Cover not available
Article published In:
Critical perspectives on gender, politics and violence
Edited by Eleonora Esposito
[Journal of Language Aggression and Conflict 9:1] 2021
► pp. 155–183

Are gold hoop earrings and a dab of red lipstick enough to get even Democrats on the offensive?

The case of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez

| University of Campania Luigi Vanvitelli , Italy
According to news media outlets, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (AOC), the newly-elected Democratic representative from New York, has stirred up conflicting feelings among Republicans and Democrats on Capitol Hill, attracting criticism, mockery and disapproval from both parties. The overarching aim of this study is to explore the extent to which these attitudes are acts of verbal aggression often dissimulated as patronizing warnings or manifestations of an opinion (Ramirez and Andreu 2003; Wodak 2015). In particular, by analyzing a corpus of headlines regarding AOC’s political persona and activism collected from six major conservative and liberal newspapers circulating in the US, the study aims to detect linguistic markers associated with aggression and verify their level of toxicity (Musolff 2012). To this purpose, both quantitative and qualitative methodological approaches are used with particular reference to Corpus Linguistics (Baker et al. 2008; Kilgariff et al. 2014) and the Discourse-Historical Approach (Reisigl and Wodak 2001, 2016). Findings show that biased mediatized political discourse can influence attitudes toward aggressive speech behavior, and, therefore, intensify the devious nature of aggressive acts.
Keywords: mediatized political discourse, headline discourse, language aggression, DHA, sentiment analysis
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Context of study
    • 2.1Aggressive speech behavior
  • 3.Data and Methodology
    • 3.1Corpus
    • 3.2Methodological framework
  • 4.Findings and discussion
    • 4.1Sentiment analysis
    • 4.2Concordance analysis
    • 4.3Analysis of full headline titles
  • 5.Discussion
  • 6.Conclusions
  • References
Published online: 4 March 2021
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/jlac.00057.ras
References (89)
References
Aiello, Giorgia, and Katy Parry. 2020. Visual Communication. Understanding Images in Media Culture. London: Sage.Google Scholar
American Association of University Women. 2017. “Barriers and Bias.” Last accessed September 3, 2019. [URL]
Baker, Paul, Costa Gabrielatos, Majid KhosraviNik, Anthony M. McEnery, and Ruth Wodak. 2008. “A Useful Methodological Synergy? Combining Critical Discourse Analysis and Corpus Linguistics to Examine Discourses of Refugees and Asylum Seekers in the UK Press.” Discourse and Society 19(3): 273–306. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Bandura, Albert. 1983. “Psychological Mechanism of Aggression.” Aggression: Theoretical and Empirical Reviews 11:1–40. New York: Academic Press.Google Scholar
Beck, Christina S. 2009. “Editor’s Introduction.” In Communication Yearbook 33, edited by Christina S. Beck, xv–xix. New York: Routledge.Google Scholar
Ben Garrison Cartoons. 2018. “Socialist Democrats’ Brave New World.” Grrrgraphics.com. Last accessed July 29, 2019. [URL]
Ben-David, Anat, and Ariadna Matamoros-Fernández. 2016. “Hate Speech and Covert Discrimination on Social Media: Monitoring the Facebook Pages of Extreme-right Political Parties in Spain.” International Journal of Communication 101: 1167–1193.Google Scholar
Blommaert, Jan. 2018. “Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez: The Next Level of Political Digital Culture.” Diggit Magazine, January 23.Google Scholar
Bou-Franch, Patricia, and Pilar Garcés-Conejos Blitvich. 2016. “Gender Ideology and Social Identity Processes in Online Language Aggression against Women.” In Exploring Language Aggression against Women, edited by Patricia Bou-Franch, 59–81. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Bough, Jill. 2010. “The Mirror has two Faces: Contradictory Reflections of Donkeys in Western Literature from Lucius to Balthazar.” Animals 11: 56–68. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Brenan, Megan. 2018. “Democrats Favor more Moderate Party; GOP, More Conservative.” Gallup, December 18.Google Scholar
Brown, Rachel. 2016. “Defusing Hate: A Strategic Communication Guide to Counteract Dangerous Speech.” Last accessed August 3 2020: [URL]
Carli, Linda L. 2004. “Gender Effects on Social Influence.” In Perspectives on Persuasion, Social Influence, and Compliance Gaining, edited by Robert H. Gass and John S. Seiter, 133–148. Boston: Allyn & Bacon.Google Scholar
Chávez, Aída, and Ryan Grim. 2018. “A Primary against the Machine: A Bronx Activist Looks to Dethrone Joseph Crowley, the King of Queens.” The Intercept, May 22.Google Scholar
