Critical Discourse Studies

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‘If you look at me like at a piece of meat, then

that’s a problem’ – women in the center of the
male gaze. Feminist Poststructuralist Discourse
Analysis as a tool of critique

Ewa Glapka

To cite this article: Ewa Glapka (2018) ‘If you look at me like at a piece of meat, then that’s a
problem’ – women in the center of the male gaze. Feminist Poststructuralist Discourse Analysis as
a tool of critique, Critical Discourse Studies, 15:1, 87-103, DOI: 10.1080/17405904.2017.1390480

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Published online: 16 Oct 2017.

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CRITICAL DISCOURSE STUDIES, 2018
VOL. 15, NO. 1, 87–103
https://doi.org/10.1080/17405904.2017.1390480

‘If you look at me like at a piece of meat, then that’s a problem’

– women in the center of the male gaze. Feminist
Poststructuralist Discourse Analysis as a tool of critique
Ewa Glapka
English Studies, University of the Free State, Bloemfontein, South Africa

ABSTRACT ARTICLE HISTORY

This article proposes a discursive approach to beauty, which it Received 27 March 2017
illustrates with a close data analysis of women’s relationship with Accepted 6 October 2017
the ‘male gaze’. In gender and feminist studies, the male gaze is
KEYWORDS
invoked with reference to the patriarchal surveillance of women’s Discursive psychology;
bodies. The article complements studies that approach the epistemic violence; Feminist
surveillance as a socio-cultural phenomenon by investigating it as Critical Discourse Analysis;
a discursive accomplishment of a social relation and identification. Feminist Poststructuralist
Taking a Feminist Poststructuralist Discourse Analysis approach to Discourse Analysis; male
the matter (and combining it with a discursive psychological gaze; woman’s body
perspective), this article focuses on the complexities and
ambiguities underwriting individuals’ personalized ways of dealing
with being looked at. Women’s positioning to the male gaze by
means of culturally available discourses is found to reveal
ambiguous sites of agency and submission within its scope.
Examining them, the article addresses the importance of
combining a feminist poststructuralist perspective on the relations
of gender with women’s lived understandings of being implicated
in them. (How) can lived and academic sensibilities be set side by
side in gender research? Is there a methodology of discourse
analysis that facilitates this?

Introduction
First theorized by Mulvey (1988), a feminist cinema theorist, the male gaze1 originally
denoted film production techniques that reproduce the voyeuristic and eroticized per-
spective of the assumed male heterosexual protagonist, which is internalized by the audi-
ence. Mulvey’s foundational work has sparked extensive feminist research on the
gendered logic of the relations of looking. Although sometimes criticized for its homogen-
izing view of the politics of female representation (Gledhill, 1988), it has been a point of
reference in the analyses of media reception (Wright, Arroyo, & Bae, 2015), advertising dis-
course (Adnan, 2015; Amy-Chinn, 2006), blogs (Merrill, Bryant, Dolan, & Chang, 2015)
beauty pageants and fashion shows (McAllister & Decarvalho, 2014). Importantly, largely
neglected in this otherwise thorough and interesting research tradition is what living

CONTACT Ewa Glapka ewaglapka_ev@wp.pl, ewaglapka@gmail.com

This article was originally published with errors. This version has been corrected. Please see Corrigendum (http://dx.doi.org/
10.1080/17405904.2017.1397348)
© 2017 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group
88 E. GLAPKA

(not solely critiquing) the male gaze renders. Although conducted from an academic fem-
inist perspective, this article is meant to address the paucity of such analyses. Another
novelty of the study is that instead of examining the male gaze as socio-culturally
embedded representations of gender, it investigates the gaze as a discursive accomplish-
ment of a social relation and identification by individuals. The article’s overarching goal is
to explore multiple and ambiguous ways in which participants engage with the gendered
relations of power.
Following Ponterotto (2016, p. 131), as a hegemonic discourse, the male gaze has pro-
duced and continues to reproduce ‘a univocal model for the female body’. Drawing on
Garland-Thomson’s (2002) feminist disability theory, Ponterotto finds the model embo-
died by a ‘normate’ – a white, abled-bodied, slim woman, personifying the ‘Californian
“body-beautiful” ideology’ (Braidotti, 1996). Although my analysis shares this view of the
role of the male gaze in the construction of female beauty, it addresses another aspect
of the relationship between the beauty and male heterosexual looking – sex appeal.
Given how often ‘sexy’ and ‘hot’ have nowadays been used interchangeably with ‘cute’
or ‘pretty’, the concurrence of appeal and beauty seems to be taken for granted. In this
analysis, this understanding is problematized.
Ponterotto (2016) observes that unlike feminists’ objections to, say, institutional patri-
archy which many women identify with, their critique of its aesthetic form has ‘not pro-
duced an equally forceful rejection of normatized corporeity’ (p. 141). Similarly, in their
discussion of the male gaze, Peterson, Grippo, and Tantleff-Dunn (2008, p. 640) observe
that although ‘feminism did promote intellectual understanding of cultural messages
and modify beliefs, women’s awareness did not translate into changed personal feelings
about beauty and their appearance’. Importantly, here, this dissonance between feminist
and popular understandings of the patriarchal relations of looking is approached as an
issue requiring research rather than as a concluding point. It is examined in a self-reflexive
feminist discursive analysis of the relationship with the male gaze established by young
South African women in their constructions of the body and beauty. By self-reflexivity
this article means a non-normative approach to the questions of critical awareness and
resistance in which the analyst’s and participants’ standpoints are isolated and compared.
With this in mind, the data are investigated by means of Feminist Poststructuralist Dis-
course Analysis (FPDA) (Baxter, 2002, 2003, 2010). Proposed as an alternative to Conversa-
tion Analysis, Discourse Analysis and Critical Discourse Analysis (Baxter, 2010), FPDA has
been applied less commonly than the other paradigms of discourse analysis (Cárdenas,
2012; Kamada, 2009, 2010). This article will thus illustrate the applicability of FPDA in criti-
cal discourse research; in particular, it will seek to underscore FPDA’s value in research on
power that is reflexive of the complex relationship between its own academic sensibility
and the lived sensibilities of its participants.
The relationship between patriarchy and women’s bodies has been frequently exam-
ined in South Africa. Here, women’s bodies have been implicated in a long history of
sexual violence that has been used as an instrument of gender domination across the
boundaries of class and race, albeit differently among racial and class groups (Moffett,
2006, p. 134). Following post-apartheid democratization and liberalization of South
African sexuality (Posel, 2004; Reddy, 2004), studies find South African women, on the
one hand, reasserting their sexual agency and rights (Bhana & Anderson, 2013), on the
other, committed to the ideas of ‘reputation’ and chastity (Bhana, 2016) and of men’s
 CRITICAL DISCOURSE STUDIES 89

