TRANSFORMATIONS OF GENDER CONCEPTUALISATION IN THE POLITICAL DISCOURSE OF THE USA (2017-2021)

Abstract

The current article studies transformations of gender conceptualization in the political discourse of the USA from 2017 to 2021. In recent years, numerous large-scale protests in the United States of America, such as #MeToo, have affected political discourse, in particular in the United States. It should be noted that specific changes were also caused by the publication of UN recommendations on the use of more inclusive language in political communication, which did not rely on a binary understanding of gender, suggesting for the first time the use of gender-neutral terms and the avoidance of words that indicate masculinity (for example, congressman, etc.). These events lead to the transformation of the English language and weaken the binary understanding of gender, which can potentially affect the English speakers’ language world model. The article aims to investigate changes in the gender component in the language of USA political discourse associated with the introduction of gender-inclusive language and its impact on changes in the modern English language. To study the transformations of gender concept in the political discourse of the United States, a corpus linguistic analysis of the language of the United States Congress is proposed. Using two language corpora, namely the Google Books Ngram Viewer and the Congressional Regional Corpus, the article compares the frequency of use of gender marked words that are associated with a specific gender (e. g., congressman, spokesperson, etc.) with the frequency of their gender-neutral equivalents (representative, spokesperson, etc.). The comparative analysis allows us to draw a conclusion about changes in the political discourse of the USA, in particular in its gender conceptualisation: the gender component is becoming more inclusive, the binary understanding of gender is becoming less unambiguous, and the attitude towards non-binary personalities is becoming more tolerant.