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Article published In: Critical perspectives on gender, politics and violence
Edited by Eleonora Esposito
[Journal of Language Aggression and Conflict 9:1] 2021
► pp. 155–183

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Are gold hoop earrings and a dab of red lipstick enough to get even Democrats on the offensive?

The case of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez

 | University of Campania Luigi Vanvitelli, Italy
Published online: 4 March 2021
DOI logo with link
https://doi.org/10.1075/jlac.00057.ras
Abstract
According to news media outlets, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (AOC), the newly-elected Democratic representative from New York, has stirred up conflicting feelings among Republicans and Democrats on Capitol Hill, attracting criticism, mockery and disapproval from both parties. The overarching aim of this study is to explore the extent to which these attitudes are acts of verbal aggression often dissimulated as patronizing warnings or manifestations of an opinion (Ramirez, Martin J., and Jose Manuel Andreu. 2003. “Aggression’s Typologies.” Revue Internationale de Psychologie Sociale IRSP 16(3): 125–141.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar; . 2015. The Politics of Fear. What Right-Wing Populist Discourses Mean. London: Sage. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar). In particular, by analyzing a corpus of headlines regarding AOC’s political persona and activism collected from six major conservative and liberal newspapers circulating in the US, the study aims to detect linguistic markers associated with aggression and verify their level of toxicity (Musolff, Andreas. 2012. “The Study of Metaphor as Part of Critical Discourse Analysis.” Critical Discourse Studies 9(3): 301–310. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar). To this purpose, both quantitative and qualitative methodological approaches are used with particular reference to Corpus Linguistics (Baker, Paul, Costa Gabrielatos, Majid KhosraviNik, Anthony M. McEnery, and Ruth Wodak. 2008. “A Useful Methodological Synergy? Combining Critical Discourse Analysis and Corpus Linguistics to Examine Discourses of Refugees and Asylum Seekers in the UK Press.” Discourse and Society 19(3): 273–306. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar; Kilgarriff, Adam, Vít Baisa, Jan Bušta, Miloš Jakubíček, Vojtěch Kovář, Jan Michelfeit, Pavel Rychlý, and Vít Suchomel. 2014. “The Sketch Engine: Ten Years on.” Lexicography 11: 7–36. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar) and the Discourse-Historical Approach (Reisigl, Martin, and Ruth Wodak. 2001. Discourse and Discrimination: Rhetorics of Racism and Antisemitism. New York: Routledge.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar, . 2016. “The Discourse-Historical Approach.” In Methods of Critical Discourse Studies, edited by Ruth Wodak and Michael Meyer, Third Edition, 23–61. London/CA/New Delhi: Sage.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar). Findings show that biased mediatized political discourse can influence attitudes toward aggressive speech behavior, and, therefore, intensify the devious nature of aggressive acts.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Context of study
    • 2.1Aggressive speech behavior
  • 3.Data and Methodology
    • 3.1Corpus
    • 3.2Methodological framework
  • 4.Findings and discussion
    • 4.1Sentiment analysis
    • 4.2Concordance analysis
    • 4.3Analysis of full headline titles
  • 5.Discussion
  • 6.Conclusions
  • References
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