sexual authority over women (Reddy & Dunne, 2007). Also interested in women’s personal
relationship with the local discourses of gender and sexuality, this article seeks to advance
a specific feminist discursive approach to women’s responses to patriarchy.

Analytical approach
Investigating how the male gaze insinuates itself into individuals’ experiences of the body
and self, I focus on the power implications of being the object of the gaze and the subject
of discourses reproducing the position. Apart from investigating how the relations of
power are imposed and contended in the gendered relations of looking, this study is
also interested in the power relations between its participants, i.e. young women in the
Global South, and the researcher from the Global North. Given their backgrounds, they
may represent unlike sensibilities. The study’s consideration here is that scholars, upon
finding participants’ relationship with patriarchy dissonant with their academic feminist
sensibility, often hastily identify the participants as lacking critical awareness and hence
in need of emancipatory projects (Avishai, Gerber, & Randles, 2013). Such an approach,
this article argues, is a form of ‘epistemic violence’ (Spivak, 1988) on the participants. It dis-
misses their local sensibilities as ‘subjugated knowledges’ which are ‘inadequate to their
task or insufficiently elaborated: naive knowledges … beneath the required level of cog-
nition’ (Foucault, 1980, p. 82). This study is aware of the hegemonic implications of the
relationship that is established between these ‘local, discontinuous, disqualified …
knowledges [and] the claims of a unitary body of theory’ (p. 83). Therefore, working
with data in which the researcher’s and interviewees’ standpoints are found to differ,
this study aims to approach the heterogeneity of the viewpoints without appraising
them (Lazar, 2007, p. 153).
FPDA was selected for the current study as a framework that facilitates such an
approach. Because FPDA parallels CDA in more than one way (Baxter, 2003, p. 45), it
shares with Feminist Critical Discourse Analysis (FCDA) (Lazar, 2005, 2007) more than
the feminist perspective. Yet, there are also vital disparities between the frameworks2 of
which one is the main reason why this study is informed by FPDA. Specifically, presenting
FCDA as aimed at ‘[creating] critical awareness and [developing] feminist strategies for
resistance and change’, Lazar (2007, p. 145) contrasts two positions of knowing – of a
woman and of a feminist. The former knows ‘from the perspective of the structure of
gender’, the latter ‘has a critical distance on gender and on oneself’ (p. 145). Although
not directly, the idea of ‘creating critical awareness’ for the apparently disempowered is
problematized by Baxter who distinguishes between CDA’s emancipatory agenda and
FPDA’s transformative quest. Advancing the latter as an inductive, non-normative approach
to gender resistance, Baxter finds CDA to presume that people lack power and/or aware-
ness thereof (2002, pp. 830–831; 2010, p. 131). Here, I do not state that any research prac-
tice is free from this presumption as long as it is conducted within the framework of FPDA,
neither do I claim that any (F)CDA study is perforce presumptive of anything.3 Any critical
feminist discourse research, using any analytical tools, can be informed by the presump-
tion or be free of it (Lazar, 2007, p. 152). Whether it will or not depends on the ways in
which the analyst occupies his or her position of knowing.
In what follows, I discuss the challenges that occupying the position may entail and
how FPDA helped me to tackle them. Originally, the extracts presented below struck
90 E. GLAPKA

