Feminist Stylistics by Sara Mills

Feminist Stylistics by Sara Mills
Dr. Asmat A. Sheikh

Feminist Stylistics
• 1. Theoretcal Component
 General Theoretical Issues (Chap 1,2,3)
2. Applicative Section
 Analysis
Theoretical Component
• Mills resorts to feminist literary critics, like
Toril Moi (1985) or Elaine Showalter (1978)
who have shown that “women’s texts have
often been excluded from canonical status, by
the process termed phallocentric criticism”
• The model of analysis proposed by feminist
stylistics takes two major aspects into account:
the production and the reception of the text.
• The former (production) is dependant upon
discourse constraints, socio-historical factors,
textual antecedents and literary conventions,
affiliations in point of gender, race, class, nation
and, last but not least, publishers and advertising.
• The latter (reception) is affected by the intended
vs. actual audience, implied vs. actual reader and,
again, socio-historical factors and publishing
practices.
Applicative Section (Analysis)
W
or
d
Le
velLevel
Phrase
Discourse Level
WORD LEVEL
• generic pronouns & nouns
• (nurse, secretary, librarian)
• male-oriented experience as the norm is
clearly sexist e.g Postman, Chairman, etc
• can be avoided by using a few choices of
• gender-free language”
• s/he convention/ passivisation or the use of
the feminine pronoun as generic. – the latter
being very difficult to implement and equally
sexist, in our opinion.
• semantis derogation in pair
• master/mistress
• lord/lady
• actor/actress
• bachelor/spinster
• (the second term in each pair may acquire negative
connotation)
• Mills’ findings can be enlarged upon at the level of
other languages as well.
PHRASE /SENTENCE LEVEL
• “Analysis at the Level of the Phrase
/Sentence” deals with ready-made phrases,
such as proverbs or famous quotations,
metaphors, following in the steps of Lakoff
and Johnson (1980), or jokes and humour. All
these are based, in her view, on ideology,
stereotypes, presuppositions and inference.
WHAT IS DISCOURSE

• In James Paul Gee’s article Literacy, Discourse, and Linguistic, (1990)
states “Discourses are ways of being in the world; they are forms of
life which integrate words, acts, values, beliefs, attitudes, and social
identities as well as gestures, glances body positions, and clothes.”
The “identity kit” Gee talks about is the Discourse of a particular role.
It’s a compilation of costume and instructions on how to talk, write,
and act, so their role is one that others will recognize. Basically the
identity kit is what you need to fulfill a certain role. It’s the clothes
you have to wear, the actions you take, and the way you speak in
order to be part of a Discourse. Some examples of Discourses Gee
gave include, being an American, a doctor, a teacher, a student, a
member of a club, or a regular at a local bar.
• One role I do not belong to is being a doctor. The identity kit
for this Discourse includes what you would need to wear, need
to do, and need to say. An identity kit for doctors could include
a lab coat or scrubs, the mask thing people wear around sick
people, a stethoscope, the thing used to measure blood
pressure, pens, and medical charts. It would also include
instructions for how to talk, write, and act. Doctor speak would
include medical terms, their actions could include anything
from prescribing prescriptions to performing surgery. Only the
people who complete medical school, complete their
residency training period, and have a license are allowed to be
a part of this group.
DISCOURSE LEVEL
• Stylistic analysis used to be less common at

the discourse level, as it was less concerned
with individual lexical patterns, but with
“larger structures and patterns which
determine[d] the occurrence of these lexical
patterns and [...] with the effect of these items
and larger structures on readers” .
• Sara Mills sets out to analyse the constructions of
characters in literary texts, but also in the media,
identifying stereotypical notions employed.
• Sara Mills makes another step in connecting
stylistics with narratology in the subchapter on
“Focalization”, in which she asserts that “the
focalization through the male’s experience
inevitably represents the female as the object of
the male gaze”
• The concept is not at all new, being coined as early as
1975 by Laura Mulvey, in her article, “Visual Pleasure
and Narrative Cinema”, and used widely in film and
media studies ever since; nonetheless, it is Mills’s
merit to introduce it into the field of linguistic
studies.
• Sara Mills’s Feminist Stylistics is a pioneering work in
the field and, despite its year of publication, can be
as useful today as it used to be in 1995.

Thank you

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Feminist Stylistics by Sara Mills

Dr. Asmat A. Sheikh

• Stylistic analysis used to be less common at

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