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On the F word: A corpus-based analysis of the media representation of feminism in British and German press discourse, 1990 2009
Sylvia Jaworska and Ramesh Krishnamurthy Discourse Society 2012 23: 401 DOI: 10.1177/0957926512441113
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DAS23410.1177/0957926512441113Jaworska and KrishnamurthyDiscourse & Society
Article
On the F word: A corpus-based analysis of the media representation of feminism in British and German press discourse, 19902009
Sylvia Jaworska
Discourse & Society 23(4) 401431 The Author(s) 2012 Reprints and permission: sagepub. co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav DOI: 10.1177/0957926512441113 das.sagepub.com
Queen Mary University of London, UK
Ramesh Krishnamurthy
Aston University, UK
Abstract
Research in social psychology has shown that public attitudes towards feminism are mostly based on stereotypical views linking feminism with leftist politics and lesbian orientation. It is claimed that such attitudes are due to the negative and sexualised media construction of feminism. Studies concerned with the media representation of feminism seem to confirm this tendency. While most of this research provides significant insights into the representation of feminism, the findings are often based on a small sample of texts. Also, most of the research was conducted in an AngloAmerican setting. This study attempts to address some of the shortcomings of previous work by examining the discourse of feminism in a large corpus of German and British newspaper data. It does so by employing the tools of Corpus Linguistics. By investigating the collocation profiles of the search term feminism, we provide evidence of salient discourse patterns surrounding feminism in two different cultural contexts.
Keywords
British, collocation, corpus linguistics, feminism, German, post-feminism, press discourse
Corresponding author: Sylvia Jaworska, Queen Mary University of London, School of Languages, Linguistics and Film, Mile End Road, London E1 4NS, UK. Email: s.jaworska@qmul.ac.uk
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Discourse & Society 23(4)
Marginalising feminism: An overview of the research into the representation of feminism in public and media discourse
We need to be sensitive to the ways feminism is perceived outside the academic world, to be aware of how it is being appropriated and, especially, misappropriated. (Talbot, 2005: 168)
Nowadays, feminism is seen as bearing little or no relevance to womens lives in contemporary society (McRobbie, 2009). Although there is an awareness of continuing gender inequalities, for example in the gender pay gap, women very rarely identify themselves as feminists, or indeed simply reject feminism (Buschman and Lenart, 1996). Even those who seem to be sympathetic to feminist values distance themselves from the movement (Percy and Kremer, 1995; Riley, 2001). In her most recent analysis of feminism in contemporary society, McRobbie (2009) argues that, since the early 1990s, there has been a steady dismantling of the status of feminism in public discourse. This process of marginalising feminism has been affected by a mechanism which, following Butler (2004), McRobbie (2009: 6) describes as a double entanglement. It is based on the co-existence of conservative values which reinforce traditional gender roles and, at the same time, an essentially feminist stance proclaiming equal opportunities. This is best illustrated by the new discourse of female success which permeates the public discourse space, suggesting that all the battles have been won, and that women are now recognised as equal citizens (McRobbie, 2009: 14). Now it is down to the individual female to merely make the right choices (out of the many possibilities supposedly available to her), in order to become successful and competitive in the labour market. Talbot (2005) provides a telling example of how feminist ideals have been subsumed and misused in the discourse of female empowerment by analysing the advertisement strategies of the National Rifle Association (NRA), aimed at selling guns to women. The underlying theme of the NRA campaign was the feminist slogan: Refuse to Be a Victim, which was used in the 1980s by a group of American feminists to encourage women to stand up against male violence. By adopting the feminist slogan, the NRA appropriated the feminist ideal of self-empowerment, not to raise awareness of violence, but to promote gun ownership. McRobbie (2009) argues that the spaces where the process of marginalising feminism have been particularly successful are in the media industry and popular culture. While the media allow for certain feminist ideas to be represented (e.g. the gender pay gap), they are re-located to the periphery of the media space, which is instead dominated by a strong focus on the female body. If feminism is mentioned, it is normally dismissed as a thing of the past, treated ironically,1 or depicted as a movement fuelled by hostility to men. Such qualities are in strong opposition to the ideal of the new femininity, centred on the fashionbeauty complex promoted by the media, and it is therefore not surprising to see that women tend to reject feminism. In so doing, the media and popular culture are, as McRobbie (2009) argues, the major agents in the dismantling of feminism, and the re-instatement of women as consumers of fashion. For some, such claims may sound like a conspiracy theory. However, some of the arguments brought forward by McRobbie (2009) seem to be supported by empirical evidence.
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In their study on the attitudes towards feminism amongst undergraduate female students in the USA (n = 261), Buschman and Lenart (1996) detected two consistent patterns. One group of respondents (35%) believed that womens status in society was good enough. Hence they did not see any need to support feminist ideals. A slightly larger group of respondents (42%) were of the opinion that there was still a need for improvement in womens status. However, at the same time, they disagreed with the feminist movement. Only a small number of respondents could be clearly classified as feminists (17%). All the groups (apart from the feminists) associated feminism with negative images based on clichd views of the movement as militant or radical. The authors concluded that the label feminism operates as a negative cognitive frame, and this may be due to the stereotyping of feminism in popular discourse, especially in the mass media. A similar pattern of expressing sympathy with feminist ideals, but simultaneously rejecting feminism (I am not a feminist but . . .) was revealed in studies by Griffin (1989), Percy and Kremer (1995) and Aronson (2003). In a survey conducted by Callaghan et al. (1999) with more than 1000 Scottish women, 45% of the respondents identified to some extent with feminist values a high percentage in the opinion of the authors. At the same time, when asked to comment on feminists, their views again largely reflected negative images. Typically, feminists were described as unreasonable, unattractive, unfeminine and extreme, with a small number of respondents equating feminists with lesbians. This negative portrayal of feminists was also confirmed in a study by Riley (2001). The author argues that the deployment of the liberal discourse of equality has been established as a practical ideology in contemporary Western society, paving the way for a new discourse repertoire which devalues feminism, confirms masculinity as the norm, and consequently minimises any need for social change. Riley (2001) further argues that this new discourse is essentially another form of sexism, without the use of overtly sexist terminology, whereby prejudice is justified with reference to positive ideals such as equality and plurality (Gough, 1998: 40). Research into public opinion and attitudes towards feminism amongst both women and men seems to support McRobbies (2009) claims about the double entanglement discussed at the beginning of this section. Scholars tend to link the disavowal of feminism with its treatment in the media (Aronson, 2003; Callaghan et al., 1999). The question which therefore arises is whether the portrayal of feminism is indeed as negative as claimed by these scholars. The representation of feminism in the media has attracted some attention over the last two decades, but research interest has generally been sparse (Lind and Salo, 2002). One of the most influential books on this subject is Faludis (1991) semi-academic (i.e. rather journalistic) account of the role that the Western media has played in devaluing feminist achievements. Drawing on Faludi (1991), Danner and Walsh (1999) analysed the coverage of the Fourth UN Conference on Women in two mainstream US newspapers: the New York Times and the Washington Post. The authors looked at 60 byline stories, and found that barely a quarter of them dealt with issues raised at the conference, such as violence against women and poverty amongst women. Instead, there was a strong focus on representing women as conflicting with each other, underlined by the heavy use of vocabulary associated with disagreement and tension. There was also a tendency to portray the participants attending the conference as radical and unfeminine,
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while the conference itself was trivialised until it seemed more like a carnival. Danner and Walsh (1999) concluded that both newspapers effectively misrepresented the conference, and hence feminist values, by ignoring the main political and social concerns raised by feminists, and instead reverting to the stereotypical views of feminism as radical and unfeminine. Rhode (1995), in her historical overview of the media image of feminism, claims that, despite the growing number of female journalists, the mainstream press has remained largely uninterested in feminism and womens issues. Whenever the feminist movement is discussed, Rhode (1995) argues that the media coverage uses four strategies: demonisation, trivialisation, polarisation, and the focus on individual rather than social transformation. The first strategy relates to the depiction of feminists as radical members of a fringe movement and as unsexed harpies with deviant lifestyles (Rhode, 1995: 693). The frequent references to the physical appearance of feminists, in Rhodes view, serve to trivialise the movement. The author also maintains that feminism and feminists are often portrayed in charged circumstances as antagonistic, polemical, and different from regular women, while their opponents appear in more contemplative settings, conducive to more reasoned responses (i.e. polarisation) (1995: 701). Finally, there is a strong focus on self-transformation, usually consisting of individual success stories encouraging women to believe that they can meet all the challenges of modern life just by improving themselves. This, in turn, obviously discourages any collective action. Similar patterns have been reported in research carried out by Huddy (1997) and Lind and Salo (2002). The latter is particularly interesting for this article, as it is the only corpus-based study of the subject conducted so far. The corpus (135,759,087 words) consisted of transcripts of 35 hours of public affairs programmes aired on various American radio networks between 1993 and 1996. The corpus was searched for the words feminism, feminist, feminists, woman and women. The outputs were categorised in accordance with seven frames: (1) demonisation (deviance), (2) personalisation (roles), (3) trivialisation (appearance, style), (4) goals (civil rights, equality), (5) victimisation (weak and vulnerable), (6) agency (strong, capable) and (7) site/ location (work place, education, home, etc.). The search terms feminism and feminist(s) occurred 25,139 times in the corpus, which amounted to only 0.02% of the total number of words. The authors argued that this provides evidence for the marginalisation of feminism and feminists.2 Woman/women appeared more frequently, representing 0.85%. Moreover, frequent collocations of the search term feminism and feminist/s were radical, militant, lesbian and raging, which led the authors to conclude that feminism and feminist/s do indeed tend to be demonised in the media. Interestingly, feminist/s were trivialised less often than regular women and more commonly associated with goals and rights. Feminist/s were also more frequently framed within the domains of arts, media and politics, while regular women tended to be associated with private spheres such as the home. In their conclusion, the authors stated that attention to feminism in the media is rather sparse. The most interesting result to emerge from the data is that feminism is not seen as relevant to the daily life issues of women. Feminists are seen as odd, and engaged in practices that are foreign to the vast majority of regular women.
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Aims of the present study

