Media discourse on women in politics: The first Muslim woman of colour in US Congress

Abstract

This analysis is a part of a bigger study on the presentation of Muslim women in the media. The focus here is on Ilhan Omar, the first Muslim Somali-born woman in American Congress, and more specifically on the latest publications on Omar which delve into her personal family life and the alleged marriage she has entered into with her brother, so that she can provide him with a green card for the USA. The topic presents a cross-section of several major fields of study such as feminism, media studies, and culture studies as the emphasis is on the biased media representation intended to diminish the real worth of a woman politician who is a carrier of several different identities, namely: gender, religious, ethnic, and class. The corpus for this study consists of 42 articles published in various online media over a period of four months from January 2020 to April 2020. The paper argues that first, the presentation Ilhan Omar enjoys is gendered and second, that it is subjected to the stereotypical image of Muslim women as submissive and silent, being of a lower status than men, especially in a male-dominated field such as politics. In addition, it is also argued that although Omar breaks the existing stereotypes of Muslim women, the way media present her actually reinforces the preconceived ideas she refutes. To prove the above, the main methods of analysis applied are Critical Discourse Analysis along with Multi-modal analysis when the non-verbal part of the presentation on the image is concerned.