Alternative discourses in Southeast Asia

This article brings into focus the question of alternative discourses in the social sciences. Alternative discourses are works that attempt to debunk ideas that have become entrenched in the social sciences, partly as a result of colonialism and the continuing Eurocentrism in the social sciences. In the context of Southeast Asia as well as much of the non-Western world, alternative discourses in the social sciences could also be referred to collectively as counter- Eurocentric social science. This paper discusses the emergence of alternative discourses in Southeast Asia, the defintion of alternative discourse, and the future of these discourses in our regio

DISCOURSES AGAINST LGBT ISSUES

The issues of LGBT in Indonesia produce two major groups of society, anti–LGBT groups and pro–LGBT groups. The former is usually positioned as the groups that in their social practices often dominate the later. They position themselves as the ones that have legitimate rights to control the LGBT people, so the dominated groups feel to be discriminated. The paper purposes to study the discourse produced by the dominant institutions in articulating their power against the LGBT issues. The research problems answered are (i) how the dominant groups practice their discourse againts LGBT issues and (ii) whether or not the discourses contain the practice of social wrong such as the power abuse and discrimination. The research data were taken from twenty texts of pro- and contra-LGBT downloaded from Kompas.com and Republika.co.id. The data are the utterances realizing the discourses against LGBT produced by people representing 18 institutions. Using the critical discourse analysis approach, I found that mostly, the text producers from the dominant group exploited lexico-grammatical expressions to oppose the LGBT communities. They used material, relational, and verbal processes to represent the negative activities and identities of LGBT commnity. They used certain vocabularies representing strong controls and hate attitudes. There are discourse articulating power abuse to control all aspects of LGBT community’s life, discrimination, and legitimation of power practices

(Mis)communication in couples : positioning as a site of conflict : a thesis presented in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Science in Psychology at Massey University

Appendix B & C missing from original copyMis)communication between people in couple relationships often results in arguments. Psychological research on this phenomenon has often relied on essentialist accounts of gender, offering little room for social or personal change. This study has used feminist poststructuralist theory to investigate the discourses that constitute couple relationships and enable (mis)communications in the form of arguments. From my reading of this theory and my experience of couple relationships I formulated three research questions: What discourses may be identified in young adults' talk about their couple relationships? How do these discourses specify the various obligations and entitlements of Boyfriends and Girlfriends? How are young adults' positions within these discourses implicated in their accounts of arguments? The transcripts of semi-structured interviews with young adults talking about their couple relationships provided the texts for analysis. I conducted interviews with six men and six women aged between 22 and 30. Four themes emerged from participants' talk: division of labour, relationship work, spending time, and arguments. I used analytic resources from Parker's (1992) and Baxter's (2003) interpretations of poststructuralist discourse analysis to identify five discourses that constitute these thematics. I have named these discourses egalitarian, traditional, togetherness, reciprocity, and men-need-space. Analyses address the ways in which these discourses position boyfriends and girlfriends. The implications of contradictory positioning for enabling arguments are discussed

Preservice Literacy Teachers in Transition: Identity as Subjectivity

This research addresses the complexities of identity development of elementary and middle school preservice literacy teachers during their teacher education program using a poststructural feminist theoretical lens. This research investigated two questions: 1) How do preservice teachers develop their identity as teachers of literacy in the midst of authoritative discourses? 2) What kinds of strategies and discourses do preservice literacy teachers use to negotiate the competing discourses of literacy during student teaching? The results indicated that the identities of the preservice literacy teachers were in transition during their teacher education program and authoritative discourses were at work constituting their subjectivities throughout this process. These discourses were heard as the preservice literacy teachers used deconstructive and reconstructive literacy discourses and strategies from their personal literacy biographies, literacy coursework, and student teaching practices. Their agency as literacy teachers was demonstrated through the strategies they used to negotiate and perform their identities during student teaching—working within and outside of the literacy structures of their cooperating teachers’ classrooms. The research also indicated the power of time and space in relation with others, as a means for continued identity transformation

Eat what you hear: Gustasonic discourses and the material culture of commercial sound recording

This article analyzes discursive linkages between acts of listening and eating within a combined multisensory regime that the authors label the gustasonic. Including both marketing discourses mobilized by the commercial music industry and representations of record consumption in popular media texts, gustasonic discourses have shaped forms and experiences of recorded sound culture from the gramophone era to the present. The authors examine three prominent modalities of gustasonic discourse: (1) discourses that position records as edible objects for physical ingestion; (2) discourses that preserve linkages between listening and eating but incorporate musical recordings into the packaging of other foodstuffs; and (3) discourses of gustasonic distinction that position the listener as someone with discriminating taste. While the gustasonic on one hand serves as an aid to consumerism, it can also cultivate a countervailing collecting impulse that resists music’s commodity status and inscribes sound recording within alternative systems of culture value

