FANGS AND POWER: An analysis of discursive patterns of discrimination in the American TV series True Blood

The American TV series True Blood uses vampires allegorically to represent disenfranchised minorities. This paper aims at accounting for discursive patterns of discrimination in it through a critical discourse-semantic analysis of its illocutionary subjects’ speech acts. To achieve this, we integrate a theory of semantic modality and a dimensional theory of meaning to the general framework of Critical Discourse Analysis. The method of dimensional analysis of meaning, aided by an analysis of context and of discourse strategies, allows us to identify 13 discursive patterns of discrimination, which are general enough to carry over to the analysis of both fictional and factual discourse.