Constructing a Feminist Identity: Discourse and the Community of Practice

Abstract

The relationship between language and gender features prominently in contemporary feminist scholarship. In particular, feminist linguists and feminist psychologists have highlighted the ways in which language works to maintain (and potentially transform) hierarchical gender arrangements and ideologies. However, despite such (political) commonalities, divergent theoretical and methodological commitments have frequently resulted in a lack of dialogue between the two disciplines. In this article, I suggest that the `communities of practice' (CoP) approach, currently influential in feminist linguistics, may provide a means of bridging feminist research within psychology and linguistics. Specifically, I explore the potential for integrating CoP theory with the version of Discourse Analysis most commonly utilized in psychological research. Thus, drawing on one woman's situated negotiations of a feminist identity, I discuss both the potential difficulties of such a synthesis, together with the additional insights it offers.

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