me as distinctly complicit in the reproduction of the male gaze. However, as stated, wary of
inflicting epistemic violence on its participants, this study does not assume their incapabil-
ity of distancing themselves from patriarchal discourse. It follows an approach to power
advanced by Mahmood’s (2005) in her study of veiling by Muslim women in Egypt. In
the study, Mahmood (2005, p. 22) challenges liberal feminists’ view of hijab as oppressive
by observing that ‘[n]orms are not only consolidated and/or subverted … but performed,
inhabited, and experienced in a variety of ways’. Strongly resonating with Mahmood’s per-
spective, FPDA will allow me to avoid deploring participants’ apparent readiness to install
their bodies in the regime of a hegemonic discourse, and to instead examine how they
negotiate power within its purview. Following FPDA, ‘speakers are able to take up, accom-
modate or resist relatively powerful or powerless subject positions made available within
competing discourses at work’ (Baxter, 2003, p. 49). FPDA’s empirical value in that regard is
that it allows ‘[pinpointing] the moment (or series of moments) when speakers negotiate
their shifting subject positions’ (Baxter, 2003, p. 49). As such, this framework will enable me
to avoid the grand (hegemonic, objectifying and empirically unproductive) gesture of
‘speaking on behalf’ and to instead present participants’ equivocal and dynamic relation-
ship with patriarchal discourse.
Consequently, below I do not ‘create critical awareness and develop feminist strategies’
(Lazar, 2007, p. 145) to the male gaze, which feminist analysts of the gaze tend to do (e.g. Pon-
terotto, 2016, pp. 141–148). Instead, I interrogate how individuals position themselves to it
outside academically informed discourses.4 The notions which this study finds particularly rel-
evant for investigating the multiplicity and fluidity of the perspectives are ‘polyphony’ and
‘heteroglossia’ (Bakhtin, 1981). In FPDA, the former is pursued to ‘[provide] space in an analysis
for the co-existence and juxtaposition of a plurality of voices and accounts that do not necess-
arily fuse into a single authorial account’ (Baxter, 2003, p. 67). Exploring polyphony in terms of
its underlying heteroglossia, FPDA makes ‘visible the non-official viewpoint, the marginalised,
the silenced and the oppressed from other, more dominant viewpoints’ (Baxter, 2003, p. 69).
Clearly, such lens resonates with the study’s interest in women’s lived stances which do not
align with the established academic feminist critique of the male gaze.
Moreover, I propound that polyphony and heteroglossia can be made analytically more
manageable if examined by means of another poststructuralist framework, namely, the ‘syn-
thetic’ (or ‘critical’) strand of discursive psychology (DP) (Edley, 2001; Wetherell, 1998). Both
FPDA and DP imply approaching the male gaze as an intersubjective accomplishment in
the pre-established but contextually contingent discursive conditions (West & Fenstermaker,
1995, 2002). In line with DP, the study investigates individuals’ relationship with the male gaze
as accomplished by taking ‘subject positions’, i.e. assuming the vantage points of speaking and
seeing (Davies & Harré, 1990), and by using ‘interpretative repertoires’, i.e. routine ‘arguments,
descriptions, and evaluations distinguished by familiar clichés, common places, tropes and
characterisations’ (Edley & Wetherell, 2001, p. 443). Following Edley (2001, p. 202), ‘interpret-
ative repertoires’, like discourses, imply ‘repositories of meaning’ and are ‘tied to the concepts
of ideology’ (p. 202). However, repertoires are ‘much smaller and more fragmented, offering
speakers a whole range of different rhetorical opportunities’. Another discursive psychological
unit, ‘identity trouble’, will enable a closer analysis of the challenges that positioning oneself as
the object of the male gaze entails. Troubled identities occur in talk when subject positions are
difficult to reconcile within an account (Taylor, 2005) or when they express a ‘negatively
valued’ identity (Wetherell, 1998, p. 398). Finally, ‘ideological dilemmas’ (Billig et al., 1988)
 CRITICAL DISCOURSE STUDIES 91

are related with the study’s interest in ‘lived ideologies’ (Billig et al., 1988, p. 27). Unlike formal-
ized, coherent ‘intelellectual ideologies’, these locally available patterns of commonsensical
thinking are contradictory and ambivalent (Edley, 2001, p. 203). In DP, ‘rather than as a kind
of nuisance’ (Edwards, 2003, p. 33; Glapka, 2017, p. 43), the inconsistencies, frictions and ambi-
guities surfacing talk are seen as valuable pointers in analysis. Here, the troubles and dilemmas
are vital for the study’s non-normative approach to critical awareness, i.e. its pursuit of the
polyphonic and heteroglossic complexity of women’s relationship with the male gaze.

The study
The data presented below come from a larger qualitative study of the subjective under-
standings of the body and beauty among women in South Africa, which was conducted
in a series of individual and group semi-structured interviews among 50 university students.
The women were recruited through a purposive, snowball sampling among students of the
same university to allow an easy and continuous contact. Due to the country’s socio-cultural
heterogeneity, the sample consisted of individuals who identified themselves as black
African (13), colored (15), Indian (16) and white (11). All interviewees identified themselves
as middle-class and able-bodied, and except for one lesbian and two bisexual interviewees,
as heterosexual. Conducted after each of them signed an informed consent form, the inter-
views lasted approximately 1.5 h. The questions they featured were intended to prompt par-
ticipants’ verbalizations of their bodily experiences, of their subjective perception of the
female body and of their understanding of the role of beauty in their life.
The interviews were tape-recorded and transcribed verbatim. All transcripts were exam-
ined on the denotative and connotative levels (Baxter, 2003, pp. 75–77). The denotative
analysis consisted in a close and detailed description of the verbal and nonverbal features
of interview data. These were next subject to ‘a theoretically driven interpretation’ (Baxter,
2003, p. 75), i.e. the connotative analysis in which positions of power and discourses were
identified. As a self-reflexive researcher, I am aware that the study data were co-con-
structed by me, an interviewer who elicited specific accounts and reinforced the relevance
of certain topics throughout the conversations. I am also aware of my role in co-construct-
ing the data in the process of data selection and analysis, in which specific aspects were
isolated as meaningful units, categorized in a specific (discursive psychological) manner
and interpreted from a feminist poststructuralist standpoint. All interviews were analyzed
with the following questions in mind:

(1) What discourses inform participants’ constructions of the body and beauty?
(2) How do the participants use them to position themselves in their social realities?

Clearly, with its focus on the gendered relations of looking, this article addresses only a
small part of the complex matter of the discursive implications of beauty. In the analysis
below, I look specifically on the relationship with patriarchy that the interviewees con-
structed when talking about their bodies. The purpose of the article is to present a self-
reflexive engagement with the differences between the interviewees’ stances on the
male gaze and my own feminist standpoint.
Conceived of as a discussion of a specific aspect of discourse research, rather than of
empirical findings on the patriarchal control of women’s bodies, the article is based on
92 E. GLAPKA

a relatively small sample of data and does not exhaust the complexity of the problem. For
example, while it is an important aspect of South African sexuality, within the limits of the
current discussion I was not able to tackle the intersections of sexuality, gender, race and
class (Reddy, 2004; Steyn & Van Zyl, 2009). The extracts below were selected for the current
discussion solely on the basis of the ambiguous relationship with the male gaze which
they illustrate. The data come from interviews with Mileka (a 21 year-old medicine
student), Tisi (a 22 year-old business student) and Kamo (a 22 year-old business
student), all of whom identified themselves as black African.

