Discourse Analysis Reading Response

DISCOURSE ANALYSIS 

Within this week’s reading there is a section looking at 'Death of the Dad', a newspaper article written by Melanie Phillips in 1997. 

The article observes the ‘re-engineering of men to be more like women’. This really stood out to me. In the context of the article, this re-engineering stands to put men in a less dominant place, i.e. the place of women in the past. Throughout history women have conformed to what men have perceived their ‘place’ in society to be, neither embracing or neglecting womanhood, simply following protocol. ‘Woman’ as an identity came much later. Fast forward to today and there’s a notion that to be a girl is a negative. I have known women who use the word woman as an insult, telling male coworkers to ‘stop being such a woman’ or ‘man up’ as if to be male was equivalent to being proficient at a task. Recent times have also seen the rise of ‘not like other girls’ being used to describe young women, placing them on a pedestal as something ‘other’ than a girl, because to be a girl is synonymous with idiocy.

This article extract reminded me of an essay written by Sherry Ortner entitled ‘Is Female to Male as Nature Is to Culture?’ which looks at how historically woman have maintained nurturing positions, whilst men have created and shaped the culture of society. With more women entering predominantly male industries today, and vice versa with a boom in the number of male nurses, this seems relevant.

Another line highlighting how this wave of feminism 'placed the idea of fatherhood itself under siege' is key because it demonstrates that in attempting to empower one group (single mothers), this wave of feminists have alienated and invalided another (fathers). It is interesting that in 20 years, feminism has reinvented itself to be so much more inclusive. In 1997, Melanie Phillips was writing about misandry before it even had a name. Before, the very notion of feminism was perceived to be wholly threatening towards men; now, feminism is a non-gender specific commonplace.