Subversion And Reconstruction Of Female Gender Identity

“Frailty, thy name is woman”, said Shakespeare. Likewise, according toprevious researches, male’s discourse style is characterized by its competitiveness andpowerfulness, while female, with characteristics of powerlessness, is more willing tocomply with cooperative principles to ensure the communication can go smoothly andsuccessfully. As social constructivism moves ahead, new insights into the gender arebeginning to take shape. As the product of social activity, gender stereotypes areneither static nor perpetual. They keep changing, even reverse at times, with everysignificant social transformation. Masculinity and femininity are not pre-determinedbiologically, but changing with the evolution of society. Gender’s differences andcharacteristics are socially constructed, thus gender identity is reflected andconstructed through social activity. Therefore, based on the social constructivism ofgender identity, adopting the transcript of divorce mediation as the corpus, this thesisdevotes to discuss the subversion and reconstruction of stereotype of female’s genderidentity, from four linguistic perspectives of the construction of gender identity, whichmakes it a reality to construct the powerful discourse style of woman.The previous researches on gender and discourse do not necessarily fit allcontexts in modern society. Therefore, based on the discursive construction of identity,the discourse style of powerful female in the divorce mediation is set as the object ofstudy. This thesis intends to probe how the gender stereotype is subverted and how thepowerful identity is constructed through the appropriate selection of discourseresource. The concrete analysis will be carried out on the lexical level involving cursewords, words indicating absoluteness, hedges; the syntactical level covering tagquestions, imperative sentences, declarative sentences, exclamatory sentences,rhetorical questions; the textual level including interruption, topic control and turncontrol; the pragmatic level focusing on the impoliteness strategies. Then, the reasonsfor subversion and reconstruction of stereotype of female’s gender identity will beexplored on the aspects of the development of feminism, the change of ideology, and the improvement of female’s status on legislation, politic, education, economy.As a part of human culture, language reflects the objective reality of society,varying along with the development of society. Thereupon, traditional genderstereotype is subverted and reconstructed as the society moves ahead. The powerfuldiscourse style of woman just reflects the characteristics of the new gender prototypeof modern woman today. Mainly conducted from qualitative analysis, this thesisintends to make a tentative study on the subversion and reconstruction of female’sgender stereotype, constructing the gender identity of powerfulness and challengingthe affirmation that “Frailty, thy name is woman”. The author expects to shed a newlight on the discourse style of new women for the future study, providing somereference and enlightenment for the female of weak group on their striving for theequal right to speak.