Discursive Strategies Contributing to Stigma towards Involuntary Childless Women in the Gikùyù Community
Abstract
Positioning women in a situation where motherhood is associated with womanhood has led to stigma towards those who do not have children. They are perceived as outsiders in their communities, and language is used to advance the ideologies that support their discrimination. The use of discursive techniques has been essential in stigmatising and categorising childlessness. Linguistic stigma has been created by language and other ideas. Degrading discourse strategies that are language-based have a significant impact on how childless women are viewed. The paper’s discursive approaches were centred on the stigma that involuntarily childless women in the Gikùyù community experience. The study was informed by Fairclough and Van Dijk’s Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA). Different elements like vocabulary, grammatical structure, and semantics ought not to be examined individually, according to CDA and their functions should not be disregarded. The purpose of the study was to assess the discursive techniques stigmatising involuntarily childless women. The study used purposive sampling to choose the villages in the Tetu sub-county, Nyeri County. They were Kǐandu, Ndǔgamano and Kǐgogoinǐ. The researcher used focus group discussions (FGDs) in order to collect data. Twelve involuntarily childless women participated in the FGD as respondents, four in each FGD. The data was then audio recorded, analysed, and categorised into themes. The study will benefit linguists since it will educate them on the extent to which language may be used to stigmatise social groups and prepare them to advocate for language change when needed. This discussion will highlight the connection between language and gender and motivate curriculum designers to include discussions on linguistic stigma, which will benefit researchers who focus on gender issues. Involuntary childless women are stigmatised linguistically according to the study, and these women should rebrand themselves by accepting their situation and reclaiming their identity
Downloads
References
Adams, M. (2009). Power, politeness, and the pragmatics of nicknames. Names, 57(2), 81-91. https://doi.org/10.1179/175622709x436369
Allport, G. (1954). The nature of Prejudice. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley.
Aristotle (2013). Poetics. Oxford World’s Classics: Aristotle: Poetics.https://doi.org/10.1093/oseo/instance.00258601
Brown, P., Levinson, S. C., & Gumperz, J. J. (1987). Politeness. Some Universals in Language Use, 4(2), 92- 123. https://doi.org/10.1017/cbo9780511813085
Chapman, S. (2013). Grice, Conversational Implicature and Philosophy. Perspectives on Pragmatics and Philosophy, 2(4), 153-188. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-01011-3_7
Chew, P. G. (2001). Infertile women in Singapore. Women’s Studies International Forum, 24(6), 727- 736. https://doi.org/10.1016/s0277-5395(01)00208-4
Connell, R. W. (2005). Masculinities. University of California Press.
Eckert, P., & McConnell-Ginet, S. (2013). Language and gender. Cambridge University Press.
Fairclough, N. (2001). Language and Power. (2nd. Ed.). Longman Publishing Group.
Fairclough, N. (2010). Language, reality and power. English Language, 512-522.
Foucault, M. (2009). Discipline and punishment: The birth of the prison. Journal of Management & Governance, 13(3), 269-280. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10997-008-9080-7
Fryer, R. G., & Levitt, S. D. (2004). The Causes and Consequences of Distinctively Black Names. The Quarterly Journal of Economics, 119(3), 767- 805. https://doi.org/10.1162/0033553041502180
Gehman, R. J. (2022). African traditional religion in African and African diaspora scholarship. The Palgrave Handbook of African Traditional Religion, 4(3), 547- 557. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-89500-6_41
Goke-Pariola, A. (2013). Language and symbolic power: Bourdieu and the legacy of Euro-American colonialism in an African society. Language & Communication, 13(3), 219-234. https://doi.org/10.1016/0271-5309(93)90027-k
Grice, P. (1999). Sentences, assertion, and the semantics–pragmatics boundary. Words and Thoughts, 213- 232. https://doi.org/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199250387.003.0011
Halliday, M. A. (2005). Studies in the English Language. Journal of English Linguistics, 35(4), 367- 370. https://doi.org/10.1177/0075424207307753
Hoey, M. P. (1988). An Introduction to Functional Grammar. London: Studies in Second Language Acquisition, 10(1), 84-87.
Irinyenikan, T. A. (2020). Risk factors for female infertility at a tertiary health facility in Akure, south-west Nigeria. International Journal of Medicine and Medical
Kenya Demographic and Health Survey. (2020). Results from the demographic and health survey. Studies in Family Planning, 25(5), 310. https://doi.org/10.2307/2138062
Kimathi, L.J. (2004). Focus group practice. SAGE.
Kvint, V. (2009). Types of Dialogue and Burdens of Proof. Association for Computational Linguistics, 17. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203882917
Kress, G. (1990). Critical discourse analysis. Annual Review of Applied Linguistics, 11, 84- 99. https://doi.org/10.1017/s0267190500001975
Locke, T. (2014). CDA made simple: Language, ideology, and power in politics and media. Cambridge Scholars Publishing.
Lotman, Y. M. (1994). Undefined. PMLA/Publications of the Modern Language Association of America, 109(3), 377-384.
Marsen, S. (2008). Book review: Discourse Analysis (2nd Ed). Oxford: Blackwell, 2008. 312 pp. Discourse Studies, 11(1), 121-123.
Mbiti, J. S. (2018). Relating peace in African religion to theologies of liberation and reconstruction 1. Religion and Social Reconstruction in Africa, 3(2), 108-123.
Nahajec, L. (2021). Negation, expectation, and ideology in written texts. Linguistic Approaches to Literature. https://doi.org/10.1075/lal.38
Njuguna, J. (2019). Influence of Gendered Linguistic Images of the Girl. A case of Nyeri County Kenya [Unpublished master’s thesis]. Egerton University, Njoro. Kenya.
Phiri, I. A. (2021). The infertility of Chewa women of Malawi: Mission in Malawi: Essays in Honour of Klaus Fiedler, 389-411.
Richardson, J. E. (2007). Critical discourse analysis: War reporting. Analysing Newspapers, 178-219. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-0-230-20968-87
Roberge, P. T., Hodge, R., & Kress, G. (2018). Language as ideology. Language, 73(2), 440.
Schultz, M. R. (1975). ‘The semantic derogation of women’. [in] E. Thorne & N. Henley (eds), 64–75. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110899979.67
Siwila, L. C. (2022). An African ecofeminist appraisal of the value of Acknowledging Women’s struggles with stigma in infertility. African Perspectives on Fertility Health, 65- 78. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003147909-5
Sophanna, S. (2016). Gender, Culture, and Infertility in Cambodian Society [Unpublished master’s thesis]. Mahidol University.
Takyi, B. K., & Mann, J. (2022). Collaborative inquiry with men who use intimate partner violence: Service user perspectives on expertise in domestic violence services for men. Journal of Family Violence. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10896-022-00369-7
Thornborrow, J. (2014). Power talk: Language and interaction in institutional discourse. Routledge.
Van Dijk, T. (2006). Politics, ideology, and discourse. Encyclopedia of Language & Linguistics, 728-740.
World Health Organization. (2011). The Concept of Infertility. Bulletin of the World Health Organization, 89(10), 1156- 1200. https://doi.org/10.2471/blt.11.10
Yule, G. (2006). Pragmatics Oxford University Press. Explaining English Grammar Oxford University Press. https://doi.org/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199574797.003.0001
Copyright (c) 2023 Pamela Mukami Gitu, Vicky Khasandi, PhD, Albert Rutere, PhD
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.