Abstract
Language used for, about and by female politicians, is qualitatively and quantitatively investigated to demonstrate how language operates to signal gender, gendering and gendered prototyping. The media have found ways to expose a ‘war among female politicians’, manipulating the choices of the language they use to refer to themselves. Marked forms are used more than unmarked in the case of sindaca (feminine) and sindaco (unmarked masculine) when referring to three female mayors in Italian newspapers. Sexual terms used to insult female politicians about their alleged promiscuous private lives seems to be purposefully used to demonstrate their unsuitability to operate in the institutional public spheres. On the contrary, female MPs legitimize their position in the parliament through language, also building a bond with women outside of the Chamber.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
References
Alvanoudi, Angeliki. 2014. Grammatical gender in interaction: Cultural and cognitive aspects. Leiden: Brill.
Battaglia, Filippo Maria. 2015. Stai zitta e va’ in cucina. Breve storia del maschilismo in politica da Togliatti a Grillo. Torino: Bollati Boringhieri.
Baxter, Judith (ed.). 2006. Speaking out: The female voice in public contexts. Palgrave Macmillan: Basingstoke.
Bazzanella, Carla. 2002. The significance of context in comprehension: The ‘we case’. Foundations of Science 7 (3): 239–254.
Bazzanella, Carla. 2009. Noi come meccanismo di intensità. In Fenomeni di intensità dell’italiano parlato, ed. Barbara Gili Fivela and Carla Bazzanella, 101–114. Firenze: Franco Cesati Editore.
Bengoechea, Mercedes. 2011. How effective is ‘femininity’? Media portrayals of the effectiveness of the first Spanish woman Defence Minister. Gender and Language 5 (2): 405–429.
Bloor, Meriel, and Thomas Bloor. 2007. The practice of critical discourse analysis. London: Hodder.
Brewer, Marilynn B., and Wendi, Gardner. 1996. Who is this “We”? Levels of collective identity and self representations. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 71 (1): 83–93.
Brezina, Vaclav, Tony McEnery, and Steven Wattam. 2015. Collocations in context: A new perspective on collocation networks. International Journal of Corpus Linguistics 20 (2): 139–173.
Bull, Peter, and Anita Fetzer. 2006. Who are we and who are you? The strategic use of forms of address in political interviews. Text and Talk 26 (1): 3–37.
Cameron, Deborah. 2006. Theorising the female voice in public contexts. In Speaking out: The female voice in public contexts, ed. Judith Baxter, 3–20. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
Cameron, Deborah, and Sylvia Shaw. 2016. Gender, power and political speech: Women and language in the 2015 UK General Election. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
Catalano, Ana. 2009. Women acting for women? An analysis of gender and debate participation in the British House of Commons 2005–2007. Journal of Politics and Gender 5 (1): 45–68.
Eckert, Penny, and Sally McConnell-Ginet. 1992. Think practically and look locally: Language and gender as community-based practice. Annual Review of Anthropology 21: 461–490.
Eckert, Penny, and Sally McConnell-Ginet. 1998. Communities of practice: Where language, gender and power all live. In Language and gender: A reader, ed. Janet Coates, 484–494. Oxford: Blackwell.
Eckert, Penny, and Sally McConnell-Ginet. 2003. Language and gender. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Eckert, Penny, and Sally McConnell-Ginet. 2007. Putting communities of practice in their place. Gender and Language 1: 27–38.
Formato, Federica. 2014. Language use and gender in the Italian parliament. PhD, thesis, Lancaster University.
Formato, Federica. 2016. Linguistic markers of sexism in the Italian media: A case study of ministra and ministro. Corpora 11 (3): 371–399.
Formato, Federica. 2017. ‘Ci sono troie in giro in Parlamento che farebbero di tutto’. Italian female politicians seen through a sexual lens. Gender and Language 11 (3): 389–414.
Garcia-Blanco, Iñaki, and Karin Wahl-Jorgensen. 2012. The Discursive construction of women politicians in the European Press. Feminist Media Studies 12 (3): 1–20.
