“Feminism is a dirty word”: The media representation of feminism in a corpus of British newspapers (1993-2013)

Details

Supervisors

Gilquin, Gaëtanelle

Faculty

Faculté de philosophie, arts et lettres

Degree label

Master [120] en langues et lettres modernes, orientation germaniques

Abstract

enBy analysing changing representations of feminism and feminists in a corpus of British newspapers between 1993 and 2013, this thesis shows how media discourse can explicitly and implicitly shape people’s attitudes towards the feminist movement. Feminists need to benefit from positive representations in order to spread the ideas of the movement and to encourage both men and women to participate in feminist actions. However, negative portrayals of feminism and feminists are more frequent than positive ones, and the framing techniques used by some newspaper writers are often damaging for the image of the feminist movement. In that regard, the present study set out to investigate the discourse around the word feminism and other related terms (i.e. feminist, feminist movement, women’s movement, and women’s liberation). The use of a corpus allowed for a more objective and quantitative analysis of how feminism is linguistically constructed in British newspapers, especially through a frequency and collocation analysis. These analyses also looked into the broadsheet/tabloid distinction and the diachronic perspective that were made possible by the composition of the corpus. In addition, a CDA and framing approach was necessary to uncover the various techniques used by journalists to depict feminism. The findings indicated that there is a lack of coverage in the British press compared to other topics related to women in general. The media representation of feminism is typically negative, even though it appears that, increasingly, feminism and feminists are also portrayed in more positive terms. Between 1993 and 2013 various terms were indeed used to demonise, ridicule and criticise the feminist movement and many stereotypical views were presented, but there has been a slow change over time towards more positive attitudes. The semantic prosody of feminism is generally negative and is created by those who attack the movement or by those who do not identify as feminists. Positive images can also be created by journalists (or interviewees) who defend feminism or present historical facts to legitimate the movement’s ideas and prominent figures. Feminism is undoubtedly an ambivalent concept which can be both problematic and essential: on the one hand, the word feminism itself is still associated with radicalism and extremism, but on the other hand, feminism is defended, valued and recognised for what it is. Studying the representation of feminism in the media allows us to realise that the issues of feminism are complex and take time. It is however important to understand, without judgement, the exact meaning of the word feminism, which is not necessarily a bad thing after all.