Abstract:
This paper explores the portrayal of women in Sri Lanka's parliamentary speeches,
focusing in particular on the role of the former Minister of Child Development and
Women's Affairs, Mr Tissa Karaliyadda, in instantiating certain ways of talking about
the subject 'women' and the issues concerning them. This exploration provides
important, although not exhaustive, insights into how women are perceived and talked
about in the country's legislature. The corpus will consist of Hansards that report the
former Minister's interventions, dating from his appointment in 2010 and extending to
2014. The paper takes a discourse analysis approach from the position that
parliamentary speech is not just communication in any self-evident sense, but reflects
a specific ordering of language and signification within a social institution, and is
underpinned by an institutional basis of power.
