A Critical Discourse Analysis of Gender Identity in Turkish Newspapers

Abstract

This study aimed to analyze gender identity in Turkish media context as presented in three Turkish newspapers: Hürriyet, Sözcü, and Yeni Akit from a Critical Discourse Analysis perspective. It employed Fairclough’s three tier analysis framework and transitivity patterns of Systemic Functional Linguistics as an adjunct theory to discover how gender is ideologically displayed across different media platforms. A purposive sampling was conducted to select the excerpts from the data, the news reports published on specific dates. These excerpts were examined by two raters to ensure the data was an accurate representative sample. A mixed method approach was adapted to analyse the data; the quantitative section focused on the statistical findings of the process types employed to represent gender and gender ideologically and the qualitative section had two parts; the first part analyzed the data from a critical perspective to specify the types of identity and ideology associated with each gender and the second part compared the content of three newspapers to investigate their differences in terms of their news coverage as it relates to gender, gender identity and gender ideology. The findings revealed that men and women are represented differently in all newspapers; with men appearing in more enabling and women in disabling discourses. Also, it was demonstrated that the transitivity patters present men in more powerful and dominating discourse while assigning women inferior and subordinated roles. The critical analysis of the data demonstrated various identities and ideological expectations from men and women. The contrastive analysis of the three newspapers showed variations in how newspapers with different ideological and political orientations tackle gender and gender identity; with more liberal newspapers, Hürriyet and Sözcü seeing gender from a more dynamic perspective than Yeni Akit which approaches gender and gender identity from a conservative perspective where women are reduced to their traditional and religious roles.