• The Conference
  • Home
  • Programme
  • Venue & directions
  • Organizing Committee
  • Scientific Committee
  • Exhibitors & sponsors
  • Satellite events
  • Conference Party
• Past & future
  • Previous symposia
  • Finland 2014
  • Spain 2016
• About FU Berlin
  • University homepage
  • Humanities at FU

Programme: accepted abstracts

Search for abstracts --- authors title abstract

---

Abstract ID: 1409

Part of Session 196: Discourse, Politics and Women as Global Leaders (Other abstracts in this session)

Governors Debating: The Role of Situational, Discourse and Transportable Identities

Authors: Adams, Karen Lee
Submitted by: Adams, Karen Lee (Arizona State University, United States of America)

Adams 2011 compared the stance and styling of two women candidates running for the office of governor in the state of Arizona, USA at different points in time. In a 2010 debate Jan Brewer was the Republican incumbent who succeeded to the office after the other woman, Democrat Janet Napolitano, who first became governor in 2002, accepted an appointment to President Obama’s cabinet in 2008. This comparison based on Zimmerman’s 1998 proposal of three broad categories of identity, discourse, situated and transportable ones, showed widely divergent stances based on situated identities claimed early on in the debate and argued for throughout as affective stances to create authority and to construct an oppositional position. These debates also differed in their turn taking structure and so created some difference in possible discourse identities.

The goal of this presentation is to continue to tease apart the range of debate stances taken by women candidates by looking at a larger number of women candidates running for the offices of governor across the United States over a 20 year period. Some of the debates in question have more than one women candidate running against each other and include a few third party candidates in addition to representatives of the Democrat and Republican parties. All these women claim to be ready to step into the position of leader of the state and present a persona designed to be convincing.

The 20 candidates to be seen in over 25 debates offer the opportunity to identify the range of ways women candidates for the same office construct oppositional and perhaps shared epistemic and affective stance to create authority. What role does the turn taking structure play? What role do claims of privileged knowledge and moral imperatives have in creating authority? Do claims of appropriate authority in governing style fit those argued for in Kendall 2003? What stances are projected on opposing candidates and are these stances taken up and by whom (Lakoff 2003)? Are there uses of down-graders of authority stances and what linguistic form do they take (Adams 1999)?  In the end, do the findings reflect or challenge stereotypes?

 

References

Adams, K.L., 2011. Governing with Authority. Paper presented at Stylistics Across Disciplines. June 16-17.Leiden University, Leiden, The Netherlands.

            Adams, K. L., 1999. Deliberate dispute and the construction of oppositional stances. Pragmatics, 9 (2), pp.231-248.

            Jaffe, A. ed., 2009. Stance: sociolinguistic perspectives. Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press.

Kendall, S., 2003. Creating gendered demeanors of authority at work and at home. In: J. Holmes and M. Meyerhoff, eds. 2003. The handbook of language and gender.  Oxford: Blackwell, pp.600-623.   

Lakoff, R., 2003. Language, gender and politics: putting “women” and “power” in the same sentence.  In: J. Holmes and M. Meyerhoff, eds. 2003. The handbook of language and gender. Oxford: Blackwell, pp.161- 178.

Zimmerman D.H., 1998. Identity, context, and interaction. In: C. Antaki and S. Widdicombe, eds. 1998. Identities in talk. London: Sage, pp.87-106.