The Role of Newspaper Discourse in Legitimizing Discrimination against Veiled Female Students in Turkey
A Multimodal Analysis
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.55425/23036966.2024.11.1.63Keywords:
Kemalist discourse, hegemony, veiling, discrimination, multimodalityAbstract
The paper analyses the Kemalist dailies’ presentation of veiled female students who protested the discrimination they faced when the hijab was banned at Turkish universities. Although such discrimination has since been quashed, the ideology that produced and legitimised it is still alive. The media, an important means of reproducing the Kemalist hegemony, relativised or legitimised discrimination against these students by discursively constructing them as a destructive force that threatened the secular order. This construct is based on the Kemalist conception of modernisation, equated with secularisation, where “the limit of the expression of religion in Turkey is the skin of a citizen”. The analysed examples reinforce the construct by integrating multimodal elements, including the text itself, typographical elements, page layouts, and accompanying images and caricatures. The paper confirms the importance of analysing linguistic and other semiotic elements of discourse in the research of complex social phenomena like discrimination, hegemony, and ideology.
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