Politics, Gender and Conceptual Metaphors

Politics, Gender and Conceptual Metaphors This page intentionally left blank Politics, Gender and Conceptual Metaph...

Author: Kathleen Ahrens

122 downloads 1857 Views 1MB Size Report

This content was uploaded by our users and we assume good faith they have the permission to share this book. If you own the copyright to this book and it is wrongfully on our website, we offer a simple DMCA procedure to remove your content from our site. Start by pressing the button below!
Report copyright / DMCA form

DOWNLOAD PDF

Politics, Gender and Conceptual Metaphors

This page intentionally left blank

Politics, Gender and Conceptual Metaphors Edited by Kathleen Ahrens Hong Kong Baptist University, Hong Kong National Taiwan University, Taipei

Selection and editorial matter © Kathleen Ahrens 2009 Chapters © their individual authors 2009 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No portion of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, Saffron House, 6–10 Kirby Street, London EC1N 8TS. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The authors have asserted their rights to be identiﬁed as the authors of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published 2009 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN Palgrave Macmillan in the UK is an imprint of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS. Palgrave Macmillan in the US is a division of St Martin’s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010. Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries ISBN-13: 978-0-230-20345-7

hardback

This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. Logging, pulping and manufacturing processes are expected to conform to the environmental regulations of the country of origin. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. A catalogue record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. 10 18

9 17

8 16

7 15

6 14

5 13

4 12

3 11

2 10

1 09

Printed and bound in Great Britain by CPI Antony Rowe, Chippenham and Eastbourne

Contents

List of Tables and Figures

vii

Acknowledgements

ix

Notes on the Contributors

x

1 Analysing Conceptual Metaphors in Political Language Kathleen Ahrens

Part I Gender and Conceptual Metaphors in Political Speeches 2 Metaphor, Politics and Gender: a Case Study from Germany Veronika Koller and Elena Semino

1

7 9

3 Metaphor, Politics and Gender: a Case Study from Italy Elena Semino and Veronika Koller

36

4 Gender versus Politics: When Conceptual Models Collide in the US Senate Kathleen Ahrens and Sophia Yat Mei Lee

62

5 Non una donna in politica, ma una donna politica: Women’s Political Language in an Italian Context Gill Philip

83

6 The Metaphorical Construction of Ireland Encarnación Hidalgo Tenorio

Part II Gender and Conceptual Metaphors in Political Debates

112

137

7 Metaphor and Gender in British Parliamentary Debates Jonathan Charteris-Black

139

8 Sex Differences in the Usage of Spatial Metaphors: a Case Study of Political Language Anatol Stefanowitsch and Juliana Goschler

166

v

vi Contents

9 Conceptual Metaphors of Family in Political Debates in the USA Karen L. Adams

Part III

Women in Gendered Conceptual Metaphors

184

207

10 Gender, War and Body Politics: a Critical Multimodal Analysis of Metaphor in Advertising Michelle M. Lazar

209

11 Power as a Conceptual Metaphor of Gender Inequality? Comparing Dutch and Spanish Politics Petra Meier and Emanuela Lombardo

235

12 Gendered Metaphors of Women in Power: the Case of Hillary Clinton as Madonna, Unruly Woman, Bitch and Witch Elvin T. Lim

254

Index

270

List of Tables and Figures Tables 2.1 2.2 2.3 2.4 2.5 2A.1 2A.2 2A.3 2A.4 3.1 3A.1 3A.2 3A.3 3A.4 4.1 4.2 4.3

5.1 5.2 5.3(a) 5.3(b) 5.4(a) 5.4(b) 5.5(a) 5.5(b) 5.6(a) 5.6(b)

Keywords in Schröder and Merkel subcorpora 18 Metaphoric expressions of JOURNEY metaphor 20 Results for the JOURNEY source domain 21 Frequent metaphoric expressions of JOURNEY metaphor 23 for each politician Results for WAR source domain 24 List of speeches by Gerhard Schröder included in the 30 corpus List of interviews by Gerhard Schröder included in the 31 corpus List of speeches by Angela Merkel included in the corpus 31 List of interviews by Angela Merkel included in the corpus 32 Results for the SPORTS source domain 50 List of speeches by Silvio Berlusconi included in the corpus 58 List of interviews by Silvio Berlusconi included in the 58 corpus List of speeches by Emma Bonino included in the corpus 59 List of interviews by Emma Bonino included in the corpus 60 Information about US Senate corpora 67 Comparisons of NP versus SF lexemes (raw frequency) 69 as contrasted by different groups Comparisons of NP versus SF lexemes (raw frequency) 74 as contrasted between Obama, Hillary Clinton and McCain Corpus size (running words) and composition 86 Top 10 keywords in Trade&Com corpus 89 Keyword groupings in FamPol 91 LFCW groupings in FamPol 91 Keyword groupings in Trade&Com 94 LFCW groupings in Trade&Com 95 Keyword groupings in RegPol 98 LFCW groupings in RegPol 99 Keyword groupings in EqualOpps 100 LFCW groupings in EqualOpps 100 vii

viii List of Tables and Figures

5.7(a) 5.7(b) 5.8 5.9 6.1 6.2 6.3 6.4 6.5 7.1 7.2 7.3 7A.1 7A.2 7A.3 7A.4 7A.5 8.1 8.2 8.3 8.4 8.5 8.6 9.1 9.2 9.3 10.1

Keyword groupings in YouthPol&Sport LFCW groupings in YouthPol&Sport Source domains used metaphorically by the ministers Summary of war metaphors by subcorpus (number of types) Corpus metadata Ahern’s and McAleese’s five key lexical domains Target domains and metaphorical expressions List of the recurrent source domains for both politicians Main subclasses of the metaphor X IS A PERSON Keywords Summary of metaphors used in Commons debates Rhetorical purposes of metaphor Profile of candidates for deputy leadership of Labour Party Source domain ‘journeys’ – literal and metaphoric uses Source domain ‘light and dark’ – literal and metaphoric uses Source domain ‘plants’ – literal and metaphoric uses Source domain ‘health’ – literal and metaphoric uses Metaphorical uses of nouns Metaphorical uses of verbs Metaphorical uses of prepositions Metaphorical uses of nouns Metaphorical uses of verbs Metaphorical uses of prepositions Female and male candidates per debate in different types of races Word count for types of debates (rounded to the nearest 10) Conceptual metaphors Conceptual metaphor: BEAUTIFICATION IS WAR

101 101 103 104 117 119 121 126 129 147 148 150 160 162 162 163 163 174 175 175 176 176 177 186 187 189 212

Figures 5.1 7.1 10.1

Concordances for ‘alimentare’ [feed, fuel] in FamPol A contemporary model for political communication L’Oréal advert

92 141 222

Acknowledgements I would like to thank the many people who have contributed either directly or indirectly to the creation of this volume. First and foremost, I would like to thank all the authors for their insightful contributions and timely responses to all requests for revisions and updates. I would also like to thank the staff at Palgrave Macmillan, including former editor Jill Lake, commissioning editor Priyanka Pathak, editorial assistant Melanie Blair, and the anonymous reviewers of this work for their support and guidance in this endeavour. I would also like to thank the colleagues who encouraged me throughout the process: Adele Goldberg, Chu-Ren Huang, John Kieschnik, Regina Llamas, Lily I-wen Su, Zazie Todd and Ruth Wodak. My students who share my interest in politics and language have given me much food for thought concerning metaphor analysis and I would like to thank them for the lively discussions we have had and the insightful comments they have provided, with special thanks going to Paul You-Jun Chang, Siaw-Fong Chung, Justine Sheng-Hsiu Chiu, Ren-Feng Duann, Shu-Ping Gong, Jia-Fei Hong, Katarzyna Proctor, Tiffany Ying-Yu Lin, Louis Wei-Lun Lu, and last, but certainly not least, Sophia Yat Mei Lee, who not only co-authored a chapter with me, but also was my editorial assistant for this volume. Thank you one and all! KATHLEEN AHRENS

ix

Notes on the Contributors Karen L. Adams is a Professor of English/Linguistics at Arizona State University, USA, where she co-directs the PhD concentration in Rhetoric/ Composition/Linguistics and is affiliated with the Gender and Women Studies Program. She has a long-term interest in the linguistic and rhetorical construction of opposition as well as in political discourse. She regularly teaches courses in pragmatics and discourse analysis and language and gender, which are all developed within the theoretical framework of critical discourse analysis. Kathleen Ahrens is a Professor at Hong Kong Baptist University. Currently on leave from her position as a Professor at National Taiwan University, she has published extensively on issues relating to lexical semantics, language processing, and conceptual metaphors. Her current research focuses on corpus-based analyses of conceptual metaphor use in political language. Jonathan Charteris-Black is a Professor of Linguistics at the University of the West of England, UK. His major interest is in social and cognitive approaches to metaphor that he describes as critical metaphor analysis and whose purpose is to explore the social motivation and influence of metaphor choices in contemporary discourse types including political speeches, religious texts, the press and other influential social domains of language use. Juliana Goschler is postdoctoral researcher at the University of Bremen, Germany. She works in the field of cognitive linguistics, especially on metaphor theory and the linguistic encoding of motion events. Encarnación Hidalgo Tenorio is a Senior Lecturer in the English Department at the University of Granada, Spain, where she teaches a variety of undergraduate and postgraduate courses on English language and linguistics. Her main areas of research include gender studies, critical linguistics, CDA and corpus linguistics. Veronika Koller is a Senior Lecturer at the Department of Linguistics and English Language at Lancaster University, UK. Her research interests x

Notes on the Contributors xi

include critical discourse analysis, cognitive semantics and social cognition, as well as language, sexuality and gender. She is currently working on the cognitive and discursive aspects of brand communication. Michelle M. Lazar is Associate Professor in the Department of English Language and Literature, Assistant Dean of Graduate Studies and Research at the Faculty of Arts and the Social Sciences, and the Academic Convenor of the Gender Studies Minor Programme at the National University of Singapore. Her research interests include critical discourse analysis, feminist and gender studies, media and political discourse, and multimodal discourse analysis. She is the editor of Feminist Critical Discourse Analysis: Gender, Power and Ideology in Discourse (2005), and series editor of Routledge Critical Studies in Discourse. Sophia Yat Mei Lee is a doctoral student at the Hong Kong Polytechnic University. She was awarded her MPhil degree from the University of Hong Kong for a thesis on complement function in lexical-functional grammar. Her research now focuses on issues related to corpus and computational linguistics. Elvin T. Lim is Assistant Professor of Government at Wesleyan University, USA, and author of The Anti-Intellectual Presidency: the Decline of Presidential Rhetoric from George Washington to George W. Bush (2008). He took a BA (first class), MSc and DPhil, all from the University of Oxford. Emanuela Lombardo is Ramón y Cajal researcher at the Department of Political Science and Public Administration at the Complutense University, Madrid, Spain, and researcher in the European QUING and TARGET projects. Her research concerns theoretical and empirical aspects of gender equality policies. She is co-editor of The Discursive Politics of Gender Equality: Stretching, Bending and Policymaking (2009). Petra Meier is Assistant Professor at the Politics Department of the University of Antwerp, Belgium. She publishes and teaches on theories on democracy and representation, electoral system design, political sociology, feminist approaches to public policies, the women’s movement and state feminism, and Belgian politics. She recently edited The Discursive Politics of Gender Equality: Stretching, Bending and Policymaking (2009). Gill Philip is a Lecturer in EFL in the Interfaculty Centre for Theoretical and Applied Linguistics, Bologna University, Italy. She has published in

xii Notes on the Contributors

the fields of CALL, corpus linguistics, lexicography and phraseology. She is currently conducting research on learner corpora, studying the use of conceptual metaphor and phraseology in the writing of advanced learners of English. Elena Semino is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Linguistics and English Language at Lancaster University, UK, where she teaches courses in stylistics and English language. Her research interests are in stylistics, corpus linguistics and metaphor theory. She has published on topics such as poetic text worlds, fictional minds, deixis, discourse presentation, and metaphor. Her most recent book is Metaphor in Discourse (2008). Anatol Stefanowitsch is Professor of English Linguistics at the University of Bremen, Germany. His research combines corpus-linguistic methods with cognitive linguistic theory, especially in the areas of construction grammar and metaphor theory. He is one of the editors-in-chief of the journal Corpus Linguistics and Linguistic Theory.

1 Analysing Conceptual Metaphors in Political Language Kathleen Ahrens Hong Kong Baptist University and National Taiwan University

The past two decades have seen an increase in the number of women serving in high-level political positions in countries throughout the world. Yet, to date, there has been no contrastive examination of the metaphorical language men and women use in the political arena. This is particularly relevant in light of research that argues that men and women use conversation rituals differently in the workplace: women to engage, men to win (Tannen 1994/2001; Holmes and Stubbe 2003), and that business media discourse involves WAR metaphors, which are regarded as a ‘masculinizing force on both discourse as well as on related social practices’ (Koller 2004: 172). If men and women are using language differently in the workplace, and the language of business has inherently masculine metaphors, what type of conceptual metaphors do women use when they participate in political office? Do they adopt the conceptual metaphors used by the majority (i.e. the men) as seems to happen in much of business discourse, or do they highlight their differences with their male colleagues by using conceptual metaphors that reflect their own perspectives on life and on the political situations as they see it? Or, as Cameron (2007) and Koller and Semino (this volume) suggest, do men and women exhibit certain patterns of linguistic behaviour which may make them appear as either masculine or feminine? The first eight chapters in this volume examine linguistic data (cf. Charteris-Black 2004, 2005) from five countries (Great Britain, Germany, Italy, Ireland and the United States) to determine to what extent the conceptual metaphors used by women with political power differ from, or remain the same as, those of men. These eight chapters have been divided into two sections: the five chapters in Part I examine the conceptual metaphors that politicians themselves use when speaking to their 1

2 Politics, Gender and Conceptual Metaphors

colleagues and their constituents; the three chapters in Part II look at the conceptual metaphors used by men and women in political debates in Great Britain, Germany and the United States. Part III discusses data that talk about women: how women are politicised in beauty advertisements in Singapore, how a leading US female senator is viewed by the pundits, and how women are portrayed in policy statements that have to do with women’s rights in the Netherlands and Spain. All authors base their analyses on linguistic data that they collected for the purpose of the study. While the studies in the first two parts take both a quantitative and qualitative approach to the data presented, the studies in the last part are primarily qualitatively based. In ‘Metaphor, Politics and Gender: a Case Study from Germany’, Koller and Semino work with a corpus of interviews and speeches given by the current and former German chancellors, Angela Merkel and Gerhard Schröder, and examine the number of metaphor tokens, metaphor types, as well as metaphoric type-token ratio and metaphor density per 1000 words, in addition to qualitative analyses of the metaphors used. Koller and Semino demonstrate through these analyses that Merkel uses metaphor in a formulaic manner, and that Schröder has a more pronounced use of WAR metaphors. In the conclusion, they argue against a monocausal explanation of gender-driven language use, noting that political party and other contextual information may also influence their results. In ‘Metaphor, Politics and Gender: a Case Study from Italy’, Semino and Koller run similar analyses on the Italian prime minister, Silvio Berlusconi, and on Emma Bonino, a prominent parliament member and former European commissioner for health and consumer protection. Semino and Koller point out that the differences in the metaphors used can be attributed to a range of factors, including: political orientation, goals, topics discussed, institutional roles and national audiences, as well as in the ways each politician strategically uses language associated with masculinity and femininity to reach his or her respective goals. In ‘Gender versus Politics: When Conceptual Models Collide’, Ahrens and Lee take a different approach to the issue of metaphor analysis. They look at the lexemes associated with the two overarching conceptual metaphors of the two major US political parties to determine if male or female senators use lexemes associated with one metaphor model more than the other. They find that gender does not drive either lexical choice or collocation patterns in speeches that occur on the US Senate floor. The chapter ‘Non una donna in politica, ma una donna politica: Women’s Political Language in an Italian Context’, by Gill Philip,

