.org/10.1558/genl.35094
