Women in the news: Representations of women in the Sunday Standard newspaper in Botswana - A linguistic perspective

Abstract

This article examines how language is used to construct women’s identitiesin news reports in the Sunday Standard newspaper. Using 30,000 wordsfrom the January to December 2009 issues of this paper, corpus analysis isemployed to determine the relative frequency of gender marked items suchas man, woman, girl, boy, girlfriend, boyfriend, daughter, son etc. to findout if men and women occur at relatively the same frequency in the newsor not. A concordance analysis of the gender marked items is also done tofind out what items they collocate with, and to determine if the collocatesrender the items positive or negative, conservative or progressive in theirrepresentation of women. The paper also uses Critical discourse analysis(CDA) as a conceptual framework to examine the dominant discourses thatthe patterns of language use in the paper articulate. We argue that, on theone hand, news coverage of women in the Sunday Standard portrays themconservatively as victims of crime, and as powerless and passive recipientsof others’ benevolent actions. Women’s roles as wives and nurturers arefore-grounded; however, there is evidence to suggest that women are notalways monolithically represented in conservative and/or disempoweringways; they are also constructed as professionals. Yet, such roles are oftenmarked as deviating from the norm, with professions such as soldier,boxer, priest, and politician being prefaced by modifiers such as ‘woman’,‘female’, and ‘first’. This, we suggest, is indicative of the clashes betweentraditional and modern gender ideologies.