Examining the contingency between emotional words and genders: Evidence from the media corpus of #MeToo movement

Abstract

Gender inequalities are linguistically constructed and indexed through the strategic use of language representing the power structure in the physical world. Recently, #MeTooIndia, an Indian version of the global feminist movement, provided a scholarly opportunity to explore the gender stereotypes of emotional expressions. Even though some researchers have studied the sociocultural dimensions of #MeToo, the corpus-based linguistic analysis of this movement has yet to be explored significantly. Therefore, the current study investigated the discursive association of emotional representation of masculine and feminine genders in media texts. Given the societal nature of Indian patriarchal ideologies, power and gender stereotypes, we hypothesize that Indian mass media, as a powerful political actor, may attribute more positive lexicons to the masculine pronoun he and more negative markers to the feminine pronoun she. Textual genres of #MeToo were extracted from the print media by using the corpus framework of collocational and concordance methods. Our results revealed that, though the news of #MeToo heightened the feminine actor and largely produced the pronoun she in the referential position, the narratives of texts assigned more positive emotive markers to the masculine social actors. Overall, this study concludes that #MeToo as a gender movement has faced strategic linguistic resistance against feminine sexual victims, favouring the masculine actors.