Mileka
My note opening Extract 1 relates to Mileka’s earlier assertion that she does not like
wearing a bikini for how it exposes her cleavage:
Extract 1

Researcher: Some people actually like showing their cleavage, you know=
Mileka: =I show legs. Yes. I don’t really have big boobs so I don’t show much of a cleavage
((chuckles)).
Researcher: Mm.

Because Extract 1 is part of a longer exchange in which I asked Mileka about her style, the
repertoire of gaze (i.e. constructions of the body as looked at and presented to others) was
made relevant by me. Nevertheless, asking ‘What’s your style like?’ does not necessarily
imply specifically the male gaze, which Mileka invokes in the extract. After all, constructing
exposing one’s cleavage as causally linked with having ‘big boobs’, Mileka refers to the
male heterosexual notion of female beauty. The no-nonsense way of Mileka’s account con-
structs the ideas as generally accepted.
The role of the male gaze in Mileka’s understanding of beauty is also evident below:
Extract 2

Researcher: Do you like being complimented on your look?

Mileka: It feels nice, sometimes it’s too much. Cause … like …
Researcher: Too much?
Mileka: Like I don’t mind but it depends on … like … if people compliment me, that’s alright
ne. But I don’t like that with strangers or … people on the street who look at me and be like,
like, sometimes, okay, I’m dressed good and I know, okay, cause people usually say that I am a
beautiful girl né,5 but I don’t like it when it attracts inappropriate attention. You understand.
Researcher: What is inappro[priate]?
Mileka: [For] example, I was walking in the street and this man tapped my fingers just to say
‘Hi’. And, it startled me a bit. I felt a bit uncomfortable with that. Or when someone tries to [xxx]
and then they make these nasty noises, whistle whatever, I don’t like attracting inappropriate
attention. Like, I don’t mind people complimenting me, ‘you look nice’, or even … yeah, but as
soon as it starts getting too much, or if the person starts complimenting me too many times, I
don’t like that.

In this extract, which is part of the same exchange concerning Mileka’s style, the repertoire
of gaze is reasserted in my question about Mileka’s feelings about having her look
appraised. Again, although it does not need to, here the repertoire also occasions the pos-
ition of the object of the male gaze. Initially, Mileka’s constructions of arousing attraction
 CRITICAL DISCOURSE STUDIES 93

do not indicate specifically male heterosexual looking, but her later account leaves no
doubt that it is men’s reactions which she constructs as ‘inappropriate attention’ from
strangers. Talking about her experience of being the object of the attention, Mileka
reinforces the disempowering implications of the position by hedging her agitation (‘a
bit’) and by eventually bracketing from the account her actual reaction to the man’s
behavior. Moreover, rather than disavow attention from strangers, Mileka constructs it
as a welcome validation of her physical attractiveness (‘It feels nice’, ‘I don’t mind’).
However, she repeatedly positions herself to the gaze through the disclaimer ‘but’ (‘but
I don’t like it when’, ‘I don’t mind but it depends on’, ‘but as soon as it starts getting
too much’). Being the object of the male gaze is thus a troubled identity in that it involves
two conflicting positions – the position of holding power over the gazer (by winning his
approving attention) and the disempowering position of losing control over the man’s
actions. Mileka ‘repairs’ this trouble (Wetherell, 1998) by disqualifying the latter position,
i.e. stating what she construes as the legitimate forms of acknowledging her appearance.
Consequently, while Mileka positions herself as the object of the male gaze, she also
asserts her right to negotiate the conditions of the relationship. The ‘what’ of Mileka’s
claim is reinforced by its ‘how’ – produced with a falling intonation, Mileka’s back-channel-
ing (‘né’, ‘You understand’) indexes her distinction between acceptable and unacceptable
expressions of appeal as commonsensical and shared.

Tisi
A line between appropriate and inappropriate forms of acknowledgement was also nego-
tiated by Tisi after I asked her what she means by saying that she looks ‘presentable’ when
she sings in a church choir:
Extract 3
Tisi: For me it’s like proper, covered up? No mini?
Researcher: Mm.
Tisi: And no cleavage?
Researcher: Yeah …
Tisi: I don’t feel like wearing something short at church [esp]ecially with guys around.
[Mm.]
Researcher: Why?
Tisi: Because they’re gonna be looking at you.
Researcher: And you don’t like guys looking at you?
Tisi: I don’t mind them looking at me but it’s about how you look at me. If you look at me
like at a piece of meat, then that’s a problem.
Researcher: With no respect?
Tisi: Yes.
Researcher: So how do you make sure that you get that respect?
Tisi: I just make sure that I don’t reveal too much of my body.
Researcher: Mm.
Tisi: But I still look presentable. Like, I will wear a pencil skirt that has shape, so it will defi-
nitely show my curves and what not. But it’s not short.

Like in Extract 1, the repertoire of gaze is invoked by me (probing what Tisi means by
‘looking presentable’), and it is also readily associated by the interviewee with men’s
looks. Also similarly to Mileka, Tisi positions herself as the object of gaze by means of
the disclaimer ‘but’ (‘I don’t mind them looking at me but it’s about how you look’).
94 E. GLAPKA

