Sketching women: a corpus-based approach to representations of women's agency in political Internet corpora in Arabic and English

Abstract

In this paper, I use methods from corpus linguistics to examine patterns pertaining to the representation of women in online Arabic- and English-language political corpora. I highlight the discursive differences and similarities that characterise the two corpora. Using word sketches, I identify representational categories in each corpus that are indexed by patterns of collocation. Analysis of semantic preference and prosody in each corpus reveals the ways in which women are represented. An exploration of the representations of women and gendered agency in both corpora reveals incongruities between the message of women's empowerment that the outlets promote and the implicit discursive representations of gender and gendered agency.