*Lanchukorn Sriwimon & Pattamawan Jimarkon Zilli
Abstract:
As the number of female political leaders and heads of states, worldwide increases, Asian female politicians and national leaders have been stereotyped as being ‘political dynastic leaders’. This paper aims to contribute to the growing body of literature and the existing knowledge on the area of gender, politics, and media by taking former Prime Minister Yingluck Shinawatra of Thailand as an example, to examine and discuss how a newspaper generates and gender stereotypes through its linguistic choices. Transitivity analysis based on Halliday and Matthiessen (2004) and referential choices analysis based on van Leeuwen’s ‘Representation of Social Actor Network framework’ (van Leeuwen, 1996, 2008) are employed as the analytical frameworks. The sample data comprises 190 news articles taken from a Thai English language news agency from May to August 2011. Results reveal a pattern of linguistic choices that reinforce gender stereotypes of female politicians in the media in Thailand.
Keywords: Asian female political leader, Thai female politicians, dynastic leader, gender politics and media, gender stereotypes