The linguistic representation of gender violence in (written) media discourse

Abstract

‘Woman’ is a key social actor, and a central conceptualization, in the construction of media discourses of gender-based violence. Scholarly research at the turn of the 21st century (Bengoechea 2000; Lledó 2002; Fernández Díaz 2003; Jorge 2004) showed that in the Spanish press, media discourses had a tendency to naturalize male aggression not as violence but as part of the (private) sexual arrangement between the sexes. In this chapter we explore the treatment of the phrase mujer maltratada (EN ‘battered woman’) in intimate partner violence newspaper articles from 2005 to 2010. Our aims are: (i) to account for the discursive representation of violence against women (VAW) in Spanish contemporary media discourse in recent years; and (ii) to unveil the expectations about gender, sexuality and power implicit in public discourses about VAW, given their apparent objectivity. In doing so, we draw on the evaluation framework for the analysis of news reports proposed by White (2004, 2006) and on Corpus Linguistics tools.

Corpus-driven insights into the discourse of women survivors of Intimate Partner Violence

“…Research from the language sciences have also echoed this pressing need, giving rise to a growing body of research investigating how the forms in which linguistic issues and IPV are intertwined. One observable trend deals with discourses of/about IPV, mostly focussing on recontextualised representations of both IPV and key social actors typically involved in it (namely abused women and their abusive male partners) in media discourse (Santaemilia and Maruenda, 2014) or online environments (Bou-Franch, 2013). Necessary though these studies are, attempts to examine discourses by social actors in IPV contexts are somewhat less frequent to date.…”