Language and Gender Discrimination

Introduction

Women have struggled for years to gain equalities in many areas of life, including their rights at their own homes, workplace rights, and rights in leadership positions. Despite the fact that women constitute more than half of the global population, only a small percentage of the women occupy executive offices in companies, and women earn lower salaries compared to men. These discrepancies become even more intensive for black women of color. Despite the discrimination, women have been at the forefront in fighting against these vices in the effort to bring equality to all and to defy the gender stereotypes in the workplace, in politics, and in places of worship ( Baker et al., 2008 ). Women take the role of promoting gender equality by becoming womanist theologians, politicians, theologians, feminists, social justice advocates, community leaders, and elected officials.

The world is slowly accepting women's equality and women's rights with the increase in the advocacy for gender equality. However, there is still a wider anti-feminist society that largely fears a modern woman rising to take on the male jobs, be politicians, be leaders in the church, take on military jobs, and many more. Today, the world has come an inch closer to closing the gender inequality gap. Women are today better represented in politics across all the countries in the world, and women have more economic opportunities like men, women have access to better healthcare, and women are also going to school and being employed in all kinds of prime jobs in companies and in government. Fewer girls are now being forcefully married or dropping out of school to get married, more and more girls are now going to school, there are several laws in place in support of women's rights, and there are more women in parliament across the world. Gender equality is not just a fundamental human right ( Fairclough, 2018 ). Gender equality is an important foundation for a peaceful, sustainable, and prosperous world. 

Despite the many progress, gender equality has not been fully realized, and it is projected by the WEF (World Economic Forum) that it will take another 100 years before true gender equality is fully achieved. There are still several challenges in respect to gender equality in society; the social norms are still pervasive, the discriminatory laws are not fully implemented to represent women's rights, women are still under-represented at most positions and levels in political leadership ( Rogers, 2011 ). Only a few women aged between the years fifteen and forty-nine report to have experienced sexual or physical violence by their marriage or intimate partners.

Materialized Gender

Butler argues that our “gender acts” affects us in such material, corporeal manners that even our thoughts regarding corporeal sexual differences are impacted on by social conventions. According to Butler, sex is not a “a bodily given where the gender construct is imposed artificially, but … cultural norm that control the bodies materialization.” For Butler, sex is an ideal construct that it materialized forcibly with time. Sex is not a static condition or a simple fact of a body, but a process where the regulatory values and norms materialize sex and attain the materialization via forceful reiteration of the values or norms. Butler’s reasoning is influenced by postmodern tendency to see the reality conception as determined by language, such that it becomes impossible to articulate or think about sex without imposing linguistic norms.

Ellen van Oost adopts “gender script” as tool for analysis in her works about materialized gender. van Oost argues that that “Gender script refers to the representations an artifact’s designers have or construct of gender relations and gender identities – representations that they then inscribe into the materiality of that artefact”.

Problem Statement

This is a linguistics analysis of Wonder Women comics. The primary focus is on woman discrimination and power in Wonder Woman comics, emphasizing gender discrimination of women and power in society. Politics is perceived as a man’s domain, and as such, women are discriminated against. Women taking on political campaigns and roles find it difficult working alongside men. Men tend to hold more control, more power, more influence, lots of finances and political power than their women counterpart.

Research Questions

Based on the problem statement, this paper asks the following research questions:

How is gender materialized on language?

Are the male and female individuals represented differently as far as the degree of agency and intentional involvement is concerned?

Methodology

In politics and social sciences, power refers to the capacity of a person or a group to influence the beliefs, actions, or conduct of other people. In the context of this study, power originates from having a privilege in accessing social resources like wealth, knowledge, and education. Another criterion of social resource access is gender. Gender refers to the male or female sex. Gender also refers to the sexes that are different from male and female, like LGBT ( Wodak, 2011 ). In respect to this study, gender refers to the socially constructed ideologies and norms that determine men's and women's actions and behaviors.

