{"title":"Cartooning and sexism in the time of Covid-19: Metaphors and metonymies in the Arab mind.","authors":"Ahmed Abdel-Raheem","doi":"10.1177/09579265221113028","DOIUrl":null,"url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Using a large-scale corpus of 706 coronavirus cartoons by male and female Arab artists, this study takes a fresh and more cognitive look at sexism in multimodal discourse. Specifically, it examines the role of salience and grammar (and hence of metaphor and metonymy) in gender bias and/or in discrimination against women. It argues that both men and women are vulnerable to the influence of stereotypical and outdated beliefs that create unconscious bias. But this raises the crucial issue of whether we can speak of 'overt' sexism in images. Issues around terminology and conceptualization are thus also investigated. Importantly, this paper makes the following contributions to feminist and cross-cultural pragmatics: (i) it brings a distinctly Arabic perspective to gender and language; (ii) it expands socio-cognitive pragmatics beyond spoken and written communication; (iii) it shows a close coupling between an Arabic grammar and other aspects of culture; and (iv) it has the potential for impact beyond academia, specifically in the sphere of coronavirus care or of health communication.</p>","PeriodicalId":47965,"journal":{"name":"Discourse & Society","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":2.4000,"publicationDate":"2023-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://ftp.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pub/pmc/oa_pdf/a2/82/10.1177_09579265221113028.PMC9969224.pdf","citationCount":"2","resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":null,"PeriodicalName":"Discourse & Society","FirstCategoryId":"98","ListUrlMain":"https://doi.org/10.1177/09579265221113028","RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":null,"EPubDate":"2022/7/26 0:00:00","PubModel":"Epub","JCR":"Q1","JCRName":"COMMUNICATION","Score":null,"Total":0}
引用次数: 2
Abstract
Using a large-scale corpus of 706 coronavirus cartoons by male and female Arab artists, this study takes a fresh and more cognitive look at sexism in multimodal discourse. Specifically, it examines the role of salience and grammar (and hence of metaphor and metonymy) in gender bias and/or in discrimination against women. It argues that both men and women are vulnerable to the influence of stereotypical and outdated beliefs that create unconscious bias. But this raises the crucial issue of whether we can speak of 'overt' sexism in images. Issues around terminology and conceptualization are thus also investigated. Importantly, this paper makes the following contributions to feminist and cross-cultural pragmatics: (i) it brings a distinctly Arabic perspective to gender and language; (ii) it expands socio-cognitive pragmatics beyond spoken and written communication; (iii) it shows a close coupling between an Arabic grammar and other aspects of culture; and (iv) it has the potential for impact beyond academia, specifically in the sphere of coronavirus care or of health communication.
期刊介绍:
Discourse & Society is a multidisciplinary peer-reviewed journal whose major aim is to publish outstanding research at the boundaries of discourse analysis and the social sciences. It focuses on explicit theory formation and analysis of the relationships between the structures of text, talk, language use, verbal interaction or communication, on the one hand, and societal, political or cultural micro- and macrostructures and cognitive social representations, on the other hand. That is, D&S studies society through discourse and discourse through an analysis of its socio-political and cultural functions or implications. Its contributions are based on advanced theory formation and methodologies of several disciplines in the humanities and social sciences.