This is hence another case in which accepting this position leads to identity trouble. As a
‘face-saving device’ used to deflect potential critique (van den Berg, 2003, p. 125), ‘but’
could have been used by the interviewees to qualify the statements that might generate
implications of vanity and/or submissiveness to the male gaze. Both in Extract 2 and 3,
‘but’ seems to serve solely the latter purpose – it allows the women to simultaneously
accept the position of the object of gaze and negotiate their ways of inhabiting it.
Hence, the two extracts illustrate an ideological dilemma of individuals who affiliate
themselves with patriarchal discourse but ambivalently and not unconditionally. After
all, like Mileka, Tisi does not disavow the idea of being looked at by men, albeit she
expresses her disapproval of some forms of it. Reinforcing her statement rhetorically
by means of a metaphor, Tisi says: ‘If you look at me like at a piece of meat, then
that’s a problem’. Here, I posit, the metaphor of meat works similarly to how Adams
(2010) finds it to eradicate animals from descriptions of meat consumption. Through
the metaphor, Adams (2010, p. 66) notes, animals become the ‘absent referents’ of
the violence that is inflicted on them. Similarly, comparing herself to meat, Tisi constructs
the male gaze as a form of aesthetic consumption of which she is an ‘absent referent’ –
consumption in which her subjecthood is annihilated as she is reduced to a passive,
anonymous and voiceless body. Clearly disempowering, the position of solely the
object of looking is abandoned as Tisi moves into the position of confrontation, i.e.
switches to the second person pronoun and calls a specific way of showing one’s
appeal as ‘a problem’. Yet, this form of empowerment is next contended when she pos-
itions herself within what Skeggs (1999) calls ‘discourse of respectability’, according to
which women are responsible for securing themselves from male heterosexual violence
(see also Stanko, 1997).6
Crucially, in this article, what Skeggs calls ‘discourse’ is construed as a ‘repertoire’ rooted
in patriarchal discourse.7 As such, depending on how it is orientated to, ‘respectability’ may
or (crucially for the point I am trying to make in the article) may not imply one’s submission
to patriarchy. For example, although following my question about demanding respect, Tisi
could have continued the line of empowering positioning, she accounts for her look
saying ‘I make sure that I don’t reveal too much’. Likewise, in the clauses ‘But I still look
presentable’ and ‘But it’s not short’, the disclaimer ‘but’ implies identity trouble related
with the position of being looked at in the conditions of patriarchy, in which a woman
is expected to arouse men’s appeal, but in morally allowable ways. Talking about her
pencil skirt that is tight but not short, Tisi takes both positions of accountability – the aes-
thetic and the moral accountability to the male gaze. However, the latter form of account-
ability was rejected by another participant, although, as the extract below demonstrates,
she also invoked the repertoire of respectability.

Kamo
Below Kamo explains relationship between her sartorial choices and her traumatic experi-
ence of rape:
Extract 4

Kamo: In our country, with rape, it always happens that they say that women provoke men. By
wearing short things and all those things, >you know<. So, especially in the rural areas, women
 CRITICAL DISCOURSE STUDIES 95

have to go to extremes trying to cover up. So, it was winter in December in Vienna. It is always
winter in Europe for me. ((chuckles)) And, I was wearing jeans, I was wearing sneakers, and I
was wearing a jersey. And it was just after a concert. So, none of us looking for anything but to
have a good time. Cause it’s about time to go back home to celebrate Christmas. And so, <I
couldn’t understand how … they could do something like this to me>and I had not even pro-
voked the men at all. And I don’t even, you know, like, according to why people get raped in
our country, it’s cause of the way they dress, how they carry themselves, or how they maybe
interact with guys so they get wrong ideas. It’s, according to me, I don’t do any of that. So, after
that, >I’m just saying like< I don’t have a big ass. Okay, maybe I do have bigger boobs, and,
what not, I didn’t have long silky hair, I didn’t have a weave, no- nothing. You know, I see like I
didn’t meet any of the requirements. Of what, you know, of what people that is happens to. So
then it happened to so I was just like …
Researcher: Is that what you thought? That it happened because of how you looked?
Kamo: Yeah, initially I thought that my body was … basically, enticing. Very. So for, up until I
think March. I covered it up a lot ((chuckles)). Because I didn’t want to attract any further atten-
tion. But then I realized that it doesn’t really help. That’s what I meant about the girls cause I
realized that, ((sighs)) when a guy is attracted you, he is attracted to you anyway ((resigned)). It
doesn’t matter.
Researcher: [But]
Kamo: [But] at that time I thought it happened to me because of what I [have].

Twice in the extract, Kamo talks about ‘provoking’ men. Related with the repertoire of
respectability, the notion of provoking is also part of patriarchal discourse. Discussing per-
vasive sexual violence against women in South Africa, Moffett (2006) finds rape a way of
keeping women ‘in [their] place’ (p. 137). Because their agency jeopardizes ‘the uncertain
status quo’ (p. 137), they are not only denied it but also ‘actively punished’ for asserting it
(for example, when they choose to look ‘disrespectfully’) (p. 138). Therefore, if rape is a
form of disciplining and punishing, the actions that ‘demand’ it are reprehensible –
hence, in discourse, the repertoire of provoking, as it were, automatically implies the pos-
ition of woman’s moral accountability.
The constructions in which Kamo relates to the repertoire of provoking are double-
voiced, in that she orientates not only to what she refers to but also to somebody else’s
speech (Baxter, 2014, p. 4). Namely, invoking the idea that rape is the effect of a
woman’s provocative appearance, Kamo distances herself from the opinion framing it
as the voice of her community (‘In our country […] they say’). However, at another
point, although she reconstructs events which took place outside South Africa, Kamo pos-
itions herself as accountable to the local politics of respectability (‘according to me, I don’t
do any of that’). Though ‘according to me’ might well have opened an expression of dis-
agreement with the politics, it qualifies Kamo’s position as one of a person providing her
version of what happened. Together with hedging devices (‘I see like I’, ‘maybe’) and
defensive tone of speech (the emphatic ‘no- nothing’, the concessional ‘Okay, maybe’),
the qualifier marks Kamo’s dialogic engagement with a contending position from which
her experience can be regarded as incriminating her. Kamo defers to patriarchal surveil-
lance by elaborating on how she ‘had not even provoked the men’. She enumerates
the bodily features that other black African interviewees constructed as preferred by het-
erosexual men – big buttocks and bust as well as silky hair.8 Constructing them as ‘require-
ments’ of, presumably, being regarded as appealing, and emphasizing she did not expose
any of them, Kamo accounts for her appearance at the time when she was raped. At this
point, Kamo’s deployment of the repertoire of provoking leads her to the position of moral
96 E. GLAPKA

