Anne Bitsch

The approach taken in this paper is an attempt to fuse critical discourse analytical tools with feminist theory.  In line with the feminist project of de-naturalizing gender relations and underscoring how gender is embedded and constructed in social practice, I showed how discourse is a defining agent in constituting power relations.

With reference to Fairclough (1993; 2001), I employed critical discourse analytical tools to investigate how gender relations in general, and motherhood in particular, are represented in Barack Obama’s autobiography The audacity of hope. At the outset, a four-fold gender discourse typology consisting of liberal, conservative, radical and post-structural gender discourses was presented. Discourse is crucial in defining whose reality and interests count. Therefore it follows that gender policy is often legitimated by certain discourses of gender relations. For instance conservative discourses of gender take for granted that men and women are “different, but equal”, thereby making power relations a matter of personal preferences and “natural” arrangements. Intended, or unintended, by doing so unequal power relations are constructed discursively in a way that makes it difficult to advocate for social change.

Gender ideology is deeply entrenched in the order of the discourse of the family in America. Drawing on Robert Connell’s (2002; 2005) concept of hegemonic masculinity and Teresa Arendell’s (1999) concept of hegemonic motherhood, I illustrated how gender relations are subjugated to gender ideology and family ideology simultaneously. The notion of the “self-sacrificing mother with no personal interests” comprises a central piece in the representations about gender in Obama’s autobiography. Unequal power relations are discursively constructed as “different, but charming unequal gender relations”. Hence, the gendered and socially constructed nature of power relations is de-politicized.

As discourses about gender tend to correspond with gender policies and welfare regimes (Kjeldstad 2001), the absence of radical and post-structuralist gender discourses makes it tempting to suspect that future policies of gender recognition and gender reconstruction will be unlikely. However, one should avoid the pitfall of conflating Obama’s personal life with the actual political policies he will support. The reason for that is that even a strong, personalised, political public in America is the outcome of negotiations between diverging and converging discourses and interests.

The thesis statement is that the cross-fertilization between critical discourse analysis and feminist theory can serve to generate knowledge about gendered representations, and by doing so expose power relations.

Read the paper «To the Women Who Raised Me». A Feminist Discourse Reading of Barack Obama here.