Gill, Rosalind. 2007. Gender and the media. Cambridge: Polity.
Helmbrecht, Johannes. 2002. Grammar and function of we. In Us and others: Social identities across languages, discourses and cultures, ed. Anna Duszak, 31–49. Amsterdam: Benjamins.
Holmes, Janet. 2006. Gendered talk at work: Constructing gender identity through workplace discourse. Oxford: Blackwell.
Iñigo-Mora, Isabel. 2004. On the use of the personal pronoun we in communities. Journal of Language and Politics 3 (1): 27–52.
Kilgarriff, Adam. 2012. Getting to know your corpus. In International conference on text, speech and dialogue, 3–15, September 3–7. Berlin, Heidelberg: Springer.
Koller, Veronika. 2014. Applying social cognition research to critical discourse studies: The case of collective identities. In Contemporary critical discourse studies, ed. Christopher Hart and Piotr Cap, 149–167. London: Bloomsbury.
Koller, Veronika, and Wodak Ruth. 2008. Introduction: Shifting boundaries and emergent publics. In Handbook of communication in the public sphere, ed. Ruth Wodak and Veronika Koller, 1–17. Berlin: De Gruyter.
Martin, Paul, and Pam Papadelos. 2017. Who stands for the norm? The place of metonymy in androcentric language. Social Semiotics 27 (1): 39–58.
McElhinny, Bonnie. 1997. Ideologies of public and private language in sociolinguistics. In Gender and discourse, ed. Ruth Wodak, 106–139. London: Sage.
McElhinny, B. 2003. Theorizing gender in sociolinguistics and linguistic anthropology. In The handbook of language and gender, ed. Janet Holmes and Miriam Meyerhoff, 21–42. Oxford: Blackwell.
Mills, Sara. 2008. Language and sexism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Mullany, Louise. 2007. Gendered discourse in the professional workplace. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
Pennycook, Alastair. 1994. The politics of pronouns. ELT Journal 8 (2): 173–178.
Peter, Mühlhäusler, and Rom Harré. 1990. Pronouns and people: The linguistic construction of social and personal identity. Oxford: Blackwell.
Prentice, Deborah A., Dale T. Miller, and Jenifer R. Lightdale. 1994. Asymmetries in attachment to groups and to their members: Distinguishing between common-identity and common-bond groups. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin 20 (5): 484–493.
Proctor, Katarzyna, and Lily I-Wen Su. 2011. The 1st person plural in political discourse: American politicians in interviews and in a debate. Journal of Pragmatics 43 (13): 3251–3266.
Pyykkö, Riitta. 2002. Who is ‘us’ in Russian political discourse. In Us and Others: Social identities across languages, discourses and cultures, ed. Anna Duszak, 233–248. Amsterdam: Benjamins.
Quirk, Randolph, Sidney Greenbaum, Geoffrey Neil Leech, and Jan Svartvik. 1985. A comprehensive grammar of the English language. London: Longman.
Scott, Mike. 2008. WordSmith Tools version 5. Liverpool: Lexical Analysis Software.
Shaw, Sylvia. 2000. Language, gender and floor apportionment in political debates. Discourse and Society 11 (3): 401–418.
Wahl-Jorgensen, Karin. 2015. Resisting epistemologies of user-generated content? In Cooptation, segregation and the boundaries of journalism, ed. Matt Carlson, 169–185. New York: Routledge.
Wales, Katie. 1996. Personal pronouns in present-day English. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Walsh, Clare. 2001. Gender and discourse: Language and power in politics, the church and organisations. Edinburgh: Pearson Education.
Wilson, John. 1990. Politically speaking. Oxford: Blackwell.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2019 The Author(s)
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Formato, F. (2019). Women in the Public Sphere: Gendered Language. In: Gender, Discourse and Ideology in Italian. Palgrave Studies in Language, Gender and Sexuality. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-96556-7_4
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-96556-7_4
Published:
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-319-96555-0
Online ISBN: 978-3-319-96556-7
eBook Packages: Social SciencesSocial Sciences (R0)