ABSTRACT
This chapter presents a discourse analysis of a graffiti text concerning an alleged rape. The text is taken from the wall of a women’s bathroom stall at the University of California at Berkeley. Because the accused rapists were African American male students who were members of the university’s football team and the raped woman was a Chinese American student, the incident associates the politics of gender with the politics of race. The first goal of the examination presented here is to trace the development and import of the graffiti discourse, specifying how textual coherence makes use of out-of-text knowledge. Writers of the graffiti remarks employ implicature (Grice 1975); that is, they make assertions with their statements indirectly, counting on readers to understand the suggested meanings behind the explicit ones. The use of implicature reveals that the writers assume other discourse participants—those who have already written on the wall and the unknown women who may write—share certain cultural knowledge. These assumptions of shared knowledge themselves evoke specifiable societal discourses. A second goal of the analysis of this text is to associate situated, linguistic discourse within societal discourses. The textual debate about male-to-female sexual violence is clearly politicized, involving issues of both gender and race identities and oppressions. I assert that analysis is needed in the study of the intersection of gender and language that associates the content and structure of texts—the products of linguistic discourse—with cultural knowledge that is differently known from different vantage points of social identity saliences.
