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Abstract:
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In Denmark today, gender equality is still a vastly debated topic despite the fact that the fight
for women’s rights goes back a hundred years. In search of potential reasons, this master
thesis explores the development in the conceptualisations of ‘gender equality’ including who
or what is assigned agency in the debate, and discusses potential consequences of the
overall development. From a historical outline of the fight for gender equality in Denmark, it
takes a closer look at the public debate in newspapers in 1968 and 2008. Social
constructionism, philosophical hermeneutics, and critical theory form the basis of the Critical
Discourse Analysis approach, and from this a framework for Faircloughian analysis is
developed.
The analysis consists of three parts: an analysis of discursive practice, textual practice, and
social practice. Based on Laclau and Mouffe’s theory of nodal points and Lakoff and
Johnson’s conceptual metaphors, the thesis explores the net of discourses that arise from the
texts, and vie to conceptualise ‘gender equality’. After summing up the results of the
discursive practice, the thesis scrutinises how the discourses are constructed textually with an
emphasis on how agency is distributed within and across the utterances of the different texts
based on analysis of semantic roles and passive diathesis. With the analysis of discursive
and textual practice, the discourse analysis is concluded. Subsequently, the social practice is
analysed, and in this, the results of the analysis are briefly discussed in light of Giddens’
theory of post modernity.
The results indicate that the conceptualisation of “gender equality” has developed recently,
and that it is today a common sense concept with a fixed meaning: equal representation of
men and women in the workplace and the home. The debate has become detached from
great narratives, and is instead based on quantitative measures and opinion. Politicians have
become active participants in the debate in the roles of debaters and policy makers, and the
state is expected to play a large part in the creation of equality between men and women.
Finally, the thesis suggests that this development can be seen as part of the extensive social
practice in the postmodern society, where social relations are “diembedded” to the modern
welfare state, and the individual is dependant upon expert systems, in that the politicians act
as representatives of expert knowledge, and consistently suggest policy making as the
solution to gender inequality. |
