Gender Stereotypes in Media Business Discourse: Variations in Identities, Contexts and Cultures

• Authors: Alcina Sousa
• Languages of publication: EN

Abstracts

EN

This paper is meant to discuss two diverse but mutually entailed goals, underpinning the analysis of media business discourse. On the one hand, it promotes a critical understanding of how gender marks discourse and encodes power in business discursive communities, thus playing a key role in “shaping the expectations about people’s behaviours” (Koller 2004: 178). On the other, it promotes an interdisciplinary approach so as to disambiguate the discursive and argumentative strategies in the construction of media content by focusing on the symbolic organization and interaction between citizens and the discursive communities, in terms of male/female representations, given the way they throw global challenges and/or replicate stereotypes and particular ways of perceiving (Carter 1994: 5) the business discourse in terms of enunciation. The contrastive analysis of a corpus of magazine texts, covering news in April and May 2011, with a large readership in the global scenario, in Portuguese and in English (Sábado, Visão, Time and Newsweek), uncovers the power imbalance created when media texts pass on stereotypical patterns of behaviour in business and everyday discursive communities.

Keywords

EN

gender stereotypes; media business discourse; intercultural approach; identities and representations

• Publisher: De Gruyter Mouton
• Journal: Lodz Papers in Pragmatics
• Year: 2014
• Volume: 10
• Issue: 2
• Pages: 197-211

Dates

published

2014-12-29

received

2014-10-24

revised

2014-11-15

accepted

2014-12-23

online

2014-12-29

Contributors

author

Alcina Sousa

• University of Madeira, Arts and Humanities Centre, Campus da Penteada, Gab. 107-P.1, 9000-390 Funchal, Madeira, Portugal

Identifiers

DOI

10.1515/lpp-2014-0011