Chung, Cindy K., Clinton Jones, Alexander Liu, and James W. Pennebaker. 2008. “Predicting Success and Failure in Weight Loss Blogs through Natural Language Use.” In Proceedings of the 2008 International Conference on Weblogs and Social Media (ICWSM). Seattle, WA, March 30–April 2.Google Scholar
Cillizza, Chris. 2019. “Nancy Pelosi just Threw some Serious Shade at Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s ‘Green New Deal’.” Cnn.com, February 19.Google Scholar
Cochrane, Emily. 2019. “Justice Democrats Helped Make Ocasio-Cortez. They’re already Eyeing their Next Targets.” The New York Times, February 23.Google Scholar
Cooke, Charles. 2018. “The Unserious Face of an Unserious Movement.” The National Review, July 30.Google Scholar
Coyne, Sarah, and John Archer. 2004. “Indirect Aggression in the Media: A Content Analysis of British Television Programs.” Aggressive Behavior 30(3): 254–271. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Dowd, Maureen. 2019. “It’s Nancy Pelosi’s Parade”. The New York Times, July 6.Google Scholar
Ekman, Paul. 1992. “Are There Basic Emotions?” Psychological Review 991: 550–553. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Esposito, Eleonora. 2021. “Introduction: Critical Perspectives on Gender, Politics and Violence.” Journal of Language Aggression and Conflict: Special Issue on Critical Perspectives on Gender, Politics and Violence. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Fairclough, Norman, and Ruth Wodak. 1997. “Critical Discourse Analysis.” In Discourse Studies: A Multidisciplinary Introduction, edited by Teun A. van Dijk, 21: 258–284. London: Sage.Google Scholar
Feldman, Ronen. 2013. “Techniques and Applications for Sentiment Analysis”. Communications of the ACM 56(4): 82–89. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Fersini, Elisabetta, Federico A. Pozzi, and Enza Messina. 2017. “Approval Network: A Novel Approach for Sentiment Analysis in Social Networks”. World Wide Web 20(4): 831–854. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Flowerdew, John, and John E. Richardson. 2017. “Introduction.” In The Routledge Handbook of Critical Discourse Studies, edited by John Flowerdew and John E. Richardson, 1–10. New York: Routledge. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Fredrickson, Caroline. 2020. The AOC Way: The Secrets of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s Success (Women in Power). New York: Skyhorse Publishing.Google Scholar
Gambino, Lauren. 2019. “We’re here to Win: US Democratic Socialists Move to Center Stage.” The Guardian, August 6.Google Scholar
Gass, Robert H., and John Seiter. 2014. Persuasion, Social Influence, and Compliance Gaining. Boston: Pearson/Allyn & Bacon.Google Scholar
Gibson, James L. 2006. “Do Strong Group Identities Fuel Intolerance? Evidence from the South African Case.” Political Psychology 27(5): 665–705. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Goffman, Erving. 1971. Relations in Public: Microstudies of the Public Order. New York: Basic.Google Scholar
Goldmacher, Shane, and Jonathan Martin. 2018. “AOC beats J. Crowley.” The New York Times, June 26.Google Scholar
Greenberg, Maxwell Ezra, and Max Modiano Daniel. 2019. “Ocasio-Cortez’s Jewish Heritage Isn’t About You”. Jewish Currents, January 18. [URL]
Infante, Dominic A. 1987. “Aggressiveness.” In Personality and Interpersonal Communication, edited by James C. McCroskey and John A. Daly, 157–192. Newbury Park, CA: Sage.Google Scholar
Infante, Dominic A., and Charles J. Wigley. 1986. “Verbal Aggressiveness: An Interpersonal Model and Measure.” Communication Monographs 531: 61–69. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Jamieson, Kathleen H. 1995. Beyond the Double Bind: Women and Leadership. New York: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Jane, Emma A. 2014. “Your a Ugly, Whorish, Slut’: Understanding E-bile.” Feminist Media Studies 1441: 531–546. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Kelly, Jesse. 2019. “The Federalist’s Jesse Kelly fantasizes about dating Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez: ‘A Little Bit of Crazy Can be Fun. I’m not Talking about Marrying her, I’m just Talking about a Date or Two’.” Media Matters, April 1.Google Scholar
KhosraviNik, Majid, and Eleonora Esposito. 2018. “Online Hate, Digital Discourse and Critique: Exploring Digitally-mediated Discursive Practices of Gender-based Hostility.” Łodz Papers in Pragmatics 14(1): 45–68. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Kilgarriff, Adam, Vít Baisa, Jan Bušta, Miloš Jakubíček, Vojtěch Kovář, Jan Michelfeit, Pavel Rychlý, and Vít Suchomel. 2014. “The Sketch Engine: Ten Years on.” Lexicography 11: 7–36. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Kogan, Seffi. 2019. “Why is AOC Tokenizing a Fringe Jewish Group?.” AJC Global Jewish Advocacy, August 2.Google Scholar