accountability and thus produces a relation of power between Kamo and patriarchal
society.
Yet, Kamo’s dialogic involvement with the repertoire of respectability is dynamic –
through time adverbials (‘initially’, ‘at that time’, ‘but then’), she constructs the process
of distancing herself from the patriarchal logic. Kamo says she initially lived the trauma
of rape through the sense of blame. For three months she continued to cover herself
up to avoid attracting ‘any further attention’. That Kamo tried to avoid specifically male
heterosexual appeal becomes evident when she explains the reason why she abandoned
her attempts – they were defeated by men’s persistent appeal to her body (‘he is attracted
to you anyway ((resigned)). It ((how you present yourself)) doesn’t matter’). Although this
sounds defeatist, Kamo constructs her experience as falsifying the politics of respectability.
Consequently, eventually shifting causality from herself upon men, Kamo leaves the pos-
ition of moral accountability.
Moreover, despite the ambivalence in Extract 4, elsewhere in the interview, Kamo, com-
municated her fondness of celebrating her physical beauty:
Extract 5

Researcher: How do you look on a date then?

Kamo: If I go on a date … I don’t know. I probably want to look nice. Most probably I am cover-
ing up. ((chuckles)) A lot.
Researcher: What do you cover?
Kamo: Oh. Generally I cover this area around here ((shows breasts)). Cause all my life people
have been talking this is very nice. So, I cover it up.
Researcher: Mm.
Kamo: I mean, ((sighs)) I don’t know, I understand it’s disturbing but=
Researcher: =And now? You don’t seem to cover up, >or do you<?
Kamo: I know! But I like them looking good too! I just don’t want you to have a problem with
them! You know.

Unlike in Extracts 1 and 3, here the position of the object of specifically the male gaze is
invoked by me (asking how Kamo looks on a date). Kamo negotiates an ambivalent
relationship with the position. The ambivalence concerns the relation between ‘looking
nice’ and ‘covering up’. Initially, Kamo constructs her attractive bust as something she
does not want to expose. When I express my uncertainty about what she means by cover-
ing up, Kamo takes up the position of accountability. Her statement ‘But I like them looking
good too!’ is ambiguous – ‘too’ may mean that although Kamo tends to ‘cover it up’, she
sometimes likes to expose her bust to make it look ‘good’, which communicates an idea
implicated in Extracts 1 and 3, namely, that beauty and visibility are concomitant. Alterna-
tively, ‘too’ may imply that Kamo sees exposing her bust as common among others and
claims her right to do it as well.
Kamo’s positioning to the male gaze is dilemmatic – her bust needs to be covered
because its beauty is disturbing to others, but she also wants to expose the bust for its
beauty to be actualized. Kamo’s dilemma over showing her cleavage reveals the two
forms of accountability accompanying beauty – one has to be attractive and visible, but
not too much. The latter accountability is, however, contended by Kamo’s subsequent
positioning when she asserts that she wants to expose her cleavage without the conse-
quences she has been used to. Namely, similarly to Extracts 2 and 3, the position of the
object of the male gaze is discursively inhabited through the disclaimer ‘but’. Unlike Tisi
 CRITICAL DISCOURSE STUDIES 97

and Mileka, who deployed the rhetorical device when they were already in the position
(and who used it to specify their preferred ways of inhabiting the position), Kamo uses
the disclaimer to enter the position after she has opted out of it (stating that she covers
her bust up because of its beauty). Added to her exclamation ‘But I like them looking
good too!’ is another exclamatory claim, ‘I just don’t want you to have a problem with
them!’. Contextually, this may mean Kamo’s demand that the body’s aesthetic qualities
be divorced from its sexual appeal (she does not want her bust to be ‘disturbing’). Conse-
quently, Tisi does not revoke the repertoire of gaze, neither the aesthetic accountability it
implies, but she rejects the position of moral accountability.
Overall, while to my feminist understanding, the sense of accountability for looking
pretty to men is a position of internalized submission, the participants articulated their aes-
thetic accountability without problematizing it. What they found problematic (and what
was categorized in the analysis as ‘identity trouble’) was the relationship between being
aesthetically appraised and arousing sexual appeal. Based on that, in what follows, I do
not advance a feminist project that would ‘rectify’ the women’s sense of accountability
which, in my view, makes them vulnerable to abuse. Discussing the participants’ articula-
tions of their awareness of the male gaze, I argue in favor of research on how resistance is
and can be done, rather than on how it should be done.

Transformative quest – ‘painting a subtle and complex picture’

Due to the study’s focus on the body and beauty, the data it rendered feature multiple
constructions of ‘gaze’. While this discussion shows only part of a more complex
picture, it illustrates how strongly being looked at was found to imply the male gazer.
The constructions of the validating role of men’s attraction and women’s responsibility
to arouse the proper kind of attraction imply the body’s vulnerable location in the patri-
archal reality in which appeal and harassment are directly proximate. Therefore, although
it is not my intention to generalize from such a small sample of data, these ways of posi-
tioning resonate with the studies that find South African women vulnerable to violence for
which they are often incriminated.
Positioning themselves as enacting their choice to be heterosexually attractive, the par-
ticipants, it might be argued, speak through the discourse of ‘(hetero)sex-positive postfe-
minism’ (Projansky, 2001, p. 67), in which women celebrate their ‘play with the
heterosexual male gaze – their invitation of the gaze and their own fascination with
and attention to the object of that gaze (their own bodies)’(p. 79). This way of positioning
women is one of the accounts on which postfeminism has been critiqued by many fem-
inist scholars (Elias, Gill, & Scharff, 2017). What, then, does this (critical, feminist) study
mean by considering the positioning as empowering in its own ways, and approaching
it in terms of ‘inhabiting’ the position of the object of the male gaze (rather than submit-
ting to the gaze)? Wary of ‘assuming sameness’ (Lazar, 2007, p. 153), I do not approach
participants’ accounts solely from the position of an academic feminist researcher,
which would make the analysis no more than a critique of patriarchal discourse. Stepping
outside the position, I suspend the critique and ask how patriarchy works in the contexts
that I enter as a researcher but do not live as a woman.
This ‘outside’ position is not irreproachable. It could be argued that when I try to under-
stand whether/how submission to patriarchal discourse can lead to something else than
98 E. GLAPKA

