What Women Want? A Multimodal Critical Discourse Analysis of UK Media Constructions of (LGBTQ+) Female Voters
abstract
Sexist media depictions of female politicians have been studied. However, studies regarding portrayals of female voters and their hetero/cisnormative narratives are lacking. Therefore, this study explores UK media constructions of female voters in the context of the 2016 EU Referendum and the 2017 General Election via corpus-assisted CDA. It mainly focuses on the exclusion of LGBTQ+ women as voters via hetero/cisnormative language use. Female voters tend to be depicted in relation to men, or children and a family in general, while mentions of queer women are rare. Moreover, LGBTQ+ rights chiefly feature in political discourse to further a nationalist agenda through homonationalist arguments.
Keywords: Brexit • CDA • Corpus Linguistics • Politics • Female Voters • LGBTQ+ • Homonationalism