This research is a qualitative research implementing descriptive comparative method with ethnographic design and discourse analysis. It is aimed to compare male and female movie reviewers’ appraisal resources in their Atomic Blonde movie reviews to understand their language style based on their gender using systemic functional linguistics approach.
Sources of data were selected using purposive sampling determined by criterion-based on the context of the texts. The primary data of this research is Thelma Adams’ and Barry Hertz’ reviews on Atomic Blonde representing female and male movie reviewer respectively. Primary data were also conducted using corpus-based research related to language and gender theories and systemic functional linguistics, especially appraisal theory. This research also implemented four analyses to ensure its novelty by combining Miles & Hubberman’ s (1992) interactive model with Spradley’s (1980) ethnographic steps which include domain, taxonomy, componential, and cultural context analysis.
There are three results of this study in which each reflects one domain of appraisal. First, in relation to attitude which has closer connection with the taste of each male and female movie reviewer, the result suggests that male reviewer is more attracted to the abstract aspects of the movie such as its values and proprieties while female reviewer is more attracted to the concrete aspects of the movie such as its impacts and capacities of people surrounding the movie production. Second, in relation with engagement which has closer connection to the voice alignment, male reviewer’s text is more aligning rather due to its higher number of heterogloss. Third, in relation with graduation which has closer connection to their vagueness, male reviewer’s review is vaguer to align his voice more toward his readers’. Additionally, male reviewer’s text is less subjective than female reviewer’s text due to high number of heteroglossic engagement and neutral graduation. Both male and female movie reviews support feminism which makes them antagonist right and left respectively.
Those results point out the inconsistency of theories on language and gender. Therefore, this research concludes that borders on language and gender are just a social construction. This research supports Cameron’s (2005) idea that discourse and language analysis should be based on contexts surrounding a text, not socialconstructed aspects such as gender. Keywords: systemic functional linguistics, appraisal, language and gender