oppression, at the very time of doing this, I entwine myself in the position of complicity
with patriarchy. Moreover, presenting the participants’ ambiguous constructions as self-
empowering, I relativize power, similarly to how Lazar (2007, p. 160) finds postfeminism
to ‘[muddy] the questions of power’. However, here I do not mean to trivialize the patri-
archal relations in the context of which the problematic positions are taken. Rather than
‘muddy’ the relations, I point out their muddiness – the women are not uncritical of the
patriarchal relations of looking but they deploy repertoires reproducing them. Importantly,
presenting an alternative (in my understanding, ‘unambiguously emancipatory’) position
at this point would be, I posit, nothing but the ‘other-driven, totalizing [mission]’
(Baxter, 2002, p. 831) of liberating and enlightening. Rather than emancipate top-down,
i.e. propose how change should be done, here I examine how change is and can be done.
This non-normative approach to resistance has been guided by FPDA’s conceptualiz-
ation of polyphony and heteroglossia. The polyphonic qualities of the participants’
accounts are visible in their deployments of a locally available discourse and in the dialogic
links that they established with the discourse. Namely, some discursively pre-established
ideas (e.g. aesthetic accountability to men) were articulated commonsensically, on the
level of presuppositions and implicatures. Others (e.g. women’s moral accountability)
were related to dialogically when the participants first indicated the existence of an
idea and next problematized it, hence rendering visible the heteroglossic relations
between multiple voices (the underlying social conflict (Baxter, 2014, p. 37)). Consequently,
while the interviewees remained within the precincts of patriarchy (reproduced the male
gaze), their troubled and dilemmatic positionings show the women’s awareness of navi-
gating an inherently oppressive discourse. ‘Repairing’ the positions, the participants
resisted the oppression in their own ways. This, I posit, demonstrates the applicability of
DP in FPDA research on how heteroglossia ‘[challenges] any simple dualism between
dominant discourses representing the voices of oppressors, and oppositional discourses
constituting the voices of the oppressed’ (Baxter, 2003, p. 70).
Therefore, applied in the study of women’s responses to the male gaze, DP’s and
FPDA’s analytical units allowed me to falsify the reductive conception of oppression
and they made the nuances of power easier to access and more transparent. The analy-
sis found that the repertoire of the male gaze does not predetermine any specific
relation of power. After all, deployments of the repertoire involved variable positions
within patriarchal discourse. Constructing the male gaze as acceptable unless overly
sexualizing, the participants positioned themselves simultaneously as its objects and
as arbiters of the objectifying relationship. Also related with the male gaze, the position
of moral accountability was deployed differently from that of aesthetic accountability.
While the latter was invoked by all three participants on their own, and maintained
throughout interactions, the position of moral accountability was articulated variably
– one of the interviewees did not invoke it at all, another used it uncritically, still
another revoked it.
Perhaps not spectacular, such constructions are construed here as individuals’ lived con-
testations of patriarchy (their own ways of ‘inhabiting’ patriarchal norms). As explained, in DP
and FPDA variabilities and ambivalences are not an unwelcome ‘nuisance’ troubling the
otherwise coherent findings but an important finding in itself. They reveal the regulatory
and restrictive qualities of discourse and may indicate its ‘subtle or more direct revisions’
(Baxter, 2003, p. 74) – new scopes of freedom negotiated by individuals, with or without
 CRITICAL DISCOURSE STUDIES 99

their explicit intentions of critique and emancipation. Accordingly, examining women’s vari-
able positionings, in the article, I sought to ‘paint a more subtle and complex picture of the
differences within and between girls/women in terms of the ways in which they variously
negotiate their positions within competing discourses’ (Baxter, 2003, p. 74). Such a
picture, Baxter claims, is capable of ‘[capturing] individual moments of resistance and
empowerment in the spoken interactions of girls/women who might otherwise be consti-
tuted as victims’. In such instances, Baxter suggests, ‘change occurs: in the form of chal-
lenges, contestations, power reversals, perhaps subtle or more direct revisions of the
status quo’ (p. 74). In the remaining discussion, I argue that polyphony and heteroglossia
have the potential to transform not only the local contexts of power but also the feminist
research that is engaged with the contexts.

Coda
The vantage point of the analysis was my observation that the male gaze has been inves-
tigated at the cost of individuals’ personalized ways of dealing with it. Therefore, instead of
thinking of women as solely exposed to men’s looks, I approached them as engaged in the
gendered relations of looking. Following interviews with fifty participants of different cul-
tural backgrounds, I do not see it as a far-fetched metaphor to consider their minds and
bodies colonized by the male gaze – symbolically, affectively and physically. I am
however wary of essentializing their position in its purview as one of submission. There-
fore, whilst I could have devoted the article to the constructions that show the invasive-
ness and insidiousness of the gaze, I examined moments in which individuals’
engagements with it obfuscate the power relations that underlie the aesthetic surveillance
of women’s bodies.
The analysis was reflexive of the disparities between the participants’ and my, the
researcher’s, standpoints on patriarchy. Such incongruities are not unknown to feminist
scholars. For example, as has been noted earlier in the discussion, Peterson et al. (2008,
p. 640) explain the persistent power of the male gaze by noting a gap between feminist
‘awareness’ and ‘intellectual understanding of cultural messages’ on the one hand, and, on
the other, individuals’ ‘personal feelings about beauty and their appearance’. Nevertheless,
such a distinction is, I posit, a form of epistemic violence. Pitting awareness and under-
standing against feelings creates positions of knowing and not-knowing, and thus
denies the ‘non-feminist’ (and non-academic) subjects the status of epistemic agents.
Moreover, the article argues, such a division implies ‘a will to power’ (Baxter, 2010,
p. 131) – positioning individuals as unaware of and hence vulnerable to power creates
a relation of power between them and those who, crudely, know how power works. Con-
sequently, it positions women as powerless within two discourses – of patriarchy and of
critical, academic feminism.
This study belied the reductive notion of power showing that ‘females are not helpless
victims of patriarchal oppression, but that gender identities are complex, shifting and mul-
tiply located, continuously fluctuating between subject positions of powerfulness and
powerlessness’ (Baxter, 2010, p. 131). Crucially, while it is FPDA’s asset that it allows
showing the dynamics, it should not lead analysts to underestimate the implications of
the power which the framework finds continuously challenged and relativized. In the dis-
cussion, I demonstrated that as it is defied, power persists to regulate individuals’
100 E. GLAPKA

