With the growing popularity of body language experts in contemporary Western societies, this thesis addresses the question of whether they pathologize the feminine subject through her body and emotions in their analyses. In the first part of this research, we position body language analysis and its uses into a spatio-temporal framework and identify it as pseudoscience. Within this context we approach our research question from the aspect of post-structural feminism, with an emphasis on the theory of Michel Foucault, and establish a genealogy of the feminine. On the basis of this, we criticize the gender dichotomy and essentialism, introducing bio-medical pathologization of the feminine subject as a device of establishing social hierarchies. We merge these theoretical areas in our case study, where we examine those body language analyses of the Depp v. Heard trial with the highest number of views on the social platform YouTube through the use of feminist poststructuralist discourse analysis. In the course of this analysis, we identify pseudoscience, gender essentialism and pathologization as the three most notable discourses, which we then examine within the context of post-structural feminism. Our research shows that body language experts primarily pathologize those women, who obstruct the patriarchal social structure. They legitimize this during their analyses under the guise of science by establishing themselves as the social authority and by utilizing essentialist discourse. Alongside, we ascertain that their employment of essentialist discourse leads to the reproduction of patriarchal relations of inequality.
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