Women and politics: analyzing the mediatic socio-cultural representation

Abstract

 In this paper, my aim is to study the representations by the Brazilian media discourse of women politicians in one particular news report. The research is based on Critical Discourse Analysis (Fairclough,2003; Theo van Leeuwen, 1997) and the Appraisal framework (White,2004; Martin,2006). The analysis of the newspaper report shows that female politicians are perceived as different from their male counterparts and that there are implicit relations of power in the text, which might contribute to shaping the reader’s perception of reality.