Kathleen Ahrens 3

also takes an innovative approach to metaphor analysis. She looks at the speeches, press interviews and press releases of five Italian women ministers from mid-2006 to mid-2007. She then extracts the lowfrequency content words, groups those words into semantically related categories, and determines whether these groupings fit the criteria for metaphorical source domains. Once this has been done, consistent mappings which indicate the presence of metaphor themes are identified. Philip finds that in the few instances when feminine themes occur, they are related either to the ministerial remit or the influence of journalists. She thus concludes that the metaphors used by female political leaders in Italy do not differ greatly from those of male politicians. In contrast to the previous four chapters, Hidalgo Tenorio, in her chapter ‘The Metaphorical Construction of Ireland’, provides evidence that the Irish president, Mary McAleese, uses metaphorical expressions twice as often as the Irish prime minister, Bertie Ahern. In addition, Hidalgo Tenorio argues that the five key domains are different for these two politicians, with Ahern focusing on information-oriented language and McAleese using people-oriented language. Although Hidalgo Tenorio acknowledges the influence of background, party loyalty and political role, she does see a clear influence of gender coming through in the choice of metaphors and language chosen by McAleese. The next three chapters all look at debates by politicians. In ‘Metaphor and Gender in British Parliamentary Debates’, Charteris-Black concludes that male Members of Parliament (MPs) in the British House of Commons use more metaphors than females, especially metaphors having to do with the concepts of health/illness and light/dark. He also notes that female MPs tend to use metaphors to make ethical appeals (although metaphor does not necessarily figure in the rhetoric of all female MPs), while male MPs tend to use metaphor to make an emotional appeal. Experienced female MPs employ metaphor more than inexperienced female MPs – though not as much as experienced male MPs which suggests that metaphor is a rhetorical skill that develops over time as female MPs familiarise themselves with the discourse norms of the House of Commons. In ‘Sex Differences in the Usage of Spatial Metaphors: a Case Study of Political Language’, Stefanowitsch and Goschler test whether spatial metaphors are used more frequently by men as compared with women parliamentarians in debates in the German Bundestag (the German parliament), based on the assumption that men are better at certain aspects of spatialization than women. However, they do not find evidence to support this hypothesis, as there is no discernible


difference in spatial metaphor use. Adams, in ‘Conceptual Metaphors of Family in Political Debates in the USA’, also does not find evidence that female candidates differ from male candidates in the way they use family metaphors in debates at the local, state or national level in the United States. Thus, to sum up the findings from the first two parts, only two out of eight studies conclude that men and women use metaphors differently. In the British parliament, male MPs use more metaphors than female MPs, and they use them differently (Charteris-Black), while the Irish president, Mary McAleese, uses more metaphors than the Irish prime minister, Bertie Ahern (Hidalgo Tenorio). However, the chapters in the third part, which look at how women are discussed by politicians or pundits or viewed by advertisers, paint a somewhat different picture as women are stereotyped by the metaphors that are used to describe them. In Lazar’s chapter on ‘Gender, War and Body Politics: a Critical Multimodal Analysis of Metaphor in Advertising’, she argues that advertisements for female beauty products are based on a model of political confrontation, with the area of battle being the female body, leading to alienation of the self. In addition, women’s ‘fight’ for beauty also refers to metaphors that relate to securing political rights and challenging the status quo. The irony, of course, is that women are now empowered to ‘fight’ what is perceived as ‘deadly’ about their own bodies. Meier and Lombardo, in their chapter ‘Power as a Conceptual Metaphor of Gender Inequality? Comparing Dutch and Spanish Politics’, examine how ‘power’ is conceptualised in Dutch and Spanish policy documents having to do with the issue of gender inequality in politics, and how conceptual metaphors are employed to describe ‘power’. They find that there is no obvious difference in terms of the conceptualisation of power between Dutch and Spanish policies, even though there are historical differences between the two countries concerning women in politics. In both cases, male power over women emerges as a taboo: it is not explicitly discussed as a problem. The invisible unstated norm of male political power suggests the perpetuation of imbalanced gender relations in political decision-making. Lastly, in Lim’s chapter, ‘Gendered Metaphors of Women in Power: the Case of Hillary Clinton as Madonna, Unruly Woman, Bitch and Witch’, he points out that gendered metaphors have been used to attack Hillary Clinton, especially as she has moved beyond the role of First Lady to the arguably more powerful roles of Senator and Democratic presidential contender.

Kathleen Ahrens 5

The chapters in this volume do not paint a uniform picture of gender and metaphor in the political realm. Some men use both femininity and masculinity to their advantage (the Italian prime minister, Silvio Berlusconi, discussed in Semino and Koller, comes to mind), and while some women use femininity and what can be construed as feminine metaphors (such as Mary McAleese discussed in Hidalgo Tenorio’s chapter), other women do not (for example, Hazel Blears as discussed in Charteris-Black). Moreover, it can sometimes be difficult to detect differences in how men and women use metaphors (as the chapters by Ahrens and Lee, and Stefanowitsch and Goschler point out). However, the use of metaphor to stereotype women can be seen in the way Hillary Clinton is portrayed by her critics. Thus, though it is possible to find gendered use of metaphors, it is also possible to find many situations in which there are no discernible differences. In short, it seems that in this modern era, both male and female politicians may choose to use femininity and masculinity when it suits their purpose. Moreover, this ability to make the most of the perceived advantages of either gender’s traits can be seen through the variety and range of conceptual metaphors politicians employ as they strive to persuade people of their plans and appeal to constituents for support.

References Cameron, L. 2007. ‘Patterns of Metaphor Use in Reconciliation Talk’. Discourse and Society, 18 (2): 197–222. Charteris-Black, J. 2004. Corpus Approaches to Critical Metaphor Analysis. Basingstoke, Hampshire, UK/New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Charteris-Black, J. 2005. Politicians and Rhetoric: the Persuasive Power of Metaphor. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Holmes, J. and M. Stubbe. 2003. Power and Politeness in the Workplace: a Sociolinguistic Analysis of Talk at Work. London: Pearson. Koller, V. 2004. Metaphor and Gender in Business Media Discourse: a Critical Cognitive Study. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Tannen, D. 1994/2001. Talking from 9 to 5: How Women’s and Men’s Conversational Styles Affect Who Gets Heard, Who Gets Credit, and What Gets Done at Work. New York: William Morrow.


Part I Gender and Conceptual Metaphors in Political Speeches


2 Metaphor, Politics and Gender: a Case Study from Germany Veronika Koller and Elena Semino Lancaster University

2.1

Introduction

In this chapter, we analyse the use of metaphor in a corpus of interviews and speeches given by the former and current chancellors of Germany, Gerhard Schröder and Angela Merkel. More generally, we will introduce a theoretical and methodological framework for analysing metaphor in discourse which informs both this and Chapter 3. The theoretical background relies on the notion of metaphor as both a conceptual and a linguistic phenomenon, which is combined with a social constructivist view on gender and language. While attention has been given to how female and male politicians are represented in the media (for example Hellinger 2006, Hercberg 2007), there are fewer studies addressing the potentially gendered language use of politicians themselves, a scarcity which this book, and indeed our chapters, are poised to remedy. Like most contemporary researchers of gender and language, we, too, follow the social constructivist view of gendered language behaviour, which rejects the idea of an inherent difference in language use by men and women (Cameron 2007). Essentialist notions of gender assume that biological sex unproblematically translates into gender identity, which in turn leads to gendered behaviour, including language behaviour. A variety of this essentialist view posits that different socialisation positions men and women in different subcultures, which then determine their linguistic behaviour (for example Tannen 1991). Following that line of thought, males would ‘naturally’ identify as men – either because of their biology or their upbringing – and exhibit behaviour that is culturally connoted as masculine. By contrast, the social constructivist approach holds that speakers use language in order to represent themselves as masculine or feminine. Contextual factors play a central role in what image speakers 9


wish to create and what strategies they employ to do so. In a nutshell, the approach to gender and language that we follow in this and the subsequent chapter does not state that a particular use of language, including metaphor, can be explained in terms of the speaker’s gender, but rather that speakers exhibit particular linguistic behaviour which makes them come across as masculine or feminine, often regardless of their biological sex. Following on from those theoretical considerations, the method section of this chapter introduces an approach to analysing metaphor in discourse which combines quantitative corpus-based investigations with qualitative text analysis. This will be exemplified with speeches and interviews given by the former and current chancellors of Germany, Gerhard Schröder and Angela Merkel. To elaborate on the background to the data we will in the following provide short profiles of the two politicians and then proceed to describe our methods of data selection and analysis. In the empirical part, we will present the results of our analysis. Finally, we will discuss what inferences these allow us to make about gendered metaphor usage by politicians, and more generally about analysing metaphor in political discourse.

2.2 2.2.1

Background Gerhard Schröder

Born in 1944 in North Rhine-Westphalia, Gerhard Schröder comes from a working-class background and first trained as a retail salesman before finishing secondary school at an evening college. He then studied law and was admitted to the bar in 1976, working as a lawyer until 1990. He joined the Social Democratic Party (SPD) at the age of 19. His political career took him from the position of chairperson of the Young Socialists to that of the party’s regional chapter and member of the party’s federal board. He was a member of parliament 1980–86 and served as governor (Ministerpräsident) of Lower Saxony between 1990 and 1998. In 1998, Schröder was elected as head of government and became chairperson of the SPD in 1999. He was re-elected in 2002 and continued to lead the coalition government of SPD and the Greens until he was defeated in the general elections of 2005. After that, he resigned from all political offices and now serves on the board of Russian energy company Gazprom. Gerhard Schröder is largely associated with a ‘modernisation’ of the SPD in the image of New Labour in Britain. His budgetary policies included both tax increases and cuts in public expenditure along with social

Veronika Koller and Elena Semino 11

policies that comprised liberalising naturalisation laws and introducing same-sex partnerships. During his terms in office, Schröder cultivated an anti-intellectual working-class image, but his penchant for fine clarets and his holiday home in Tuscany meant that he was frowned upon as a social climber. At the same time, he was notorious for curry-favouring businesspeople, leading to the epithet ‘comrade of bosses’ [Genosse der Bosse]. In gender terms, he very much presented himself as a ‘red-blooded male’, sporting all the necessary accoutrements such as cigars and a fourth wife, Doris Köpf. He appeared drunk in public after his re-election and similar speculations were voiced when he bullied Angela Merkel after his electoral defeat by bluntly refusing, in a televised debate, to step down as chancellor. After negotiations that dragged on for weeks, he finally ceded the chancellorship to her. 2.2.2

Angela Merkel

Angela Merkel was born in 1954 in Hamburg but grew up in the German Democratic Republic (GDR). She holds a PhD in physics from the University of Leipzig (1986) and worked as a research associate at the Academy of Sciences between 1973 and 1986. Her political career started after the fall of the Iron Curtain in 1989, when she joined first the Democratic Beginnings movement and, a year later, the Christian Democratic Union (CDU). She immediately became the spokesperson for the last government of the GDR, a member of parliament in the same year, deputy federal chairperson of the CDU in 1991 and chairperson of the regional chapter of the CDU in Mecklenburg-Vorpommern in 1993. Under Chancellor Helmut Kohl, she served as secretary for women and young people (1991–94) and secretary for the environment (1994–98). During the Schröder years, she became federal chairperson of the CDU and successfully ran for chancellor in 2005. She has been leading a grand coalition of CDU and SPD since then and has achieved modest successes in reforming and improving the economy. Angela Merkel’s meteoric career has left many baffled; in a conservative party that prefers its key members to be Catholic family fathers from the Rhineland, a childless Protestant woman from eastern Germany is an oddity. Starting out as a nobody from the former GDR, Merkel came to be known as ‘[Chancellor Helmut] Kohl’s little girl’, but fell out with him when she took over the CDU after his electoral defeat in 1998. Compared to the boisterous Schröder, Merkel’s image is that of a well-organised, diplomatic and cool person, who largely refuses to discuss her private life. Merkel is married to her second husband, professor of chemistry Joachim Sauer, who also keeps a very low public profile.


Before analysing the metaphor use of the two politicians, we will elaborate on our theoretical framework and methodological approach.

2.3

Theoretical framework

Conceptual metaphor theory in the tradition of Lakoff and Johnson (1980) posits that metaphor is a way of conceptualising one, usually abstract, thing in terms of another, usually more concrete, one. It is therefore first and foremost a cognitive phenomenon. It is only in a second step that conceptual metaphors find their surface-level expression in language and other semiotic modes of communication. In the mental operation known as metaphoric transfer, knowledge about a source domain, for example JOURNEY, is mapped onto a target domain, for example LIFE, yielding LIFE IS A JOURNEY. At the level of language, this metaphor might then be expressed as I’m at a crossroads. Notably, the mapping process only ever involves partial transfer of certain knowledge about the source domain, in accordance with the cognitive and pragmatic function that the metaphor and its related metaphoric expressions are meant to serve in speakers’ conceptual structure, language and communicative ends. For instance, in the persuasive genres that make up most of political discourse, political activity may be conceptualised, and then expressed, as a journey towards a positively evaluated destination. Mappings are thus likely to centre on determination, perseverance in the face of obstacles and possibly solidarity among travellers, while taking a detour, forgetting vital luggage and missing trains are unlikely to be drawn upon. This not only positions the speaker in relation to their audience, making metaphor serve an interpersonal metafunction (Halliday and Matthiessen 2004), but also represents the world from a particular viewpoint, thus meeting an ideational metafunction. As Lakoff and Johnson recognised (1980: 159), ‘metaphor can create realities for us, especially social realities’. Following on from that latter aspect of conceptual metaphor theory, a number of researchers have further developed the framework by investigating the ideological function of metaphor in discourse (for example, Charteris-Black 2004, Dirven et al. 2001a, b, Goatly 2007, Koller 2004b, Musolff 2004, Zinken 2003). Although different with regards to method and data, the studies listed above all address metaphor as a way of representing the world from a particular viewpoint,1 used in discourse with the aim of persuading, if not manipulating, audiences to accept the speaker’s position. In so far as acceptance of that position would reify the speaker’s relative power vis-à-vis others, metaphor does ideological work in discourse. One area of social life that is notoriously imbued with ideology is


gender. Particular representations of masculinity or femininity do ideological work in that they help to maintain, or challenge, notions of gender identity that benefit one group while disadvantaging another. In societies characterised by relatively high gender segregation and disproportionate male power, the group likely to have privileged discourse access and therefore to impose their views of gender is representative of what has been called ‘hegemonic masculinity’ (Connell 1995, Connell and Messerschmidt 2005). The role that metaphor plays in constructing gender identities that disadvantage women or express stereotypical gender identities has been investigated for various cultures and discourses, along three main dimensions: • gendered metaphors that reify power asymmetries, for example, by drawing on predominantly male experiences to define aspects of reality (Koller 2004b, Velasco Sacristan 2005, Wilson 1992); • metaphors used to refer to men and women (Hegstrom and McCarlNielsen 2002, Hines 1999, Hiraga 1991, Koller 2004a, Luchjenbroers 1998); • metaphors used by men and women. This chapter and the subsequent one address the third dimension and thereby complement studies on gendered metaphor use in educational contexts (Fiksdal 1999), emotional communication (Fussell and Moss 1998) and media coverage of war (Hollingsworth 2006). The rationale for investigating potentially gendered use of metaphor rests on the assumption that due to their socialisation, women and men perceive the world differently. Accordingly, the argument is that they might conceptualise the world differently (Kövecses 2005: 90) and express these different cognitive models in language features such as metaphoric expressions. Analysis of wo/men’s metaphor use would therefore allow for inferences about the gender identity of speakers as they develop it in a social context characterised by asymmetrical power relations between genders. As indicated in the introduction, however, most contemporary research in the area of language and gender dismisses the essentialist notion that gender identity unproblematically brings about gendered (language) behaviour. Rather, a social constructivist approach sees gender identities as discursively constructed, and regards femininity and masculinity as linguistic resources that speakers of any gender can draw on. The aim of such gendered self-presentation is perhaps not so much to come across as masculine or feminine – although that can also be the case – but to