The research studies reported above seem to confirm the claims put forward by McRobbie (2009): that the media arena is a site where feminism is marginalised, or trivialised. While these studies provide significant insights into the way in which feminism is represented, there are also some limitations. First and foremost, all are based on investigations of the media in an Anglo-American setting (and there is very little research outside this context). Moreover, with the exception of the corpus-based study by Lind and Salo (2002), the results are mainly based on small samples of texts. In our present study, we intend to address some of the shortcomings of previous work by examining the discourse surrounding feminism in large corpora, and in German as well as British newspaper data. We will do so by employing the methods and tools of Corpus Linguistics (CL). Increasingly, CL has been used in critical discourse studies to examine the discourse of racism (Krishnamurthy, 1996), homosexuality (Baker, 2004), climate change (Grundmann and Krishnamurthy, 2010), refugees (Baker and McEnery, 1996; Gabrielatos and Baker, 2008) and gender issues (Hunt, 2011), uncovering the existence of language patterns and messages otherwise unobserved. Alongside the methods of Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) usually adopted in the investigation of discursive patterns and strategies (Van Dijk, 2001; Wodak, 2001), CL can add a new quantitative dimension to the analysis (Baker et al., 2008). Normally, language users have a range of lexical items at their disposal. However, when referring to a certain phenomenon or a group of people, they may tend to prefer certain lexical choices over others and, in so doing, will propagate a certain version of reality. Van Dijk (1995) highlights the fact that lexical choices (or lexicalisation, as he calls it) are not only evaluative judgements, but also reflect the ideological stance of the user, or the group that she or he represents. A classic example is the use of the terms terrorist (and its associations with extremism in one discourse context) and freedom fighter (in another) (Van Dijk, 1995: 259). Even words or phrases that on the surface seem to have a rather neutral or positive meaning can, in some discourse contexts and in occurrence with certain words, express negative value judgements and specific ideological stances. Stubbs (2001: 105) gives an example of cosy, whose meaning generally tends to be positive, but in the phrase cosy little relationship it expresses the negative meaning of cliquey. This point goes back to Sinclairs (1991) claim that the meaning of a word depends strongly on its relationship with other co-occurring words, and that some words have a tendency to occur with pleasant events, while others may be generally associated with negative situations. Louw (1993: 157) terms this phenomenon semantic prosody, and defines it as the consistent aura of meaning with which a form is imbued by its collocates. Stubbs prefers the term discourse prosody to differentiate between lexical choices that express speaker attitudes in specific contexts, and meanings that are purely lexical and independent of speakers. Baker (2006: 8687) offers a good example to illustrate the difference: the sequence of items glass and of normally attracts words denoting drinks. However, the combination of the word refugees with the verb to plot or to arrest is more than just a lexical combination. It attaches particular attributive or evaluative meanings to the word refugees, which are, in this case, negative; that is, refugees are seen as criminals. The former combination is an
Louw:semantic prosody Stubbs:discourse prosody

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example of semantic preference, while the latter is referred to as discourse prosody. The distinction is important, as we should not think that phenomena such as, for example, migration or feminism inherently attract certain meanings. Rather, certain meanings are attributed to them by language users who prefer particular lexical choices over others (Gabrielatos and Baker, 2008). Frequent patterns of co-occurring choices, that is collocations, are especially interesting to investigate, as they can point to the salient ideas associated with a particular phenomenon. In doing so, they can provide indications as to how the phenomenon is frequently framed in discourse. As Stubbs (2001: 35) states, collocations are not simply lexical items, they are also widely shared within a speech community and are often nodes around which ideological battles are fought (2001: 188). This in turn can hint at the societal value judgements that the phenomenon in question evokes (Mautner, 2007). By investigating the collocation profiles of the search term feminism in two large corpora, we will provide attested evidence of salient discourse patterns, and consequently the discourse prosodies surrounding the word feminism, in two different cultural contexts.
The methodology and corpus data

To investigate the media representation of feminism in British and German newspapers, two corpora of articles that appeared from 1990 to 2009 in major national newspapers of Germany and Great Britain were compiled. All the articles were retrieved from NexisUK.3 To achieve reasonable comparability between the two corpora, the decision was made to look for the search term feminism in national newspapers only. The next criterion for selecting articles was that feminism had to be the primary topic of the article, that is, it had to appear either in the headline or in the lead paragraph. This was done with a view to including only articles in which feminism was discussed as the major topic (or at least one of the major topics), and to exclude texts in which the word was mentioned only in passing. Based on these criteria, the contents of the British Press Corpus (BPC) are as follows (Table 1).
Table 1. The British Press Corpus (BPC) 19902009. 19901999 Guardian/Observer Independent Times/Sunday Times Daily Mail/Mail on Sunday Mirror/Sunday Mirror Total 20002009 Guardian/Observer Times/Sunday Times Independent/Independent on Sunday Articles 597 372 297 177 10 1,453 Articles 524 266 190 Words (tokens) 654,450 352,037 252,929 111,908 5,515 1,376,839 Words (tokens) 413,717 188,207 156,282

Table 1. (Continued) 19901999 Daily Telegraph/Sunday Telegraph Daily Mail/Mail on Sunday Mirror/Sunday Mirror Sun Total BPC Total Articles 134 120 26 15 1,275 2,728
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Words (tokens) 92,459 142,074 14,396 4,030 1,011,165 2,388,004
Table 2. The title, type, frequency and circulation of British newspapers. Newspaper title Sun Daily Mail Mirror Mail on Sunday Sunday Mirror Daily Telegraph Times Guardian Sunday Times Independent Sunday Telegraph Observer Independent on Sunday Type of publication4 tabloid middle-range tabloid middle-range tabloid middle-range tabloid middle-range tabloid broadsheet broadsheet broadsheet broadsheet broadsheet broadsheet broadsheet broadsheet Frequency of publication daily except Sunday daily except Sunday daily except Sunday every Sunday every Sunday daily except Sunday daily except Sunday daily except Sunday every Sunday daily except Sunday every Sunday every Sunday every Sunday Circulation5 7,682,000 4,678,000 3,221,000 2,098,244 1,900,460 1,761,000 1,673,000 1,102,000 1,011,385 543,000 499,612 274,304 164,518
In the British corpus, most of the data come from four newspapers and their corresponding Sunday publications: The Guardian, The Independent, The Times and The Daily Telegraph. There are also the three biggest selling newspapers: The Sun, The Daily Mail and The Mirror (see Table 2). The German corpus is considerably smaller, which is due to the restricted number of publications in German available in NexisUK (see Table 3). The largest number of articles comes from Tageszeitung (TAZ) followed by Die Zeit, Die Welt, together with its Sunday publication, and Frankfurter Rundschau. Der Spiegel is a popular weekly magazine. Bunte is also a weekly magazine but it focuses mainly on fashion and celebrities, and can be classified as a middle-range tabloid (see Table 4). Both corpora were searched by using WordSmith Tools (Scott, 2010). The search terms used were feminism in the British corpus and Feminismus in the German corpus. Baker (2006) recommends using large reference corpora when applying corpus methodology in the investigation of discursive constructions of a given social phenomenon. Large reference corpora are normally regarded as representative of a language in general,
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Table 3. The German Press Corpus (GPC) 19902009. 19901999 TAZ Zeit Welt/Welt am Sonntag Spiegel Bunte Total 20002009 TAZ Zeit Welt/Welt am Sonntag Frankfurter Rundschau Spiegel Bunte Total GPC total Articles 160 140 15 7 2 324 Articles 279 220 84 60 29 3 675 999
Words (tokens) 108,397 146, 672 11,810 8,622 155 267,034 Words (tokens) 177,970 188,803 60,347 38,859 19,678 4,840 490,497 757,531
Table 4. The title, type, frequency and circulation of German newspapers. Newspaper title Spiegel Bunte Zeit Welt am Sonntag Welt Frankfurter Rundschau TAZ Type of publication broadsheet middle-range tabloid broadsheet broadsheet broadsheet broadsheet broadsheet Frequency of publication every Sunday every Monday every Thursday every Sunday daily except Sunday daily except Sunday daily except Sunday Circulation 975,0006 634,7807 503,5598 412,5009 252,33410 122.51911 101,57212
and contain data from a variety of sources. For this reason, they act as a good benchmark of what is normal in language against which data from ones own corpus can be compared (Baker, 2006: 43). The reference corpora can also reveal certain normative language patterns associated with the phenomenon in focus, and indicate how the search term is used, the associations it has, and who is likely to use it. For this reason, we decided to consult two large corpora of English and German language in order to find out how the search terms feminism and Feminismus are framed, in which types of text, and the associations they have. For English, we consulted the Bank of English, which is a corpus created at Birmingham University by COBUILD (a joint project with HarperCollins Publishers) and used originally for writing dictionaries and other language reference publications.
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Now it is used mainly for research and teaching. It consists of 448 million words of largely British, American, Australian and Canadian English texts; written texts (newspapers, magazines, fiction and non-fiction books, and ephemera junk mail, advertising and information leaflets, etc.); and recorded speech (radio broadcasts, formal interviews, informal conversations, etc.). The vast majority of the texts are from the 1990s. The corpus is not publicly available.13 For German, the corpus stored at the Institut fr Deutsche Sprache (IDS) in Mannheim was used. It is the worlds largest collection of texts in German (3.9 billion words), including the Swiss and Austrian varieties. The IDS corpus consists predominantly of written texts, of which a large sample is publicly available. The corpus is for the main part a collection of press articles, including many regional Austrian, German and Swiss newspapers. It can be searched using a web-based interface, which has an inbuilt corpus software programme (Belica, 1995).
Representations of feminism in the reference corpora

