Hegemonies of expatriate identities in Portuguese English-language press

My article is about reader’s identity construction in “readers write” texts published in Portuguese English-language newspapers, The Anglo-Portuguese News (The APN), The News and The Algarve Resident at the turn of the Millenium. The keyword concept of my approach is textual identity construction through a transdisciplinary approach – i.e., culture, society and language. My linguistic theoretical framework follows the Australian School of Systemic Functional Linguistics, founded by Michael Halliday and Ruqaiya Hasan. I examine the theme of identity construction by combining several disciplinary orientations and establishing relationships between them. My basic theoretical argument on identity construction is that, first of all, it is always a relational concept and it is built upon the notion of difference. Difference is actually central for the existence of all meanings. Binary oppositions are no doubt over-simplified because there is always one who dominates; the dimension of power – and the continuous negotiation of it - is omnipresent in all cultural activities. Besides, we only construct meanings (remember Voloshinov’s notions of dialogism and heteroglossia) and ourselves (psychoanalytic stance, for instance) through a dialogue with the other. The so called tourist experience (which would include the category of the expatriate as a long-term tourist) can also be considered as a search for a difference between “one’s normal place of residence/work and the object of the tourist gaze”, as John Urry (1990: 11) has argued