Journal of Language Aggression and Conflict - Volume 2, Issue 2, 2014

This article contributes to a body of research in which media reports of violence against women are analysed for the ways they gloss precisely what it is that constitutes ‘violence against women’ in the event under report. To catch this glossing in flight, as it were, mediated reports of violence are conceptualised as recontextualisations; that is, reports that may differ in rhetorically consequential ways from those provided by victims of, or witnesses to, that violence. A mediated stylistic analysis of press reportage of the charges of rape made against Julian Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks, in 2010, subsequently shows that and how Assange’s allegedly violent actions were recontextualised such that their status as violent was readably downgraded, mitigated or even deleted. The article ends by calling for more attention to be paid to the various techniques of recontextualisation via which reports of violence against women are presented in the media.

This article examines how reviewers take silence-sustaining or silence-breaking stances toward rape in online reviews of anti-terrorism expert, Jessica Stern’s (2010) book, Denial: A Memoir of Terror. I analyze how reviewers recontextualize the story of this uncontroversial rape and its narrator. The data consist of 47 reviews, ranging from professional reviewers at major newspapers to ‘citizen reviewers’ found on commercial bookstores’ websites and on readers’ blogs. Using stance as my analytic framework (Jaffe 2009), I show how readers align their reviews in ways that either authorize or de-authorize the narrator and her narrative.

This paper examines language aggression against women in public online deliberation regarding crimes of violence against women. To do so, we draw upon a corpus of 460 unsolicited digital comments sent in response to four public service advertisements against women abuse posted on YouTube. Our analysis reveals that three patriarchal strategies of abuse — namely, minimize the abuse, deny its existence, and blame women — are enacted in the online discourse under scrutiny and shows how, at the micro-level of interaction, these strategies relate to social identity and gender ideology through complex processes of positive in-group description and negative out-group presentation. We also argue that despite the few comments that explicitly support abuse, this situation changes at implicit, indirect levels of discourse.

‘Woman’ is a key social actor, and a central conceptualization, in the construction of media discourses of gender-based violence. Scholarly research at the turn of the 21st century (Bengoechea 2000; Lledó 2002; Fernández Díaz 2003; Jorge 2004) showed that in the Spanish press, media discourses had a tendency to naturalize male aggression not as violence but as part of the (private) sexual arrangement between the sexes. In this paper we explore the treatment of the phrase mujer maltratada (EN ‘battered woman’) in intimate partner violence newspaper articles from 2005 to 2010. Our aims are: (i) to account for the discursive representation of violence against women (VAW) in Spanish contemporary media discourse in recent years; and (ii) to unveil the expectations about gender, sexuality and power implicit in public discourses about VAW, given their apparent objectivity. In doing so, we draw on the evaluation framework for the analysis of news reports proposed by White (2004, 2006) and on Corpus Linguistics tools.

Verbal aggression against women often serves to naturalize a binary construction of gender. The form and content of verbal aggression against women may be shifting in the 21st century context, in which overtly sexist language in public settings is viewed as unacceptable. However, we argue that in fact, sexist language continues, albeit at times in less overt ways and particularly so when the discourse is public, or likely to be made public. This study examines the specific content of language aggression against women with two sources of data: 1) the population of tweets containing the handle @femfreq posted during 17 days in the fall of 2013, and 2) the population of 130 civil protection order petitions filed in the first 8 months of 2010 in a small city in the Pacific Northwest. We consider how the content of gendered language aggression in Tweets — a form of verbal discourse that is authored by people who do not personally know the object of their aggression — is similar to and different from the language aggression perpetrated by the intimate partners of women seeking legal protection from abuse from the courts — a form of verbal discourse enacted in intimate contexts.