A critical discourse study of the representation of immigrant women in a sample of the Spanish press: between victimization and prostitution

Abstract

This paper analyses the main characteristics of the representation of immigrant women as social actors in a sample from the Spanish press. The data consist of all the news items published on immigrant women in the digital editions of the Spanish newspapers El País, ABC and El Mundo from 1 January 2012 to 1 January 2022. Van Leeuwen’s (2008) social actors’ theory will show how immigrant women are portrayed linguistically in the corpus by analysing the main categories observed in the news items analysed: assimilation, role allocation, identification and functionalization. Moreover, corpus linguistics (CL) will be a powerful complementary tool to Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) because it allows observation of the main patterns and collocations in discourse. The findings indicate that women are not very visible in the corpus and that they are mainly associated with prostitution and low-paid work. Thus, their representation is associated with victimization and vulnerability.