Gender Issues in Raisin in the Sun: A Critical Discourse Analysis

Abstract

The research study entitled Gender Issues in Raisin in the Sun: A Critical Discourse Analysis was an attempt to critically analyze the discourses of the drama Raisin in the Sunto document gender issues in the discourses to showgender inequalities and discrimination. To fulfillthe objectives of this study,I collected 40 discourses using non-random judgmental sampling procedure. The tool for data collection was observation and checklist. Those selected discourses were critically analyzed separately under various parameters. Thestudy showed the existence of gender discrimination in the discourses. Forexample, the use of generic he and man diminishes the visible role of femalein the language which is found to be responsible forcreating discrimination and inequalities. Similarly, family names and titles, marked woman and unmarkedmen, gender roles and responsibilities, status, profession and even the paralinguistic mode of communication favoured man and showed the existenceof gender discrimination in the discourses. The whole thesis is divided into five chapters: Chapter one deals with thebackground of the study, statement of the problem, rational of the study,objectives of the study, significance, delimitations and operational definition of key terms. Second chapter deals with the review of the related literature and conceptual framework. Chapter three includes the vital elements of the research study, i.e. methodology which was adopted to conduct the whole study and described in detail. It contains the design of the study, sources of the data,sample size, tools for data collection, data collection procedure and of analysis and interpretation. The result is discussed in chapter four and in the last chapter the whole study is summarized and concluded along with the implications.