This section presents the main findings which emerged from the two reference corpora. In the present study, we focus on collocates which will be categorised into semantic groups in order to identify recurrent discourse patterns that surround the search term feminism in Anglophone and German-speaking contexts.
Representations of feminism in the Bank of English

A search for the word feminism in the Bank of English returned 3077 occurrences. To begin with, we examined the distribution of the search term across the genres and registers contained in the corpus. The analysis revealed that the word is used more frequently in American academic books, and in Canadian and British writing. It is also frequently used in British broadsheet newspapers, such as The Guardian, The Independent and The Times. It is less frequently used in business and scientific texts (such as the Economist or New Scientist), and in spoken media covering international affairs (BBC World Service radio broadcasts and American national public radio or NPR). Feminism is not an issue discussed frequently in tabloids, and it does not generally feature often in the spoken genres included in the corpus. All in all, the analysis of the distribution of the search term strongly indicates that feminism is a matter featured predominantly in the written mode, particularly in academic text types. Moreover, feminism is more likely to appear in broadsheets as opposed to tabloids. Given that broadsheet newspapers have a much smaller circulation compared to tabloids, we can assume that the impact of feminism (if any) is restricted to a small section of society. In the next step, we examined collocates, that is words that co-occur more frequently than normal distribution with the search term feminism, in order to capture its most frequent lexical associations. The list of collocates was obtained by using the t-score statistic (which calculates the co-occurrence frequencies expected from corpus frequencies, and compares this with the actual number of co-occurrences) and sorted by frequency. The procedure yielded the following results (see Table 5).
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Table 5. The 20 most frequent collocates of feminism within a 5 to +5 span. Collocate of and is has women radical her about feminism political wave post lesbian feminist anti men new modern politics socialist t-score 1,211 965 415 248 204 131 123 115 110 76 70 65 64 58 55 55 55 45 45 42 Frequency 16,568,256 12,321,319 9,037,262 10,450,125 13,460,741 11,360,602 6,322,697 5,981,272 10,471,986 7,788,159 8,253,780 7,620,464 7,905,844 7,556,627 7,044,710 6,019,111 5,725,465 6,261,655 5,944,469 6,375,852
The top 50 collocates were subsequently categorised into thematic groups. Since some words could belong to more than one thematic group, their use in context was carefully examined by looking at the concordance lines. Overall, six thematic groups were identified, as summarised in Table 6 below.
Table 6. The 50 most frequent collocates of feminism categorised into six thematic groups. Category political movements sex, gender time place evaluative academic Collocates radical, political, anti, socialist, politics, movement, Marxism, liberal, minority, equality, liberation, black lesbian, gay, lesbianism, gender 1970s, post, contemporary, wave, second, generation Western new, modern theory
As Table 6 shows, the search term feminism is strongly associated with political movements, most of which are on the left of the political spectrum, such as socialist and Marxism. Within this context, the most frequent collocate is the adjective radical, suggesting a strong sense of extremism. At the same time, there are a number of collocates pointing to a progressive stance, as exemplified by the relatively frequent use of liberal

Table 7. Distribution of the search term Feminismus in the IDS corpus: 10 main sources. Occurrences 209 196 187 131 117 106 105 98 81 45 Source
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19922000 Die Presse 19971999 Frankfurter Rundschau 19962010 Rhein-Zeitung 19902010 Nrnberger Nachrichten 19912000 Salzburger Nachrichten 19972010 St Galler Tagblatt 19962000 Zrcher Tagesanzeiger 19952010 Mannheimer Morgen 20022010 Nrnberger Zeitung 19962000 Tiroler Tageszeitung
and equality. However, this is contrasted by the frequent references to homosexuality, as in the frequent use of the adjectives lesbian and gay. This largely confirms the stereotypical and rather widespread view of feminism as a movement of lesbian women (cf. Callaghan et al., 1999; Riley, 2001). Another noticeable pattern is the frequent connection of feminism with the past, as evident in the use of time references such as 1970s and post-; the latter, in particular, implies that feminism is historical and no longer current. Finally, we can see from the list of collocates that feminism is a movement strongly associated with the Western part of the world. Within the 50 most frequent collocates, there are no examples of collocates indicating other geographical locations.
Representations of feminism in the IDS corpus of German

The search for the word Feminismus in the IDS corpus yielded 1799 occurrences (the size of the corpus: 2,291,515,012 words). In terms of its distribution, Feminismus occurs more frequently in major national newspapers (see Table 7). The greatest number of articles was retrieved from two large national newspapers: the Austrian Die Presse and the German Frankfurter Rundschau. Feminism is also frequently discussed in regional newspapers, such as Nrnberger Nachrichten and Rhein-Zeitung, but this apparent frequency is inflated by the large amount of data in the corpus from both these newspapers, covering 14 years or more (see Table 7). Given the large number of texts, the coverage of the issue is actually rather minimal. Since the newspaper data in the IDS corpus was collected in different years, and coverage for each source publication spans different periods of time, it is difficult to make robust claims about the overall increase or decrease of media attention regarding the issue of feminism over the past two decades in the German-speaking press. As with the English data, the next step was to examine collocates of the search term. These were retrieved by using the co-occurrence software function available within the web interface of the IDS corpus (Belica, 1995). Unfortunately, this software uses loglikelihood ratio (LLR) to calculate collocates, and no other statistical measures are available (so an exact comparison of the English and German data in terms of collocation is
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not technically possible). A span of five words to the left and to the right of the search term was chosen again, to offer some consistency. The analysis produced 297 collocates. Table 8 shows the 20 most frequently occurring LLR collocates.
Table 8. The 20 most frequent collocates of Feminismus within a 5 to +5 span. Collocate Frau Emanzipation Ikone antiradikal gleich kologie Thema Maskulismus kmpferisch Machismo post neu Sex Sozialismus Geschlecht Konsum Vertreter Mann feministisch LLR 333 230 211 204 166 156 144 143 140 137 134 133 119 113 106 104 94 93 90 90 Frequency 138 16 14 19 22 21 16 49 3 9 6 15 67 10 11 12 7 12 37 11
Subsequently, all 297 collocates were categorised into seven thematic groups. These included: (1) political movements/ideas, (2) sex, gender roles/body, (3) feminist ideas, (4) academic/arts/literature, (5) places/nationalities, (6) time, and (7) social trends. Table 9 shows the main collocates that accompany the word Feminismus. As can be seen from the list, Feminismus in the German-speaking press seems to be strongly associated with political movements and ideas, particularly with those on the left of the political spectrum such as Sozialismus (Socialism) and Kommunismus (Communism). These movements, of course, are in Western countries widely regarded as belonging to the past and are nowadays discussed, if at all, only in academic and political circles. A point worth noting is the frequent use of adjectives such as radikal (radical), kmpferisch (combative) and militant (militant), all pointing to a rather threatening and aggressive activism. Interestingly, the subsequent examination of collocates of the lemma radikal in the IDS corpus (60,335 occurrences) confirmed that it is used mainly with reference to political movements or religious groups seen in press discourse as fundamentalist or extreme, such as Islamist (Islamist), Palstinenser (Palestinians), Moslem and Hamas. This is even more evident in the case of militant (12,799), which is almost exclusively used to describe extremist groups. All of this evidence suggests that

Table 9. Collocates of Feminismus categorised into seven thematic groups. Category political movements/ideas Collocates
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sex, gender roles/body feminist ideas academic/arts/literature places/nationalities time social trends
radikal (22) kologie (16) politisch (14) Vertreter (12) Sozialismus (11) Kommunismus (10) kmpferisch (9) militant (7) existieren real (5) Ideologie (7) Nationalismus (5) Kampf (5) extrem (4) Frau (138) Mann (37) mnnlich (14) weiblich (13) Geschlecht (12) Machismo (10) Sex (10) sexual (7) Mutter (5) feminin (5) schwul (4) neu (67) Emanzipation (16) Ikone (14) feministisch (11) Feministin (5) Alice Schwarzer (6) Beauvoir (4) Thema (49) Pusch (12) Kunst (8) Theorie (6) Philosophie (6) Diskussion (5) akademisch (4) Medium (4) amerikanisch (11) Post [-feminism] (15) westlich (7) 70er (10) Jahr (18) Geschichte (9) heute (6) siebziger (4) Konsum (7) Pop (6) Mode (4) sozial (4)
there is a tendency to position feminism close to fringe and/or leftist organisations with a radical or extremist potential. Feminismus also strongly collocates with words which can be indentified with the main aims of the movement, such as emancipation (Emanzipation). However, a closer look at the concordance lines reveals that these aims tend to be deprecated or regarded as already achieved (i.e. suggesting that feminism is obsolete). There are also very frequent references to words denoting gender, sex, and gender roles, such as Frau (women), Sexismus (sexism), Geschlecht (gender), Mann (man) and Machismo (macho). A quick look at the concordance lines shows that words such as feminism, sexism and machismo are often grouped together; and rarely do we find more elaborative statements pointing to the fact that, for example, feminism is against sexism. In the list of collocates, there are also many words that denote academic domains, as well as related areas of philosophy and the arts. Feminism is frequently discussed in book reviews in relation to academic or semi-academic publications and authors (e.g. Luise Pusch14). Geographically, feminism is associated with the West, particularly the USA, and there are also frequent time references, especially to the 1970s.
Summary of results from the reference corpora

