Text trajectories, legal discourse and gendered inequalities

Abstract

Following Blommaert (2005), this paper examines what he calls a ‘forgotten’ context within Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) and Conversation Analysis (CA) – that of text trajectories. For Blommaert, a limitation of both CDA and CA is their focus on “the unique, one-time” instance of a given text and, by extension, the (limited) context associated with such an instance of text. Such a focus, according to Blommaert, ignores a salient feature of communication in contemporary societies – the fact that texts and discourses move around, are repeatedly recontextualized in new interpretive spaces, and in the process undergo significant transformations in meaning. The text trajectory investigated in this paper begins in a legal institution, more specifically, with a 2004 American rape trial, Maouloud Baby v. the State of Maryland. This legal case garnered much media attention and, as a result of such exposure, references to the case have appeared in both mainstream and social media outlets. Hence, as a ‘text’ that has displayed considerable movement across different contexts within the legal system and, subsequently, beyond the legal system to mainstream and popular forms of media, the Maouloud Baby trial constitutes fertile ground for the exploration of a text's trajectory. Indeed, in keeping with Blommaert's claims, I show how this trial's ‘text’ undergoes significant transformations in meaning as it is recontextualized in different kinds of interpretive spaces (both within the legal system and outside of it) and how these transformations in meaning reproduce larger patterns of gendered inequalities.