ABSTRACT
Critical discourse analysis is a movement which seeks to raise critical consciousness about the discursive dimensions of social problems involving discrimination, disadvantage, and dominance with the aim of contributing to broader emancipatory projects. Among the many enduring social concerns investigated by CDA scholars, gender-based inequalities have constituted an important research focus. Belonging to the family of CDA scholarship, studies with a focus on gender share the main tenets of CDA (for example, van Dijk 1993; Fairclough, Mulderrig and Wodak 2011) and are enriched intellectually by other critical discourse research projects. At the same time, feminists’ engagement with gender relations and ideologies has also contributed intellectually to wider CDA research. Notably, feminist studies had provided an impetus in the formative years of CDA scholarship in the 1980s (van Dijk 1991). Decades later, in a move to signal explicitly the ongoing contributions of feminist thought and politics in gender-related CDA studies, as well as the disciplinary hybridity which that has entailed, the term ‘feminist critical discourse analysis’ (or ‘Feminist CDA’/‘FCDA’) was introduced (Lazar 2005; Walsh 2001).