In linguistics, transitivity is a clause-level scenario that is normally referred to as a grammatical relationship that encodes the number of items or objects that are required by a verb. Three main aspects are of concern, including process, participants, and circumstances. Processes are represented through verbs. The participants are the receivers or doers. The participants can be abstracts concepts or objects. Circumstances refer to the propositional phrases or the adverbial groups. For this essay's case, the most critical processes are the materials ones and the behavioral processes. The material processes describe the stages of doing and constitute serious consequences. The behavioral processes are the physical or psychological behaviors that are semantically between the mental and material processes.

This analysis also has an interest in two devices in the analysis of the extract; the enforcing explicitness and the topic control strategy. Topic control strategy represents the aptitude for the prevailing speaker to steer the conversation regarding their personal agenda. Enforcing explicitness, on the other hand, is adopted from a power figure to make any statement ambiguous to go in their own direction, in regards to topic control.

As described by Van Leeuwen, social actors are the human participants in any social event. With the actors in a social setting comes their analysis in terms of their textual representation. Under surveillance, the primary features are the exclusion or inclusion of the actors in the representation to determine whether they are implied or omitted, then categorization afterward. Categorization refers to choosing by naming an actor in a social setting by using classifiers and another noun phrase and by the use of both identification and functionalization (Baker et al. 2008) . Functionalization happens when the social actors are viewed in terms of an activity they perform, like a responsibility or an occupation. On the other hand, identification views social actors regarding their permanent situation, with recognizable attributes.

Besides the transitivity aspects discussed above, the analysis will also cover the voice system. When presenting the social actor, linguistic choice can also be made of passivation or activation. Activation refers to a sentence where the involved subjects or participants act as stated by the verb, such as the material process actor. On the other hand, passivation refers to a scenario where the subject is acted on by the verb, for example, the material processes objectives.

Results

Clause	Process	Participants	Circumstances
Age when proud and beautiful women, stronger than men, ruled Amazonia	Was: relational-attributive	Amazonia	Stronger than men
The most powerful and captivating girl of modern times	Had: relational-possessive	Possessor: wonder woman Possessum: most captivating girl in modern times	Most powerful girl
You wouldn’t understand, am just a woman	Curled: material	Actor: beauty	Am just a woman
My women shall conquer men with love	Were: relational; (attributive)	Carrier: her body, Attribute: love
I’ll trade these five beautiful slave girls for thy goat	Know: mental	Senser: I	Trade girls for goat
Stupid men, you have no chance against us while I wear Aphrodite’s girdle magic	Sat: material	Actor: I	Stupid men
I will make love to her and steal the magic girdle	Looked: behavioural	Senser /Behaver: I, phenomenon: at her	Make love to her

Discussion

There are several social actors in this comic story. The social actors include the wonder woman herself, the Amazonian women, captain Steve Trevor, and Mars. Wonder Woman comic is a presentation of the history of the human race. The wonder woman comic begins from the golden age when the beautiful, proud, and strong-willed women were the Amazonian rulers. These women ardently worshipped the immortal Aphrodite Goddess of beauty and love. Wonder Woman was the most captivating and powerful girl of her modern times; she was a fearless maiden who gave up her happiness and heritage of peace to help America fight aggression and passion. The story begins with the disappearance of a brilliant young army man, Captain Steve Trevor. The army officer crashes into the sea and disappears in 'foam and mist.' Trevor is listed as 'killed in pursuit of duty.' A few weeks later, a mysterious yet very beautiful woman appears from nowhere, carrying Trevor in her arms. The girl vanishes just like she came, leaving Trevor in safe hands. They call her Wonder Woman. Society is surprised because it is not normal for a woman to be the one to save a military man from a situation people think is impossible.

The Wonder Woman comic story is published in the renaissance period when women were not recognized in society. Women were believed to be less muscular, belonged to the kitchen, was meant to bear children, and care for their husbands, children, and homes. Women were meant to serve men. They were not to take any role in society. They were powerless and could not help in any way besides in the homestead. Wars, power, and politics were the male domain. Material processes can be analyzed based on the manner in which roles are distributed from the beginning of the comic ( Rogers, 2011 ). The Wonder Woman appearance begins to change the idea of sexism. Other women see her as a hero and a light. She gives them hope that even a woman can have a military role, and they can do it better than men. Even though the wonder woman does not speak out in the first scene, her presence in the room as she hands over the captain speaks a lot. Her presence shapes the way the men and the women in the room speak and thinks. She exudes the power that influences the people around her.

