This PowerPoint helps underscore some of the main ideas from James Paul Gee's "Literacy, Discourse, and Linguistics."

1. Identity Kits:
Understanding James Paul Gee’s “Discourses”

2. What are “Discourses?”
• Gee suggests that, when talking about literacy, “what is important is
not language, and surely not grammar, but saying (writing)-doing-
being-valuing-believing combinations” (274). He calls these
combinations “Discourses.”
• He believes that how we understand literacy is directly linked to the
Discourses we come from and belong to.
• You can think of Discourses as an “identity kit” that is made up of
how you speak…but also how you act, and how you dress, and the
things you believe—this identity kit helps you fit into a particular
social group.
• Be sure to understand the different between a “discourse
community” and Gee’s Discourse.

3. Types of Discourses, part 1
• Primary Discourse: “Our original and home-based sense
of identity” (279). You don’t choose to be in this
Discourse, it is chosen for you. It is usually a person’s
family.
• Secondary Discourse: These are discourses we choose
(or our parents choose for us) to acquire, such as academic
discourse, which we start learning when we go to school.
It could be the church you go to. Or a particular career
you’ve chosen: consider the “identity kit” that goes along
with a career in construction, versus the Discourse of a
career in medicine.

4. Types of Discourses, part 2
• Another way Gee divides up Discourses is as:
• Dominant Discourse: Discourse that carries with it
social prestige and/or power (and/or money). This is
how you make a living.
• Nondominant Discourse: Discourse that “often brings
with it solidarity with a particular social network, but
not wider status or social goods in the society at large”
(Gee 280). These are your friend groups, recreational
groups you belong to, etc.

5. Let’s put these ideas into
practice…
• Consider your primary Discourse. How do you communicate?
What do you wear? How do you act?
• Now, think about one of your secondary Discourses. How do
you talk to people in this group? What do you wear? How do
you act?
• Do you get money/prestige from mastery of this secondary
Discourse? Do you get scholarships? Do you get job offers?
Then it is a dominant Discourse.
• Do you feel a sense of belonging, but no status, prestige, or
money comes from your association with the group? Then it
is a nondominant Discourse.

6. Under pressure
• Gee says “we can always ask how much ‘tension or conflict’
is present between any two of a person’s Discourses” (280).
He says there will almost always be some tension or conflict.
• Some people experience “overt and direct” (extreme)
conflicts between two or more of their Discourses.
• This conflict can create interference, which deters
acquisition of (or fluency in) one or more of the Discourses.
• Consider a person who is trying to get a job as a receptionist
after getting out of prison. Imagine the tension created
between these conflicting Discourses.

7. Belonging?
• How do you become part of a Discourse?
• Groups will employee “tests” to see how fluent
members (“natives”) are.
• Groups will employee “gates” to keep out non-natives.
(Gee 281)
• Think about the ACT, SAT, MCAT, LSAT…these tests
serve to allow certain people into college or medical
school or law school—and to keep other people out.

8. Interference & Transference
• Two Discourses can interfere with each other. Consider
the former prisoner who is trying to become a receptionist:
she might have a hard time adopting the new identity kit,
especially if she runs into her old cell mate at work.
• Two Discourses can also transfer aspects from one to the
other. Consider learning a new language: grammar rules
from Latin might help you learn Spanish, for example.

9. Liberating Literacy
• Gee goes into a lot of detail about ways in which
secondary Discourses can influence one another; see page
281.
• Gee defines “literacy” as “the mastery of or fluent control
over a secondary Discourse.”
• Literacy can be “liberating” if it “can be used as a ‘meta-
language,’ allowing the critique of other literacies (Gee
282).

10. Literacy Theorems
• Gee has identified several theorems that follow from his definition
of literacy. He discusses two of them:
• Theorem 1: Someone cannot engage in a Discourse in “a less
the fully fluent manner” (Gee 282). There are only fluent
speakers and apprentices (Gee 283).
• Theorem 2: Primary Discourses can never be liberating
Discourses, because a “liberating Discourse must contain both
the Discourse it is going to critique and a set of meta-elements”
that can be used to analyse and criticise. You can’t have meta-
knowledge of one Discourse without experiencing another, and
so the first (primary) Discourse you learn can’t liberate you.

11. Middle-class Mainstream
Discourse
• Gee states:
• Many Discourses are connected to schools and other
public institutions.
• These Discourses often carry with them power and
prestige.
• These Discourses use details of grammar mechanics,
“correctness,” and other superficial features of language
as “tests” of membership, or “gates” to exclude non-
members. (Gee 285)

12. Mushfake
• True acquisition of a secondary Discourse will almost
never occur.
• However, “mushfake” Discourse is possible. Mushfake is
a term from prison culture that means making do with
something less when the real thing isn’t available (Gee
288).
• Mushfake Discourse means “partial acquisition couple
with metaknowledge (if you don’t know that word, be sure
to look it up!) and strategies to ‘make do’” (Gee 288).

13. Some concluding
thoughts….
• Gee believes that “ ‘Mushfake,’ resistance, and
metaknowledge” are a perfect recipe for successful
students and successful social change. Do you see why he
says this?
• Do you agree?

14. work
cited
• Gee, James P. “Literacy, Discourse, and
Linguistics: An Introduction.” Writing
about Writing: A College Reader, 3rd ed.
Ed. Elizabeth Wardle and Doug Downs.
Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2017. 276-
95. Print.