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Tekijän nimiVarga, Oana
TyyppiVäitöskirja
NimekeFrom Women to Gender. A Diachronic Exploration of Participant Representation in Texts from the United Nations
Julkaisuvuosi2010
YliopistoÅbo Akademi
TiedekuntaHumanistinen tiedekunta
Laitos/oppiaineEnglannin kieli ja kirjallisuus
JulkaisukieliEnglanti
ISBN978-951-765-532-3
ISBN elektr.978-951-765-533-0
KustantajaÅbo Akademi
KustannuspaikkaÅbo
Linkki verkkojulkaisuun Varga, Oana 2010
YhteenvetoThe evolving perspectives on the status of women and men in societies are mirrored in the renewed approaches of development economics: from ‘Women in Development’ through ‘Women and Development’ to ‘Gender and Development’. The changing approaches bring with them new ways of talking about women, men and development. This research contributes to the understanding of the representation of women and men within the domain of development economics; of the way in which gender relations are represented in development texts throughout decades, thus pointing to changing social and economic aspects in the field; of the conceptualization of ‘gender’ within the field; and of the characteristics of three organizational genres. All these aspects are analyzed from a diachronic perspective. By analyzing texts written within the field of feminist economics from the 1960s to the beginning of the 21st century, the present study documents the way in which the language of text producers within development economics constitutes and is conditioned by their approach towards development issues and towards women and men. The analysis focuses on the use of activation and passivation processes in the representation of the two main participants, women and men, the introduction of the notion of ‘gender’ and the evolution of development issues across approaches, time and genres. The research framework stretches over various disciplines: systemic functional grammar and critical discourse analysis, but also organizational discourse analysis and development studies. The texts selected for analysis originate in three varied sources: plans from the world conferences on women organized by the United Nations (starting with 1975 up to 2000), resolutions on women and development released by the General Assembly of the United Nations (starting with 1957 up to 2003) and Action Plans on women in development written by the United Nations’ Food and Agriculture Organisation (starting with 1989 up to 2002).

The method of linguistic analysis is based on the grid of roles and means of participant representation as developed by M.A.K. Halliday and Th. Van Leeuwen. For each decade and for each genre, the study scrutinizes the changes in the process types and participant roles, together with the change in the focus on issues concerning women and the conceptualization of gender. The quantitative analysis is corroborated by detailed analysis of fragments belonging to different points in time and approaches.

The results of the study are of grammatical and lexical nature and they are genderrelated, genre-related and time-related results. The study shows that the activation processes are largely more numerous than the passivation processes in the representation of women. However, there is also another result which shows that a better understanding of participant representation is achieved when the grammatical processes are re-grouped along identifying, activating and targeting processes. There are three pillars which constitute the representation of women: the pillar of the identification of women, the pillar of the activation of women and the pillar of the passivation of women. Possession joins location, profession, social status and age to form the threads which compose the portrait of the women in development economics. There is a general consensus to turn the attention of development texts towards women’s identity issues, which results in less importance accorded to women’s activity issues. The preference for nouns and nominalisations is conspicuous. Both to express women in action and to identify women, more nouns/nominalisations are used than finite verbs. As the sole recognised component of the working force, men are the norm of assessment of the success of development plans for women, but they also become the goal of the development plans. Gender is a social variable in development work, used in the form of quality, less as thing and never as a process. The three genres have different means of representing participants and thus ensure the existence of diversified discourses of development texts. From the diachronic perspective, the study shows that the 1990s bring a homogenisation in the use of processes and issues across genres, in contrast to a diversification at the levels of notions under discussion: the resolutions focus on equality and poverty, the world conference plans focus on human rights, health and violence, while the FAO plans focus on the issues of access and workload.

The change from focusing on women to focusing on gender is not as much a change in the processes via which participants are represented, but more a change in the rhetoric of approaches and their focus: from the integration of women to women’s self-empowerment, from women’s situation to gender relations, from urgent addition to social conflict and cooperation.
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