Kopytowska, Monika. 2021. “Xenophobia, Misogyny and Rape Culture: Targeting Women in Cyberspace.” Journal of Language Aggression and Conflict: Special Issue on Critical Perspectives on Gender, Politics and Violence. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Kuperberg, Rebecca. 2021. “Incongruous and Illegitimate: Antisemitic and Islamophobic Semiotic Violence against Women in Politics in the United Kingdom” Journal of Language Aggression and Conflict: Special Issue on Critical Perspectives on Gender, Politics and Violence. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Liu, Bing. 2015. Sentiment Analysis: Mining Opinions, Sentiments, and Emotions. UK: Cambridge University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
McGarrity, Laura. 2016. “What Sentiment Analysis can Do for your Brand.” MarketingProfs, April 5.Google Scholar
Media Fact Check. 2018. Media Bias / Fact Check. Last accessed July 2 2019: [URL]
Minority Rights Group International. 2017. “No Escape from Discrimination: Minorities, Indigenous Peoples and the Crisis of Displacement.” Last accessed June 24 2019 [URL]
Musolff, Andreas. 2012. “The Study of Metaphor as Part of Critical Discourse Analysis.” Critical Discourse Studies 9(3): 301–310. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
National Democratic Institute. 2018. “No Party to Violence: Analyzing Violence against Women in Political Parties.” Last accessed December 8 2019 [URL]
Nichols, John. 2018. “The Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez Effect.” The Nation, August 15.Google Scholar
Nilsen, Ella. 2018. “It’s Official: Democrats will Control the House.” Vox.com. November 6 2018. Last accessed June 29, 2019: [URL]
NowThis News. 2019. “Why Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is Willing to Break the Mold.” March 2. YouTube video, 3:02. [URL]
Ocasio-Cortez, Alexandria. 2018. “The Courage to Change.” May 30. YouTube video, 2:08. [URL]
(@AOC). 2019. “I don’t even get to see all of them. Just the ones that have been flagged as particularly troubling. It happens whenever Fox gets particularly aggressive + hateful, too. Young interns have to constantly hear hateful messages (far beyond disagreement) from ppl we don’t even rep.” Twitter, May 29, 12:03 a.m. [URL]
Pang, Bo, and Lillian Lee. 2008. “Opinion Mining and Sentiment Analysis.” Foundations and Trends in Information Retrieval 2 (1–2): 1–135. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Pennebaker, James W., Richard B. Slatcher, and Cindy K. Chung. 2005. “Linguistic Markers of Psychological State through Media Interviews: John Kerry and John Edwards in 2004, Al Gore in 2000.” Analysis of Social and Public Policy 51: 1–9. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Pennebaker, James W., Ryan L. Boyd, Kayla K. Jordan, and Kate Blackburn. 2015. The Development and Psychometric Properties of LIWC2015. Austin, TX: University of Texas at Austin.Google Scholar
Progovac, Ljiljana, and Antonio Benitez-Buccaco. 2019. “From Physical Aggression to Verbal Behavior: Language Evolution and Self-Domestication Feedback Loop.” Frontiers in Psychology 101. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Ramirez, Martin J., and Jose Manuel Andreu. 2003. “Aggression’s Typologies.” Revue Internationale de Psychologie Sociale IRSP 16(3): 125–141.Google Scholar
Rancer, Andrew S., and Theodore A. Avtgis. 2014. Argumentative and Aggressive Communication: Theory, Research, and Application. New York: Peter Lang.Google Scholar
Re, Gregg. 2018. “As Upstart Ocasio-Cortez Hits Cam paign Trail with Bernie Sanders, High Profile Spurs Fears of Dem Rift.” Fox News, July 19.Google Scholar
Rego, Richard. 2018. “Changing Forms and Platforms of Misogyny: Sexual Harassment of Women Journalists on Twitter.” Media Watch 9(3): 472–485.Google Scholar
Reich, John W., Alex J. Zautra, and Mary Davis. 2003. “Dimensions of Affect Relationships: Models and their Integrative Implications.” Review of General Psychology 7(1): 66–83. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Reisigl, Martin, and Ruth Wodak. 2001. Discourse and Discrimination: Rhetorics of Racism and Antisemitism. New York: Routledge.Google Scholar
. 2016. “The Discourse-Historical Approach.” In Methods of Critical Discourse Studies, edited by Ruth Wodak and Michael Meyer, Third Edition, 23–61. London/CA/New Delhi: Sage.Google Scholar
Saville Roberts, Liz. 2018. “Foreword.” In Violence against Women in Politics: Global Perspectives of a Global Issue, report prepared by Shannon O’Connell and Graeme Ramshaw. Westminster Foundation for Democracy.Google Scholar
