International Journal of Linguistics & Communication

"Who is the culprit: The structure or the culture?" Indirect sexism: Linguistic representation of women in Egyptian print media
Heba Nayef, Mohamed El-Nashar

Abstract
This paper aims at investigating the more subtle ways of linguistic sexism in Egyptian print media. The paper examines three types of indirect sexism: collocations, transitivity, and presupposition and visibility, in Al- Ahram newspaper Headline and Front Page report coverage of June 30th, 2013events. The paper has shown that it is not just the androcentric nature of the Arabic language that posed structural limitations that led to the linguistic invisibility of women as shown in a previous study (Nayef, 2014a). Such obscuration of women here is also induced by the masculine supremacy beliefs in the patriarchal culture. The paper investigated how the reporters used certain lexical items in collocation with female participants in the political activities during that period. These collocations were either negative in meaning or used in a negative context, creating a negative image of women in both cases. The study has pointed out that even in events where women were key 'Actors', they were represented as 'Goals' rather than 'Actors'. It was also shown that the male reporters reproduced the culturally accepted division of public and private spheres, the presupposed role of women and men and the stereotypical characteristics assigned to members of the two genders.

Full Text: PDF     DOI: 10.15640/ijlc.v3n2a15