capitalise on cultural associations that accrue to gender. For example, Holmes (2006) has shown how managers of either gender use pragmatic and conversational features such as humour, politeness and turn-taking in a hybrid style that combines transaction and interaction, to perform what is culturally associated with masculinity and femininity and to be perceived as competent and determined, or as caring and compassionate. Mills (2005) has found a similar phenomenon for everyday talk. These speakers’ self-presentation was not so much an effect of their gender identity but a strategic choice in order to achieve their goals in a particular context. How does this social constructivist approach square with conceptual metaphor theory and its emphasis on metaphor being ultimately embodied? Undoubtedly, primary metaphors have their source in human beings experiencing their body in three-dimensional space. However, by their very nature, such metaphors rest on universally human, not genderspecific, experiences.2 What we are dealing with when researching gender and metaphor, then, is less the embodied basis but rather the interpersonal and ideational metafunctions of metaphor. Ruling out bodily experiences, the assumption would again be that people of different sexes are socialised into particular gender identities which shape their conceptualisations of the world, including metaphoric ones, and consequently the way these models are expressed in language. While speakers of different genders have been found to use different metaphors to conceptualise the same situation (for example, Fiksdal 1999), it should be kept in mind that gender identity is not as fixed as essentialism would have it. At the very least, gender should be seen as a linguistic resource rather than necessity, as demonstrated in the abovementioned studies by Holmes (2006) and Mills (2006). More importantly still, gender is only one facet of a person’s identity and can be overridden by contextual factors and the aspects of identity prioritised by them. Thus, Holmes’ (2006) informants used language first and foremost in their professional roles, and other studies have shown how gender can combine with other aspects of the self, such as religious identity (Jule 2007). Furthermore, politicians in a democratic state are representatives of their party as well as their constituencies and also have to tailor their language use to various, often multiple, audiences. We would therefore expect to find considerable ‘linguistic variation according to the communicative setting, subject matter, medium, audience, and other factors’ (Kövecses 2005: 95). Last but by no means least, we should not forget that speeches, which form half of our data in this chapter, are actually composed by professional speech writers,


who are part of the politician’s public relations (PR) team. Indeed, the politician giving a speech often functions mainly as animator, and as a representative of a particular world view carefully designed by PR experts to target a maximum number of potential voters. On the one hand, the politicians’ own conceptualisations result in metaphoric expressions, which are likely to be influenced by factors such as gender, party membership, professional background and historical context. On the other hand, their language use is designed according to pragmatic considerations about audience and current politics. After detailing our methods of data selection and analysis in the next section, we will disentangle these aspects of politicians’ metaphor use in the empirical part of the chapter.

2.4

Methods of data selection and analysis

The comparative study of Schröder’s and Merkel’s metaphor use is based on a corpus of a total of 116,421 words (see Appendix 2.1 for details). The corpus is divided into two subcorpora of just under 60,000 words each, one for each politician. The texts were selected to represent a comparable range of genres, topics and media formats for both politicians. Thus, each subcorpus includes approximately 30,000 words of speeches and a similar proportion for interviews. The Schröder subcorpus contains ten speeches and ten interviews, compared to seven speeches and eight interviews in the Merkel subcorpus. The different genres were included in the corpus for the sake of variety; unfortunately, however, the data sets are too small to discuss them in detail. Therefore, we will only list them in the tables and mention them with regard to some examples. All data are available at http://archiv.bundesregierung.de, the archive page of the official website of the German government. The Schröder subcorpus spans six of the eight years of his chancellorship (2000–5), while the Merkel data are from the years 2005–7. In both cases, speeches address the topics of employment, European politics and the budget. Interviews are more diverse in their subject matter, as interviewers often tick off a list of topics. Interestingly, this for Angela Merkel also includes private matters such as her married life, while the same cannot be found in questions asked of Gerhard Schröder. Rather than being grouped by topic, the interview data cover a range of media outlets such as newspapers (tabloids, broadsheets and financial papers), news magazines, public radio stations as well as public and private TV channels. The data were selected in order to maximise the balance within each corpus in terms of topics and media. It should be noted that this corpus structure is


slightly different from that for the data for Italian politicians which we present in the following chapter (Semino and Koller, this volume). This is chiefly due to the fact that the two German politicians both held the same office, making the subcorpora much more homogeneous in terms of topics and audience. We started the analysis by using the software suite WordSmith Tools 3.0 to ascertain which words were overused by either Schröder and Merkel and thus get a first idea of the central topics and issues in the two subcorpora. This was done with the help of the word list and keyword programs, which generate frequency lists of the subcorpora and then compare them against each other to see which words are statistically overused in each case (p = .0000001) (Scott 1999). This procedure yielded a list of 19 expressions that are overused in the Schröder as compared to the Merkel data. The respective figure for the Merkel subcorpus is 29. We then selected a subset of approximately 30,000 words of speeches and interviews across topics and media formats. This cross-section was equally divided between the two subcorpora and analysed manually. The analysis was conducted following the metaphor identification procedure put forth by Pragglejaz Group (2007), and resulted in a list of metaphoric expressions used by each politician in those core data. This step of the analysis helped us gain familiarity with the data and identify recurrent source domains. It should be noted that we decided to focus only on particular source domains even at this early stage, excluding overly general ones such as TIME IS A CONTAINER (for example, ‘im letzten Jahr’ [(in the) last year]) or the primary metaphor MORE IS UP/LESS IS DOWN that is prominent in talking about the economy (for example, ‘niedrigste Neuverschuldung’ [lowest level of new debt]). Instead, the analysis concentrated on those metaphors that were used to conceptualise political activity, mainly JOURNEY and WAR metaphors. This first step in the analysis resulted in a list of 39 lexemes for the above source domains. The lexemes, or types, comprised both single words (for example, ‘Schritt’ [step]) and phrasal verbs (‘nach vorn schauen’ [to look ahead]) as well as their different compounds and lemmas (for example, ‘Reformschritt’ [reform step], ‘ich schaue nach vorn’ [I am looking ahead]). We subsequently returned to the WordSmith Tools software and thereby to the whole of the data. This step of the analysis involved running concordances for the 39 types in each subcorpus and checking them for metaphoric usage of the word or words in question. A metaphoric usage was considered relevant when it referred to political activity, and when it involved an individual or collective human actor. Thus, a phrase such as ‘das wird uns nicht von unserem Reformweg abbringen’ [this


won’t distract us from our path of reform] was included as an instance of the JOURNEY metaphor, while ‘die Steuerreform ist auf dem Weg’ [the tax reform is on its way] was not. Based on the results, we calculated: • the number and percentage of types realised for each of the source domains (JOURNEY and WAR) to see how productively either politician uses the metaphor; • the number of metaphoric tokens, that is, the individual metaphoric expressions; • the metaphoric type-token ratio (mTTR; see Koller 2004b) to ascertain the variety with which each metaphorically used lexeme is realised. The metaphoric type-token ratio shows how often different metaphoric expressions occur in a corpus; the lower the mTTR, the less varied is the metaphor usage in the corpus. It follows that the number and percentage of metaphoric types that are realised does not correlate with the mTTR, because the number of tokens may be disproportionately higher; • the metaphor density per 1000 words to determine the frequency with which the metaphoric tokens in question are used by the two politicians. As ‘quantitative advantage does not necessarily lead to a qualitative advantage’ (Kövecses, forthcoming), we deemed it necessary to relate the results of the computer-assisted corpus analysis back to the wider co-text of the speech or interview. The extended concordances for the lexemes allow us to do so, and to relate the metaphoric expression to other linguistic features that support its effect, such as modality, intertextuality, negation and, as far as the interviews are concerned, co-construction of the metaphor. This quantitative and qualitative analysis combines the dimensions of individual speaker and source domain. (In the next section, we will present the findings along the source domains.) It therefore allows us to discuss the results with regard to gender identities, but also contextual factors such as topic, audience and historical background, all of which can impact on politicians’ metaphor usage.

2.5 2.5.1

Analysis and results Keywords

As mentioned above, the Schröder subcorpus shows 19 statistically overused words, compared with 29 for the Merkel subcorpus. We can

18 Politics, Gender and Conceptual Metaphors Table 2.1

Keywords in Schröder and Merkel subcorpora Schröder

Merkel

Role

Bundeskanzler [chancellor] (masc.)

Bundeskanzlerin [chancellor] (fem.)

Abstract issues and entities: political

Gewerkschaften [trade unions]

Verfassungsvertrag [constitutional treaty]

Steuerreform [tax reform]

Koalition [coalition] Präsidentschaft [presidency]

Abstract issues and entities: other

Teilhabe [participation]

Glaube [belief]

Modell [model]

Thema [topic]

Self-reference

wir [we] CDU

Other reference Proper names: countries

Menschen [people] Polen [Poland] Deutsch [German]

Russland [Russia]

Frankreich [France] Emotional states

zufrieden [content]

Verbal processes

sprechen [to speak]

Mental processes

denke [(I) think]

Other

gelegentlich [occasionally]

sehr [very]

deswegen [because of that]

deshalb [because of that]

und [and]

einfach [simple, simply]

übrigens [by the way]

dass [that](relative pronoun)

der [the] (masc.)

(an dieser) Stelle [(at this) point]

(auf der) Basis [(on the) basis]

zum [to the] (masc., neuter)

(nicht) zuletzt

viele [many]

[(not) least]

wieder [again] hier [here] anbelangt [concerning]


ignore keywords such as the names of the politicians, magazines and interviewers, because those were not actually uttered but only appear in the transcription of the interviews.3 They are therefore excluded from Table 2.1. If we group the remaining keywords into semantic categories (Table 2.1), we can see that Angela Merkel draws on some categories exclusively, such as self- and other reference. There are a few similarities between the keywords in the two subcorpora: in both, references to the politician’s job title (‘Bundeskanzler[in]’ [chancellor]) rank high as keywords, but a closer look at the data shows that they feature as self-reference only 11 times in the Schröder subcorpus and 7 times in the Merkel subcorpus. Further, reference to political issues and entities is very much dictated by the politics of the day. There are, however, differences with regard to other abstract entities such as values; the reference to ‘Teilnahme’ [participation] is as predictable coming from a Social Democrat as is the Christian Democrat’s focus on ‘Glaube’ [belief]. However, the most notable differences concern Merkel’s use of the intensifiers ‘sehr’ [very] and ‘viele’ [many], which contrast with Schröder’s low-affinity ‘gelegentlich’ [occasionally]. Further, Merkel realises the categories self- and other reference as well as emotional states and verbal processes, which are absent in Schröder’s language use as conveyed in our data. The additional fact that he alone realises mental processes makes for a gender stereotypical impression where the female politician addresses not only political issues but also emotional states. In addition, she refers to her understanding for the concerns of the ‘people’ and shows intensification in her speech style. The following analysis of metaphor use will investigate whether this impression of gendered language use is borne out by the types of metaphors used by each politician and the way in which they use them. 2.5.2

Metaphor use

As outlined in the method section, the analysis of the politicians’ metaphor use combines quantitative and qualitative analysis. It will focus on the prominent source domain of JOURNEY and the additional source domain of WAR. 2.5.2.1

The JOURNEY source domain

What we have, for the sake of convenience, simply called the JOURNEY source domain is in fact shorthand for a much more complex conceptual scenario that ultimately goes back to the metaphor PURPOSES ARE DESTINATIONS (Lakoff and Johnson 1999) and a related SOURCE–PATH–GOAL


schema (Johnson 1987). In that model, a typically human agent moves purposefully towards a destination, often facing obstacles on the way: PURPOSEFUL ACTIVITY IS MOVING ON A PATH TOWARDS A DESTINATION (see also Lakoff 1993). Motion is usually self-propelled and persists until the goal has been reached. Crucially, the JOURNEY metaphor also serves to positively evaluate certain policies, since the destinations are seen as desirable (Charteris-Black 2004: 93). Due to its bodily basis of selfpropelled goal-oriented motion, the JOURNEY metaphor is extremely productive and has been confirmed for political discourse in countries as different as Britain, China, Germany, Italy, Taiwan and the US (Charteris-Black 2005, Chilton, personal communication, Musolff 2004, Semino 2002, Teng and Sun 2001).4 In our case study, we will look at its particular realisation in German political discourse, and at the individual differences in usage between the two politicians. The 22 types that have been found to realise the JOURNEY metaphor corroborate the basic schema (Table 2.2).

Table 2.2

Metaphoric expressions of JOURNEY metaphor

German original

English translation

Anlauf anstreben antreiben Ausweg Fahrplan führen gehen Geschwindigkeit kommen Kurs Meilenstein mitnehmen nach vorn schauen Pfad Schritt Sprung vor etwas stehen

start (noun) to strive towards to drive exit itinerary to lead to go speed, pace to come course milestone to take along to look ahead path step leap to face something (German: ‘to stand in front of something’) way point (on rail track) turning point goal

Weg Weiche Wendepunkt Ziel

Veronika Koller and Elena Semino 21 Table 2.3

Results for the JOURNEY source domain JOURNEY

Overall Metaphoric types

22

Schröder 18 Speeches 16

Metaphoric tokens

395

0.06

3.39

Speeches 16

Interviews 61

Speeches 140

Interviews 0.18

Speeches 0.11

Interviews 85

0.09

2.91 Speeches 3.6

Interviews 15

225

0.11 Speeches 0.15

Metaphor density/ 1,000 words

20 Interviews 11

170 Speeches 109

mTTR

Merkel

Interviews 0.18

3.88 Interviews 2.16

Speeches 4.79

Interviews 2.96

Figures for the mTTR and for density differ between the speakers, indicating that Merkel uses a slightly higher number of different expressions relating to the JOURNEY metaphor and also uses them more densely, particularly in her speeches. However, the mTTRs indicate that her metaphor use is not overly varied. Table 2.3 summarises the results for the JOURNEY metaphor. Merkel’s pronounced, if somewhat formulaic, use of the JOURNEY metaphor is supported by other linguistic features as well. Looking at the core data for her, we see that intensification5 and intertextuality serve to underscore the metaphorically phrased message. For instance, she elaborates the JOURNEY metaphor and adds adverbs (‘ganz entschieden’) to communicate determination. In English, this best translates as a prepositional phrase (‘with determination’):6 (1) … auf diesem Reformweg nicht stehen zu bleiben, sondern ihn ganz entschieden weiter zu gehen. … not to stand still on this path of reform but to continue on it with determination. (AM14) Intensifying adverbs and adjectives are also combined with highaffinity deontic modality to emphasise obligation with regard to the

22 Politics, Gender and Conceptual Metaphors JOURNEY metaphor. The speaker uses modal verbs (example 2) and adjectives (example 3) to express a high degree of obligation:

