THE DISCOURSE OF DOMESTIC CONTROL: A CRITICAL DISCOURSE ANALYSIS OF POWER AND COERCION IN NETFLIX’S MAID
Keywords:
Critical Discourse Analysis, Linguistic Strategies, Power, Coercion, Control, Interaction, Vocabulary, Grammatical Structures, Pragmatics, Dominance, Power Dynamics, Ideological HierarchiesAbstract
Maid is a limited series on Netflix which was released in 2021. This series is a depiction of poverty, domestic abuse, and motherhood. This research is a critical Discourse Analysis of a language of a character in this series whose name is Sean, focusing specifically on linguistic strategies of power, coercion and control within partner interactions. Through the analysis of selected dialogues between Alex and Sean, this research identifies how the choice of vocabulary, grammatical structures and pragmatics are used to dominate and manipulate relations. This research uses Fairclough’s three dimensional CDA framework to reveal that Sean’s language represents dominance, power dynamics and construct ideological hierarchies in a relationship.
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Copyright (c) 2025 Maliha Shahid, Dr Awais Bin Wasi (Author)

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