Discursive patterns of anti-feminism and pro-feminism in Arabic newspapers of the KACST corpus
Almujaiwel, Sultan . 2017
This article presents the results of an analysis of the large-scale processed texts of Arabic newspapers in the KACST Arabic Corpus Project. I adopted methods modified from the Biber Connor Upton Approach to retrieve the expanded concordances of the lexical units almarᵓa (woman) and alnisāᵓ (women) from the corpus. The extracted text reveals the discursive patterns regarding a number of topics which are discussed in Arabic newspapers, namely socio-culture (social practices) and eco-politics. The results of the study show how and why topics related to Arab women are discursively constructed, revealing negative patterns with regards to the topics discrimination, the veil, sports, male guardianship, driving, pro-divorce settlements and municipal elections, and positive patterns concerning the topics marital status, violence, education, travel, sexual harassment, the removal of male guardianship, employment, ministerial election and political participation. The specific case of the topic (un)veil is subsequently analysed in more detail and the results reveal that the topic is associated with negative patterns within a wider socio-cultural discourse
