COMMUNICATIVE STRATEGIES OF CREATING POSITIVE GROUP EVALUATION IN OPPRESSED SOCIAL GROUPS: THE CASE OF A FEMINIST ESSAY

Abstract. This study aims to investigate communicative strategies and tactics used in early intersectional feminist discourse in the USA in a situation of intergroup conflict related to gender and racial discrimination. The methods used by the researcher are linguistic description, context analysis, and pragmatic analysis. The paper looks into linguistic and sociological approaches to social categorization and the “Us — Them” dichotomy and describes the way this dichotomy is realized in the discourse of discriminated social groups, which often tend to attach positive evaluation to “them” (the more prestigious, dominant outgroup) and negative evaluation to “us” (the less prestigious, oppressed ingroup). Using G. Anzaldúa’s essay “Speaking in Tongues. A Letter to Third World Women Writers” (Anzaldúa G., 1981) as an example, this study identifies two main communicative strategies used in early intersectional feminist discourse: the strategy of delineating “us” and “them” and the strategy of reevaluation. It also identifies several communicative tactics implementing these strategies, describes the linguistic means used for each of the tactics, and analyzes their pragmatic potential. The study shows that the main communicative goal organizing the different strategies and tactics has to do with changing the way the discriminated group perceives and evaluates itself. Particular attention is given to the communicative tactic of access control, used by the author to address Spanish readers whose command of English is limited, while simultaneously trying to exclude readers who do not speak Spanish. This tactic includes two types of code switching: switching between different languages (English and Spanish) and between two genres (essay and personal letter, the essay being the predominant genre of the two). Another important tactic used by the author is rhetoric, which includes the use of various stylistic devices to influence the reader emotionally and aesthetically. The main stylistic devices identified in the essay include metaphors, allusions, rhetorical questions, and syntactic parallelism. It is demonstrated that intersectional feminist media may serve as a platform for oppressed groups to reaffirm their positive group identity and subvert negative social stereotypes.

Keywords: communicative strategies, communicative tactics, feminist discourse, discrimination, the “Us — Them” dichotomy