(2) Hier müssen wir nur das Ziel klar definieren. What we have to do here is to clearly define the goal. (AM14) (3) Leipzig [war] eine wegweisende, unabdingbare Weichenstellung für die CDU … wir [müssen] in dieser Richtung weitergehen. Leipzig [was] a groundbreaking, indispensable positioning of points for the CDU … and we [have to] continue in this direction. (AM10) Such an emphatic language use is consistent with the keywords ‘sehr’ [very] and ‘viele’ [many] that we found in the Merkel data. Elsewhere, Merkel echoes the interviewer’s metaphoric expression but disagrees with what it implies: (4) Interviewer: Bedeutet das nun, dass ein völlig neuer Anlauf genommen werden muss? AM: Ich glaube, wir sollten nicht einen völlig neuen Anlauf nehmen. Interviewer: Does this mean that a completely new start will have to be made? AM: I do not think that we should make a completely new start. (AM14) A similar Schröder:

JOURNEY

metaphor is used in an interview given by

(5) Wir [halten] an unserem Konsolidierungskurs fest. We are staying our course of consolidation. (GS14) These statements suggest the politicians’ determination and belief in their own politics, a sentiment that was made (in)famous by George W. Bush’s phrase ‘staying the course’, which is echoed above by Schröder.7 The lexemes that Schröder and Merkel use most often to realise the JOURNEY metaphor are given in Table 2.4. In the Schröder subcorpus, a quarter of all occurrences of ‘Weg’ [way] (his most frequent expression related to the JOURNEY metaphor), can be found in only one speech (GS10), where it is echoed and elaborated in

Veronika Koller and Elena Semino 23 Table 2.4 Frequent metaphoric expressions of JOURNEY metaphor for each politician German original

English translation

Occurrences in Merkel

Occurrences in Schröder

Weg

way

37

41

gehen

to go

31

n/a

Ziel

goal

30

35

vor etwas stehen

to face something

n/a

17

kommen

to come

29

16

Schritt

step

28

15

clusters, demonstrating the textual metafunction of metaphor in providing coherence to a text (Koller 2003): (6) Wir wissen, dass der Weg der Reformen kein einfacher Weg ist. Er ist lang und steinig … wir [müssen] auf diesem Weg weitergehen. Die Türkei, indem sie ihren Reformweg konsequent weitergeht … We know that the way of reforms is not an easy way. It is long and stony … we [have to] continue on this way. Turkey by determinedly continuing on its way of reforms … (GS10) The high degree of intertextuality among politicians reinforces the JOURNEY metaphor, as does the high-affinity deontic modality and other intensification devices that could be observed in Merkel’s language use. Given her cool and detached image, especially when compared to the ebullient Schröder, it is conceivable that the current German chancellor strategically uses (scripted) language, including metaphor, to appear engaged and passionate. Apart from being based on the primary metaphor PURPOSEFUL ACTIVITY IS MOVING ON A PATH TOWARDS A DESTINATION (Lakoff and Johnson 1999), the JOURNEY metaphor is further related to the source domain of OBJECT MANIPULATION. This becomes salient whenever the metaphoric concept PROBLEMS ARE OBSTACLES, which forms part of the metaphor, is drawn upon. Consequently, structural reforms can be approached with courage (‘beherzte[s] Angehen von Strukturreformen’, GS7), difficulties can be overcome and reforms tackled (‘Schwierigkeiten [werden] überwunden und Reformen angepackt’, AM6; see also Fairclough [2000: 62] on the verb ‘to tackle’ in the language of New Labour) and tasks can be attacked (‘diese Aufgabe in Angriff nehmen zu können’, AM14). The


last example shows that aspects of the JOURNEY metaphor tie in with the WAR metaphor. 2.5.2.2

The WAR source domain

Evidence for the WAR metaphor was found in far fewer lexemes (‘angreifen’ [to attack], ‘Kampf’ [fight], ‘Munition’ [ammunition], ‘Sieg’ [victory] and ‘Wagenburg’ [corral] (under siege)), as shown in Table 2.5. While the overall mTTR is very similar to that for the JOURNEY metaphor, density of metaphoric tokens per 1000 words is much lower. With regard to individual speakers, we found the reverse situation to that ascertained for the JOURNEY metaphor: the Merkel subcorpus includes 0.43 relevant metaphoric expressions per 1000 words, in contrast to the above-average figure of 0.72 for the Schröder subcorpus. Of the five types realising the WAR metaphor, by far the most frequent is ‘(to) fight’ (‘Kampf, ‘[be-]kämpfen’), which records 54 of the total 67 metaphoric tokens for the WAR metaphor. Of these 54 tokens, over two-thirds are to be found in the Schröder subcorpus, and most of them in the interviews. Occurrences of ‘fight’ cluster in the interviews GS13–GS15, which were conducted in the run-up to the general election in September 2002. Consequently, the lexeme is mostly realised in the compound ‘Wahlkampf’ [election campaign] (German:

Table 2.5

Results for WAR source domain

WAR

Overall Metaphoric types

5

Schröder 4 Speeches 2

Metaphoric tokens 67

0.07

0.58

Speeches 2

Interviews 29

Speeches 11

Interviews 0.1

Speeches 0.18

Interviews 1.03

Speeches 0.38

Interviews 14

0.16

0.72 Speeches 0.43

Interviews 4

25

0.1 Speeches 0.15

Metaphor density/ 1,000 words

4 Interviews 3

42 Speeches 13

mTTR

Merkel

Interviews 0.29

0.43 Interviews 0.49


‘fight for the election’). The interviewers largely restrict themselves to that expression, while Schröder shows more varied usage when also realising the lemmas ‘kämpfen’ [to fight] and ‘kampfbereit’ [ready to fight]. His parts of the interview also establish a pattern where the metaphoric expression is: • negated: (8) Interviewer: Sagen Sie damit dem Steuerdumping den Kampf an? GS: Von Kampf kann keine Rede sein. Interviewer: Does this mean you are declaring war on tax dumping? GS: War is not the correct term. (GS19) • used with reference to negatively connoted words:8 (9) Wir haben versucht, die Arbeitslosigkeit […] mit allen Mitteln zu bekämpfen. We have tried to fight unemployment with all means. (GS14) • used with reference to positively connoted words, as in the phrasal verb ‘to fight for’: (10) Ich bitte alle jene, die jetzt die Konjunktur herunterreden, um jedes Zehntel [Wirtschaftswachstum] zu kämpfen. I ask all those who are now talking down the economy to fight for each tenth of a percent [of economic growth]. (GS11) In this context, Charteris-Black has noted that ‘fight is an “attack” metaphor when it collocates with against and a “defence” metaphor when it collocates with for’ (2004: 69), but that both variants can be seen as realisations of what he terms CONFLICT metaphors. The pattern is even more pronounced in Schröder’s speeches, where infighting is rejected as negative, while the speaker presents himself as fighting against unemployment, wage dumping, illegal employment and the negative effects of an ageing population, but for Europe, values, the future, friendship and basic rights. Examples are: (11) Am meisten freue ich mich aber über die deutlichen Fortschritte bei der Bekämpfung der Arbeitslosigkeit. But I am most pleased about the clear progress in fighting unemployment. (GS3)


(12) Um dieses Europa muss also politisch gekämpft werden. So we have to fight for this Europe in political terms. (GS2) Although the respective figures are lower in the Merkel subcorpus – she uses only 25 tokens related to the WAR metaphor compared to Schröder’s 42 – the same pattern exists: the interviewers only realise the WAR metaphor by mentioning election campaigns, while Merkel, in both speeches and interviews, discredits ‘ideological trench warfare’ (‘ideologische Grabenkämpfe’, AM8). In addition, she sometimes presents herself as fighting crime, unemployment and national debt, but mostly as fighting for positively connoted issues, namely progress, jobs, values, the European constitution, free trade and people’s hearts: (13) Natürlich müssen wir die Kriminalitätsbekämpfung … ständig weiterentwickeln. Of course we have to continuously develop … the fight against crime. (AM6) (14) Wer den Gedanken des freien Handels aufgibt und dafür nicht weltweit kämpft, der wird Europas Chancen minimieren. Who gives up the idea of free trade and does not fight for it globally, will minimise Europe’s chances. (AM3) Metaphorically fighting for or against something shows what the speaker deems desirable or not. While both Schröder and Merkel fight for values and against unemployment, it is noteworthy that Schröder also fights against illegal employment and wage dumping, and thus for the interest of his core electorate of labourers, whereas the conservative Merkel fights against crime and for free trade. Here we can see how the WAR metaphor functions as ‘a heuristic for creating political identity’ (Charteris-Black 2004: 93). The fact that Merkel mostly presents herself as fighting for something rather than against, while Schröder presents himself as doing both in equal measure, corroborates Charteris-Black’s (2004: 70) observation about British political discourse, that is, that Labour manifestos show a more pronounced tendency to fight against what is perceived as social ills. In more general terms, we can account for these differences as typical of an inherently more progressive agenda that seeks to effect social change, for example by fighting against unfair employment practices, as opposed to a conservative agenda that seeks to preserve the positive, for example by fighting for values. On the whole, it seems that in the two politicians’ rhetoric, the fight against political opponents is only permissible in election campaigns.


Even then, the WAR metaphor is attenuated as ‘fighting for victory’ in the election rather than fighting against a competitor, also by the interviewers: (15) Wenn das für den Wahlsieg reicht, was wollen Sie dann tun? If that should be enough for election victory, what do you want to do then? (GS14) Otherwise, the WAR metaphor seems undesirable, at least in our data, which admittedly do not include election campaign speeches directed at an audience of party members or supporters. In the final section, we will discuss our findings with regard to gender and other factors influencing the observed use of metaphor, and draw general conclusions about analysing metaphor in political discourse.

2.6

Discussion and conclusion

The differences and particularities in the keywords and metaphors used by Schröder and Merkel can be accounted for by a variety of factors. Some features are likely to be due to party membership and concomitant world view, such as the keywords ‘Teilnahme’ [participation] for a Social Democratic politician, as contrasted with ‘Glaube’ [belief] for a Christian Democratic one. Likewise, Merkel’s (self-)presentation as fighting for social values rather than against social ills fits in with a conservative world view and politics that aim to preserve rather than change. Other results are probably due to the politicians’ personality and professional background. For example, the fact that Merkel’s use of more metaphoric types does not translate into a higher mTTR means that she uses metaphor in a rather formulaic way; the same is indicated by the fact that she uses some types exclusively metaphorically or uses them disproportionately often, for example ‘Weichenstellung’ [positioning of points]. This might simply be down to the fact that Merkel, as a trained physicist, has less feel for language than the former lawyer Schröder, who is also more confident in speaking freely. (However, in contrast to anecdotal evidence reported by Köveceses [2005: 108] and Koller [2004b: 13], professional background does not seem to influence the choice of source domains in our data. This may be one more indication that much of politicians’ language is scripted, with such scripted expressions even being echoed in the interviews.) Still other particularities are due to current politics, most notably the more pronounced use of the WAR metaphor by Schröder, especially in the interviews given in the run-up to the general election. The fact that the WAR metaphor in our data pales in comparison to the JOURNEY metaphor, and


that the SPORTS metaphor is absent altogether, is best explained by the historical context: given the cataclysmic consequences of Germany’s warmongering regimes in the first half of the twentieth century, rhetorical restraint is now seen as desirable in politicians and failure to live up to that ideal will meet with swift criticism which has in the past ended political careers.9 Moreover, our corpus contains only institutional speeches, and WAR and SPORTS metaphors may be more frequently used at rallies. So what has gender got to do with it? We can perhaps establish a link to gendered language use in the (self-)presentation of Angela Merkel. This shows in her keywords that include intensifiers and emotional states, as well as in her intensification of and around metaphoric expressions through devices such as verbs and adverbs, modality and intertextuality. Further, Merkel’s language use in our data also includes the keyword ‘Menschen’ [people]. This is underscored in her usage of the metaphoric expression ‘weh tun’ [to hurt],10 which she uses exclusively with regard to the pain that the government’s austerity policies cause citizens: (16) Wir wissen, dass das weh tut, dass das schwierig ist für viele Menschen. (We know that this hurts, that this is difficult for many people. (AM9) In stark contrast, Schröder only talks about what has hurt him personally: (17) Auch wenn es schmerzt persönlich – und etliches hat mich persönlich geschmerzt – da muss man auch einen Trennungsstrich ziehen können. Even if it hurts personally – and many things have hurt me personally – you still need to be able to draw a line of separation. (GS13) On the face of it, Merkel’s language use signals stereotypically feminine traits such as empathy and passion, and there is indeed no doubt that these characteristics are culturally associated with femininity. However, we do not think that these findings can be explained as a result of the speaker being a woman; apart from our critical position concerning essentialist discourses on gender, the fact that much of Merkel’s public language use is likely to be scripted by PR experts makes such an interpretation untenable. Of course one could argue that the same PR experts attempt to present her as feminine and again, some of her language fea-


tures, for example intensification, are indeed culturally feminine. However, another possible interpretation is that Angela Merkel is presented as a compassionate conservative, both to counter her image as ‘dry’ and cerebral, and to follow a trend among conservative politicians that was started by George W. Bush in the US and adopted by David Cameron in the UK. This trend uses culturally feminine notions for politicians of both genders in order to soften the image of conservative policies and move them to the oft quoted centre of the political landscape. Judging by her language use, it seems that Angela Merkel is the latest follower of this trend. The fact that she is female and exhibits some feminine characteristics in her language behaviour has led the media to describe her with maternal metaphors, such as ‘matriarch’ (Unger 2007) and ‘mother of the Grand Coalition’ (‘Mutter der Großen Koalition’; ‘Das endlose Ende’ 2007: 28). Yet, it is also conceivable to interpret Merkel’s language use as less, or not only, an expression of femininity but also as the representation of a particular type of conservative politician. In the case of politicians, we are faced with men and women speaking in public, a historically male activity. The problematic position that women face when entering public spaces has come to be known as a ‘double bind’, where the usually masculinist norms of institutions simultaneously demand from them to be and not be feminine. As Shaw (2005) has shown, this double bind leads to contradictory reactions by women politicians, who at the same time try to be non-confrontational and employ masculine adversarial styles, sometimes using femininity strategically but on other occasions trying to downplay it. The role of compassionate conservative may be one way out of this dilemma, as it embodies ‘permissible’ feminine language behaviour. Concerning the analysis of metaphor in political discourse in general, we advocate a theoretical framework that combines conceptual metaphor theory with critical analysis of texts-in-context. Further, we argue in favour of a methodological approach that oscillates between quantitative analysis of large data sets on the one hand and detailed qualitative text analysis on the other. In our view, the first is necessary in order to get a comprehensive overview of the data and to avoid making far-reaching claims based on a few selected examples. Moreover, each speech and interview cumulatively contributes to the construction of the public image of a particular politician and his or her views, and should therefore be seen in the context of a larger corpus. On the other hand, qualitative analysis is needed to gain an in-depth view of selected data samples and thus be able to relate metaphor use to other linguistic features. Finally, we strongly believe that the results gained by such an integrated analysis


have to be interpreted by taking into account a range of factors, so as to avoid overly simplified monocausal explanations, where gender overrides all other aspects, or, worse still, circularity, where the speaker’s gender somehow makes their language use masculine or feminine. In this chapter, we have developed such a framework and applied it to data from German politicians. The next chapter will provide a complementary analysis of the metaphor use of a male and a female politician in Italy.

Appendix 2.1 NB: Asterisks indicate core data. Table 2A.1

List of speeches by Gerhard Schröder included in the corpus

Number

Year

Speech given at/on

Word count

GS1

2000

Annual meeting of Federal Association of German Employers (Arbeitgebertag)

4,974

GS2

2000

Government declaration on the European Council

4,151

GS3

2001

German Civil Servants’ Association’s meeting on trade union policy

1,764

GS4

2001

Opening of the Franco-German talks ‘After Nizza – Europe running out of steam?’

