GENDER ASPECT OF THE CONCEPT OF POWER IN CONTEMPORARY ENGLISH-LANGUAGE POLITICAL MEDIA DISCOURSE
Abstract
This article investigates the gender aspect of the concept POWER in contemporary English-language political media discourse. The relevance of the study is determined by the fact that political discourse is an important tool for constructing social representations of power and its distribution, while the gender perspective allows identifying hidden stereotypes and mechanisms of discrimination. The aim of the study is to analyze how representatives of different genders, as well as gender-marked categories, are presented in political media in the English-language context, and to determine the ways POWER is linguistically constructed through gender markers. The methodological basis of the research includes cognitive and discourse analysis methods, which make it possible to identify semantic and structural features of the concept POWER in speech. The corpus of materials included news publications, analytical articles, and social media posts from English-language political media over the past seven years. Special attention was paid to lexical-semantic units, stylistic devices, and contextual markers that reflect gender stereotypes or highlight the representation of women and men in political discourse. The results showed that gender features of the concept POWER in English-language media discourse manifest through lexical choices, the use of metaphors and euphemisms, as well as through structural and genre-specific features of texts. Female representations of power are often associated with emotional competence, social responsibility, and communicative sensitivity, while male representations are associated with strength, authority, and dominance. It was found that media actively construct certain gendered narratives, influencing public perception of the roles of women and men in politics. Thus, the article emphasizes the necessity of including a gender component in the analysis of political discourse, as it allows for a more comprehensive understanding of the ways POWER is socially constructed and the impact of media on shaping societal perceptions of gender roles. Thus, the study confirms the necessity of including a gender component in the analysis of political discourse, as it allows for a more comprehensive understanding of how POWER is socially constructed and the impact of media on shaping societal perceptions of gender roles. The results of the study can be applied in educational processes, journalistic practices, and in the development of communication strategies for political and social projects.
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