Stepmother as electron: Positioning the stepmother in a family dinner conversation

This article proposes a discourse analysis of a family dinner conversation in which the participants are a father, a stepmother and a teenage daughter. Such analysis has social relevance insofar as roles within the stepfamily have not been either socially reshuffled or academically defined. The age-old myth about the wicked stepmother has provided the symbolic and discursive placement of stepmothers in contemporary American society in lieu of societal efforts to realistically define such a role. Thus, each case must define itself. My research examines a stepfamily's discourse about food as a window through which to view discursive strategies of inclusion and exclusion. I find that, in a situation where the child is a female teenager, a stepmother's identity is defined by positioning actively undertaken through the stepdaughter's discourse. Integrating a new parent into an existing unit is made far more difficult if the stepmother is seen as an outsider, who may be admitted to membership of the household, but not necessarily to the family.     

Book Reviews

Books reviewed:
Angela Williams and Jon F. Nussbaum, Intergenerational Communication across the Lifespan
Jan Blommaert, (ed.) Language Ideological Debates
Patrick Stevenson and John Theobald, Relocating Germanness: Discursive Disunity in Unified Germany]
Felicia D. Roberts, Talking about Treatment: Recommendations for Breast Cancer Adjuvant Therapy
Alison Sealey, Childly Language: Children, Language and the Social World
Una Cunningham-Andersson and Staffan Andersson, Growing up with Two Languages. A Practical Guide