Applying Critical Discourse Analysis as a conceptual framework for investigating gender stereotypes in political media discourse

Abstract

     This paper aims to demonstrate how Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) can be used as a conceptual framework for investigating gender stereotypes in political media discourse. Language and gender studies in media discourse work with a diverse theoretical standpoint underpinning each particular work, and are generally bound by a concern for the reproduction of ideology in language use, which is also one of the aims of CDA. However, CDA has previously been criticized for selecting and using only a small number of texts, leading to concerns of representativeness of the texts selected, and thus susceptibility to the researcher's bias in text selection for an intended analysis. In this paper, we used news reports with reference to the former Prime Minister Yingluck Shinawatra of Thailand as the case study to examine how gender stereotypes related to female politicians are linguistically generated in media text. We demonstrate how an abstract concept such as stereotyping can be investigated through systematic linguistic analysis and how such criticisms, especially that of representativeness of the texts selected, or cherry-picking data, can be addressed when conducting a CDA research project. We propose that the potential bias in data selection can be minimized or even eliminated by systematically obtaining a data set large enough to be a representative sample. Doing so can help increase the ability to describe texts, and more thoroughly convince the reader of the resulting claims regarding how gender stereotypes in politics are reproduced and generated through language used in media.