“Behave yourself, woman!”: Patterns of gender discrimination and sexist stereotyping in parliamentary interaction

• Autores: Cornelia Ilie
• Localización: Journal of language and politics, ISSN 1569-2159, Vol. 17, Nº. 5, 2018, págs. 594-616
• Idioma: inglés
• Texto completo no disponible (Saber más ...)
• Resumen

  • After a record number of women were elected to the House of Commons in 1997, many incidents of sexism and abusive behaviour were reported. The aim of this article is twofold: on the one hand, to scrutinize the mechanisms and effects of sexist discrimination and stereotyping of women MPs in the House of Commons; on the other, to identify the strategies used by female (and male) MPs to subvert discriminatory representations, and to counteract gender-biased and sexist treatment. The focus of the multi-level analysis is on three recurrent strategies: objectifying women MPs through fixation on personal appearance rather than professional performance (e.g. making trivialising comments about women’s hair and dressing style); patronizing women MPs through the use of derogatory forms of address (e.g. directly addressing them by the terms of endearment “honey”, “dear”, “woman”); and stigmatizing women MPs through abusive and discriminatory labelling (e.g. ascribing to them stereotypically insulting names.