Academic literature on the topic 'Feminist discourse analysis'

This is a critical discourse analysis research project that examines the print and television advertisements of Merck & Co.’s Human Papillomavirus (HPV) vaccine GARDASIL®. There are three commercial campaigns identified for this project: “Make the Connection/ Charm4Life,” “Tell Someone,” and “One Less/ I Choose.” Two print and two television commercials per campaign are analyzed. I used black feminist and girls studies theoretical frameworks to address how representations of race, class, “girl power,” and the cooptation of feminist language are both expressed and utilized in the marketing as a method to target consumers. I conclude with “parody/ protest” advertisements of the vaccine featuring young women demonstrating a critical consumer voice towards the marketing of the vaccine. As a result, I found that the PSAs used fear-driven messages about HPV’s link to cervical cancer beginning a year before the FDA’s approval of GARDASIL® in order to market and sell its product.

The purpose of the study is to develop both a descriptive and critical understanding towards the phenomenon of femicide in Turkey. First, the answers to the questions who commits femicide, where it takes place, what the ages of the victims and perpetrators are, in what ways femicide is committed and what are the &#039<br>reasons&#039<br>of committing femicide will be revealed through news reports of incidents of femicide. Second, the news texts of incidents of femicide will be analyzed based on the framework of Feminist Critical Discourse Analysis (FCDA). The discourse of framing the incidents will be identified. In particular, &#039<br>justifying discourse&#039<br>in the language of the news reports will be examined.

Every year over 8,500 women under the age of 50 are diagnosed with breast cancer in the UK. Current treatments can lead to severe long-term consequences, including infertility. Young women have been shown to have particularly high levels of psychosocial distress after a breast cancer diagnosis, the causes of which remain unclear. Distress in this medical context is largely defined as an indicator of psychopathology, rather than as an interpersonal and social emotion. Drawing on feminist literature which emphasises the importance of reproductive discourses for the subjectivities of women in the current climate of pro-natalist tendencies in Western societies, this thesis presents an alternative framework to the prevailing medical model. It explores the distress that young women report feeling as a result of their breast cancer diagnosis, and their experiences of breast cancer, infertility, and their female subjectivities. It moves away from the medical model's emphasis on quantification to focus on women's experiences from their viewpoint. A critical realist framework is employed to emphasise the constructed nature of 'experience', but also to acknowledge that this construction is shaped by material circumstances. A feminist materialist discourse analysis was conducted on 14 in-depth interviews with young women who had become infertile after breast cancer treatment. Chapters 2 and 3 provide a critical discussion of extant literature in the area, and chapter 4 provides the theoretical research context. The first four analysis chapters (chapters 5-8) discuss the dominant construction of infertility as a 'dysfunction' and 'problem', and chart a 'process' from initial treatment decision making, via the link between constructions of infertility and constructions of the 'self, to the losses women reported as a consequence of their infertility, and how they resisted and negotiated these dominant constructions. The last analytic chapter (chapter 9) presents alternative understandings to the dominant notion of the end of a woman's periods as 'infertility' or as a 'problem'. Recommendations are made not only for the improvement of medical breast cancer procedures, but also in relation to discursive constructions and practices.

Despite the breakthrough of ‘women’s empowerment’ in the international development field and the continuous emphasis on its importance, there is still no consensus on the concept’s meaning. Many feminist scholars argue that this has affected the concept’s transformative potential as development institutions have tended to adopt overly simplistic understandings. The recent establishment of UN Women can be understood as marking an institutionalization of the women’s empowerment agenda as it was created through development institutions’ joint forces for the increased advancement of gender agendas. With this new institution and the still ambiguous meaning of women’s empowerment, this study examines how UN Women understands women’s empowerment and explores possible implications of this understanding for its practice of empowering women. Via ideal types this study uses feminist critique and visions as reference points to discuss whether UN Women has managed to change previous simplistic understanding of women’s empowerment. The study concludes that UN Women’s understanding of women’s empowerment is similar to the international development institutions’ often adopted understanding of the concept. The results therefore imply that despite the institutionalization of the women’s empowerment agenda via the creation of UN Women, the transformative project of women’s empowerment is likely to be absent.