| Discourse performs indispensable functions in social communication. This thesis focuses on conversations extracted from the second season of Veep, a hit and award-loaded bureaucratic sitcom presented by HBO. It aims to conduct a textual analysis on the leading character Selina Meyer’s gender identity construction in social conversations. In order to achieve this aim, this thesis incorporates feminist theories, critical discourse analysis and systemic functional grammar to shed lights on the constructive process.The theoretical start point of the thesis is a discussion on the differences between essentialist’s and constructionist’s interpretations on gender identity. From the essentialist point of view, gender is biologically decided. It is a fixed status of male and female. And the adoption of certain speech style is largely dominated by speaker’s gender identity. On the contrary, this thesis adopts Judith Butler’s ’performativity’theory, a constructionist viewpoint, to explain how gender identity is constructed by discourse in social and cultural contexts. Rather than seeing gender identity as a fixed attribute of human being, she takes gender identity as a social construct mainly manifested in discourses.In this thesis, several approaches to casual conversations, including Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA), Systemic Functional Grammar (SFG) and Conversation Analysis (CA), are adopted to investigate the construction process of the character’s gender identity. CDA, an approach of discourse and text analysis that acknowledges the role of language in structuring power relations in society, is used as the main research perspective in this thesis. It is a method which investigates how social and political inequalities are manifested and reproduced in discourses. Among all the theories of CDA, Fairclough’s ’three-dimensional theory’, which is built from socio-cultural perspective, is used as the major framework of the thesis. Besides, SFG, an approach proposes by Halliday, is used as an aid to CDA in analyzing discourses. It identifies three meta-functions of language, among which only ideational function and interpersonal function are involved in this thesis. Ideational function is used to express one’s experience of the world and mainly realized by transitivity, while interpersonal function is used to investigate how people constitute relationship through language and is mainly realized by modality. And CA as well as its analytic focus turn-taking system is used as supplements to the theoretical framework of the thesis. The above three approaches consist of the theoretical framework of this study and require us to investigate the character’s conversations from the aspects of lexicon choice, transitivity, modality and turn-taking situation. Conversation data are collected and processed by the research function of Microsoft Word 2007.The major findings include:(1) the topics Selina always talks about shows that she always involves in talks that mostly favored by men; and her usage of swear words indicates that she tends to adopt man-like speech style; (2) her frequent usage of material process and Actor ’You’ tell us that she is the one who gives order and asks other participants to do things for her; (3) while her adoption of medium and low value modal auxiliaries reveals that she has a moderate and mild character which is the opposite to the other conclusions we get from the analysis; (4) and her frequent interruptions and silence breaking in conversations imply she is always the one who controls the conversations. We can conclude that Selina performs more like a masculinity identity than a femininity one when interact with her team members, male counterparts, the public, and even her family. More detailed explanatory of Selina’s gender identity construction will be expanded in the following thesis. Hopefully, this modal would give positive implications to further study. |
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