Browsing by Subject "Sexual harassment of women"
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Item Discourse, power, and social rupture: an analysis of Tailhook 91(Texas Tech University, 1997-12) Orbell, Brenda Camp GordonSocial constructionist theories that focus on discourse as a stabilizing force for creating shared meaning within a cohesive community have been criticized in recent scholarship for ignoring the power relations involved in constructing meaning. This dissertation examines the complex power relations involved in constructing meanings in military discourse. It focuses on the power of discourse to achieve closure with a social rupture, Tailhook, and on how this process influenced the values, beliefs, and policies of the military, particularly those concerning the restriction of women from combat. Chapter I develops a framework for analyzing military discourse that adopts a social perspective but compensates for the shortcomings of social constructionist theory by including cultural theories that emphasize the institutional and political circumstances in which social actions are produced and constrained and the ways in which marginalized groups can challenge these constraints. Chapter II establishes status as the recurring context needed to understand the historical participation of women in the military, and establishes the situational context of the discourse used to establish policies for maintaining and altering that status according to the needs, values, and beliefs of the milhary. Chapter III, using methods of discourse analysis, shows how the social practices at Tailhook created a discourse that reflected and maintained an ideology prevalent in the male-dominated culture of the military, one that reduces women to sexual bodies and perpetuates the values and beliefs used to restrict women from combat. Chapters IV and V use methods of rhetorical and genre analysis to examine two groups of military reports that attempt to achieve closure on Tailhook and the crisis over military women, particularly the relationship between sexual harassment and the combat restrictions. The chapters show that the rhetoric of official reports is not neutral; it must first establish its own legitimacy and then deal whh the illegitimate actions under investigation while maintaining the military system that is the source of its legitimacy but also allowed the illegitimate actions to occur. Through their rhetorical choices, the reports move to close Tailhook while perpetuating the status of military women as secondary players in a male-dominated culture. Chapter VI presents a closing look at the power of discourse in the struggle of women in the military and in the process of achieving closure with Tailhook. It returns to the silences in the discourse analyzed in the earlier chapters and concludes how separating issues of sexuality from issues of sexual equality allowed the official discourse to achieve closure Tailhook while at the same time reaffirming the existing military system, which institutionalizes gender hierarchy—sexual inequality—and encourages sexual harassment and sexual assaults.