The collocation profile which has emerged in the previous part of the study suggests that, in both reference corpora, feminism is framed predominantly as a political movement closely associated with radicalism, militancy, and leftist ideology, which in turn have distinctively negative connotations. Feminism is, at the same time, heavily historicised through frequent references to past decades and the history of the movement. Although there are some collocates referring to the aims of feminism (such as emancipation), there is a tendency to downplay these goals, or to see them as already achieved. This latter perspective is reinforced by the frequent use of the prefix post- in both the English and
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German corpora, implying that feminism is finished, or at least no longer relevant. Overall, the analysis shows that feminism is portrayed as a fringe political movement, and there is a tendency to demonise or to sexualise it. The latter is evidenced by the frequent use of words from the domains of sex and gender. There are also a number of features that point to differences in the representation of feminism in the two cultural contexts. In the English corpus, there is a higher proportion of collocates referring to homosexuality, confirming the stereotypical tendency to see feminism as a movement of and for lesbian women. By contrast, in the German corpus, there are a greater number of items referring to the domain of academia and the arts, which suggests that feminism is a subject of mainly intellectual interest. The initial analysis of the representation of feminism in the large reference corpora has confirmed some of the claims made by social and cultural theorists, that feminism is essentially a marginalised or demonised phenomenon. The analysis also pointed to some differences in the representation of the movement in the British and German-speaking cultural contexts not accounted for by previous research. However, the analysis also has some limitations. First, both corpora use different statistical tests to calculate collocations, making an exact comparison of the English and German data in terms of collocation technically not possible. Second, many source publications cover different periods of time. Third, in the German corpus, there was a much higher proportion of regional (as opposed to national) newspapers. The former are normally less interested in generic social phenomena, or if they are, they tend to present them from the point of view of specific regional needs. Because we were interested in the representation of feminism in a broader national context, we carried out an in-depth analysis in two large corpora of English and German that consisted of national newspapers published in Great Britain and Germany.
Representations of feminism in the British and German press corpora Feminism in the British Press Corpus (BPC)
The search for the word feminism in the British national newspapers available at NexisUK yielded 2728 articles: 1453 of these were published in 19901999, and 1275 in 20002009 (see Table 1). By way of comparison, the word terrorism (as the major mention) for the year 1990 alone produced 2773 results. Hence, we can assume that feminism occupies a more marginal position in the British newspaper coverage. The inclusion of several new newspapers in the database in 2000 did not contribute to an increase in the number of articles. This is not surprising, because most of the new data came from tabloids (which, as discussed above, are not very interested in feminism). In fact, where data from the same newspaper is available for both decades, we actually observe a slight (or in some cases substantial) decrease in the number of articles. Between 1990 and 1999, for instance, The Times and its sister publication The Sunday Times published 297 articles about feminism, while The Independent had 372. In the subsequent decade, the number of articles declined to 266 and 190 respectively. We can also witness a decrease in the number of articles featuring feminism as the main topic across all national newspapers in the decade 20002009. This points to a significant marginalisation of the movement in the British press.

Table 10. The 20 most frequent collocates of feminism. Collocates of the is and has that a new in to was for as on about not with by women it
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Frequency 1,155 639 573 545 439 334 249 212 198 172 170 130 126 116 108 106 87 65 60 58
Following Sinclairs principle Decide on the strongest pattern and start there (2003: xvi) we looked first at collocates in the vicinity of the search term (using a 5 to +5 span) which occurred more than 10 times. The analysis was conducted by using WordSmith Tools (Scott, 2010) and 661 collocates in total were retrieved. As Table 10 above illustrates, the top 20 right-hand collocates include predominantly grammatical items, mainly forms of the verb to be, and a number of prepositions. Most researchers tend to exclude function/grammatical words, and focus exclusively on lexical items (Baker, 2006: 100). While lexical or content words carry the primary lexical meaning, they combine with grammatical words to form recurrent lexico-grammatical patterns (or chunks) that can specify or modify the meaning of a word (cf. Sinclair, 1991). For this reason, we examined the most frequent lexicogrammatical patterns, which in the BPC were: of feminism (1155), feminism is (573) and feminism and (545). In English, the preposition of often occurs with nouns to form nominal groups, in which the first element can often denote, among other things, a measure or an attribute (Sinclair, 1991). In order to see what attributes are frequently associated with feminism, the most frequent collocates appearing to the left of the pattern of feminism were examined. Most of the collocates were time references such as years, decades, history, age and days, which point to a strong historicalisation of the concept (see Table 11). As can be seen from Table 11, feminism is more strongly associated with failures (15 times, plus failure 10 times) than with achievements (9 occurrences) and gains (8 times). Another noticeable pattern is
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Table 11. The most frequent collocates to the left of the pattern of feminism. wave (35) years (34) face (23) brand (22) future (20) decades (19) cause (17) rise (17) afraid (16) kind (16) failures (15) history (13) school (13) age (12) name (12) definition (10) failure (10) achievements (9) days (8) gains (8) Table 12. Complements of feminism is. Negative meanings feminism is dead (24) no + longer (5) bad (5) seen + as negative (4) boring (4) finished (3) Positive meanings news (6) action (5) alive (4) of feminism
brand of feminism, which suggests the treatment of feminism as a commodity. This deprives feminism of its essentially ideational ethos. Feminism is also often seen as a movement in flux, always in need of a re-make. This is evidenced by the frequent use of the words wave and face, the latter usually accompanied by the adjective changing or new. The examination of feminism and provided further indicative results. The most frequent collocates to the right of the pattern were the (70), political (11), gay (11) and lapdancing (9). It is particularly surprising to see feminism linked so frequently with lapdancing a phenomenon which most feminists would surely oppose. The list also shows that feminism is strongly associated with gay, which is then predominantly followed by the word rights (9). This is an aspect which most feminists have indeed always supported. At the same time, it is only one point of the feminist programme, and it would be rather reductionist to associate feminism solely with gay rights. The last pattern we examined was feminism is. Most of the words to the right were grammatical words such as a (54) and the (29) and the negative particle not (47); but the adjective dead (24) also occurred frequently. A further analysis of the concordances for the pattern feminism is a/the showed that one of the recurrent patterns was feminism is a + dirty word (6). Overall, there is a stronger tendency for the pattern to occur with words evoking a negative evaluation (see Table 12). To see whether feminism is indeed predominantly imbued with negative associations, in the final step we decided to examine the most frequent adjectives occurring in the vicinity of the search term. It is interesting to see that the most frequent adjective is new, which could suggest an innovation in, or re-birth of, the movement (see Table 13). However, a look at the concordances revealed that the phrase new feminism frequently refers to a book titled The New Feminism by Natasha Walter (1998), which is often discussed in book reviews. When analysing the concordance lines, we also realised that more than 30 instances of the word new and feminism were surrounded by scare quotes and written in lower case, hence not referring to the aforementioned book. This indicates that the concept of new feminism is often treated ironically, or its existence is questioned. The second most