660

GS5

2001

Meeting of the trade union Construction, Farming and Environment

2,440

GS6

2002

*GS7

2003

Budget report

GS8

2004

Polish forum on the Lisbon strategy

3,215

GS9

2004

Berlin conference on European cultural policy

2,198

*GS10

2005

Eid-ul-Fitr in Istanbul

1,633

Total

‘Franco-German relations in an enlarged Europe’

4,782 4,433

30,250

Veronika Koller and Elena Semino 31 Table 2A.2

List of interviews by Gerhard Schröder included in the corpus

Number

Year

Media outlet

GS11

2001

Bildzeitung newspaper

GS12

2001

Focus magazine

1,559

GS13

2002

ZDF TV

6,839

*GS14

2002

Handelsblatt newspaper

2,195

Word count 549

*GS15

2002

Der Spiegel magazine

1,870

GS16

2003

Deutschlandfunk radio

3,585

GS17

2003

RTL TV

2,099

GS18

2003

ARD TV

3,222

GS19

2004

Handelsblatt newspaper

1,950

GS20

2004

N24 TV

4,381

Total

28,249

Table 2A.3

List of speeches by Angela Merkel included in the corpus

Number

Year

Speech given at/to

AM1

2006

Annual meeting of the German Trade Union Congress (DGB)

4,436

AM2

2006

Opening of the International Bertelsmann Forum ‘The Future of the European Union’

3,138

AM3

2006

Annual meeting of Federal Association of German Employers (Arbeitgebertag)

5,241

AM4

2006

German Association for Foreign Policy

5,201

AM5

2006

Frankfurt European Banking Congress

5,129

*AM6

2006

Budget report

4,662

*AM7

2006

Citizens’ representatives (Bürgervertreter) on the occasion of the German EU presidency

1,392

Total

Word count

29,199

32 Politics, Gender and Conceptual Metaphors Table 2A.4

List of interviews by Angela Merkel included in the corpus

Number

Year

AM8

2005

Focus magazine

1,848

AM9

2006

N24 TV

3,694

*AM10

2006


1,959

AM11

2006

Süddeutsche Zeitung newspaper

2,083

Media outlet

Word count

AM12

2006

ARD TV

11,160

AM13

2007

ZDF TV

2,352

*AM14

2007

Deutschlandfunk radio

3,668

AM15

2007


1,959

Total

28,723

Notes 1 Note that this aspect of metaphor echoes Fairclough’s definition of a discourse as ‘a way of signifying experience from a particular perspective’ (1995: 135). 2 One exception is the BIRTH metaphor. Moreover, young girls and boys experience their body differently, by for example being more or less likely to engage in physical fights. However, we take these gendered bodily experiences to be largely an effect of culture. 3 It is noteworthy, however, that next to ‘Schröder’ and ‘Merkel’, ‘Angela’ is a keyword, but ‘Gerhard’ is not. This suggests a gendered naming practice in the media by which men in public roles are referred to by last name only, while the first name is more often included in reference to women (CaldasCoulthard 1995, 2005). 4 In view of the findings from East Asian cultures, it seems that Kövecses’ claim that the JOURNEY metaphor is particularly salient in the Western world (2005: 124) has to be qualified. However, different aspects of the JOURNEY metaphor may be foregrounded in different cultures, for example a focus on the goal vs a focus on travelling itself (personal communication Paul Chilton, 17 June 2008). 5 ‘Intensification’ is here used to refer to linguistic features used in combination with and around metaphor to reinforce its effect. In contrast, Eubanks (2000) uses the term to mean a reinforcement of the semantic content of the metaphoric expressions themselves. 6 Relevant metaphoric expressions and other linguistic features are underlined in the examples.

Veronika Koller and Elena Semino 33 7 Merkel also quotes the then American president when she stresses: (18) Man muss auch kämpfen um die Herzen der Menschen in Afghanistan. One also has to fight for the hearts of the people in Afghanistan. (AM6) However, intertextuality has a mainly rhetorical function and does not necessarily indicate the chancellor’s political sympathies; elsewhere in the above speech, she varies a quote by Social Democratic chancellor Willy Brandt: (19) mehr Freiheit wagen to risk more freedom. (AM6) 8 The semi-fixed phrase ‘fight against international terrorism’ was not included, as this is at least partially literal. 9 For example, the president of the German parliament, Philipp Jenninger, resigned in 1988 after a speech he delivered at the commemoration of the 1938 November pogroms against the Jewish population. He had attempted to make his speech more vivid by employing the rhetorical device of hypothetical thought representation to illustrate the assumed anti-Semitic view of Germans in Nazi Germany. This was perceived by many as expressing sympathies for National Socialism. 10 The metaphoric expressions ‘pain’ and ‘to hurt’ are not only realisations of an ILLNESS metaphor but are also conceptually related to the WAR metaphor.

References Caldas-Coulthard, C. 1995. ‘Man in the News: the Misrepresentation of Women Speaking in News-as-narrative Discourse’, in S. Mills (ed.) Language and Gender: Interdisciplinary Perspectives. London: Longman. Caldas-Coulthard, C. 2005. ‘Man in the News Revisited: the Mis-Representation of Women in News-as-Narrative Discourse’. Paper presented at the 14th Symposium on Critical Discourse Analysis, Athens/Greece, May. Cameron, D. 2007. The Myth of Venus and Mars: Do Men and Women Really Speak Different Languages? Oxford: Oxford University Press. Charteris-Black, J. 2004. Corpus Approaches to Critical Metaphor Analysis. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Charteris-Black, J. 2005. Politicians and Rhetoric: the Persuasive Power of Metaphor. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Connell, R.W. 1995. Masculinities. Berkeley: University of California Press. Connell, R.W. and J.W. Messerschmidt. 2005. ‘Hegemonic Masculinity: Rethinking the Concept’, Gender & Society, 19(6): 829–59. ‘Das endlose Ende’ [The endless end]. 2007. Der Spiegel, 19 November: 26-40. Dirven, R., B. Hawkins and E. Sandikcioglu (eds). 2001a. Language and Ideology. Vol. 1: Theoretical Cognitive Approaches. Amsterdam: Benjamins. Dirven, R., R.M. Frank and C. Ilie (eds). 2001b. Language and Ideology. Vol. 2: Descriptive Cognitive Approaches. Amsterdam: Benjamins. Eubanks, P. 2000. A War of Words in the Discourse of Trade: the Rhetorical Constitution of Metaphor. Carbondale, Ill.: Southern Illinois University Press. Fairclough, N. 1995. Critical Discourse Analysis. London: Longman.

34 Politics, Gender and Conceptual Metaphors Fairclough, N. 2000. New Labour, New Language? London: Routledge. Fiksdal, S. 1999. ‘Metaphorically Speaking: Gender and Person’, Language Sciences, 21(3): 345–54. Fussell, S.R. and M.M. Moss. 1998. ‘Figurative Language in Emotional Communication’, in S.R. Fussell and R.J. Kreuz (eds) Social and Cognitive Approaches to Interpersonal Communication. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum. Goatly, A. 2007. Washing the Brain: Metaphor and Hidden Ideology. Amsterdam: Benjamins. Halliday, M.A.K. and C.M.I.M. Matthiessen. 2004. Introduction to Functional Grammar, 3rd edn. London: Arnold. Hegstrom, J. L. and J. McCarl-Nielsen. 2002. ‘Gender and Metaphor: Descriptions of Familiar Persons’, Discourse Processes, 33(3): 219–34. Hellinger, M. 2006. ‘Why Merkel is not Enough: On the Representation of Fe/male Politicians in German Newspapers’. Paper presented at the International Gender and Language Association conference, Valencia, Spain, 8–10 November. Hercberg, E.N. 2007. ‘The 2007 Presidential Campaign in France: Language, Media, and Sexual Discrimination’. Paper presented at the Women, Power and the Media conference, Aston University, Birmingham, UK, 15–16 September. Hines, C. 1999. ‘Rebaking the Pie: the WOMAN AS DESSERT Metaphor’, in M. Bucholtz, A.C. Liang and L. Sutton (eds) Reinventing Identities: the Gendered Self in Discourse. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hiraga, M. 1991. ‘Metaphors Japanese Women Live By’, Working Papers on Language, Gender, and Sexism, 1(1): 37–57. Hollingsworth, S.B. 2006. ‘The Impact of Gender on the Use of Metaphors in Media Reports Covering the 2003 Gulf War in Iraq’, unpublished MA thesis, University of Missouri-Columbia, USA. Holmes, J. 2006. Gendered Talk at Work. Oxford: Blackwell. Johnson, M. 1987. The Body in the Mind: the Bodily Basis of Meaning, Imagination, and Reason. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Jule, A. (ed.) 2007. Language and Religious Identity: Women in Discourse. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Kövecses, Z. 2005. Metaphor in Culture: Universality and Variation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Kövecses, Z. Forthcoming. ‘Methodological Issues in Conceptual Metaphor Theory’, in S. Handl and H.-J. Schmid (eds) Windows to the Mind: Metaphor, Metonymy and Conceptual Blending. Berlin: de Gruyter. Koller, V. 2003. ‘Metaphor Clusters, Metaphor Chains: Analyzing the Multifunctionality of Metaphor in Text’, Metaphorik.de, 5: 115–34, http://www. metaphorik.de/05/koller.pdf Koller, V. 2004a. ‘Businesswomen and War Metaphors: “Possessive, Jealous and Pugnacious”’? Journal of Sociolinguistics, 8(1): 3–22. Koller, V. 2004b. Metaphor and Gender in Business Media Discourse: a Critical Cognitive Study. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Lakoff, G. 1993. ‘The Contemporary Theory of Metaphor’, in A. Ortony (ed.) Metaphor and Thought, 2nd edn. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Lakoff, G. and M. Johnson. 1980. Metaphors We Live By. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Lakoff, G. and M. Johnson. 1999. Philosophy in the Flesh: the Embodied Mind and Its Challenge to Western Thought. New York: Basic Books.

Veronika Koller and Elena Semino 35 Luchjenbroers, J. 1998. ‘Animals, Embryos, Thinkers and Doers: Metaphor and Gender Representation in Hong Kong English’, Australian Review of Applied Linguistics, 21(2): 105–22. Mills, S. 2005. ‘Contextualised Analysis of Gender and Language’. Paper presented at the Theoretical and Methodological Approaches to Gender and Language Study Seminar, 18–19 November, Birmingham, UK. Musolff, A. 2004. Metaphor and Political Discourse: Analogical Reasoning in Debates about Europe. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Pragglejaz Group 2007. ‘MIP: a Method for Identifying Metaphorically Used Words in Discourse’, Metaphor and Symbol, 22(1): 1–39. Scott, M. 1999. WordSmith Tools 3.0. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Semino, E. 2002. ‘A Sturdy Baby or a Derailing Train? Metaphorical Representations of the Euro in British and Italian Newspapers’, Text, 22(1): 107–39. Shaw, S. 2005. ‘Governed by the Rules? The Female Voice in Parliamentary Debates’, in J. Baxter (ed.) Speaking Out: the Female Voice in Public Contexts. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Tannen, D. 1991. You Just Don’t Understand: Women and Men in Conversation. New York: Ballantine Books. Teng, N.Y. and S. Sun. 2001. ‘Metaphoric Framing: ROAD as a Metaphoric Concept in Political News in Taiwan’, Mass Communication Research, 67: 87–112. Unger, B. 2007. ‘Germany’s Double Act’, The World in 2008, Special Issue of The Economist, 51. Velasco Sacristan, M.S. 2005. ‘A Critical Cognitive–Pragmatic Approach to Advertising Gender Metaphors’, Intercultural Pragmatics, 2(3): 219–52. Wilson, F. 1992. ‘Language, Technology, Gender, and Power’, Human Relations, 45(9): 883–904. Zinken, J. 2003. ‘Ideological Imagination: Intertextual and Correlational Metaphors in Political Discourse’, Discourse and Society, 14(4): 507–23.

3 Metaphor, Politics and Gender: a Case Study from Italy Elena Semino and Veronika Koller Lancaster University

3.1

Introduction

In this chapter we apply the theoretical and analytical framework introduced in Chapter 2 to a corpus containing a selection of speeches and interviews by two contemporary Italian politicians, Silvio Berlusconi and Emma Bonino. As in the previous chapter, we combine the main tenets of conceptual metaphor theory (Lakoff and Johnson 1980; Kövecses 2002) with a social constructivist view of gender (Sunderland 2004) in order to consider the rhetorical functions and ideological implications of metaphor use (see also Koller 2004, Semino 2008). More specifically, we attempt to explain the differences and similarities in the metaphoric choices made by a male and female politician in terms of a range of sources of variation, including political orientation, topics, concerns, goals and audiences (see also Kövecses 2005). These factors help us to interpret the particular ways in which each individual politician performs femininity and masculinity in their public discourse. We begin with a brief introduction to the political careers and identities of Berlusconi and Bonino. We then describe our data and methodology, and present some of the results of our analysis.

3.2 Silvio Berlusconi and Emma Bonino in the Italian political scene Italy has never had a woman as prime minister, or, more precisely, as ‘Presidente del Consiglio’ [President of the Council of Ministers]. We cannot therefore replicate for Italy the comparison that we have made in the previous chapter between Gerhard Schröder and Angela Merkel, respectively the former and current German chancellors. Our decision 36

Elena Semino and Veronika Koller 37

to focus on Berlusconi and Bonino is due to the prominent, if different, roles they have played (and continue to play) in Italian politics. 3.2.1

Silvio Berlusconi

Silvio Berlusconi was born in 1936 and is currently Italy’s richest man, thanks to a business empire that started with construction, and grew to include financial services, sports (notably, the football club AC Milan), publishing, cinema and television (notably, three nationwide television channels). Berlusconi’s brother, Paolo, owns one of Italy’s main daily newspapers, Il Giornale. Berlusconi entertained strong political connections throughout his entrepreneurial career (for example Veltri and Travaglio 2001). In 1994, however, he became directly involved in politics by founding his own political party, Forza Italia (which translates as ‘Come on Italy’), and forming a coalition with other existing centre-right or right-wing parties, which he named Il Polo delle Libertà [The Pole of Freedoms]. This coalition was later renamed La Casa delle Libertà [The House of Freedoms]. Berlusconi led his party and coalition to electoral successes in 1994 and 2001, and was Italy’s prime minister in 1994–96 and 2001–6. In both 1996 and 2006, he was defeated by a centre-left coalition led by Romano Prodi. In 2008 he returned to power as leader of a new, broader centre-right party, the Partito del Popolo delle Libertà [Party of the People of Freedoms]. Berlusconi has had two children with his first wife, and three with his current wife, former actress Veronica Lario. He cultivates a rampantly heterosexual image, both by publicly boasting about his popularity with women, and by ostentatiously flirting with young, attractive women at social and political events. It has also been noted that Berlusconi adopts a particularly didactic, condescending and flirtatious tone when addressing female audiences, and tends to describe the role of women in his movement as limited to supportive activities, such as fund-raising (see Bolasco et al. 2006: 121–34). In January 2007, his wife (who usually keeps a low profile) stunned Italian public opinion by complaining about Berlusconi’s womanising in a letter to Italy’s leftwing newspaper La Repubblica, and by demanding an apology. Berlusconi was forced to apologise equally publicly, but dismissed his verbal advances to other women as the result of his playful, self-ironic and irreverent personality. Berlusconi has openly acknowledged undergoing cosmetic surgery to his face, as well as two hair transplant operations. It is also well known that he routinely uses make-up and has his hair dyed. Although these behaviours can be described as


prototypically feminine, they are compatible with Berlusconi’s attempt to project the image of a strong, youthful and attractive Italian male. 3.2.2

