A Critical Discourse Analysis of Sexual Harassment in North Country Movie

Abstract

The current study employs a Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) approach to examine sexual harassment in the movie North Country (2005). The main objective is to explore how sexual harassment is discursively constructed through vocabulary, grammar, speech acts, and ideological frameworks. The study seeks to answer the following questions: (a) What lexical and grammatical features are used to represent sexual harassment? (b) How are speech acts employed to reflect interactional meanings and power relations? (c) What ideologies underlie the depiction of sexual harassment in the movie? The study adopts Fairclough’s Three-Dimensional Model (2001), which comprises description (focusing on textual features), interpretation (analyzing discursive practices such as speech acts), and explanation (examining sociocultural context and ideology), alongside Van Dijk’s (1998) Ideological Square Theory. A qualitative approach is used to analyze selected scenes from the movie’s dialogue. The findings show that sexual harassment in the movie is constructed through specific lexical and grammatical choices, power-laden speech acts, and discourse patterns that reinforce unequal gender relations. These linguistic features collectively reveal how interactional dynamics naturalize male dominance, constrain female agency, and reflect underlying patriarchal ideologies that normalize harassment and marginalize women.