Table 13. The most frequent adjectives in the vicinity of feminism. new (212) post (104) modern (88) British (74) American (60) radical (58) anti (23) contemporary (19) French (17) early (14) socialist (14) Western (9) western (8)
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feminism
frequent modifier is the prefix post-. The term post-feminism was introduced by Faludi (1991) in her semi-academic analysis of feminism in the US media, to refer to a backlash against feminism and feminists during the Reagan era. Since then, the phrase has been associated mainly with the rejection of feminism on the grounds that equality has been achieved, and that therefore feminism is obsolete in modern society. The fact that the term features so prominently in the corpus signals that feminism is often framed as a thing of the past. Finally, feminism is exclusively associated with the Western world. All in all, our analysis of the search term feminism in the BPC revealed that there are five distinctive frames adopted in the portrayal of the movement. First and foremost, feminism is strongly historicised, which is evidenced by the high number of time expressions referring to the past. Second, the frequent occurrence of words such as dead, failure and post- suggest that feminism is often negatively framed as a movement that did not achieve much, and which is finished. Third, there is a tendency to see feminism as a commodity; and fourth, we find a number of collocates associated with sexuality, particularly with homosexuality. Finally, feminism is firmly located in Western countries, and there are virtually no references to any other places in the world. Overall, we can conclude that the discourse prosody of the search term feminism tends to be rather negative. A question that may be asked is to what extent this rather negative portrait is a strategy widely distributed across the corpus and apparent, for example, in a single text. To test this, we selected the first article from our sub-corpus containing the most recent data (published in 2009) in The Guardian. The Guardian was chosen because, given its leftist orientation, it was assumed to be neutral or even positive towards feminism (the same procedure was adopted in the selection of a text in German). The selected Guardian article was published on 17 May 2009 in the section World News. The articles title was Sex, drink and fashion. Is this the new face of American feminism?, and it focused on a debate about the current state of feminism (see Appendix 1). The starting point for the article was a commentary published by a new feminist website called Double X, which accused a popular womens website, Jezebel, of having a damaging effect on womens lives. Jezebel is an American website dedicated predominantly to celebrities, sex and fashion and which claims to have over 900,000 readers throughout the world. The article sets the scene as follows:
An online war has broken out in the womens movement sparked by the Jezebels, young bloggers who flaunt their hard drinking and unashamed promiscuity and who are infuriating traditional feminists.
Striking here is the use of war metaphors to portray the debate between the traditional feminists and the young women who contribute to Jezebel. The war metaphors are also frequent in the rest of this article, and they are mostly used in the depiction of the
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traditional feminists. For example, further on we read that: the site [Double X] chose to fight its first battle with one of its own, accusing Jezebel [] of damaging women or The argument has become so furious that others have stepped in, with all guns blazing, where others refer to traditional feminists such as Naomi Wolf. Although the article tries to offer a balanced view by citing prominent feminists who emphasise the importance of feminism in todays world (feminism is a social justice, there is more of a need for feminist activism than ever), the overall tone is that of a serious generation conflict (young, urban and sexually liberated women vs. traditional feminists) and uncertainty about what feminism really is. There are also a number of negative views expressed directly when portraying feminism and traditional feminists: it [feminism] has become a word that people dont want to be associated with, it [Double X] speaks of trying to slut-shame women. For reasons of space, we cannot offer a detailed analysis of all the discourse strategies employed in this article. However, even from this brief analysis, we can see that the way in which feminism is portrayed here reflects some aspects of the negative discourse prosody described above. Although the most frequent negative collocational patterns identified quantitatively (radical, dead, failure, dirty) are not present in the text, there are a number of other lexical choices that point in the same direction. For example, the use of war metaphors hints at the militancy of feminism, which is questioned by the younger generation of women. Despite the fact that, at the end of the article, the need for feminist action is stressed, the overall impression is that the movement does not respond to the needs of younger women and its social impact is rather low. This is a good example to demonstrate how a quantitative corpus-based analysis can complete a qualitative insight and vice versa.
Feminism in the German Press Corpus (GPC)

The search for the word Feminismus in the German national newspapers available in NexisUK produced 999 articles, of which 324 were published between 1990 and 1999, and 675 between 2000 and 2009 (see Table 3). The smaller number of articles available for the first decade is due to the fact that many of the German newspapers were not available in NexisUK until 1999. It is interesting, though perhaps not surprising, that the greatest number of articles comes from the left-orientated TAZ (439 articles) followed by Die Zeit (360). There are a smaller number of articles from Die Welt, including its Sunday edition, Welt am Sonntag. By way of comparison, the word Terrorismus (terrorism, as the major mention) for the decade 19902000 produced more than 300,000 results. Hence, we can assume that in the German newspaper coverage feminism also occupies a niche. As in the previous section, we began our analysis by retrieving collocates of the search term Feminismus (again using a 5 to +5 span) that occurred more than 10 times. 214 collocates in total were retrieved. The most frequent words to the left were grammatical words such as des (the definite article in the genitive case), its nominative form der and its accusative form den. In the top 20 left collocates, we also find a number of adjectives such as neu (new), konservativ (conservative) and deutsch (German) and the noun Wort (word). The top 20 right collocates include the conjunction und (and), forms of the verb sein (to be) and haben (to have), and several prepositions (see Table 14).

Table 14. The 20 most frequent collocates of Feminismus. Collocates der des und den ist die neuen in zu das eine als sich nicht fr von mit sie Frauen ein
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Frequency 261 257 148 141 99 90 87 67 47 41 32 28 26 26 25 23 21 21 20 19
For further analysis, we focused on the most frequent lexico-grammatical patterns, which in the GPC were as follows: des Feminismus (of feminism, 257), Feminismus und (feminism and, 148) and Feminismus ist (feminism is, 99). In German, the genitive form of the definite article des is most frequently preceded by a noun, and its function is to express possession or attribution. We examined all 257 concordances of the pattern des Feminismus, which allowed us to identify important descriptors that accompany the search term. A high proportion of the words (51 out of 257) pointed to negative attributes, including Ende (end), Krise (crisis) and Dummheit (stupidity). There were 31 words denoting positive aspects for example suggesting a revival of feminism, or the progress of feminism such as Sieg (victory), Errungenschaften (attainments) and Vormarsch (advance). However, a careful reading of concordances suggests that many of the positive attributes are often questioned or denied, as the following examples demonstrate:
(1) Ein Sieg des Feminismus? Wohl kaum. A victory of feminism? I think not. ... wie die Siege des Feminismus sich in Niederlagen verwandeln ... how the victories of feminism turn into defeat [sie] den Vormarsch des Feminismus als zu weit gehend kritisiert. [she] criticises the advances of feminism as going too far.
(2)
(3)
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Table 15. Complements of Feminismus ist. Negative meanings (50) Feminismus ist tot (dead 315) verpnt (frowned upon 1) eine Totgeburt (a stillbirth 1) ein No-Wort (a no word 1) doof (stupid 1) dumm (stupid1) eine realittsferne Veranstaltung (an event detached from reality 1)
Positive meanings (39) interessant (interesting 2) aktuell (current 2) eine Revolution (a revolution 1) eine Bewegung der Humanitt (a movement of humanity 1)
Out of the 257 words to the left, 44 made reference to the past and 43 were attributes of people, mostly famous feminists. These were described as Ikone (icon), Dame (dame), Heldin (heroine), Mutter (mother) or Popstar (pop star). Most of the words refer to women who are dead, or are over 60 years of age (their age is often stated explicitly). Some of the attributes are taken from religious domains, implying a rather dogmatic adherence to the movement (e.g. Patriarchin (patriarch)), or are used ironically (e.g. Katechetin (female catechist), Prophetin (prophetess) and Heilsbringerinnen (female saviours)). The status of feminism as a movement of the past is reinforced by frequent references to its history. Interestingly, many of the positive phrases such as Boomzeiten des Feminismus (boom times of feminism) or Frhling des Feminismus (the spring of feminism) are also located in the past, indicating that the best time of the movement is over. An examination of the pattern Feminismus ist revealed that there are two adjectives used particularly frequently as complements, namely tot (dead) and sexy. After analysing all 99 concordances, it emerged that the pattern Feminismus ist sexy (feminism is sexy) refers to a book title; 50 out of 89 of all complements to the right of the pattern express a negative tendency, some in a very direct manner (see Table 15). The final frequently occurring pattern we examined for this study was Feminismus und (feminism and). Most of the words following the combination are nouns referring to social phenomena and movements. Some of them are related to core feminist ideas such as Geschlechterdemokratie (gender democracy, 3), Frauenbewegung (the womens movement, 3) and Gleichberechtigung (equal rights, 1). Most of the nouns denote phenomena which cannot, however, be described as feminist or feminism-related, for example: Pornographie (pornography, 4), Popkultur (pop culture, 3), Multikulturalismus (multiculturalism, 3), Sex (2) and Elektropop (electro-pop, 2). We also have a number of nouns derived from the academic and artistic domains, such as Kunst (art, 3), Psychoanalyse (psychoanalysis, 2) and Postmoderne (postmodernism, 1). This, in turn, suggests that feminism is often juxtaposed with other popular cultural phenomena, some of which it actually opposes, such as pornography. There is also evidence pointing to feminism as a field of academic inquiry.