Emma Bonino

Emma Bonino was born in 1948 and first became involved in politics in the mid-1970s, as part of a movement for the legalisation of abortion in Italy. In 1976 she was elected to the Italian Chamber of Deputies for the first time, and, apart from the five-year period in which she acted as EU commissioner, has been a Member of Parliament ever since. She has also had four terms as a Member of the European Parliament. From 1994 to 1999, she was European commissioner responsible for health and consumer protection. Throughout her political career, Bonino has been centrally involved with the Italian and international Radical movement. In the 1990s, she was president and then secretary of the Transnational Radical Party. The core of her political engagement has been a series of campaigns for civil rights and on a range of humanitarian issues. In Italy, these include the legalisation of abortion, the banning of nuclear energy and a campaign for freedom in scientific research. Internationally, Bonino has campaigned against capital punishment and female genital mutilation, and for the prevention of poverty in Third World countries. Bonino has lived in Cairo, is fluent in Arabic, and is involved in a range of initiatives for the promotion of intercultural relations and of democracy in the Arab world. She is an exponent of non-violent action in civil rights campaigns, including hunger strikes. In Italy, the Radical movement has not always corresponded to a political party. Hence, Bonino has, over the years, stood for election as part of different political formations, which have made alliances with either the centre-right or the centre-left coalitions, or, on other occasions, run independently. In 1994, the Radicals joined Berlusconi’s Polo delle Libertà, but this alliance was short-lived, due to profound differences in the conception of ‘liberalism’. In the 1999 European election, Bonino headed her own list, which gained an unprecendented 8.5 per cent of the votes. In 2006, Bonino and the Italian Radicals were part of a grouping which joined the centre-left coalition that won the elections. As a result, from 2006 to 2008 Bonino was minister for international trade and European affairs in the centre-left government led by Romano Prodi. Bonino has never married and has no children. In 1975, she gave herself up to the authorities after having an abortion, since this was illegal in Italy at the time. For several years, she fostered two children


until they were able to return to their family of birth. She has publicly declared that she has attempted, and failed, to become pregnant by artificial insemination, and has openly discussed the end of a longstanding heterosexual relationship. Overall, however, she does not tend to publicise her private life, and does not cultivate the fashion-conscious and often sexy femininity that is adopted by some Italian female politicians. Rather, her public image can be described as sober, elegant and tough. During her mandate as EU commissioner, she famously got herself dropped by helicopter onto a Spanish fishing boat in order to intervene directly in a dispute between Spanish and French fishermen. Apart from its potential as a publicity stunt, this initiative inevitably showed Bonino in a normally masculine, and rather unflattering, situation, which dramatically contrasts with Berlusconi’s tendency to stage-manage his public appearances in order to present a slick and groomed image.

3.3

Data and method

In order to conduct our comparative study of Berlusconi’s and Bonino’s use of metaphoric language, we assembled a corpus containing a total of 119,911 words. The corpus is divided into two subcorpora of approximately 60,000 words each, one for each of the two politicians. Each subcorpus includes approximately 40,000 words of speeches and 20,000 words of interviews. The Berlusconi subcorpus contains 14 speeches and 8 interviews, while the Bonino subcorpus contains 13 speeches and 21 interviews. Both subcorpora span a period from 1999 to 2007, which means that, for each politician, our data include material both from periods of office and from periods of opposition (see Appendix 3.1 for details, and for the labels we will use to refer to individual speeches and interviews). In addition, we included, for both politicians, similar proportions of different kinds of speeches, including speeches given in institutional contexts (for example, the Italian or European parliaments) and addresses given to supporters at political conferences and rallies. Our Italian data are therefore more heterogeneous than the German data discussed in the previous chapter, which relates exclusively to Schröder’s and Merkel’s respective terms as German chancellor, and only includes institutional speeches and interviews. As a consequence, the discussion of our findings in this chapter has a slightly different structure from the discussion of the German data in the previous chapter. It is also worth noting that the involvement of speech writers may be less systematic in the speeches included in the Italian corpus.


Generally speaking, Berlusconi’s speeches are more likely than Bonino’s to be the result of teamwork, due to his institutional role from 2001 to 2006 and to his personal resources. In addition, speeches delivered by both politicians in non-institutional contexts are more likely to include some element of improvisation, which is something that Berlusconi in particular tends to take pride in. The steps we followed in the analysis of the Italian corpus, however, are the same as those we followed in the German case study. We began by using the Keywords facility in the WordSmith Tools 3.0 software package (Scott 1999) in order to obtain an overview of lexical contrasts between the two subcorpora. We then carried out a manual analysis of metaphoric expressions in a ‘core’ section of the corpus containing approximately 35,000 words, equally divided between the two subcorpora (see starred items in the Appendix). This analysis was conducted on the basis of the metaphor identification procedure described in Pragglejaz Group (2007), and resulted in lists of metaphoric expressions used by each politician in the core data. These lists were then expanded by examining the complete word lists for each subcorpus (as provided by WordSmith Tools) in order to identify further potential candidates for metaphoricity. This led to the compilation of extended lists of potential metaphoric expressions, which were grouped according to the source domain that they can be said to evoke (for example JOURNEYS, SPORTS, VISION). We then selected a small set of source domains which displayed the most interesting contrasts across the two subcorpora (including SPORTS, WAR, NATURE, RELIGION, VISION), and employed the Concordance facility in WordSmith in order to (a) find all instances of the expressions relating to each of these source domains, and (b) identify all metaphoric uses of those expressions in the corpus. In the rest of this chapter we present and discuss a selection of the findings of our analyses.

3.4

Keywords in the two subcorpora

The Keywords tool in WordSmith can provide a preliminary overview of differences between the two subcorpora in terms of main topics and concerns. We employed this tool to compare with each other the complete word lists of the two subcorpora, and chose a p-value of 0.000001 for calculating statistical significance (Scott 1999). This resulted in a list of 39 words that, in our data, are used more frequently by Berlusconi than by Bonino, and a list of 36 words that are used more frequently by Bonino than by Berlusconi.


3.4.1

Berlusconi’s keywords

Out of the 39 words that are statistically overused in the Berlusconi subcorpus, 25 can be subsumed under the following broad topics: 1. Freedom: ‘libertà’ [freedom(s)]; 2. Government and the state: ‘governo’ [government], ‘stato’ [state]; 3. Left-wing forces in Italian politics: ‘sinistra’ [the left], ‘l’Ulivo’ [the Olive Tree] (the latter is the name of Prodi’s left-wing coalition); 4. Italy and the Italians: ‘Italiani’ [Italians], ‘Italia’ [Italy]; ‘nazionale’ [national], ‘popolo’ [people], ‘cittadini’ [citizens]; 5. Taxation: ‘tasse’ [taxes], ‘imposta’ [tax], ‘fiscale’ [fiscal]; 6. Crime and security: ‘sicurezza’ [security], ‘reati’ [crimes], ‘ordine’ [order], ‘criminalità’ [criminality]; 7. War and Iraq: ‘iracheno’ [Iraqi], ‘Iraq’ [Iraq], ‘dell’Iraq’ [of Iraq], ‘guerra’ [war]; 8. International politics and the United Nations: ‘risoluzione’ [resolution], ‘dell’ONU’ [of the UN]; 9. The opposition between ‘them’ and ‘us’: ‘loro’ [they/their(s)], ‘nostro’ [our(s)]. Not surprisingly, Berlusconi deals more frequently than Bonino with traditional right-wing concerns, such as taxation (group 5) and law and order (group 6). He also mentions Italy and its people more frequently (group 4), and makes more references to the leftwing forces to which his party and coalition are opposed. This is shown not just by group (3) above, but also by group (9): in most cases, the word ‘loro’ [they/their(s)] is used to refer to the left, while ‘nostro’ [our(s)] is used to refer to those groupings whom Berlusconi feels he represents: his party, his coalition, his government, his electorate and, generally, all those Italians he describes as hard-working and freedom-loving. The word ‘libertà’ [freedom(s)] is used by Berlusconi not just as part of the name of his coalition, but also as a value that sets his political side apart from the left, which he consistently describes as undemocratic. When it comes to international politics, groups (7) and (8) can be related to Berlusconi’s time in office between 2001 and 2006, when he supported the US administration’s strategy in the ‘war on terror’ following the 9/11 attacks, and deployed Italian troops in the ‘post-war’ operations in Iraq.


3.4.2

Bonino’s keywords

Out of the 36 keywords that are statistically overused in the Bonino subcorpus, 27 can be subsumed under the following broad topics or grammatical categories: 1. The Radical movement: ‘Radicali’ [Radicals], ‘radicale’ [radical], ‘Marco’ (reference to Marco Pannella, the most prominent member of the Italian Radical movement); 2. Referenda and the collection of signatures: ‘referendum’ [referendum], ‘firme’ [signatures]; 3. Non-violent methods in political action: ‘nonviolenza’ [non-violence], ‘nonviolenta’ [non-violent]; 4. Women: ‘donne’ [women], ‘femminile’ [female]; 5. Problems and issues for which the radicals and Bonino have campaigned: ‘ricerca’ [research], ‘scientifica’ [scientific], ‘divorzio’ [divorce], ‘aborto’ [abortion], ‘diritti’ [rights], ‘problema’ [problem], ‘temi’ [themes]; 6. Alternative conjunctions: ‘o’ [or], ‘oppure’ [or]; 7. Negative expressions: ‘non’ [not], ‘né’ [nor, neither], ‘neanche’ [not even]; 8. Adversative, concessive and hypothetical conjunctions: ‘ma’ [but/yet], ‘però’ [but, however], ‘se’ [if]; 9. Hedging expressions: ‘credo’ [I believe], ‘magari’ [possibly, perhaps], ‘forse’ [perhaps, maybe]. It is not surprising that Bonino talks more frequently than Berlusconi about the Radical movement, the variety of issues for which they have campaigned, and the methods they have used, notably referenda and non-violent protest (groups 1, 2, 3, 4 and 5). What is more striking is that the expressions we have grouped under (6), (7), (8) and (9) are mostly grammatical words, which are used to introduce alternatives, contrasts and qualifications. The hedging expressions listed under (9), in particular, are used by Bonino to make explicit the expression of her own beliefs, and, in a few cases, to suggest tentativeness. In fact, Bonino also repeatedly uses VISION metaphors to signal that she is putting forward her own personal, subjective opinions, as in the expressions ‘per come vedo io le cose’ [as I see things] and ‘a mio modo di vedere’ [in my view/in my way of seeing]. We have found no matching expressions in the Berlusconi subcorpus. These patterns point to an important contrast between Berlusconi’s and Bonino’s political discourse.


3.4.3 General differences between Berlusconi’s and Bonino’s political discourse Both politicians are passionate in their rhetoric, and present themselves as entirely committed to their respective causes. However, Berlusconi constructs himself as a strong and entirely confident leader, with a clear vision of what is right and wrong, good or bad. This allows little space for any expression of uncertainty, or any allowance for nuances or alternative possibilities (see also Bolasco et al. 2006). As compared with Berlusconi, Bonino uses a more reflexive and intellectual political discourse, which includes alternatives, scalar differences, expressions of doubt, and openness to others’ opinion. These differences can partly be explained by the fact that Bonino cannot aim for the highest office, and often addresses a more select portion of the public. However, this contrast can also be related to some traditional gender distinctions, and particularly to the stereotypically male characteristics of strength and decisiveness, which Berlusconi unequivocally embodies. Indeed, Berlusconi’s frequent self-descriptions (as well as his tendency to speak of himself in the third person) reflect a rampant and almost naive self-confidence: 1. … se c’è qualcuno che ha qualche possibilità, che è capace di mandare avanti tante cose insieme questo è il sottoscritto. Ho guidato il governo più longevo nella storia di questo paese. Ho fondato aziende. Ho portato per otto volte il Milan alla finalissima di champion league e ho vinto cinque coppe. Sono io il più concreto, il più pragmatico. (SB22) … if there is anyone who has any chance, who is able to keep many things going at the same time, this is yours truly. I have led the longest-lived government in the history of this country. I have founded companies. I have taken AC Milan to the Champions League final eight times and I have won five Cups. I am the most concrete, the most pragmatic. (SB22) More generally, it is widely recognised that Berlusconi brought into Italian politics a simple, direct, colourful and emotive vocabulary, which is a far cry from the abstraction and obscurity of traditional Italian political language (Amadori 2002, Bolasco et al. 2006). He also consistently presents himself as a non-politician – someone who, unlike professional politicians, comes from the ‘real’ world of work. In contrast, Bonino positions herself within a more intellectual political and philosophical tradition, which appeals to reasoning as well as to the emotions, and which makes fewer allowances for those sections of the


audience who are not well versed in political thinking and history. Indeed, while reflecting on a recent electoral defeat, Bonino commented self-consciously on the metaphoric ‘distanza’ [distance] of her movement ‘dal paese reale’ [from the real country] (EB2). These general patterns and differences provide a useful background to the analysis of some aspects of metaphor use in the two subcorpora.

3.5

Metaphor use in the two subcorpora

The lists of metaphoric expressions we obtained from our data suggest that, broadly speaking, both Bonino and Berlusconi draw from a set of source domains that have a wide metaphorical scope in Italian, as well as in English (see Kövecses 2002). These include particularly: • • • • • • • • •

and VIAGGI (MOVEMENT and JOURNEYS) and AGGRESSIONE (WAR and AGGRESSION) SPORT (SPORTS) COSTRUZIONE and EDIFICI (CONSTRUCTION and BUILDINGS) SALUTE and CORPO (HEALTH and BODY) VISIONE (VISION) SONNO and SOGNI (SLEEP and DREAM) MOVIMENTO GUERRA

BUSINESS NATURA (NATURE)

Several of these source domains (for example MOVEMENT and WAR) have been found to be dominant in the discourse of politicians in other countries, particularly the United Kingdom and the United States (for example Charteris-Black 2005). There are, however, differences in metaphor use between our two subcorpora, which we discuss in the rest of this chapter. We begin by considering how Berlusconi and Bonino use metaphor to construct different target domains, which correspond to their different individual concerns. We then show how the two politicians use a particular source domain (that of SPORTS) in very different ways. 3.5.1

