Are They Speaking for Themselves or Being Spoken for? In Search of the Professional Identity of Female Politicians: A Theoretical and Empirical Study

The monograph addresses the issue of discrimination against women in political media discourse. The theoretical framework of the study is based on the concepts of Michel Foucault, Pierre Bourdieu, Erving Goffman, and Anthony Giddens. The main research question is the way in which the professional identities of women politicians are articulated in the gender perspective in the Polish press discourse of selected dailies and weeklies in 2016-2018. In the study, a methodological strategy combining KAD, the perspective of feminist research (FKAD) and elements of conversational analysis was employed. The structure of the work is based on two main parts: theoretical and empirical-analytical. The theoretical part is built around two key issues: the definition of gender and the role of cultural and social determinants of gender in the political discourse, while the empirical-analytical part consists of three chapters. They are methodological, analytical, and summarizing the results of the analysis. The methodological chapter describes the analytical approach adopted in the study. The analytical chapter consists of three parts. The first section describes the mechanisms by which the professional identities of women politicians are constructed in press interviews. The second section is an analysis of the categories into which topics related to feminism are included in press interviews. The purpose of the third section is to analyze how politicians create their professional identifications in the press discourse by referring to stereotypical gender characteristics and roles. The book ends with the chapter in which the conclusions were formulated and the final analysis of the topic in the context of the research questions. An integral part of this work is an appendix which describes the press texts that form the basis of empirical survey.