Women's Friendships And Women's Talk In Sex And The City

This thesis is a tentative analysis of women's friendships and women's talk in the comedy series Sex and the City. Critical Discourse Analysis with a sociolinguistic perspective is employed as general framework for the research work.To start with, some concepts of "gender/sex" and "discourse" are clarified. While the binarity of the sexes is an immutable fact, the traits assigned to a sex by a culture (gender) are cultural constructions, that they are socially determined and therefore alterable. And discourse is not only understood as units and forms of speech, of interaction, which can be part of everyday linguistic behavior, but is further seen as a form of social practice which implies that a discursive event is shaped by and can shape the situation that frames it.With the consensus of the basic definitions, the theoretical development of gender studies in feminist linguistics (FL) is traced briefly. Along with the feminism movement which seeks for full humanity of women, the word "sexism" is invented to refer to the binary opposition of two sexes. With the concept of "sexism", women define themselves for the first time as a social group and as a suppressed minority. Social groups often define themselves by means of their common language which plays an important role in identity creation and serves as a means of differentiating themselves from the outside world. In this light, an important feminist political activity, consciousness raising (CR) exists. It is essentially a linguistic practice in which women in groups talk to one another about their experience. The idea behind CR is that when women come together to articulate personal experience they will discover common threads and come to perceive the world better than they can do alone.Then some sociolinguistic approaches and conversation analysis approaches connected with FL are used for reference. According to them, sociological and psychological parameters are both suggested into gender studies; the concept of...