Woman mayor or man mayor? Representations of Virginia Raggi and Chiara Appendino in Italian daily newspapers

Abstract

The research is framed in the tradition of social representations, which assumes the strategic use of language to mask power relations. We explored the language by detecting the presence of specific linguistic devices in the representations of the two 5Stars mayors Chiara Appendino and Virginia Raggi in the Italian daily press. The attention is on the agency attributed them, citing their words; on sexist or non-sexist language; on the valence (negative, sarcastic, neutral, positive) of the context of use of this language, and on its lexicographical characterization with respect to the two sexist / non-sexist forms. 810 titles were analyzed, published in the four months following the election of the two women mayors, from 10 newspapers. Statistical processing was carried out with SPSS and SPAD-T. In this last case two procedures were used: 1) Mots for the exploration of the general vocabulary of the titles, the detection of the direct speech, as a signal of agency, the markers of linguistic sexism / non- sexism; 2) VOSPEC to analyze typical words of titles referring to the valence of the context of use of sexist / non-sexist forms. The results show the prevalence of non-sexist linguistic markers and of the negative context, compared to the positive one, which is greater for non-sexist forms than for sexist ones. In the latter case, newspapers use the appropriate gender declension in an apparent "sanitization" of language which, however, supports the routinization of the masculine domain through a negative, derisive or sarcastic context.