Men were the social actors of genderism. The Comic story helps avoid the traditional historical practices that saw women sold for the gain of man. The article refers to women as being 'cheaper than cattle.' Despite these humiliations, through Wonder woman, 'Amazons were born, women champions, stronger than men. The Amazons built Amazonia, a magnificent city that defeated the enemy with ease (Baker et al. 2008) . Men like Mars were not happy and declared war on the Amazons. In the end, the Amazonians conquered their captors.

The material processes are demonstrated from the fact that women, in the end, liberates themselves. Women do things for themselves, go to school, get a job for themselves, take on the military roles, make their own decisions, and are independent of the men. The main historical context of the Wonder Woman comic book is feminism. Even in the early days of human history, patriarchy was used as a system to oppress women. Patriarchy is a system of social practices and systems where men oppress, govern, and exploit women. Even in the golden ages, patriarchy was viewed as an unjust social system used to harm especially women ( Rogers, 2011 ). Wonder Woman was therefore used as a symbol or an icon to demonstrate the power and the ability of a woman to be just as useful as a man. Wonder Woman breaks the social injustices and enlightens the woman as being capable of doing what a man can do, only much better.

Realizing the connection between feminism and understanding the woman's struggle over time is critical in making modern society a better place. The fundamental objective of feminism is to empower both men and women to better understand the experiences of people from the opposite sexes for the broad aim of gender equality. Feminism gives a way to understand the present and the past of women and provides an outlet to have more informed decisions in the future. Realizing the connections allows people to break the cycle of repetition and live a life based on understanding and ignorance.

Behavioral processes are demonstrated in the comic when the men advance upon the Amazonian women. Mars, sensing fear of women's domination, mobilizes men, using the land's traditions as their defense. Mars launches a fight against the women and momentarily keeps them on hold. Mars and his team of men take control of the situation. Mars speaks out, using behavioral processes. He was initially acting more passively. He also uses physical reactions to demonstrate how determined he was.

In the modern world, specifically western society, the feminist movement has effected significant change. Some of these changes include women suffrage, that is, equitable salary with men, greater access to education for every girl, the rights to start a divorce proceeding, the right to own property, the women's rights to make their own decisions about pregnancy (these include the right to abortion and access to contraceptives), and many more women freedoms and fundamental rights. It is also arguable that feminism has been core in significantly reducing domestic violence levels in Western countries, particularly against men as the likely killing an intimate female partner. Beginning in the 1960s, a lot has happened in the space to liberate women from different fronts. The women's liberation movement has been at the forefront of campaigning for women's rights. Some of the rights the movement has fought for include equal pay for women as men, the same rights in law, and family planning freedom. These efforts were never easy; they were met with mixed results. The issue normally related to notions of female rights includes the right to vote, the right to hold public office, the right to own property, the right to have a formal job, the right to serve in the military, religious and parental rights, and the right to enter a legal contract, and others. The feminists have also worked so hard to protect girls' and women's rights from sexual abuse, challenging the earlier perception that girls made men have sexual feelings for them even when the girls are still at a very young age.

Conclusion

Even though this was a wonderful comic, it is twisted in the sense that it is full of mistakes done by the male actors. The woman is only viewed as a prop and a tool for men to be comfortable in life. The women are more of objects as opposed to being independent figures. The linguistic processes materialize the wonder woman and the Amazonian women, sexualized by their female gender, yet the woman seems to be comfortable in her position as a woman who takes care of men, children, and the home ( Rogers, 2011 ). The women allow the men to explicitness and control topics in unexpected processes and in crude linguistic formulations. The normal begins to change when Wonder Woman comes home, a mysterious woman, carrying a soldier in her arms. Society is not structured this way. The men and women are surprised at his new act that later changes everything, giving the woman her voice, and to take control.

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