Gender, language and floor apportionment in political debates

Political debates are speech events which foreground issues of power and the `floor', and allow the opportunity of assessing the ways in which the gender of participants affects their construction as more or less powerful participants in debates. Debates in the British House of Commons are adversarial in style, making it appropriate to view the floor as `the site of a contest where there is a winner and a loser'. Previous research into political debates has found that male participants violate the formal rules in debates more than their female counterparts, in order to gain the floor. Although the canonical form and rules of debates exist to `permit the equalization of turns', rule violations are common, and inequalities between participants exist. In this article legal and illegal interventions are evaluated in five debates in order to establish the extent to which the gender of participants is related to the control that an individual has over the debate floor.

'I am not an Honourable Lady': gender and language in the National Assembly for Wales

Women have been historically underrepresented in political institutions and it has been claimed that it is difficult for women to succeed in the masculinist cultures that exist in political contexts. The ‘new’ devolved institutions of the UK offer opportunities to investigate gender inequality in political contexts which have a greater proportion of women members; that have included women from their inception; and that have been designed with egalitarian issues to the fore. Here, ethnographic and discourse analytic data is used to assess a senior woman’s performance in the National Assembly for Wales; to explore politicians’ appraisal of this performance; and to analyse the breakdown of the debate floor in terms of ‘rule-breaking’ activities such as barracking. In this Community of Practice the individual’s performance draws upon communicative styles that are both stereotypically masculine (adversarial) and feminine (consensual), which can be viewed as an indication of the speaker’s competence. However, this is undermined by the speaker’s failure to adopt the correct linguistic practices for this CoP which leads to the breakdown of the formal debate discourse. Assembly Members appraise this failure negatively while also drawing upon stereotypical notions of gendered communicative norms and wider discourses of gender differentiation.

An ethnographic investigation into gender and language in the Northern Ireland Assembly

This paper investigates the extent to which the negative evaluation of one of the women Ministers in the Northern Ireland Assembly can be attributed to gender. Interviews with politicians as well as the Minister herself illuminate this discussion by identifying the ‘gendered discourses’ that are drawn upon when describing the Minister’s communicative style in debates. Close analyses of transcripts of debates offer a description of some elements of this style, and find that while the Minister is confrontational in debates and ‘stands her ground’, she does not take part in illegal interventions that disrupt the debate floor and are characteristic of the Assembly as a whole. Although the construction of the Minister’s unpopularity can be attributed to a complex interplay of factors, it can be concluded that it is partly the way she draws on gendered linguistic resources that leads her to be negatively judged by her peers.

Gender, Power and Political Speech: Women and Language in the 2015 UK General Election

Gender, Power and Political Speech explores the influence of gender on political speech by analyzing the performances of three female party leaders who took part in televised debates during the 2015 UK General Election campaign. The analysis considers similarities and differences between the women and their male colleagues, as well as between the women themselves; it also discusses the way gender - and its relationship to language - was taken up as an issue in media coverage of the campaign.

Power, Arab media Moguldum & gender rights as entertainment in the Middle East

Discourse is a giant field of research and gender related rights are still a disputed area of thinking. Thus, when Arab transnational satellite televisions produce dialogues, images, stories and narratives about the disputed “universal” gender rights in the Middle East, the big questions remain how and why. According to De Beauvoir (1949), one becomes woman and to Butler (1990) one is not born a gender at all but is “done” and “undone” to become one via discourse. Islamic feminism speaks of a cultural/religious specificity in defending women rights and even gender diversity based on new Quranic interpretations. The gender, “Al-Naw’u”, remains synonym to sex “Al Jins” as gender and queer theories never developed in Arabic in tandem with the European institutions or the theories of the19th century– especially those ideas emerging from studies of the mental asylum. This research tries to understand gender related “rights” and “wrongs” as manifest in the discursive institutions owned by media mogul Prince Al Waleed Ben Talal Al Saud. The trouble of such a study is lexical, ideological and institutional at the same time. Since we lack a critique of the discourses and narratives addressed in the pan-Arab satellite channels, in general it is difficult to understand their significance and influence in everyday life practices. What language is used to speak of gender rights or wrongs? Which ideology is favoured in this practice of legitimisation and/or policing? Using case studies, CDA of social and religious talk shows, narrative analysis of Arabic cinemas, this research adapted triangulation to show the complexity of conversing and narrating gender related content at the micro and macro levels within an institution of power. Using semi-structured interviews from fieldwork in Egypt (2009) and Lebanon (2011), archive research and online ethnography, the research exposes the power structure under which gender discourses evolve. It emerges that gender content is abundant on the Pan Arab satellite space, “manufactured” on talk shows and plotted tactfully in the cinematic “creative-act”. The result is a complex discourse of gender content that scratches the surface calling for interpretation. So how and why do gender rights and wrongs find place on Prince Al Waleed’s Media Empire?