Abstract

The purposes of this study are to identify the woman’s disempowerment factors found in the movie dialogues investigated at discourse and sentence levels and to see how each factor is reflected through a movie discourse. All dialogues from the movie “Changeling” were preliminarily studied and there were totally eight dialogues in the movie script that reflected some characteristics of the disempowerment. Thus, with the implementation of critical discourse analysis, the researcher further analyzed those eight dialogues as the main samples to reveal the occurrence frequency of the woman’s disempowerment factors such as gender roles, powerlessness, violence against women as well as how those factors were presented in characters’ discourses. According to the findings, the highest percentage of occurrence frequency fell into the violence against women factor, yet the gender roles factor is found at the lowest percentage. Furthermore, this research also reflected the cultural problems regarding the hierarchical inequality between female and male through their social status and roles. However, the findings of this research interestingly trigger the further investigation on both scripts and scenes of a movie to understand the more in-depth views on how cultural issues are presented via those channels; especially the issues related to verbal and non-verbal communication.

Keywords: disempowerment, woman’s disempowerment, social status, and inequality