Discourse, gender, and violence

1. Aims of the volume

Discourse, Gender, and Violence: Insights from News and Social Media Texts is a collection of work by researchers in the area of language use and gender-based violence (GBV). It demonstrates how a discourse approach to the study of GBV can cast light on the ways in which the mechanisms of gendered power linguistically operate in news and social media texts.

The last two decades have seen the proliferation of books and edited collections on language and GBV (e.g., Lazar, 2005; Bou-Franch, 2016; Caldas-Coulthard, 2020; Cameron, 2024). These have largely focused on the role that language plays in situations of social inequality whereby the abuse is motivated by the gender of the targeted group. Like these, the subject matter of this book is GBV and language use. This means that the volume addresses verbal and semiotic instances of GBV as discursive constructions of the social that are inherently entrenched in the larger power systems that contribute to the reproduction and maintenance of GBV. However, the volume explicitly foregrounds the notion of GBV and explores its workings in two particular textual domains. Namely, news and social media texts. Chapters variously focus on GBV issues such as sexual violence, online grooming, and hate speech in newspaper articles, press reports, blog entries, online forums, crisis text services, and social media posts. Contributions thus underscore the instrumental aspect of news and social media discourse, as they illustrate how values associated with GBV are mediated through their linguistic and semiotic signs.

The aim of this introductory chapter is to set the scene. We first trace the theoretical development of gender and violence in discourse analysis. This allows us to provide a general framework for the volume. In so doing, we hope to underscore the significance –as well as the limitations– of radical¹ feminist thought in exposing the discursive dimension of GBV. Next comes an orderly and contextualised discussion of those key notions guiding the book. Namely, those of discourse, gender, violence, and GBV. The chapter also reflects on current understandings of GBV and advocates for an explicit feminist stance towards the analysis of media discourse. We finalise with a brief presentation of each contribution that makes up this volume.

It is our hope –and the hope of the contributing authors– that the work here serves to further our understanding of GBV from a discursive point of view. It is also our wish, as lecturers in the area of discourse and social inequality, that the book will be a valuable resource to the many university departments where courses on language, gender, and violence are taught, as well as to those with a focus on contextualized language use. These may include courses such as sociolinguistics, applied linguistics, gender identities, politics, and inequalities, language and the law, language and the media, and (critical) discourse analysis.

2. Setting the scene

Research on gender in discourse analysis began in the early 1970s. Following a binary and biological understanding of the term, scholars studied two domains of language use: Women and men’s speech at a phonological level and their conversational styles. Trudgill’s (1974) work on sociolinguistic variation in Norwich and Chesire’s (1978) research on dialects are illustrative in this respect. For his part, Trudgill observed that women were more status-conscious than men, as they used less non-standard forms in both casual and formal speech. On the other hand, Cheshire also concluded that schoolgirls used more standard verb-forms than schoolboys. Though both studies certainly yielded valuable insights at both empirical and methodological levels, it is also true that their biological explanations ignored women and men’s social roles. For instance, they ignored the fact that patriarchal social structures may require women to be more well-spoken in the workplace, or that girls may be expected to conform to certain social behaviours at school (Eckert, 1989). Instead, both studies rested on essentialist ideas associated with the biological and stable nature of gender.

Almost 60 years later, gender has become a prolific area of discursive inquiry. To our minds, such proliferation is due to two factors that run parallel to each other: The social advances gained by activist movements and the conceptual shift that the field has taken towards a non-essentialist understanding of the term. For clarity, Angouri (2021) defines the anti-essentialist approach to gender as that which distrusts all attempts to define gender as a predetermined category on the basis of biological sex. Rather, gender is defined as a socially-constructed category of social identity that is not stable nor fixed. Such a social constructionist perspective draws on poststructuralist paradigms such as Butler’s (1990) theory of gender performativity. An example of gender performativity often cited in the linguistics literature is Hall’s (1995) study of telephone sex workers in California and their use of powerlessness in language to perform the sort of femininity customers expect. Another significant development has been the incorporation of sexuality to the language and gender research agenda since the 1990s. This combination has become increasingly popular over the past decade in which we have seen a series of dedicated books being published (e.g., Ehrlich et al., 2014; Kiesling, 2019; Angouri/Baxter, 2021) and articles in journals such as Gender and Language emerge (e.g., Chen, 2023). In addition, the turn to poststructuralism has prompted scholars to adopt an intersectional approach, thus showing that risk of social exclusion increases from the intersection of gender and other categories of social identity (e.g., sexuality, race/ethnicity, class, age, and body ableness). As a result, the field has swiftly moved away from the cisgender-heterosexual matrix, thus challenging binary oppositions, fixed sexual identities, and addressing the complexities of people’s social identities.