Schein, Virginia E. 2001. “A Global Look at Psychological Barriers to Women’s Progress in Management.” Journal of Social Issues. Gender, Hierarchy and Leadership 57(4): 675–688. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Schwab, Nikki. 2019. “Ocasio-Cortez Says she once Acted like a “White Dude” to Fit in.” New York Post, February 27.Google Scholar
Shuman, Vera, Elizabeth Clark-Polnera, Ben Meuleman, David Sander, and Klaus R. Scherer. 2015. “Emotion Perception from a Componential Perspective.” Cognition & Emotion 37(1): 47–56. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Singman, Brooke. 2018. “Ocasio-Cortez Wins House Seat, Becoming Youngest Woman Elected to Congress.” Fox News, November 6.Google Scholar
Stickles, Nisha, and Barbara Corbellini Duarte. 2019. “Exclusive: Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez explains what democratic socialism means to her.” Business Insider, March 4.Google Scholar
Strachan, Cherie, Lori Poloni-Staudinger, Shannon Jenkins, and Candice Ortbals. 2020. Why don’t Women Rule the World? Understanding Women’s Civic and Political Choices. London: Sage.Google Scholar
Tarlo, Shira. 2018. “Fox News is freaking out over Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s victory.” Salon. June 28.Google Scholar
Taylor, Sarah. 2018. “Obama sends out official endorsement list – and one socialist sweetheart in particular is missing.” The Blaze, August 1.Google Scholar
The Women Candidate Tracker. 2018. “One hundred twenty-five were elected to office.” Politico.com. November 28.Google Scholar
Thelwall, Mike, Kevan Buckley, and Georgios Paltoglou. 2012. “Sentiment Strength Detection for the Social Web.” Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology 63(1): 163–173. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Tremblay, Manon. 2007. “Democracy, Representation, and Women: A Comparative Analysis.” Democratization 14(4): 533–553. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
United Nations Women. 2018. “Violence against Women in Politics: Expert Group Meeting Report and Recommendations.” March 8–9. Last accessed May 8 2019: [URL]
United States House of Representatives. 2019. Proposal 109 introduced by Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. “Recognizing the duty of the Federal Government to create a Green New Deal.” Last accessed July 29, 2019. [URL]
Unites States Senate. 2019. Proposal 1129. Introduced April 10, 2019 by S. Bernie Sanders. “Medicare for All Act of 2019”. Last accessed July 29, 2019. [URL]
van Leeuwen, Theo. 2008. Discourse and Practice. New Tools for Critical Discourse Analysis. Oxford University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Wehner, Peter. 2015. “Have Democrats Pulled too Far Left?” New York Times, May 27.Google Scholar
Wodak, Ruth. 2009. “Critical Discourse Analysis: History, Agenda, Theory and Methodology.” In Methods for Critical Discourse Analysis, Second Revised Edition, edited by Ruth Wodak and Michael Meyer, 1–33. London: Sage.Google Scholar
. 2011. The Discourse of Politics in Action: Politics as Usual, Second Edition. UK: Palgrave Macmillan.Google Scholar
. 2013. Critical Discourse Analysis. London: Sage. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
. 2015. The Politics of Fear. What Right-Wing Populist Discourses Mean. London: Sage. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Wolfson, Nessa. 1986. “The Bulge: A Theory of Speech Behavior and Social Distance.” WPEL Working Papers in Educational Linguistics 2(1): 55–83.Google Scholar
Wu, Nicholas. 2019. “Passive Aggression. It’s a Lifestyle: Ocasio-Cortez Responds to a GOP Congressional Critic.” USA Today, July 30.Google Scholar
Xiang, Zheng, Zvi Schwartz, John H. Gerdes, and Muzaffer, Uysal M. 2015. “What can Big Data and Text Analytics Tell us about Hotel Guest Experience and Satisfaction?” International Journal of Hospitality Management 441: 120–130. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Cited by (4)

Cited by four other publications

Del Saz Rubio, Maria Milagros
2024. ‘You are not empowered, you have neither character nor pride’. Journal of Language Aggression and Conflict DOI logo
Nartey, Mark
2024. Examining the communication of female political leaders in the Global South. Journal of Language and Politics 23:1 ► pp. 1 ff. DOI logo
Esposito, Eleonora
2021. Introduction. Journal of Language Aggression and Conflict 9:1 ► pp. 1 ff. DOI logo
Esposito, Eleonora & Sole Alba Zollo
2021. “How dare you call her a pig, I know several pigs who would be upset if they knew”*. Journal of Language Aggression and Conflict 9:1 ► pp. 47 ff. DOI logo

This list is based on CrossRef data as of 5 july 2024. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers. Any errors therein should be reported to them.