Berlusconi’s metaphors for the left and taxation

As we have already mentioned, an important element of Berlusconi’s rhetoric is the description of the political left in Italy as a dangerous force, whose access to power would lead to a loss of freedom and democracy. Throughout his political career, Berlusconi has supported this claim by stating that the apparent respectability of the left (as embodied, for


example, by Romano Prodi) conceals its continuing links with its communist past, and particularly with a Stalinist version of communism. A number of rhetorical strategies are used by Berlusconi to construct the left as menacingly communist. These include the provision of figures for the number of people killed worldwide under communist regimes, and metaphoric expressions such as Examples (2) and (3) (here and throughout, we underline only the relevant metaphoric expressions): 2. Ho già detto che un albero non può cambiare frutti, un albero dà sempre gli stessi frutti. E l’albero di questa sinistra ha le sue radici in una cultura anticapitalistica, in una ideologia che possiamo chiamare francamente con il suo vero nome, che è il comunismo ortodosso, il comunismo di allora e di sempre. (SB11) I have already said that a tree cannot change its fruits, a tree always gives the same fruits. And the tree of this left has its roots in an anticapitalistic culture, in an ideology which we can frankly call with its real name, which is orthodox communism, the communism of then and of always. (SB11) 3. la Sinistra ha sempre avuto un’attrazione fatale per la dittatura, sapete, e non furono portati in tribunale perché la Sinistra fece infiltrare i suoi uomini in tutti i punti nodali dello stato, cioè le scuole, i giornali, le stazioni TV, la magistratura, nel sistema nervoso centrale dello stato. (SB17) the left has always had a fatal attraction for dictatorship, and they weren’t prosecuted because the left infiltrated its men into all of the nodal points of the state, that is, the schools, the newspapers, the TV stations, the judiciary, into the central nervous system of the state. (SB17) In these examples Berlusconi uses a range of different metaphors to present what he sees as the pernicious and deceptive aspects of the left. Goatly (1997) has referred to this phenomenon as ‘diversification’: the use of a range of different source domains for the same target domain. In (2) a particular scenario from the NATURE source domain is used to suggest that the link between the current left-wing parties and communism still applies today and always will: the left is presented as a tree that has its roots in ‘orthodox communism’. Within the source scenario, a tree cannot change the location of its roots, and this notion


of an inevitable connection is projected by Berlusconi onto the target domain of the left and its characteristics. In (3) the relationship between the left and dictatorship is metaphorically presented as a ‘fatal attraction’, and the activities of the left are described via the verb ‘infiltrare’ [infiltrate], which, in Italian, still retains the physical meaning of ‘penetrating’ (usually by gases or liquids). What is being infiltrated is various parts of the Italian state, which are also described metaphorically as its ‘punti nodali’ [nodal points] and personified via the expression ‘sistema nervoso centrale’ [central nervous system]. This ‘reds-under-the-bed’ tendency in Berlusconi’s rhetoric is well known (for example see Bolasco et al. 2006: 77–90), and is often derided as anachronistic. Nonetheless, its appeal to part of the electorate is supported by the fact that left-wing coalitions have often included two parties which retain the label ‘Communist’ in their name. What Berlusconi’s claims conveniently ignore, however, is not just the fact that these small parties are entirely committed to democracy, but also that Italy’s main left-wing party moved away from communism well before Berlusconi entered politics. The fact that Berlusconi’s coalition includes a post-Fascist party (Alleanza Nazionale/National Alliance) constitutes a further underlying inconsistency in Berlusconi’s claims. A related aspect of Berlusconi’s political discourse concerns taxation. Berlusconi is openly committed to low taxation, and systematically associates the left with the threat of excessive and unfair taxes. As part of these claims, the levying of taxes is metaphorically described via expressions such as ‘furto’ [theft], ‘rapina’ [robbery], ‘sequestro della ricchezza’ [seizure of riches/wealth], ‘saccheggiare i nostri redditi’ [ransack our income] and ‘mette(re) … mani rapaci’ [laying … rapacious hands] on families’ lifelong savings. A further example is given below: 4. Mai in cinque anni ho portato sul tavolo del Consiglio dei ministri un provvedimento che permettesse al fisco di mettere le mani in più nelle tasche dei cittadini. (SB11) Never in five years have I taken to the meetings of the Council of Ministers a law which gave the Inland Revenue a greater ability to put its hands into the pockets of the Italians. (SB11) This extract contains Berlusconi’s most frequent figurative description of taxation as involving ‘mettere le mani nelle tasche’ [putting one’s hands in the pockets] of the Italians. The noun ‘tasche’ occurs five times in our corpus, and all cases are part of descriptions of taxation similar to Example (4). This use of ‘tasche’ can be seen as metonymic,


since money is traditionally kept in pockets. However, the expression ‘mettere le mani nelle tasche dei cittadini/degli Italiani’ [put one’s hand in the citizens’/Italians’ pockets] evokes a pickpocket scenario, which is used metaphorically to present the levying of taxes as a surreptitious and immoral activity at the expense of hard-working citizens. This tendency to describe taxation as theft is not simply an element of populist right-wing discourse, but has particular significance in relation to Berlusconi and to the Italians’ attitude to taxes. Tax evasion is endemic in Italy, and Berlusconi himself has been repeatedly prosecuted for tax fraud and false accounting, as well as other crimes. In several cases, trials ended with acquittals (in some cases with a dubitative formula), while in others Berlusconi was cleared of charges because the statute of limitations had expired (in fact, the statute of limitations for crimes such as fraud was shortened during Berlusconi’s time in office). On the whole, tax evasion tends to be perceived by many Italians as a minor offence, or not an offence at all. By using metaphors such as those we have mentioned above, Berlusconi therefore taps into the views and emotive reactions of large portions of the Italian public, who may feel vindicated in their own attitudes and practices. 3.5.2

Bonino’s metaphors for identity

Diversification, that is, the use of different source domains for one target domain, can also be found in the Bonino subcorpus, but the target domains in question are different from those we discussed in relation to Berlusconi. One such target domain is the notion of identity, and particularly European identity. Bonino deals with this issue in various speeches given both to Italian and international audiences. Here we focus on a speech delivered at the 2004 Conference of the Italian Radicals, in which she responds to the claim that the Judaeo-Christian tradition is a central component of European identity, and should therefore be included in the EU’s constitution. In this speech, Bonino begins by questioning the validity of a view of identity as based in a shared past, a view that she explicitly associates with the metaphor of ‘roots’ [radici]. Her own alternative view is expressed via two different metaphors. One draws from the source domain of CONSTRUCTION/BUILDINGS, and presents identity as a ‘progetto’ [plan/project] that involves a gradual process of ‘costruzione’ [construction]. The other draws from the source domain of VISION, and constructs identity as a process that involves ‘guardare avanti’ [looking forward] to the future rather than ‘guardare indietro’ [looking back] to the past.


Bonino then goes on to replace the conventional ‘roots’ metaphor by drawing from different aspects of what we may call the TREE source scenario: 5. Siamo sicuri invece che la nostra identità […] è un’identità progettuale, è un’identità di divenire. La nostra storia, se vogliamo prendere la metafora della pianta […] non sono le nostre radici sono le foglie e gli innesti, quello che riusciamo a costruire. (EB8) Rather we are convinced that our identity […] is a project identity, it is an identity of becoming. Our history, if we want to take the metaphor of the plant, […] is not the roots it is the leaves and graftings, what we manage to build. (EB8) Here the CONSTRUCTION metaphor is combined with a novel and explicit use of the TREE metaphor for identity. In Lakoff and Turner’s (1989) terms, Bonino extends the traditional metaphor of identity/shared history as a tree by drawing from normally unused elements of the source scenario, namely leaves and graftings. More specifically, she replaces the normally used element of the source scenario (the roots) with two normally unused elements. The notion of grafting in particular accommodates the possibility of new people, races and culture being included in a shared identity – something that the metaphor of roots does not easily allow for. Later in the same speech, Bonino uses a different metaphor to question the view that Muslim immigrants pose greater problems for Europe and its identity than Christian immigrants: 6. Non preoccupa, appunto, di che fede religiosa sono, ma se entrano in una casa – come dice lei – o in una famiglia che sa chi è, non perché sa chi sono i suoi genitori ma perché sa chi sono i suoi fratelli e le sue sorelle. (EB8) I am not worried, in fact, about their religious faith, but about whether they enter a house/home – as you say – or a family who knows who it is, not because it knows who its parents are but because it knows who its brothers and sisters are. (EB8) Here Europe is metaphorically presented first as a house/home (a metaphor attributed to Senate speaker Marcello Pera), and then as a family. However, the FAMILY source domain is used in a rather unconventional way. Prototypically, identities within families depend on links with


previous generations, and with parents in particular. Indeed, sibling relationships are defined in terms of shared parentage. In extract (6), Bonino juxtaposes an identity based on knowledge of one’s parents to an identity based on knowledge of one’s siblings. This relies on a looser view of sibling relationships, which are implicitly presented as something that can be acquired independently of shared parentage. Hence Bonino advocates a notion of European identity as being based on current relationships of coexistence and intimacy among different groups of people, rather than on shared origins (be they racial, cultural or religious). Bonino’s metaphors are sophisticated and potentially powerful, especially in combination with one another. However, they are also likely to be more demanding than the conventional metaphors she is attempting to replace, and do not rely on the well-established emotional associations of metaphorical expressions such as ‘roots’. In this sense, Bonino’s political discourse, and metaphor use in particular, differ considerably from Berlusconi’s in terms of their potential for mass appeal. In the next section we will show that similar conclusions can be reached by considering a particular source domain. 3.5.3

The

SPORTS

source domain

metaphors are a well-known staple of political discourse (for example Balbus 1975). Berlusconi, in particular, has been associated with the use of SPORTS and, more specifically, FOOTBALL metaphors, particularly at the beginning of his career as a politician (see Semino and Masci 1996). The very name of Berlusconi’s party, Forza Italia, is an expression used by supporters of the national football team. Berlusconi regularly refers to his decision to enter politics as ‘scendere in campo’ [enter the field/pitch], and originally described his goal as that of giving Italy a strong ‘squadra di governo’ [government team]. These expressions are often also accompanied by reminders of Berlusconi’s successes as the owner of the AC Milan football club, which provide a powerful literal motivation for his choice of metaphor (see also Semino 2008). SPORTS metaphors carry a particularly strong gendered bias, since most sports are prototypically male activities, and supporters are also more likely to be male than female (for example Segrave 1994). In addition, it is male teams and competitions that receive most media attention, especially in the case of sports such as football. In Berlusconi’s case, the association with football and the use of FOOTBALL metaphors contribute to the construction of his masculine identity as strong, active and competitive. It is therefore interesting to compare Berlusconi’s use of SPORTS metaphors in our data with Bonino’s. SPORTS


Overall, we have identified in our data 202 occurrences of metaphoric expressions (metaphoric tokens) that can be related to the SPORTS source domain. These 202 occurrences realise 28 different lexemes, or, for our purposes, metaphoric types (for example, different occurrences of the verb ‘vincere’ [to win] can be subsumed under a single metaphoric type). Altogether, these metaphoric types show an mTTR (metaphoric typetoken ratio) of 0.14, and a density of 1.68 sport-related metaphoric tokens per 1000 words. As shown in Table 3.1, we actually identified more instances of SPORTS metaphoric tokens in the Bonino subcorpus than in the Berlusconi subcorpus (126 tokens as opposed to 76, resulting in a higher density per 1000 words).1 The number of types is also higher in the Bonino than the Berlusconi subcorpus (20 vs 16), but the mTTR is lower for Bonino (0.16 vs 0.21). In other words, there is greater variation in the SPORTS metaphoric expressions used by Berlusconi than in those used by Bonino, but she uses her particular set of SPORTS metaphoric expressions more often. Out of a total of 28 metaphoric types, 10 are found in both subcorpora, and constitute highly conventional metaphoric expressions that realise central elements of the SPORTS source domain as a whole or of particular sports, such as: ‘avversario’ [opponent], ‘vincere’ [to win], ‘campo’ [pitch] and ‘traguardo’ [finishing line]. The speaker-specific metaphoric types, however, are much less conventional in the Bonino subcorpus than in the Berlusconi subcorpus. Indeed, our quantitative results cannot be properly interpreted without a qualitative analysis of the ways in which SPORTS metaphors are used by each politician. 3.5.3.1

Berlusconi’s SPORTS metaphors

The SPORTS metaphors we have identified in the Berlusconi subcorpus draw from a variety of sports, as shown in Examples (7)–(9): 7. Senza spirito di squadra non si affronta nessuna gara. Così come senza patriottismo non si va da nessuna parte. (SB15)

Table 3.1

Results for the SPORTS source domain Whole corpus

Metaphoric types Metaphoric tokens mTTR Metaphor density/1,000 words

28 202 0.14 1.68

Berlusconi 16 76 0.21 1.26

Bonino 20 126 0.16 2.1


Without team spirit one cannot face any race/match. Equally without patriotism one cannot go anywhere. (SB15) 8. Il processo di modernizzazione non si è mai arrestato […] fino a toccare il traguardo storico dell’aggancio al plotone di testa dei paesi più progrediti. Il mio governo è impegnato fortemente per continuare a farne parte. (SB15) The process of modernisation has never stopped […] until we reached the historic goal/finishing line of catching up with the leading group of the most advanced countries. My government is strongly committed to ensure that we continue to be part of it. (SB15) 9. In quel guizzo imprevisto, che ci fa riguadagnare il centro del ring ogni volta che siamo messi all’angolo, molti vedono il riflesso fortunato del famoso stellone d’Italia. Io sono convinto, invece, di vederci il patriottismo degli italiani di buona volontà. (SB15) In that unexpected dart/move, that enables us to get back to the centre of the ring every time we have been pushed into a corner, many see evidence of Italy’s famous lucky star. In contrast, I am convinced that I see in it the patriotism of all Italians of good will. (SB15) In Example (7) the general notion of ‘team spirit’ is used metaphorically to present patriotism as necessary in international relations, which are implicitly constructed as a ‘gara’ [race/match]. In Example (8) Italy’s successful effort to be included in the Eurozone (which was achieved by the first Prodi government) is expressed via a CYCLING metaphor. In Example (9) a BOXING metaphor is used to express Italy’s ability to remain among the most advanced nations against all expectations. In the same extract, the expression ‘di buona volontà’ [of good will] is also an example of the frequent intertextual references to the Catholic liturgy or the Bible which Berlusconi uses to support his claim that he represents the Catholic electorate in Italy. In other words, Berlusconi tends to present national or international politics as a match or a race, and draws from aspects of various sports in order to emphasise the efforts and successes achieved by Italy, or by himself and his government/supporters. Such uses of SPORTS metaphors are mostly conventional in Italian political discourse, both in terms of the linguistic expressions that are used and in terms of the underlying conceptual mappings. More specifically, Berlusconi’s SPORTS


metaphors tend to exploit the audience’s sense of identification with the teams they support and the positive emotional associations of sporting victories. Berlusconi himself is also constructed as either participating in or facilitating difficult but ultimately successful sporting enterprises. 3.5.3.2

