Linguistic means of constructing the image of a femalepolitician (on the example of the microblog twitter)

Abstract

The presented research is devoted to the issues of ambiguous attitudes towards women’s participation in politics. The relevance of the study is explained by underrepresentation of women in the decision-making sphere. The presidential elections in the United States (2016) and Russia (2018), where women were registered as candidates, served as a newsbreak for discussing this issue in the media and social networks. The authors aimed at creating a stereotypical portrait of a female politician, constructed by various linguistic means. The material for the study constituted the entries of the microblog Twitter, published between January 1, 2017 and March 31, 2018, and selected by the keywords “female candidate”, “female politician”, and “female president”. The results of the qualitative content analysis of tweets were visualized using Gephi. The study revealed that the image of a female politician is constructed by the users of Twitter with the help of four groups of linguistic means, namely stylistic, lexico-semantic, syntactic and grapho-stylistic. Stylistic means are the most numerous group, marking, on the one hand, appearance, education, goodwill, and on the other — incompetence, poor upbringing, and other qualities of female politicians. Semantic spheres mark social roles of women politicians: bloggers discuss the problem of women’s representation in the highest echelons of power throughout the world, the combination of political career and family, self-realization in other spheres of public life, etc. The stereotypical portrait based on the data obtained emphasizes the users’ attitude to women’s participation in politics as controversial, combining traditional gender stereotypes and new egalitarian trends.