THE REPRESENTATION OF TRUMP’S TWO-GENDER POLICY IN THE GUARDIAN: A CRITICAL DISCOURSE STUDY

Abstract

This paper explores linguistic and discursive interpretation of the two-gender policy of Donald Trump in the article of The Guardian, with respect to the ideological patterns that are practiced in the media content. The two main questions that the research answers are the linguistic means by which The Guardian constructs the Trump policy and discursive strategies and evaluative linguistic decisions that are used to create ideological meaning. The research is a mixed one that seeks to integrate the qualitative Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) with the quantitative frequency of lexicon to give a micro-level and macro-level view of the discourse. The Ideological Square provided by Van Dijk (1998) is used as the analytical framework to facilitate the analysis of the in-group and out-group representation, priorities and de-priorities strategies and moral evaluation. The review of a corpus of about 200 articles associated with the year 2017-2020 has shown that The Guardian deems The two-gender policy of Trump as limiting, retrogressive, and discriminative and depicts the LGBTQ community and rights activists as ethical and powerless. Repetitive strategies noted by lexical and discursive analysis included nomination, predication, intensification, and intertextuality; all of which supported a polarized narrative and a liberal approach of the newspaper. The results highlight the importance of media discourse in influencing the social perception of gender policies and also highlight the necessity to critically understand the media. The work makes a contribution to media linguistics, gender representation, and the analysis of political discourse studies and thus provides the empirical evidence to the questions on the interplay of language, ideology, and sociopolitical power in modern journalism.