Feminism as a Fashionable Mediascourse: Speech Aspect

Abstract

The article observes the feminist media discourse in Russia over the past two years in its speech aspect. The relevance of the study is due to the growth of this discourse’s infl uence, especially among young people. The author studied the content of both the most infl uential social and political Russian state media of various political orientations (with more than 100,000 readers in its digital environment) and craft media, for which feminism is one of the leading topics. Specifi c information resources of feminist orientation, such as websites of diff erent organizations and social networks groups, with more than 1,000 subscribers, were also studied. By means of content analysis and discourse analysis, the main communicative practices of feminist discourse and its thematic dominants have been identifi ed. In addition, multimodal analysis was also applied, since media publications of this discourse are oft en accompanied by nonverbal elements. As the study has indicated, the main initiators / newsmakers of the discourse are mainly specialized Russian feminist organizations, such as “Tebe poveryat”, “Nasiliyu.net”, “Syostry”, “Kitezh”, “Tyneodna”, as well as such independent media as “Novaya gazeta”, “Takie dela”, “7*7”, “Meduza”, and a number of bloggers in social networks. The author argues that over the past two years the traumatic situation with COVID-19, when domestic violence increased and many women have lost their jobs, played an important role in the growth of feminist discourse. In this case, the activation of feminist discourse can be viewed in the context of promoting new values through new speech practices, in particular, with the active introduction of feminitives. The analysis shows that during a pandemic, the dominant thematic areas of media discourse are the following (arranged in descending order of caliber and importance): 1) domestic violence; 2) harassment; 3) the political and social role of women in Russia. The dominancy is expressed not only in the quantitative representation of publications on the subject, but also in their formative role for the discourse itself. Newsmakers and discourse activists use the following communication tools in digital formats: memes, fl ash mobs, the creation of women’s self-help groups on social networks, educational and investigative publications in the media.

Keywords:

feminist media discourse, feminitives, gender, domestic violence, harassment, influence