The impact of women's conversational style on ideological and socio-cultural stability in Toni Morrison's Sula.pdf

The paper entitled "The impact of women's conversational style on ideological and socio-cultural stability in Toni Morrison's Sula examines how women's talk-style influences both ideological and socio-cultural stability in the text. The difference approach to language and gender studies which proposes that women's language is polite, cooperative and supportive of their interlocutors as well as socially functional in maintaining unity and solidarity amongst women as a social group is used as a major theoretical framework for the study while conversational analysis is used as analytical tool to examine women's talk-style in order to determine whether these propositions abound or not and their implications on socio-cultural feminist ideological preoccupation and stability. The paper reveals that each woman has her individual talk-style which translates to her individual feminist ideology and which has either a positive or a negative impact on feminist ideological and socio-cultural stability amongst women groups. The paper further reveals that women's talk-styles that maintain socio-cultural feminist ideology are considered as having positive impacts on socio-cultural stability and are therefore celebrated while those that disrupt socio-cultural stability are considered as having negative impacts and are therefore rejected. The paper concludes that Toni Morrison in Sula has been able to use the black female voice to stabilize socio-culturally approved ways for women in African-American society while at the same time being intolerant to deviant feminist ideologies that might disrupt their own feminist socio-cultural stability.