Table 16. The most frequent adjectives in the vicinity of Feminismus. neuen (87) konservativen (25) neuer (20) deutschen (20) neue (13) alten (10) amerikanischen (10) existierenden (10) westlichen (10) deutsche (8) konservative (8) konservativer (8) westliche (5) akademischen (5)
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Feminismus
Finally, we examined the most frequent adjectives occurring in the vicinity of the search term. As in the data obtained from the IDS corpus, the most frequent adjective is neuen/neuer/neue (new, 120), which could suggest an innovation in, or rebirth of, the feminist movement. At the same time, we have two frequent adjectives that oppose the concept of a feminist revival, namely konservativen/konservative/konservativer (conservative, 41) and alten (old, 10) (see Table 16). This again indicates that feminism is discussed by referring to oppositions: new versus old, new versus conservative. The examination of the collocate neu in the immediate vicinity of Feminismus revealed another interesting pattern. The most frequent word occurring with neu and feminism is the verb brauchen in the first-person plural (we need, 25 occurrences), often accompanied by the negative adjective keinen (no), forming the sentence: Wir brauchen keinen neuen Feminismus (We dont need a new feminism). In some instances, keinen does not appear, and in this case the sentence is formulated as a question: Brauchen wir einen neuen Feminismus? (Do we need a new feminism? (see Table 17)). This does not suggest a rebirth of the movement. Rather, it points to a set of sceptical attitudes questioning the need for feminism. What is new, or rather what is reported as new, is a conservative type of feminism propagated by the female politicians of the conservative party CDU. We can see from the concordances that the new form of feminism is based on traditional conservative values, taking the patriarchal family as the basic structure of the nation, and is not at all interested in changing the status quo of gender inequality. Indeed, this could far more readily be interpreted as a defeat of the feminist ethos, rather than its revival. Another pattern emerging from the data is the irony in the positioning of feminism on the left of the political continuum. One of the most frequent attributes is existierenden (existing). The examination of concordances revealed that the word is always accompanied by another adjective real (real). The two combined together immediately bring to mind the term real existierender Sozialismus (real existing socialism), which was coined by the communist regime of the former GDR in an attempt to consolidate the ideological fundament of the new country. Scholars studying the GDR dictatorship remind us that this particular term was a form of newspeak used to support an ideological fiction. As Wolle (1998: 237) observes, to put an emphasis on real when referring to existence has a defensive undertone and is, more or less, a linguistic exercise to assert the existence of something which everyone knows does not really exist. Applying the communist newspeak phrase to describe feminism as real existierend creates a sense of ideological illusionism, and reveals a strong sense of irony bordering on cynicism (Table 16). Finally, it is not surprising to see that one of the most frequent adjectives is akademisch (academic), which provides further evidence for the canonisation of feminism (to borrow McRobbies term) as a field of academic inquiry.
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Table 17. Concordances of neu* feminism. N 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 Concordance
, fordert Rang. Vielleicht brauchen wir einen neuen Feminismus? Im Centrum selbst, immerhin, gibtes Alice Schwarzer meinen: Wir brauchen keinen neuen Feminismus, sind jngere Autorinnen durchaus der another wave wir brauchen keine neue Welle des Feminismus. Dass bei der wichtigen Auslotung Trotz Eva-Herman-Hype: Wir brauchen keinen neuen Feminismus, sagt die Wirtschaftsjournalistin Barbara teilweise. Denn die Frage Brauchen wir einen neuen Feminismus? erweist sich als produktiv, haben die zu wiederholen. Denn was wir brauchen, ist kein neuer Feminismus wie denn auch, wenn bis jetzt nicht Trotz Eva-Herman-Hype: Wir brauchen keinen neuen Feminismus, sagt die Wirtschaftsjournalistin Barbara 2007 NEUER FEMINISMUS? OES Brauchen wir neuen Feminismus oder wieder mehr alten oder gar keinen? und nicht nach dem alten? Wir brauchen keinen neuen Feminismus. Der Feminismus hat in zweihundert . Hngen Sie auch der These an, dass wir einen neuen Feminismus brauchen? Was wir auf jeden Fall nicht
In conclusion, the examination of the search term Feminismus and its collocations in the GPC showed that there are four distinctive patterns used to frame the movement. First and foremost, feminism is depicted as a thing of the past (which is emphasised by frequent references to its own history, and also to famous feminists who are either dead or over 60). Even the frequent use of the phrase new feminism, which could evoke a re-birth of the movement, actually indicates that such a revival is rejected, or seen as obsolete. The weak status of the feminist ideal in society is also confirmed by the introduction of the notion of conservative feminism which, at its core, perpetuates the concept of patriarchy (and the traditional model of family as central to the wellbeing of the nation), and dismantles feminism rather than reviving it. Second, feminism is strongly associated with academic fields of inquiry, particularly postmodernism. Third, there is a strong sense of irony in some of the depictions of feminism and feminists, with some of the attributes being suggestive of religious dogmatism. Overall, feminism seems to be, like Communism, a utopia which can only be made real by describing it as real existierend. Finally, there is a strong association of feminism with Western countries, and (as in the BPC) there are virtually no references to any other parts of the world. As was the case with the analysis of the BPC, to complete the above quantitative examination we selected the first article published in the subcorpus of the most recent data (2009), from TAZ. This newspaper was chosen because it can be seen as roughly equivalent to The Guardian. The title of the article was Ungleiche Schwestern (Unequal Sisters) and it was published on 12 May 2009, just five days before the article from The Guardian analysed in the section on feminism in the BPC (see Appendix 1). Interestingly, there is a similarity of topics the TAZ article also focuses on a conflict situation, in this
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case a conflict which emerged between feminists from the Eastern and Western Lnder after the reunification of Germany. The main point discussed here involves the different conceptions of feminism held by women in the East and West. The conflict is introduced in the opening paragraph in the following way:
Ostfrauen sind trutschige Muttis und Westfrauen nervende Emanzen. So sehen sich Feministinnen aus beiden Teilen des Landes nach der Wende. Eine gesamtdeutsche Frauenbewegung scheitert, weil sie nicht miteinander reden knnen. (Women from the East are dowdy mothers and women from the West annoying womens libbers. This is the way in which feminists from each part of the country portray each other after the reunification. A united womens movement fails because they cannot talk to each other.)
The extract shows a sharp and clashing division between the two groups of feminists and it does so by referring to derogatory attributes (trutschige, dowdy; nervende, annoying), with which women on both sides allegedly describe each other. The issue at stake is the view on motherhood and relationships with men. While feminists from the East normally have children, their Western counterparts see it as a betrayal of the feminist ethos (Kinder zu haben bedeutet, mit dem Feind im Bett gewesen zu sein (To have children means to have been in bed with the enemy)). The only issue on which women from both sides agreed was paragraph 218, which made abortion illegal in Germany (this law was subsequently changed in 1995). However, this is described as only a brief moment in the history of the relationship between the two groups. The overall message is that of antagonism and a lack of communication. Feminists on both sides are presented as argumentative and unwilling to compromise or unite. There are also a number of stereotypical views. For example, feminists from the West are portrayed as being kinderlos (childless) and lesbisch (lesbian), while those from the East as verheiratet (married). In her analysis of the media representation of feminism, Rhode (1995) argues that one of the strategies frequently used to portray feminists and feminist issues is that of polarisation. A supposedly balanced view is achieved by presenting extreme positions on both sides, creating a kind of spectacle in which anything sensible in between is left out (Rhode, 1995: 701). This leads to feminism and feminists being frequently presented in highly charged circumstances likely to yield polemics (Rhode, 1995: 701) and appearing as a radical or lunatic fringe. It is striking that the two articles taken from the corpora, which were published at roughly the same time in left-orientated newspapers in Germany and Great Britain, both make use of the polarisation strategy. In both texts, feminism is depicted as a movement represented by quarrelsome women who criticise other women, while true feminist concerns, such as the workmotherhood balance or pay gap, are only mentioned in passing, or not at all.
Conclusions
An analysis of the search term feminism/Feminismus in the British and German press corpora revealed that there is a strong tendency to portray the movement in negative terms. In both corpora, there is a general association of feminism with the past. The movement is often framed as outdated, and no longer relevant. This is evidenced by the
