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In:Migration and Media: Discourses about identities in crisis
Edited by Lorella Viola and Andreas Musolff
[Discourse Approaches to Politics, Society and Culture 81] 2019
► pp. 137–160

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Chapter 6
Gender, metaphor and migration in media representations

Discursive manipulations of the Other

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Available under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives (CC BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license.

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Published online: 7 March 2019
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https://doi.org/10.1075/dapsac.81.07arc
Abstract
This study discusses the gendered use of metaphors in the media texts collected from the U.S. and UK online media sources in the time span of two years (2015–2017) on the topic of the EU 2015 migration. Using Metaphor Identification Procedure (Pragglejaz Group 2007), 88 media texts were analysed, following the criteria of topicality and gender. The findings reveal how the evoked frames of quantifiable and tradable objects, natural phenomena, crimes, war and terrorism contribute to suppressing positive emotions, related to empathy or compassion. It is also determined how the collective media voice is twisted by such underlying categories as competition, hierarchy and dominance that create an ideological opposition and relegate the collective migrant to the Other.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Migration, metaphor and evaluation
  • 3.Gender and the media
  • 4.Data and method
  • 5.Findings and discussion
    • 5.1Migration metaphor use from the male perspective
    • 5.2Migration metaphor use from the female perspective
  • 6.Concluding remarks
  • Notes
  • References
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De Backer, Laurence, Renata Enghels & Patrick Goethals
2023. Metaphor analysis meets lexical strings: finetuning the metaphor identification procedure for quantitative semantic analyses. Frontiers in Psychology 14 DOI logo
Catalano, Theresa & Linda R. Waugh
2022. Metonymies of migration. In Figurative Thought and Language in Action [Figurative Thought and Language, 16], ► pp. 215 ff. DOI logo
De Backer, Laurence & Renata Enghels
2022. The persuasive potential of metaphor when framing Mexican migrants and migration. Metaphor and the Social World 12:2 ► pp. 204 ff. DOI logo

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