Tools of inquiry for Discourse analysis

In the poststructuralist approach, the reader replaces the author as the primary subject of inquiry and, without a central fixation on the author, the inquiry becomes an examination of other sources for meaning, which are never authoritative. In following this approach, I am guided by the work of J.P. Gee, whose schema for data analysis I have adapted following a pilot study conducted in early 2014. Gee’s Discourse Analysis model (2014) categorizes data into 42 distinct classifications: beginning with the Building Tasks of significance, practices, identities, relationships,

88 _{Text and the study of ‘texture’; discursive practices and the concept of ‘orders of discourse’; and}

82 connections, politics (the distribution of social goods), and sign systems and knowledge, Gee then analyses the workings of these building tasks in specific instances of language-in-use to form tools of inquiry (TOI), which cover situated meanings, social languages, figured worlds, Discourses and Conversations. However, given the limited data contained within each micronovel (each comprising 140 characters, maximum), analysis through all 42 categories in the pilot study proved excessive and often yielded extraneous results.

For this reason, I elected to focus on the three TOI that yielded the most relevant data during the pilot study (situated meanings, figured worlds and Discourses), and to use five of the seven Building Tasks (significance, practices, identities, politics and imagery [adapted from Gee’s ‘sign systems’]. The following summaries are taken from Gee (2014, pp.32–36, 121):

1 Significance: How is this piece of language being used to make certain things significant or not, and in what ways? Sub questions: How are (1) situated meanings, (2) social languages, (3) figured worlds, (4) intertextuality, (5) Discourses and (6) conversations being used to build relevance or significance for things and people in context?

83 2 Practices (Activities): What practice (activity) or practices (activities) is

this piece of language being used to enact (i.e. get others to recognize as going on)? Sub questions: How are (1) situated meanings, (2) social languages, (3) figured worlds, (4) intertextuality, (5) Discourses and (6) conversations being used to enact a practice (activity) or practices (activities) in context?

3 Identities: What identity or identities is this piece of language being used to enact (i.e. get other to recognize as operative)? What identity or identities is this piece of language attributing to others and how does this help the speaker or writer enact his or her own identity? Sub questions: How are (1) situated meanings, (2) social languages, (3) figured worlds, (4) intertextuality, (5) Discourses and (6) conversations being used to enact and depict identities (socially significant kinds of people)?

4 Politics (the distribution of social goods): What perspective on social goods is this piece of language communicating (i.e., what is being communicated as to what is taken to be ‘normal,’ ‘right,’ ‘good,’ ‘correct,’ proper,’ ‘appropriate,’ ‘valuable,’ ‘the way things are,’ ‘the way things ought to be,’ ‘high status or low status,’ ‘like me or not like me,’ and so forth)? Sub questions How are (1) situated meanings, (2) social languages, (3) figured worlds, (4) intertextuality, (5) Discourses and (6) conversations being used to create, distribute, or withhold social goods or to construe particular distributions of social goods as ‘good’ or ‘acceptable’ or not?

5 Sign systems and ways of knowing: How does this piece of language privilege or disprivilege specific sign systems (e.g. Spanish vs. English, technical language vs. everyday language, words vs.

84 images, words vs. equations, etc.) or different ways of knowing and

believing or claims to knowledge and belief (e.g. science vs. the Humanities, science vs. ‘common sense,’ biology vs. ‘creation science’)? Sub questions: How are (1) situated meanings, (2) social languages, (3) figured worlds, (4) intertextuality, (5) Discourses and (6) conversations being used to privilege or disprivilege different sign systems (language, social languages, other sorts of symbol systems) and ways of knowing?

The selection of these three TOI from Gee’s model builds a logical progression of analysis of the ways in which stories of same-sex love and intimacy are created, distributed and consumed, which I believe also encapsulates Fairclough’s conceptualization of a three-dimensional framework for CDA outlined in 3.3.1.1, comprising the layers of text, Discourse practice, sociocultural practice:

1. The situated meanings TOI gives us an insight into what is happening at the sentence level, showing how the specific use of language and vocabulary is being used to locate meaning within the clause. I refer to this as the ‘What is happening?’ question.

2. The figured world TOI provides us with the ‘How is it happening?’ question, as it demonstrates how the interpretations of situated meanings are governed by our understanding of underlying assumptions and judgements pertaining to the worlds in which the text exists.

3. Finally, the Discourses TOI poses the ‘Why is it happening?’ question, as one focuses on the wider conduits of discussion and conversation that are both reflected within the text, and which are sparked from the messages the texts carry.

85 Gee’s Discourse model has previously been applied to Chinese language textual material in the work of Guo89 _{(2013). Precedent for selective application and}

inversion of Gee’s original Building Tasks and TOI models can be found in Marsh and Lammer’s work (2011) on the construction of masculinity within educational settings, in which the authors adapt Gee’s methodological framework to explore how constructions of masculinity presented by a middle-class, Mexican American male student shaped his participation in school literacy activities (and the way that school literacy activities and class-room contexts, in turn, shaped his understandings of what it meant to be a boy in a literacy classroom). To achieve this, the authors used four of Gee’s TOI (Discourses, social languages, situated meanings and figured worlds) to extract data from interview material, using Discourses to frame their study, and using figured worlds as their major analytical tool. Their successful adaptation of this model supports my rationale for selective use of Gee’s TOI framework.