Fatima S. Alhalwachi, Birkbeck College, University of London, United Kingdom
Keywords
positioning, identity, gender, discourse, infertility
Abstract
Based within a social constructionist paradigm and anchored on constitutive studies of research on identity within sociolinguistics and communication studies, this research uses a context based, socially oriented small story narrative analysis approach, aiming at exploring the ‘how’ of identity construction in infertile women’s personal narratives. It looks into the social, cultural, religious and personal aspects that emerge from and contribute to the various discursive constructions and negotiations of ‘self’ lending from Bamberg’s dilemmatic spaces of personhood (2011). The methodology is based on positioning theory (Bamberg; Davis and Harré 1991) and extends upon notions of stance (Ochs 1996) and relationality and indexing (Bucholtz and Hall 2005). From a corpus of 411 posts by 10 bloggers, the study takes on a qualitative query in which it investigates the way linguistic and discursive features are utilised by infertile Muslim women in the construction of identity in relation to the wider social and cultural context in the narratives they write. A discourse analysis framework is implemented to look at elements of the text and identify claims and negotiations of identity at both a ‘micro’ lexico-grammatical level, as well as considering the impact of such choices at more ‘macro’ semantic and societal levels. Through exploring how infertile Muslim women construct and manage their sense of self and how they use narratives as spaces of identity creation, performance and negotiation, the study contributes to our knowledge in an under-researched area of sociolinguistics. It aids our understanding of the personal and cultural challenges that face infertile Muslim women as they construct a sense of self and perform their various identities in narrative.