Power And Solidarity In Divorce Litigation Discourse: A Gender Perspective

With the emergence of feminist movement in the 1970s, scholars in psychology, linguistics, anthropology, and other disciplines began to search for relationships between language and sex, and to think about how gender roles influence speech style. It is believed that discourse is connected in various ways to the power relations found in our society, especially in the trend of critical discourse analysis. Gender inequalities in legal field, more specifically in court interactions, have been touched on in western world under the adversarial legal system. The most noted are linguistic studies to reveal women's revictimization in rape trials and divorce mediations. China is a country where inquisitorial legal system is adopted, that is the reason why power-related studies in courtroom are generally carried out on the judge and we seldom find scholars who investigate gender power asymmetries. Besides, divorce cases are not as open as other cases to the general public since more privacy is involved. Thus, no works are found to explore possible gender inequalities existing in contemporary Chinese divorce cases.This dissertation takes critical looks on Chinese divorce litigation discourse with critical discourse analysis, systemic functional linguistics (Appraisal theory, to be more exact), and conversation analysis (CA) as guidelines for its analytical tools in the hope of finding whether the law has failed to deliver its biggest promise—justice, more specifically, the equal treatment of men and women in this study. The data to be examined are 12 first-instance divorce cases (including mediations and court trials) recorded in one district-level court in Qingdao chaired by one female judge.This dissertation is methodologically characterized by the integration of descriptive and qualitative analysis with quantitative justification. The author has adopted Fariclough's three-dimensional model and proposed her analytical framework by focusing on text and context. Text analysis is done at two linguistic levels, i.e., the lexico-grammatical level and the textual level in Chapter 4 and 5 respectively. Chapter 6 is dedicated to prejudicing gender ideologies which play a significant role in discriminating against women but are hard to be classified in either Chapter 4 or Chapter 5. Linguistic resources to be examined at the lexico-grammatical level are affect lexes, deontic modals and graduation lexes, selected from Appraisal theory. Conversation analysis has provided classical linguistic topics at the textual level, such as speech turns, adjacency pairs, interruptions, overlaps, topic initiations and changes etc. This dissertation does not assume that certain communicative styles or features consistently characterize one sex or the other, instead, it maintains that in certain context, linguistic style features are used to express social relations which also characterize gender relations.Linguistic studies in this dissertation have confirmed the previous view that men interact more competitively while women's interaction pattern is more cooperation/solidarity-based. Men generally obtain more speech turns and they are more competitive in taking turns without the judge's permission and responding with dispreffered turns. They interrupt and overlap the judge more than their wives with higher efficiency. Besides, men are more impatient to maintain a topic, thus they tend to initiate and change topics in conversations. On the contrary, women are found to be more emotional not only by frequent demonstrations of sadness, anger, and anxiety, but also linguistically by employing more affect lexes. They are not eager to grab more speech turns and they are more cooperative in replies and taking turns. They do interrupt and overlap, but not as frequent as men. Women are also proved to be more helpful to smooth conversations and keeping topics. They are more willing to invite the judge's participation into their talks and share their experiences and feelings.But it is found that women have to some extent been treated unfairly or revictimized in court because of their different communicative styles. They are often prohibited from releasing their emotions (especially in mediations which are assumed to be less formal than court trials) and accused of 'excessive' demonstrations of emotions in courtroom. Stereotypical gender ideologies have also restricted their performance in court. For example, women's demonstration of aggressiveness and competitiveness is greatly disapproved by the judge even though men are proved to be more aggressive linguistically. In addition, prejudicing gender ideologies have restrained women from making favorable choices for themselves, such as the custody of their children.This study has theoretically contributed to applying CA, CDA, SFL, Appraisal theory and FL in Chinese data. Practically it has shed new light on Chinese legal systems, especially divorce cases by revealing where gender power inequalities lie and how women are revictimized by stereotypical gender prejudices. It is thus suggested at the end of this study that mediation should be practiced as a completely separated procedure so that every couple goes to court can truly enjoy the advantages of mediations. Besides, the author hopes that her study would be of help for judges and other law practitioners to recognize those gender problems so as to improve their future works.Of course, this study needs further improvements. As is pointed out at the very end of this dissertation, a larger corpus (to cover people of various ages and classes) is needed not only to solidify the present findings but also to explore gender problems with more details. More field works, interviews and questionnaires are also expected to provide persuading social backgrounds for linguistic analysis.