subjectivities and actions, imprints on their bodies and it does so reinforcing the inequal-
ities which are being contended by the individuals.
My application of Mahmood’s logic of ‘inhabiting norms’, which disavows the binary of
submission and resistance, is not a coincidence in the discussion – even though our
studies concern different contexts of visibility (veiling and exposing the body in the
Muslim and Western culture respectively). Mahmood’s conceptualization is her response
to Western feminists’ debates on whether veiling contravenes women’s self-empower-
ment. The equivocal stance of the Occident on veiling is akin to my perception of the par-
ticipants’ constructions of the male gaze as dilemmatic. Drawing from Mahmood, I sought
to accommodate their and my unlike stances by avoiding a polarizing and essentializing
understanding of resistance and submission. The idea of ‘inhabiting norms’ which this
approach implies was analytically pursued in terms of polyphony and heteroglossia. The
concepts were instrumental in providing an account which neither romanticizes
women’s agency within the patriarchal relations of looking nor construes them as power-
less solely because they resist patriarchy differently from academic feminist critics. This, I
suggest, demonstrates the relevance of FPDA in research conducted in the conditions of
globalization, migration and transnationalism. In fact, as a framework that allows examin-
ing issues of gender without ‘epistemic violence’ on the ‘Other’, FPDA is recommendable
not only in transfeminist research, but in all critical feminist discourse research interested
in composite identities and contested understandings of patriarchy, agency etc. Indeed, in
comparison to research pursuing a ‘radical social change’ (Lazar, 2007, p. 160), this may
seem little. However, in that case, with its programmatic skepticism of grand, enlighten-
ing gestures and with its interest in a non-hierarchical approach to differences, FPDA
can work as a tool of self-reflexive critique and of self-reflexive transition from critique
to praxis.
For example, by strictly adhering to my own feminist stance on the male gaze, I would
have considered the interviewees as vulnerable to patriarchy. Focusing on the oppressive
implications of their sense of accountability, I would have ignored the women’s personalized
contestations of power. The ‘blinding effect of feminism’ (Avishai et al., 2013), and its hege-
monic implications, were avoided thanks to FPDA’s understanding that ‘contained’ between
dominant discourses (Baxter, 2003, p. 39), individuals are capable of positioning themselves
as powerful (p. 39) and these moments of powerfulness mark ‘opportunities for transform-
ation’ (p. 39). Apart from showing how transformation happens (or may happen) in the con-
texts of study, such findings, I suggest, have a transformative potential for feminist projects.
They encourage researchers to revisit their habitual assumptions vis-à-vis participants’ local
sensibilities and personal exigencies. Capable of identifying locally specific responses to
patriarchy, analysts are better positioned to avoid reifying the powerlessness of the partici-
pants whose lived ideologies differ from their (the analysts’) agendas. This, clearly, demands
a nuanced understanding of the discursive processes from which the multiple sensibilities
emerge. Such understanding, I posit, can be arrived at through FPDA.

Transcription notes
. stopping fall in tone
>talk< a stretch of talk which is faster
… longer silence
 CRITICAL DISCOURSE STUDIES 101

[xxx] inaudible
? rising intonation
Mm yes, go on
[…] material omitted by the author
(( )) transcriber’s comments, not transcription
[talk] overlapping utterances
word underline indicates speaker emphasis

[Adapted from Hutchby and Wooffitt (1998, pp. vi–vii)].

Notes
1. In the discussion, the ‘male gaze’ implies the heterosexual male perspective.
2. For extended discussion see Baxter, (2010, pp. 131–132).
3. For extended discussion see Glapka, (2014, pp. 33–34).
4. This approach is proposed as supplanting (not replacing) other critical discussions.
5. In South African English, ‘né’ is a particle meaning ‘not so?’.
6. The role of the politics of respectability in South Africa is noted by Krige and Oostendorp
(2015), and Moffett (2006, p. 129), who sees the country’s high rape rates as ‘fuelled by justi-
ficatory narratives that are rooted in apartheid practices that legitimated violence by the
dominant group against the disempowered’.
7. But see Kamada’s (2010) FPDA study, where ‘repertoires’ and ‘discourses’ are used
interchangeably.
8. Attainable to black women, among others, through weaves (synthetic or human hair clipped
onto or sewn into one’s own hair).

Acknowledgements
I am very grateful to both reviewers for their helpful comments on this article and to John Richardson
for his kind editorial assistance. I would also like to thank Judith Baxter for encouraging me to publish
the paper.

Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor
Ewa Glapka is a post-doctoral research fellow in the Department of English Studies at the University
of the Free State, South Africa. She has published on the issues of gender and discourse, critical dis-
course analysis, media discourse and media reception, including a book, Reading bridal magazines
from a critical discursive perspective (2014, Palgrave). Her current research focuses on the discursive
constructions of the body, beauty and gender in South Africa. Department of English, University of
the Free State, FGG, no. 206, Bloemfontein 9300, South Africa.

ORCID
Ewa Glapka http://orcid.org/0000-0002-0397-0200
102 E. GLAPKA

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