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high frequency of collocates such as dead and post-. At the same time, we did not find many references implying radicalism, demonism or charged circumstances that were, for example, evident in the analysis of the two reference corpora. Moreover, the relevance of feminism in the form of new feminism is either questioned or treated with a touch of irony. Another common feature of the representation of feminism in both corpora is its association with countries of the Western world. The analysis has also pointed to some differences in the portrayal of the movement in the two different cultural contexts. While in the BPC we find more references to sexuality, particularly homosexuality, in GPC there are more associations with academic fields of inquiry and with the arts, suggesting that feminism is seen in the German context as an intellectual rather than a socio-political endeavour. The German press also focuses on new types of feminism, with particular prominence given to the recently emerged conservative feminism, which can in fact be viewed as a mechanism for dismantling many of the feminist ideals. The present study has provided further empirical evidence in support of some of the claims put forward in previous research. Generally speaking, feminism receives little attention in the British and German press (marginalisation) and there is a climate of negativity surrounding the term (Lind and Salo, 2002; Rhode, 1995). There is also a noticeable willingness on the part of the press to report the demise of feminism, or to treat it with a degree of irony (trivialisation). Moreover, feminism is not seen as a movement having wide social support, but is increasingly re-located to the domain of academia, literature and the arts, which are, essentially, spheres open to only a small number of middle-class women. A qualitative analysis of two sample articles has subsequently pointed to the use of the polarisation strategy when depicting the movement, and in doing so, provided further evidence for the rather negative discourse prosody surrounding the depiction of feminism in the media. There are still a number of topics that need to be further investigated. First and foremost, it would be important to see whether there has actually been a change in the representation of feminism between the 1990s and 2000s by performing more rigorous comparative analyses. Second, assuming that peoples general political stance may have an impact on their views of feminism, it would be important to examine with greater precision the differences and similarities in the portrayal of the movement in newspapers representing different political orientations. Finally, it is also crucial to move beyond the search term feminism/Feminismus itself, and to analyse the lexical patterns surrounding those who represent the movement the feminists. Given the high frequency of lexical items such as women/woman and men/man in both press corpora, it would also be interesting to conduct a contrastive analysis of their collocational profiles. Funding
This research received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial or not-for-profit sectors.
Notes
1. To exemplify the ironic treatment of the feminist ideal, McRobbie (2009: 65) refers to an advertisement for the glossy fashion magazine Grazia, published in The Guardian in 2006,
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2.
3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15.
which carried the following message: 42% of women who ask for a pay rise get one. 100% of them would probably celebrate with shoes. It should be noted that taking the percentage of corpus tokens is a rather unconvincing measure of proving marginalisation. Comparing the search term feminism with another one denoting a social movement or a concept would be a better way of assessing its status. The database can be accessed at: http://www.lexisnexis.com/uk/nexis/auth/bridge.do?rand= 0.9027018220641432 The newspapers were classified following the categorisation proposed by Tunstall (1996). Data provided by the Newspaper Marketing Agency at: http://www.nmauk.co.uk/nma/do/ live/factsAndFigures and retrieved on 27 July 2010. Data obtained from: http://www.spiegel-qc.de/deutsch/media/dokumente/partner/kurzportraet/ spiegel_factsheet.pdf on 27 July 2010. Data obtained from: https://www.mediadaten-online.com/mediadaten/tarife/publikumszeitschrift/ aktuelle_illustrierte/b/bunte/titel_3545.html on 27 July 2010. Data obtained from: http://www.ivw.eu/index.php?menuid=8 on 27 July 2010. Data obtained from: http://www.axelspringer-mediapilot.de/artikel/DIE-WELT-AuflagenWELT-GRUPPE_722174.html on 27 July 2010. Data obtained from: http://www.axelspringer-mediapilot.de/portrait/DIE-WELT-DIEWELT_671154.html on 27 July 2010. Data obtained from: http://www.ivw.eu/index.php?menuid=8 on 27 July 2010. Data obtained from: http://www.taz.de/zeitung/ueberuns-verlag/ on 27 July 2010. Further details of the corpus and its development can be found in Krishnamurthys publications from 1987 to 2004 (see http://www.btinternet.com/~ramesh28/ for a list of publications). Luise Pusch is a feminist writer and a linguist, who established the field of Feminist Linguistics in German academia. The number in brackets is the number of occurrences.
References
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Appendix 1 Text 1
Sex, drink and fashion. Is this the new face of American feminism?: An online war has broken out in the womens movement sparked by the Jezebels, young bloggers who flaunt their hard drinking and unashamed promiscuity and who are infuriating traditional feminists. Amelia Hill and Eva Wiseman report. It seemed like a coup for feminism when Slate, an online magazine, launched a new, womenfocused website, Double X, last month. Declaring its dedication to tackling subjects high and low in voices that were unabashedly intellectual without being dry or condescending, Double X burst on to the blogosphere, seemingly ready to tackle the knotty question of what it means and takes to be a fully liberated woman today. Except that, instead of squaring up to the sexual politics of the outside world, the site chose to fight its first battle with one of its own, accusing Jezebel one of Americas biggest and liveliest websites for women of damaging women, degrading its own writers and betraying the quest for true sexual equality. Jezebel is a tabloid-style website dedicated to Celebrity, sex, fashion for women without airbrushing. Based in the USA, it has almost 900,000 readers across the world. Its writers lead divided lives: landing some hard-hitting feminist punches such as raising funds for the victims of honour killings in Basra while at the same time writing salaciously and candidly about their choice to live lives of unashamed promiscuity. It was in response to one of these articles that Double X lit the fuse that has set the online global community alight. Under the heading The trouble with Jezebel: how Jezebel is hurting women, it accused its rival of mistaking self-indulgence for acting in pursuit of a political goal. Double X columnist Linda Hirshman, also a contributor to the New York Times and the Washington Post, referred to an hour-long television appearance by Tracie Egan, a Jezebel blogger who goes by the moniker Slut Machine, and Maureen Moe Tkacik, in which the two young women refused to engage with a serious discussion about sexual politics and culture. Shrugging off a question about rape and sexual responsibility, Tkacik casually explained why she didnt report her own date rape to the police. I had better things to do, she said. Like drinking more. After the programme, presenter Lizz Winstead explained how shocked she had been by the behaviour of the young women. Writing on her Huffington Post blog, Winstead said: They do not understand the influence they have over the women who read them, nor do they accept any responsibility as role models for young women who are coming of age searching for lifestyles to emulate. In last weeks article for Double X, Hirshman singled out Egan and Tkacik as a symptom of the weaknesses in the model of perfect egalitarian sexual freedom. The Jezebel website, she argued, is guilty of promoting the belief that modern-day feminism is simply doing what feels good to you. In doing so, it uses the language of old-style feminism to betray the movements ideals. Hirshman, author of Get to Work: A Manifesto for Women of the World, added: Its the supposed concern with feminism that makes the site so problematic. The Jezebels are . . . a living demonstration of the chaotic possibilities the movement always contained. The writer said that she found the attitudes particularly surprising because they look a lot like the natural heirs of feminism: young, college-educated, urban (mostly New York), single, hard-working, sexually liberated. Her accusations have reverberated around the global online community. The Jezebel website has responded with Who are you calling a bad feminist?, in which Hirshman is decried as creating a victim-shaming diatribe and for promoting a feminist philosophy that is deeply sexist. I have seen misogyny and, most of the time, it looks a lot like the ideology Hirshman has the
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audacity to call feminism, the article stated. The argument has become so furious that others have stepped in, with all guns blazing. Speaking to the Observer, Naomi Wolf, author of Give Me Liberty: A Handbook for American Revolutionaries, agrees with Hirshman. Third-wave feminism is pluralistic, strives to be multi-ethnic, is pro-sex and tolerant of other womens choices, she said. It has led to an embrace of what was once so politically suspect the notion that you can be a lipstick lesbian or a riot grrrl (referring to a feminist punk movement that emerged in the 90s) if you want to be, that you can choose your persona and your freedom for yourself. But that very individualism, which has been great for feminisms rebranding, is also its weakness: it can be fun and frisky, but too often its ahistorical and apolitical. As many older feminists justly point out, the world isnt going to change because a lot of young women feel confident and personally empowered, if they dont have grassroots groups or lobbies to advance woman-friendly policies, help break through the glass ceiling, develop decent workfamily support structures or solidify real political clout. But feminists are in danger if we dont know our history, and a saucy tattoo and a condom do not a revolution make, she added. The fact is, we know the answers to western womens problems: the way is mapped out, the time for theory is pretty much over. We know the laws and the policies we need to achieve full equality. What we lack is a grassroots movement that will drive the political will. Lipstick or lifestyle feminism wont produce that movement alone. Julie Bindel, a feminist campaigner and journalist, admitted being infuriated by women like Egan and Tkacik. Feminism is not the freedom to act like a dickhead, she said. These women are individualists, not feminists. They are lazy, bone-idle women who have no interest taking part in a political movement for change but are trying to get credibility for their selfish lives by playing identification politics. You cant claim to be a feminist simply because youre a woman. Sandrine Leveque, campaigns manager at Object, the human rights organisation which challenges the sexual objectification of women in popular culture, agreed. Its almost like what was seen as sexist 20 years ago has been repackaged as empowerment and liberation for women in the 21st century, she said. It is difficult to make choices in todays pornified culture which bombards us with the message that raunch culture is where its at for women in 2009. Younger feminists, however, are more inclined to be critical of Hirshman. When it comes to Double X, I think were just left with questions is it feminist, or is it not feminist? Why did it host a story blaming another woman for not reporting being raped? What is promiscuity? What does that mean? To me, it speaks of trying to slut-shame women who are having consensual sex as and when they want it, said Jess McCabe, editor of The F Word, a British website that describes itself as feminist. There is no such thing as a bad feminist. Feminism is a social justice movement, it is not about chiding other women, or establishing yet another set of standards for women to be judged against. We all mess up weve all been raised in a sexist, racist, transphobic, heteronormative society, and guess what, that affects our behaviour. We all also differ in terms of what feminism means to us. Ellie Levenson, author of the forthcoming book The Noughtie Girls Guide to Feminism, is also critical of Hirshmans definition of good and bad feminism. A lot of the criticism against Jezebel is against women being open about their sexual antics, she said. Feminism is about women choosing how to behave and having the same rights and freedoms to behave badly as men do, so in order to make these choices we need to be able to read about women who have made all kinds of choices. The main problem with feminism today, added Levenson, is that it has become a word that people dont want to be associated with. But when you start asking them whether they believe in equal rights for men and women they say, yes, absolutely. So it is the word and not the concept that is the problem. McCabe agreed. Feminism today may be characterised by infighting and factionalism, she said, but the movement is very definitely alive and fiercely kicking. Just look at the number of feminist groups launching up and down the UK, from the Million Women Rise march in London, from the resurgence of
