A Critical Discourse Analysis Of Gender Representation In English News Headlines
Auteurs : Ali Ali .
Résumé
News headlines are among the most powerful sites of ideological construction in media discourse, condensing entire news events into brief, highly structured linguistic units that shape readers' first and often lasting impressions. This study adopts a Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) approach to examine how gender is represented, constructed, and sometimes distorted in English news headlines. Drawing on the analytical frameworks of Fairclough's three-dimensional model, van Dijk's socio-cognitive approach, and Wodak's discourse-historical approach, the study investigates the lexical choices, syntactic structures, transitivity patterns, and naming/reference strategies used to portray men and women in headlines drawn from major English-language news outlets. The analysis reveals that female subjects are more frequently identified through relational and appearance-based descriptors, associated with passive grammatical roles, and referenced through familial or marital titles, whereas male subjects are more often represented as active agents associated with power, authority, and professional achievement. These patterns, while frequently naturalized as neutral reporting conventions, are shown to reproduce and reinforce broader societal gender ideologies. The paper concludes by discussing the implications of these findings for media literacy, journalistic practice, and future research on gender and language in the media.
Mots clés
Ctitical discourse anaylsis
