Feminism in Discourse: A Critical Multimodal Discourse Analysis of the TED Talk “We Should All Be Feminists” by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

The present dissertation explores feminist discourse, focusing on a TED Talk delivered by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie in 2012, named We Should All Be Feminists. More specifically, this study investigates how gender issues are built and denounced through language and non-verbal elements. The main purpose is to analyse feminist discourse with a combined approach of multimodal analysis and critical discourse analysis. The analysis is based on the TED Talk video and its transcription. The multimodal analysis focuses on the ironic utterances, examining gestures, body posture and facial expressions in meaning construction of the visual component, while the critical discourse analysis identifies, in the transcription of the verbal component, linguistic and communication strategies which represent gender differences, related to ideologies and power relationships. Results show that the interaction of language and non-verbal factors contribute to strengthening the feminist message and to questioning gender-based social constructs, while they also emphasise that discourse is a fundamental tool for cultural change.