Female gender representations in digital mass media via discourse analysis: A case study

The goal of this work is to reveal the discursive strategies that employ the digital platform of a Chilean mass media to represent the female gender and the corresponding people interaction on social networks with respect to the news. This is important because if we can detect the existence of male hegemony, we could conclude that it is a prevailing ideology and thus corroborate the existence of a patriarchal order in the national press. We take as a starting point that mass media constitute a privileged access platform, because through language they spread a particular world vision, even though the press - as publicly representation - intend to accommodate a wide and heterogeneous set of speeches. The mass media, as active agents in social processes, target imagined, massive, and diverse audiences, because through its discourse, they present fragments and perspectives of the “reality” with which hide, describe, make visible, ignore or reinforce constructions and ideologies. When analyzing the modes of representation of the female gender, we observe how they refer to the women, generating an important and motivating challenge that will allow us to detect and describe how the subordination of the female gender is manifested in a particular social time.