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reclaim-the-night marches, from the growth of feminist blogs, she said. The tide is slowly growing, and it is badly needed, she added. Things like the rape conviction rate being so pathetic it is almost non-existent, womens services facing closure and the pay gap actually increasing there is more of a need for feminist activism than ever. Source: The Guardian, 17 May 2009
Text 2
Ungleiche Schwestern; Ostfrauen sind trutschige Muttis und Westfrauen nervende Emanzen. So sehen sich Feministinnen aus beiden Teilen des Landes nach der Wende. Eine gesamtdeutsche Frauenbewegung scheitert, weil sie nicht miteinander reden knnen. Ein Rckblick VON SIMONE SCHMOLLACK An einem strmischen Herbsttag 1992 macht sich die Ostfrau Frauke Reinhardt auf den Weg zu einem Tagungszentrum im Osten Berlins. Dort findet ein Frauenkongress statt, er soll die ostdeutsche und die westdeutsche Frauenbewegung endlich zusammenfhren. Daran arbeiten Feministinnen aus beiden Lndern schon seit dem Mauerfall, eine gesamtdeutsche Frauenbewegung ist ihr groer Traum und der Kongress einer unter vielen. Frauke Reinhardt nimmt ihre schulpflichtige Tochter und deren Freundin mit. Spter sitzen die Lehrerin und die Mdchen im groen Saal und lauschen einer Knstlerin aus dem Westen. Die erzhlt etwas von Emanzipation, Feminismus und Schwesternschaft. Pltzlich unterbricht sie ihre Rede und zischt scharf ins Mikro: Knnen endlich mal die beiden Knaben aus dem Raum gefhrt werden. Mit Knaben meint sie die zwei Mdchen, sie haben kurze Haare und noch keine Brste. Tief gekrnkt verlsst Frauke Reinhardt den Kongress. Etwa zur gleichen Zeit reist die westdeutsche Journalistin Ulrike Helwerth durch Ost- und Westdeutschland. Mit Gislinde Schwarz, einer Kollegin aus dem Osten, schreibt sie gerade an einem Buch ber Feministinnen aus beiden Lndern. Spt am Abend kommen die beiden Autorinnen im thringischen Erfurt an, bei einer weiteren Gesprchspartnerin, einer Kirchenfrau. Ulrike Helwerth und die Protagonistin kennen sich seit 1988, die Westjournalistin schtzt die Ostfeministin als aufgeschlossene und politisch integre Partnerin. Doch was die ihr nun statt einer freundlichen Begrung entgegenschleudert, verletzt Ulrike Helwerth bis ins Mark. Die Ostfrau sagt: Na, du Westfrau. Zu Beginn der Neunzigerjahre sind die ost- und die westdeutsche Frauenbewegung wie ein unerfahrenes, binationales Liebespaar: Die Beteiligten kennen sich nicht, aber sie finden sich interessant, anziehend und exotisch. Sie wollen sich lieben, ein gutes Team sein und die Welt verndern. Aber sosehr sie sich auch darum bemhen, irgendwie will es nicht so recht klappen mit ihnen. Und warum nicht? Ganz einfach und doch so kompliziert: Sie knnen sich nicht einander verstndlich machen. Sie sprechen komplett verschiedene Sprachen. Ihr Buch nennen Ulrike Helwerth und Gislinde Schwarz spter Von Muttis und Emanzen. Der Titel beschreibt exakt, woran die Sprachlosigkeit der vermeintlichen Schwestern damals lag: an den verschiedenen Biografien und Lebensentwrfen von Ost- und Westfrauen. Aber was soll daran so furchtbar sein? Unterschiede lassen sich berwinden, zumindest aber lsst sich darber debattieren. Doch die Frauen, Feministinnen, die glauben, es mit der deutsch-deutschen Vereinigung besser zu machen als Mnner, sind nicht in der Lage, das jeweils Andere, Unbekannte, Fremde anzuerkennen. Unter anderem an diesem Unvermgen scheitert der erste und einzige Versuch, Frauen in Deutschland zu einer starken gesellschaftlichen Bewegung zusammenzufhren. Frauke Reinhardt, heute 48, arbeitet damals ehrenamtlich in einem Ostberliner Frauenprojekt, sie organisiert Diskussionen, Frauenfrhstcke und Demos gegen Paragraf 218. An einer Wand
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im Bro hngt ein Plakat der Ostberliner Malerin Anke Feuchtenberger: Es zeigt eine eilige schwangere Frau, die auf ihren Schultern ein Kind trgt und eines unter dem Arm. Eines Tages kommt eine Kreuzbergerin ins Bro, sieht das Bild und sagt: Diese Vorstellung ist ja schrecklich. Frauke Reinhardt ist emprt. Wieder einmal wertet eine Westfrau ihre Biografie ab. Die Auseinandersetzungen entznden sich immer wieder an denselben Themen: Kinder, Mnner, Gleichberechtigung. Die Lebensrealitten von Ost- und Westfrauen fallen komplett auseinander: Ostfeministinnen haben fast immer Kinder, sind verheiratet und stehen ihren Mann im Beruf. Westfeministinnen sind hufig lesbisch, kinderlos und studieren lange. Ostfrauen setzen auf Gleichberechtigung und wollen mit den Mnnern etwas bewegen, Westfrauen grenzen Mnner strikt aus. Unsere Hauptemprung galt dem Mann sowohl als sozialem Geschlecht als auch als Individuum, sagt Ulrike Helwerth, heute 54. Westfrauen kmpfen gleichermaen gegen den Staat und die Herrenwelt. Ostfrauen haben nur einen Gegner, den Staat. Diese Vershnlichkeit mit den Mnnern war uns total fremd, sagt Ulrike Helwerth. Kinder zu haben bedeutet, mit dem Feind im Bett gewesen zu sein. Aber es war unsere normale Lebensrealitt, sagt Frauke Reinhardt. Die Mutterrolle band sehr viele Krfte, sagt Ulrike Helwerth. Darber lachen Ostfrauen, weil sie sich alles andere als gebunden fhlten. Schlielich kennen sie sich bestens aus mit der viel beschworenen Vereinbarkeit von Familie und Beruf. Und: Durch die Vollbeschftigung sind sie finanziell unabhngig. Aber anders als den Westfrauen fehlt ihnen vielfach die universitre feministische Bildung. So kommt es zur Rollenzuschreibung, die sich teilweise bis heute hlt: Westfrauen knnen Feminismus und Gleichstellung wissenschaftlich erklren, Ostfrauen leben sie. Streiten die Frauen mal nicht ber den Nachwuchs, zerfetzen sie sich ber den Sinn und Unsinn von Quoten, ber die Frage, ob Feministinnen Minircke tragen drfen und ob eine Frau ein Lehrer oder eine Lehrerin ist. Fast alle Ostfrauen benutzen damals die mnnliche Variante, so sind sie es gewohnt. Die Westfrauen sehen darin einen Totalangriff. Sprache war eine Standarte, sagt Ulrike Helwerth. Konsens Paragraf 218 Die Ostfrauen verweigern sich dem weiblichen Suffix und dem groen I allerdings nicht aus Trotz, sondern aus einem DDR-typischen Gefhl der Emanzipiertheit heraus: Sie sehen sich lngst als gleichgestellt und glauben, eine sprachliche Sonderstellung nicht ntig zu haben. Heute schmunzle ich darber, sagt Frauke Reinhardt. Die Frauen qulen sich aber nicht nur mit Missverstndnissen in der Kommunikation und beim Biografieanspruch, sie finden auch sonst kaum gemeinsame Themen. Der einzige Punkt, in dem sie sich klar treffen, ist der Paragraf 218. Seit Jahrzehnten ist die Abschaffung des Abtreibungsparagrafen klares politisches Ziel der Westfrauen. Nun hoffen sie auf Hilfe aus dem Osten. Auch keine Ostfrau will den Rckfall in mittelalterliche Verhltnisse, gemeinsam organisieren die Frauen eine Reihe von Paragraf-218Demos. Was die fremden Schwestern besonders zermrbt: Sie zerreden sich und beginnen Diskurse immer wieder von vorn. Weder die westdeutsche Frauenbewegung noch die ostdeutschen Feministinnen sind ein homogenes Gebilde, es gibt Lesben, Migrantinnen, Kirchenfrauen, Unifrauen, Projektefrauen, Partei- und Basisfrauen, Frauenbeauftragte, Mtter, Arbeitslose. Das Einzige, was sie verbindet, ist der Fakt, eine Frau zu sein. So schnell geben die Frauen ihre Bltentrume jedoch nicht auf. Fr den 8. Mrz 1994 planen sie den bundesweiten FrauenStreikTag, mit dem kleinsten gemeinsamen Nenner: Protest gegen den frauenpolitischen Rollback seit der Wiedervereinigung. Ein Jahr lang bereiten die Frauen den Tag vor, sie grnden regionale Streikkomitees, treffen sich zu Gesamtplenen in Kassel und denken sich Aktionen aus: Die Frauen sollen die Hausarbeit niederlegen, nicht arbeiten oder wenigstens nur Dienst nach Vorschrift tun, nicht einkaufen, nicht lcheln, den Mnnern die Kinder auf den Schreibtisch setzen. All das passiert auch, in machen Orten mehr, in anderen weniger. Mit dabei sind Fernsehen, Rundfunk und Presse, der Tag wird zu einem Medienereignis. Ansonsten aber bleibt er folgenlos. Die mediale Prsenz ist das Einzige, was der Tag erreicht hat, werten am Ende die Skeptikerinnen. Er war mehr, halten die Befrworterinnen dagegen: Wir konnten unsere
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Forderungen lauthals formulieren. Eines aber ist der Tag tatschlich: eine bundesweite, Aufmerksamkeit erregende und vor allem gemeinsame Aktion. Fr einen Moment sind Ost- und Westfrauen keine Stiefschwestern. Source: TAZ, 12 May 2009
Author biographies
Sylvia Jaworska studied German and Applied Linguistics at the University of Gdask (Poland) and the University of Siegen (Germany). In 2006, she obtained a PhD at Aston University (Birmingham, UK) in the area of language policies, language planning and language teaching. She also works in the field of Discourse Analysis and Corpus Linguistics and is interested in the application of both methods to investigate discursive constructions of gendered and racist language. She is a Language Studies Coordinator at Queen Mary University of London. Ramesh Krishnamurthy studied French and German at Cambridge University (19671970), and Sanskrit at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), London University (19761983). He worked on the COBUILD project (Birmingham University and HarperCollins Publishers) full time from 1984 to 1997 and part time from 1998 to 2003, creating the Bank of English corpus and contributing to many COBUILD publications. He has taught undergraduates and postgraduates, supervised PhD research, and participated in European and international research projects, at Birmingham, Wolverhampton and Aston Universities. He is now a Visiting Academic Fellow at Aston, and Director of the ACORN (Aston Corpus Network) project, focusing on a range of research projects (see http:// acorn.aston.ac.uk/projects.html).

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Words (tokens) 92,459 142,074 14,396 4,030 1,011,165 2,388,004

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