Discourse Analysis of Female Identity Shaped by International Media through Systematic Functional Linguistics

Abstract

A correlation between media, gender identity and society is central in this information era. Gender and sexuality has seen a paradigm shift in recent decades, making female representation a subject of several cultural studies. International media contributed to shaping women’s identity and impacting social construction. The aim of this study was to analyse the role played by international media organisations like Netflix through the lens of Systematic Functional Linguistics (SFL). In order to offer an in-depth analysis of the female identity, the study opted for a qualitative research method using discourse analysis and a systematic literature review to achieve the research objectives. The findings of the study demonstrated that Netflix, as an international media organisation, has been using a biased representation of female characters where the major focus has been led on the overt masculinity of white female characters. The study used contextuality to study two recently released Netflix original series Sex Education and Ginny and Georgia. Further, to achieve the second objective of the study, semantics analysis was conducted to review the studies published by previous scholars. The findings of the study further demonstrated the stereotypical representation of the female protagonists portrayed by Netflix and other international media organisations. Additionally, the study offered a further analysis of Systematic Functional Linguistics to study the language used for shaping female identity on a global level.