Theory 5: Cultural Studies

Analytical text – Discourse and ideology of man and woman

Discourse can simply be defined as cultural framework. This is where meaning is constructed and interpreted to that particular object or event. Clearly, meaning can only be created through human communication and construction. According to Em Griffin (2011), Stuart Hall (1985) claimed that culture is concerned with the exchange in meaning between society– give and take meanings. He assumed that two people who came from the same culture would generally interpret meaning similarly and they could understand their thoughts and feelings in the way that they could understand each other.  The question is, how did the two people could roughly interpret meaning similarly? The answer is that because there is social construction in making meaning. Since they come from similar culture, they are raised to understand and believe the particular meaning that they shared and thus it indirectly shaped the way they think (Teun A. van Dijk, n.d).

It is related to representation and ideology.  A discourse always has many representations whereas it also involves ideology of people. In the case of the discourse of man and woman, it represents many things depending on what people see, hear and talk about them. For example, a discourse of man represents masculinity, strong and blue. Meanwhile, woman represents its femininity, emotion and pink. In terms of ideology, it is how the society commonly thinks about man and woman in terms of the way they speak, dress and the way they should behave socially. This is because ideology determines what we understand as unquestionable truth and shapes people’s perception. For instance, it is the ideology of woman to become a mother who looks after her children. People would also say a mother as housewife even if the woman has a career. However, people do not say a husband or a father who do not work as househusband.

Apart from that, ideology always involves comparison between the two and this includes the discourse f gender. In other words, it created binary formation where one must be a good one and the other must be a bad one – refer to ideology binary system (Teun A. Van Dajik, n.d). In the context of discourse of gender, man is considered as good and woman is considered as bad. People see man as strong and successful in career and woman is seen as a weak people and unsuccessful in terms of career wise.

However, the ideology in the discourse of man and woman do not represent the whole truth. This is because ideology is only the general human perception in which it does not apply in the cruel reality. Since man is considered good, some truths are left unspoken where man is not always good. In fact, for some cases, man abused his wife and children.

In short, discourse always involve ideology in which meaning are socially constructed depending how that particular society see it. Ideology also involve comparison between the two which is called the ideology binary system (Teun A. van Dajik, n.d). However, the ideology of the discourse do not always represent the whole truth.

References:

Griffin, E. (2011). A First Look at Communication Theory, 8^th Edition. Pp. 344 -349.  New York: McGraw Hill.

Teun A. van Dajik. (n.d). Discourse, Ideology and Context. University of Amsterdam. Pp. 12-13

Teun A. van Dajik. (n.d). Ideological Discourse Analysis. Pp. 143-144.