title: Voices Unheard: A Corpus-assisted Critical Discourse Analysis of the UK Newspaper Media's Representation of Female Voters in 2015-2017
Creators: name: Verheijen, Lotte
Publisher: name: University of Liverpool Repository
Year: 2023

description: This thesis examines the linguistic underrepresentation of female voters in the UK media. It does so by exploring how these voters are linguistically constructed and represented by UK newspapers in the lead-up to both the 2015 and the 2017 General Elections, and the 2016 EU Referendum. In particular, which types of female voters are included in or excluded from this group, and what linguistic features characterise their representations. Additionally, this thesis critically examines how these media representations contribute to the absence of women from the political sphere. I explore these questions by means of a diachronic and synchronic corpus-assisted Feminist Critical Discourse Analysis ((Fairclough, 2013; Lazar, 2007)) of specialised 2015, 2016 and 2017-based corpora of UK national newspaper articles that contain references to female voters. This analysis also draws from van Leeuwen’s (1996) social actor representation, combining text-level linguistic analysis with context analysis. Additionally, sub-corpora divided by political orientation, referendum stance, publication type and author gender are analysed in order to investigate the impact of these categories on the representation of female voters. This combination of corpus and discourse analytic methods allows for more in-depth qualitative and extra-linguistic analyses, as well as engagement with intersectionality and queer theory (Levon, 2015; Motschenbacher &amp; Stegu, 2013). I primarily focus on how both subtle and more overt normative language choices and discourses exclude British female voters who are perceived to be non-normative from political discourse and/or question their presence in said discourse. Overall, this research found that in general, female voters voices go unheard, as they are either backgrounded and ignored or belittled and classed as irrelevant. Even in a corpus focused on female voters, they are not ‘key’ to the narrative(s). Furthermore, only certain female voters are deemed worthy of being heard in a narrowly defined notion of the paradigmatic female voter. Women are homogenised, passivated, conflated with motherhood, and subordinated to men, and their linguistic representation is subject to a slew of normative and discriminatory conceptions (i.e. heteronormativity, cisnormatviity, ableism, racism, Islamophobia, xenophobia, sexism and classism). This conceptualisation upholds and sustains institutionalised power asymmetries between (and among) groups of women and men in politics and in society at large. Consequently, it perpetuates the underrepresentation of women in the political sphere and contributes to the silencing of women, excluding them from the political arena and potential policy decision making. In conclusion, this study contributes to closing the gap in the literature regarding media portrayals of, and appeals to, female voters. Concurrently, it raises vital awareness regarding the specific characteristics of the dangerous underrepresentation and misrepresentation of these female voters.