Gender Representation in Central Anatolian Culture: A Critical Discourse Analysis on Folk Tales

Abstract

This study aims to investigate how gender ideology is constructed in selected Anatolian Folk Tales: Helvacı Güzeli, Keçeli Kız, Erkek Kılığına Giren Kız, Kız Çocuklarını Sevmeyen İki Padişah and Yaşlı Adam ve Kızları. This study adopted Fairclough’s three dimensional model to make an analysis at textual, intertextual and social levels regarding these folk tales. At textual level, linguistic items such as nouns/noun phrases, adjectives, verbs, transitivity have been studied to see how gender ideology is encoded in explicit linguistic items. The second step attempted to understand how intertextuality helps to represent gender ideology through folkloric elements. Lastly, social analysis tries to probe into social context and how it affects or is affected by gender ideology. As for methodology, purposeful sampling method has been utilized to select the most relevant and information-rich data serving for the aim of this study. Purposeful sampling has been carried out under the scope of inter-rater reliability. Further, content analysis method has also been used to analyze folk tales under specific themes. Findings reveal that explicit linguistic manifestations hold implicit gender ideology representations in them, showing that males are of dominance over females. Further, inter-textual references unveil that gender ideology has many folkloric references in it contributing to how gender ideology is constructed through these references. Lastly, social context shows the dialectic nature of folk tales. In this way, findings are parallel with the existing literature in terms of gender ideology and each folk tale complements one another having consistent results.