Colors and Orientalism as associations: Exploring the semiotic (re)presentation of Saudi women in British and Saudi newspapers

Abstract

Media representations can have significant influence in shaping opinions and influence public response to certain communities or gender and ethnic representations around the world. Investigating semiotic representation in linguistic discourse as vehicles for meaning in culture has been a fruitful area of research over the past decades. This study explores how stereotypes of women feed into the representations of Saudi women in contemporary press in Britain and Saudi Arabia. The focus is on the newspaper genre. Data for this study have been gleaned from a particular set of British and Saudi newspapers. Using the Color Image Scale (CIS) as a research tool, this study yielded a number of findings, the main one of which is the discrepancy in Saudi women's representation in the journalistic discourse under study. In addition, variances in color choice and usage between the newspapers in the present study were apparent. The study provides an important opportunity to advance our understanding of Saudi women's representation in British versus Saudi newspapers. The present study also makes a major contribution to research on critical discourse analysis by demonstrating how power as well as orientalism impact Saudi women's representation. The findings of this study are important for scholars of gender, religion, media, and cultural diversity.

Triangulating visual and textual corpus-assisted discourse analysis to study social actor representations: the case of Saudi women in the British and Saudi news media

“…While most research on media representations of Saudi women has analysed texts, Elyas et al (2022) conducted a small-scale visual analysis comparing the UK and SA press. The study concluded that black colour dominated the representations of Saudi women in British newspapers, whereas in the SA press, black attire was barely noticeable and Saudi women were depicted more frequently as active social agents.…”

“…Yet, the triangulations have included mostly one mode, that is, written language (including transcriptions). There are several corpus linguists who have recognized the importance of other modes of communication (e.g., Adolphs & Carter, 2015;Knight, 2011), and some have already integrated the visual mode into corpus linguistics (Caple et al, 2020;Elyas et al, 2022;Sun & Chalupnik, 2022). The latter group often limits the 3 amount of images to be studied considerably, partially because of the complexity of visuals.…”