Community Of Practice: Discourse, Identity And Gender

Gender is the major focus of the sociolinguistics; however, the traditional studies of gender discourse regard gender as a static feature of the speaker, put too much more attention to the differences of the male and the female and ignore their similarities as well as their overlapping parts, thus, this kinds of analysis cannot uncover the complexity of gender. With the development of linguistics, the research orientation of gender discourse has turned from the traditional studies of gender language to the theory of the feminists who applied the postmodernism idea in gender discourse. The basic one is the theory of community of practice, which refers to an aggregate of people who come together around mutual engagement in some common endeavor. Ways of doing things, ways of talking, beliefs, values, power relations - in short, practices - emerge in the course of their joint activity around that endeavor. As a social construct, a community of practice is different from the traditional notion of community, primarily because it is defined simultaneously by its membership and by the practice in which that membership engages. To a large extent, gender is involved in the construction of an orientation by male and female. The differences of gender discourse are resulted from the various communities of practices and the forms of the participation in which men and women engage.Studies of gender discourse abroad have become more comprehensive and wide-eyeshot, and have a tendency towards diversity, dynamic, and local, that is the studies has turned from the traditional studies of gender language to the postmodernism idea which applies social gender construction in gender discourse. Comparing with the gender studies abroad, scholars in China began the exploration into gender discourse in the early 80s of the 20th century. Studies of gender discourse in China is still at the stage of theory introduction or the beginning stage, the author hopes, in this paper, to provide a new viewpoint to this field.Prison Break is an American serial drama that premiered on the Fox Broadcasting Company in 2005, which describes stories of the criminals' breaking of a prison and their escaping life. Our heroine, as the only female in this series, has a distinct variation in her discourse.This paper is under the framework of Wenger's notion of community of practice, taking a discourse analytical critical perspective to investigate the characteristics of the discourse of the heroine in Prison Break, and the data are collected from the heroine's discourse of the transcribed scripts according to the DVDs of the first two seasons of this TV series. It aims to explore the relationships among discourse, identity and gender. A comprehensive statistical data as well as a number of examples from the conversations between Sara and the hero Michael will help to illustrate our analysis. We pay special attention to the relationship among identity, identity transition, social practice as well as linguistic variationsThe results show that there are language differences which have no direct relation with gender. The social practice people engaged in decides their identity, and the transition of identity influences their social gender. Discourse and gender influence each other in various communities of practice. Gender is not an individual property; it is constructed in a complex array of social practice within communities. Gender discourse differences are a dynamic relation with other social practice. In other sense, there are quantitative type and qualitative type of gender difference. In a variety of situations, that is community of practice, gender discourse may show up variations. In this sense, the differences between females and males are relative, merely a kind of quantitative type of differences.