The Visibility Of Masculine And Feminine Languages In Columns

Abstract

With the beginning of the feminist movement, gender studies developed around the "woman phenomenon” and focused only on research on women for many years. Gender and media relations were investigated along the main axis of “women's representation in the media”. The "representation of women in media texts" was problematized from the perspective of content analysis, discourse analysis, and semiology, and through these forms of representation, "the image of women in patriarchal society" was revealed. In recent years, as the stereotyped roles attached to men and women have changed, the concept of gender has begun to be examined in different dimensions. Research on media professionals shows that a male-dominated media structure still exists. As of March 2014, according to bianet.org and based on mastheads, women journalists accounted for 19 percent whereas men accounted for 81 percent in Turkish newspapers. Therefore, news language still reproduces sexist representations as it carries masculine characteristics. Columns, in which the agenda is interpreted from different angles and presented to readers, are considered an important and effective component of newspapers. Columnists examine the agenda, propose solutions to problems, and present their ideas in a narrative and linguistic style of their own. This study examines how male and female stereotypes attributed to men and women in social life are represented by columnists. A specialized corpus, named the “TS Column Corpus”, was built from 9982 columns harvested from online versions of Turkish Internet Newspapers between 2014 and 2015. The data were studied through the frequency of word choices by male and female columnists and analyzed using corpus linguistics, content analysis, and discourse analysis methods to determine the reflections of masculine and feminine features in the texts.