(Re)Producing the Nation: The Politics of Reproduction in Serbia in the 1980s and 1990s

The dissertation looks at the struggle for hegemonic control over the meaning of reproduction and sexuality in Serbia, 1986-1997, in the context of the ideological and socio-economical changes created by the collapse of socialism. The dissertation focuses on changing meanings of reproduction and reproduction's intersection with the concepts of gender, sexuality and nation. Such a focus is determined by two considerations: 1) gender organization in patriarchal societies is based primarily on different roles that men and women are believed to play in reproduction; and 2) in almost all post-socialist societies, discourses and policies have been produced aimed at changing reproductive practices of specific targeted populations: not simply women, but women belonging to particular groups (ethnic, religious, class). During the fieldwork in Serbia, multiple methods for data collection were used: archival research, participant observation, semi-structured interviews and life histories. All material was subjected to discourse/textual analysis, while the interpretation combines economic, political and symbolic approaches.The population discourses and closely related abortion debates are at the center of the analysis. I argue that for the Serbian nationalism in the 1980s and 1990 demographic issues were associated with the concerns related to continuity of the nation in its temporal and special dimension. Demographic discourses also projected a specific vision of modernity recreating gendered images of the state and nation, of "self" and the "other". Finally, they contributed to the processes of the radical social change by redefining the meaning of reproduction and by reshaping gender roles. This research has also unrevealed common epistemological properties shared by population discourses; the dominant discourses on gender and gender relations; and nationalist discourses (about origin and development of nations, and about survival of and threat to the national 'stock'). Consequently, these discourses emerge as not only mutually dependent, but actually, mutually constitutive. Modernist bias that allowed demography to embrace 'scientific objectivity' in representation of population trends also allowed nationalist discourses to embrace images of 'backwardness' and 'progress'. An inherent gender dimension of this bias allowed both demographic and nationalist discourses to employ the same hegemonic images of masculinity and femininity

The discourses of homosexuality in the police: a thesis presented in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts in Psychology at Massey University

The present study examined the discourses of homosexuality in the police, using the discourse analytic method developed by Potter and Wetherell (1987). The study asked how police officers constructed gay men using their discourses and why gay men should or should not be employed by the police. Eight police officers were interviewed. Analysis revealed officers drew on three distinct discourses to construct gay men. The effeminate discourse associated homosexuals with effeminate behaviours. The deviant discourse associated homosexuals with behaviours that are morally and legally proscribed, and the discourse of conditional acceptance was used by officers to positively present, while voicing reservations about homosexuals. These discourses formed the linguistic resources officers used to construct types of homosexuals that were subsequently rejected as potential police officers. Several arguments were used to justify the conclusion that homosexuals were unsuited to the police. These related to the internal and external pressures impinging on the department, with regard to the employment of homosexuals. The implications of the discourses are discussed with reference to gay men, the police and the ideologies of heterosexism and gender

The existence of Roma in youth justice discourses

Critical scholars have repeatedly emphasised the importance of how various categories become constructed. This paper discusses the ‘existence’ of ‘the other’ in youth justice discourses. Drawing on qualitative analysis of police, prosecution, youth court and social services discourses, this paper discusses the positioning of migrant youths, referred to youth court on suspicion of having committed an offence. The talk particularly focuses on Czech and Slovak Roma in two legal departments in Belgium. I discuss in what types of cases and discourses the case of Roma (i.e. references to ethnicity and popular images of the ‘Roma culture’) exists and in what instances it seizes to exist. Particular attention is directed to the constitutions, circularity and contexts of ethnicising discourses throughout youth justice trajectories, as well as their performative nature

Sport as real life

A new chapter that examines the relationship between sport and European society. It argues that the discourses of modernisation surrounding the sports industry echo broader political and economic discourses that dominate European thinking on the relationship between sports and industry

‘In Drag’: Performativity and Authenticity in Zadie Smith’s NW

Zadie Smith’s latest novel, NW, presents a multiverse in which multiplicity is driven into homogeneization by the forces of those dominant discourses that attempt to suppress the category of the “Other.” This paper focuses on the development of the two female protagonists. Their opposing attitudes towards motherhood, together with their confrontation with their origins, bring to the fore the performativity found in the discourses of gender, sexuality, class, and race. Thus, this paper will explore authenticity and performativity in a contemporary context, where patriarchal and neocolonial discourses still apply