Sasha Trae, Dixie State University
Communication
This research critiques prevailing economic, political, and social discourses that create or uphold disadvantage, inequity, and oppression against women. Using multiple Critical Discourse Analysis tools, such as, lexical suppression and absence and representational strategies, this researcher will examine activist, political, and socio-cultural discourse, including Take Back The Night, to expose underlying ideology. This paper analyzes ideological functions of these and other constructions identified in the discourse. This researcher will illustrate how the analyzed discourse shapes our reality that the ownership of women’s equality and safety are in the hands of men. Additionally, this researcher will unveil the ideological suppression and absence of the perpetrator; consequently, twenty-first century public discourse places the responsibility in the hands of women to prevent and address violence against women, the victims. Further, this researcher will demonstrate how the revealed ideologies indicate that violence against women is random or unstoppable; thus, setting up women to continue being integrated into a system that is hostile to them. Moreover, the breadth of this ideology indicates that every society within the nations of our world declare that women are a subset of humanity, and that it is men who get to resist relinquishing this equality while women expend their efforts to obtain it. This paper concludes that violence against women is part of an economic and political system that has been codified and written into the laws of nations; therefore, creating and perpetuating the very structures responsible for the violent climate that we fear and live in.