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Article published In:
The Mediated Communication of Gender and Sexuality in Contemporary Politics
Edited by Angela Smith and Michael Higgins
[Journal of Language and Politics 19:1] 2020
► pp. 48–70

Trumping Twitter

Sexism in President Trump’s tweets

ORCID logo | Università degli Studi di Napoli L’Orientale

The present paper is part of an overview of the discursive manifestations of the U.S. President Trump’s sexist attitudes and practices. Drawing upon Mills’ model of sexism (2008) and Van Dijk’s socio-cognitive framework (2006), the study will analyse a corpus of all the negative Tweets against women tweeted by President Trump since the beginning of his 2016 campaign (July 2015) to February 2019. The study sheds a light on how President Trump’s vocabulary perpetuates a male-centric hierarchy. Considering the outcome of the 2016 elections, it can be said that his ideology has had a significant impact, particularly amongst his supporters. His political ascendency speaks to how these ideological beliefs risk to become dangerously ingrained in language and society.

Keywords: sexism, Trump, Twitter, women, gender discrimination, language, discourse analysis
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Literature review
    • 2.1Politics and Trump’s tweets
    • 2.2Sexism
    • 2.3Overt and covert sexism
  • 3.Theoretical framework
  • 4.Corpus
  • 5.Findings and discussion
    • 5.1Women are weak, lacking in strength and ability, incompetent and ‘mentally instable’
    • 5.2Males as the norm, that is, women appear as dependent beings
    • 5.3Valuing women based on their appearance rather than their intelligence or personality
    • 5.4Negative evaluation of women: Women as dishonest liars
    • 5.5Semantic derogation/disparagement of women
    • 5.6Women are no more than possessions
    • 5.7Vulgarity when speaking about women
  • 6.Final remarks
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 15 January 2020
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/jlp.19034.sco
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