Bonino’s SPORTS metaphors

Bonino’s SPORTS metaphors include a number of instances that radically contrast with Berlusconi’s conventional uses, since they exploit aspects of the source domain that are not conventionally used in metaphorical mappings. Consider Examples (10)–(12): 10. … l’assenza di regole ha consentito in passato e consentirà ancora a Bossi e ad altri opportunisti e/o avventurieri della politica di cambiare squadra e casacca nel corso della partita. (EB2) … the absence of rules has allowed and will still allow Bossi and other opportunists and/or adventurers of politics to change team and shirt in the course of the match. (EB2) 11. Perché a noi è successo quel che accadrebbe a una squadra che si iscrive a un torneo mettiamo di pallacanestro – con difficoltà, perché la pallacanestro non è il nostro sport preferito – e che al momento di scendere in campo viene informata di dovere giocare non più a pallacanestro ma a pallanuoto. (EB2) Because what happened to us is what would happen to a team who sign up for a tournament let’s say of basketball – with difficulty, because basketball is not our favourite sport – and who at the time of entering the pitch are informed that they no longer have to play basketball but water polo. (EB2) 12. Vede, signor Presidente, lei […] ci ha dimostrato che il senso delle Istituzioni non è il suo forte. Certamente lei è un esperto di calcio e di calcio mercato, quindi, per spiegarmi con un esempio, lei – signor Presidente–cosa direbbe di un campionato dove una squadra, magari la sua, è costretta a chiudere il calcio-mercato un mese prima delle altre? Lei direbbe che è un campionato fasullo, sleale, illegale. (EB13) You see, Mr President, you […] have shown us that a regard for institutions is not your forte. Certainly you are an expert in football and football transfers, so, in order to make myself clear with an example, you – Mr President – what would you say of a


championship in which a team, perhaps your own, is forced to end the transfer season a month before the others? You would say that this is a fake, unfair, illegal championship. (EB13) In all three cases, Bonino uses SPORTS metaphors to criticise the Italian political context, and particularly the absence of precise and fair rules concerning elections and the allocation of parliamentary seats. This, she argues, allows practices that consistently damage the chances of electoral success of political formations such as her own. In Example (10) Bonino stigmatises the fact that Northern League leader Umberto Bossi and other party leaders tend to move in and out of different coalitions, thus unfairly altering the political scenario. In Example (11) an extended SPORTS metaphor is used to denounce the fact that preelection rules were changed in such a way as to reduce the chances of success for her list. In Example (12) Bonino pretends to address Berlusconi himself (who was then prime minister), and prefaces the use of a FOOTBALL metaphor with a reminder that he is an expert in football and in the transfer of players. This metaphor is used to describe a situation in which, according to Bonino, her own list received little or no media exposure in the run-up to the elections, in contrast with the main political parties. Our data contain further examples of similar metaphoric expressions, such as ‘gioco impazzito’ [a game gone mad] and ‘giocando una partita truccata’ [playing a fixed match]. In other words, Bonino primarily uses SPORTS metaphors to expose what she sees as unfair and illegal practices. In the source scenarios, her own role is that of a (reluctant) player/ team who is damaged by the absence of clear rules for the game, or by the fact that others can change the rules as they please. These uses of metaphor exploit the SPORTS source domain in unconventional and sometimes counter-intuitive ways. In several cases, the metaphorical scenarios Bonino outlines are actually impossible, or, minimally, implausible in the source domain: players cannot normally change teams half way through the match, and it is unlikely that a team will be forced to play a different sport than what they were expecting. This, in a way, is Bonino’s point: her metaphors show that what is possible in Italian politics would be outrageous if transferred to a sporting context. In this sense, the improbable nature of the metaphorical scenarios she uses is potentially very effective. On the other hand, however, Bonino’s metaphor use is less immediately accessible than Berlusconi’s, and does not exploit the most obvious sources of emotional involvement provided


by the source domain, such as the elation and pride associated with winning. Indeed, it could be argued that Bonino uses SPORTS metaphors not because they are the most natural choice for her, but because she is forced to employ them by their dominance in political discourse, particularly as represented by Berlusconi himself (as can be seen by the fact that she address Berlusconi directly in (12)). However, she uses these metaphors in a way that goes against the grain of the source domain itself, and that reflects her own lack of familiarity and identification with it. In Kövecses’s (2002: 109–12) terms, it can be argued that Berlusconi normally exploits the ‘main meaning focus’ of the SPORTS source domain (that is, the concepts of competition, physical struggle, victory), whereas Bonino relies on other aspects of sporting activities, which are not normally used metaphorically and may even be improbable in the source domain (see also the ‘Mapping Principles’ proposed in Ahrens, forthcoming). We do not have the space in this chapter to consider the use of other source domains in our data. However, the patterns we have found in relation to several other source domains are similar to those we have described for the SPORTS source domain, in terms of the different degrees of conventionality, accessibility and emotive potential of the metaphors used by the two politicians. This applies particularly to the WAR source domain, which is closely related to SPORTS. Both Berlusconi and Bonino exploit the WAR source domain in ways that are similar to those we have discussed for Schröder and Merkel in Chapter 2 (that is, they present themselves as ‘fighting for’ positive outcomes and ‘against’ negative situations). However, Berlusconi also consistently uses WAR metaphors in order to construct the Italian left-wing parties as a threat to freedom and democracy, and as engaged in constant aggression against him in particular, which requires self-defence on his part (see also Bolasco et al. 2006: 95–7). Bonino also uses WAR metaphors for the Italian political scene, but usually to criticise the excessively adversarial attitudes of both the centre-left and the centre-right coalitions, and to construct herself and her colleagues as belonging to neither camp. In addition, on several occasions she exploits the WAR source domain in unconventional and counter-intuitive ways. For example, she self-consciously chooses WAR metaphors to emphasise the effectiveness of non-violent methods of political resistance, and, on one occasion, describes Europe as ‘questa cittadella, che vediamo sempre più assediata e che in realtà si assedia da sé’ [this citadel, which we see as more and more under siege and that in fact puts itself under siege], in order to question the perception of migratory movements as a threat for EU countries. In other words,


as we have noted with the SPORTS source domain, Berlusconi’s WAR metaphors mostly exploit the main meaning focus of the WAR source domain (that is, the presence of an enemy, attack, defence, etc.), while Bonino often constructs ad hoc source scenarios (for example selfimposed siege) and/or unconventional cross-domain mappings, which are more creative but also potentially less immediately accessible and involving than Berlusconi’s metaphors (see Ahrens, forthcoming for evidence of the lower acceptability and interpretability of metaphorical expressions that do not rely on conventional cross-domain mappings).

3.6

Concluding remarks

The differences we have noted in the metaphors used, in our data, by Berlusconi and Bonino can be explained in terms of a range of factors, including: • Political orientation and tradition (Berlusconi’s populist right-wing tradition vs Bonino’s Radical tradition); • Goals (Berlusconi’s aim to be elected or confirmed as prime minister vs Bonino’s aim to obtain particular civil rights, and to gain an inevitably modest proportion of the votes in elections); • Topics (Berlusconi’s focus on the left, tax and security vs Bonino’s focus on civil rights, women’s issues and cultural issues); • Institutional roles (Berlusconi as prime minister or leader of the main opposition party, Bonino as member of the Radical movement, Italian and European MP and leader/member of various national and international initiatives); • National audiences (Berlusconi’s mass audience of centreright Catholic supporters vs Bonino’s more restricted party audience, as well as a wider national audience on some civil rights issues). In addition, we have shown that differences in metaphor use can also be related to the particular ways in which each politician performs masculinity or femininity. Berlusconi embodies many of the characteristics that have been associated with contemporary charismatic (male) right-wing leaders (Eatwell 2005): a Manichean world view in which the forces of ‘good’ are opposed to the forces of ‘evil’, a special personal mission to


save the nation and its people, a view of himself as both superior and ‘one of the people’, and an attractive, magnetic personal presence. Berlusconi’s metaphors are one of the strategies he uses to convey this particular image, which is associated with strong, heterosexual masculinity. As we have shown, a range of different metaphors are used in his speeches and interviews to set up frightening scenarios in which Italy is under constant threat from a communist left, and to construct internal politics in terms of competition and aggression. Against this background, Berlusconi presents himself as a prototypically masculine heroic leader who remains strong in spite of continued attacks, and who alone is capable of ensuring that Italy is free, democratic and successful. On the other hand, however, Berlusconi also tends to appeal to instinct, the emotions, and the irrational (as opposed to reasoning, intellect and rationality). This can be seen as a characteristic that is stereotypically associated with femininity. Indeed, in a speech addressed to Forza Italia’s women movement (analysed in Bolasco et al. 2006: 121–34), Berlusconi explicitly praises women for having contributed to the party a tendency to act on instinct as opposed to rationality. Bonino’s use of metaphor also reveals a complex interplay between the realisation of both masculine and feminine roles. Unlike Berlusconi, Bonino tends to put issues and goals centre-stage rather than herself. She also makes her own limitations explicit, and often hedges her own opinions (whether via metaphor or otherwise). This is a tendency that is often associated with femininity, in contrast with Berlusconi’s prototypically masculine confidence and certainty. On the other hand, however, Bonino presents herself as tough and passionate, and uses metaphors drawn from source domains that correspond to typically masculine activities, such as SPORTS and WAR. However, she tends to exploit these source domains in unconventional ways, in order to make particular points and to challenge dominant views. In particular, she appears to use SPORTS metaphors as a concession to dominant, male-centred political discourse, but makes non-obvious, againstthe-grain uses of SPORTS scenarios, and attributes to herself the role of a reluctant and disadvantaged sportswoman. Overall, Bonino’s unconventional uses of metaphor are likely to make greater interpretative demands of her audiences, and tend to appeal to their intellect and reasoning abilities more than to their emotions. In this sense, Bonino allies herself with a more intellectual and sophisticated political tradition than Berlusconi, and adopts a role that is more associated with masculinity.


We do not have the space here to carry out a cross-cultural and crosslinguistic comparison between our findings in this chapter and the previous one. Such a comparison would be worthwhile, however, since we have noted a much greater use of novel, extended and deliberate metaphors in the Italian corpus. This can partly be seen as a result of the differences between our German and Italian corpora, which we mentioned above. However, we would also argue that the Italian data reflect a tendency in contemporary Italian politics toward the use of simpler, more vivid and colourful language than was the case before the early 1990s (which marked the end of what is known as Italy’s ‘First Republic’). The cause of this change has been identified in the rise of political figures such as Northern League leader Umberto Bossi, and, even more, Berlusconi himself, whose language has, appropriately in our view, been described as exhibiting a distinct lack of ‘restraint’ (for example Bolasco et al. 2006). Arguably, Bonino’s unconventional SPORTS metaphors reflect an attempt to adapt to these changes while at the same time distancing herself from some central aspects of the source domain. In conclusion, our analysis in this and the previous chapter suggests that the performance of gendered identities should not be ignored when considering variation in metaphor use at the level of the individual. We have also shown, however, that such variation can only be properly explained by taking into account the interaction of a range of factors, of which the performance of masculinity and femininity is one.

Note 1 In a corpus-based study, Bolasco et al. (2006) have noted a decrease in Berlusconi’s reliance on FOOTBALL metaphors in the course of his political career, and an increase in WAR metaphors.


Appendix 3.1 NB: Asterisks indicate core data. Table 3A.1

List of speeches by Silvio Berlusconi included in the corpus

Number

Year

Speech given at/to

SB1

1999

‘Security Day’ demonstration

9,342

*SB2

1999

‘Tax Day’ demonstration

8,985

SB3

2003

Italian Chamber of Deputies

3,339

SB4

2003

Italian Senate

1,770

SB5

2003

EU Intergovernmental Conference

1,067

*SB6

2004

Italian Chamber of Deputies

2,527

SB7

2004

Italian Senate

2,010

SB8

2004

Ceremony for the signing of the EU constitution in Rome

SB9

2005

Italian Senate

SB10

2005

Italian Senate

SB11

2006

Forza Italia youth clubs

SB12

2006

Italian electorate via radio

*SB13

2006

American Congress

SB14

2006

Anti-government demonstration

Total

Word count

632 2,272 706 2,135 500 2,108 2,480 39,873

Table 3A.2

List of interviews by Silvio Berlusconi included in the corpus

Number

Year

Media outlet

SB15

2001

Ideazione magazine

4,474

*SB16

2002

Ideazione magazine

1,666

SB17

2003

The Spectator magazine

3,466

SB18

2005

Libero newspaper

*SB19

2006

RAI 3 TV programme

1,378

SB20

2006

RAI 1 TV programme

5,887

SB21

2007

Il Sole 24 Ore newspaper

1,696

*SB22

2007

La Stampa newspaper

Total

Word count

259

936 19,762

Elena Semino and Veronika Koller 59 Table 3A.3

List of speeches by Emma Bonino included in the corpus

Number

Year

Speech given at/to

EB1

1999

Event organized by the Radical movement

5,769

*EB2

2001

Coordinating committee of the Radical movement

5,436

*EB3

2002

Meeting of EU centres in USA

1,112

EB4

2002

Spanish SLA association

1,660

EB5

2003

Conference for the prevention of female genital mutilation in Cairo

1,234

EB6

2004

EU Parliament

EB7

2004

Meeting of Italian association of women elected to high office

1,594

EB8

2004

Congress of the Italian Radicals

6,198

*EB9

2004

Suzanne Mubarak, Women for Peace International Movement

3,845

EB10

2005

EU Parliament

EB11

2005

Luca Coscioni, association for freedom of research

3,915

EB12

2005

Event organised by the Radical movement

3,409

*EB13

2006

Congress of SDI-Rosa nel Pugno

4,960

Total

Word count

802

411

40,345

60 Politics, Gender and Conceptual Metaphors Table 3A.4

List of interviews by Emma Bonino included in the corpus

Number

Year

Media outlet

EB14

2000

La Repubblica newspaper

2,980

*EB15

2000

L’Espresso magazine

1,010

EB16

2000

Il Messaggero newspaper

EB17

2003

Welfare Cremona online magazine

EB18

2004


646

*EB19

2005

Liberal Café online newspaper

837

EB20

2005

Noi Donne online newspaper

EB21

2005

National Council of Accountants

613

EB22

2005

Il Messaggero newspaper

483

EB23

2005


551

EB24

2005

Il Corriere della Sera newspaper

380

EB25

2005

Uninetwork, a network of Italian universities

668

EB26

2005

Sistema Italia association

699

EB27

2006

RAI 3 TV programme

863

EB28

2006

RAI 3 TV programme

1,378

*EB29

2006

RAI 3 TV programme

1,043

EB30

2006

Veneto Radicale association

676

EB31

2006


660

EB32

2006

L’Espresso magazine

EB33

2007


760

EB34

2007

La Voce Repubblicana online forum

536

Total

Word count

958 2,007

1,123

1,060

19,931


References Ahrens, K. Forthcoming. ‘Mapping Principles for Conceptual Metaphors’, in L. Cameron, A. Deignan, G. Low and Z. Todd (eds) Researching and Applying Metaphor in the Real World. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Amadori, A. 2002. Mi Consenta: Metafore, Messaggi e Simboli. Come Silvio Berlusconi ha conquistato il consenso degli Italiani. Milan: Libri Scheiwiller. Balbus, J. 1975. ‘Politics as Sport: the Political Ascendancy of the Sports Metaphor in America’, Monthly Review, 26 (10): 26–39. Bolasco, S., G. Luca and N. Galli de’ Paratesi. 2006. Parole in Libertà: Un’analisi statistica e linguistica. Rome: Manifestolibri. Charteris-Black, J. 2005. Politicians and Rhetoric: the Persuasive Power of Metaphor. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Eatwell, R. 2005. ‘Charisma and the Revival of the European Extreme Right’, in J. Rydgren (ed.) Movements of Exclusion: Radical Right-Wing Populism in the Western World. New York: Nova Science Publishers. Goatly, A. 1997. The Language of Metaphors. London: Routledge. Koller, V. 2004. Metaphor and Gender in Business Media Discourse: a Critical Cognitive Study. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Kövecses, Z. 2002. Metaphor: a Practical Introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Kövecses, Z. 2005. Metaphor in Culture: Universality and Variation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Lakoff, G. and M. Johnson. 1980. Metaphors We Live By. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Lakoff, G. and M. Turner. 1989. More than Cool Reason: a Field Guide to Poetic Metaphor. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Pragglejaz Group. 2007. ‘MIP: a Method for Identifying Metaphorically Used Words in Discourse’, Metaphor and Symbol, 22 (1): 1–39. Scott, M. 1999. WordSmith Tools, Version 3. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Segrave, J. O. 1994. ‘The Perfect 10: “Sportspeak” in the Language of Sexual Relations’, Sociology of Sports Journal, 11: 95–113. Semino, E. 2008. Metaphor in Discourse. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Semino, E. and M. Masci. 1996. ‘POLITICS IS FOOTBALL: Metaphor in the Discourse of Silvio Berlusconi in Italy’, Discourse and Society, 72: 243–69. Sunderland, J. 2004. Gendered Discourses. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Veltri, E. and M. Travaglio. 2001. L’odore dei soldi: Origini e misteri delle fortune di Silvio Berlusconi. Rome: Editori Riuniti.

4 Gender versus Politics: When Conceptual Models Collide in the US Senate Kathleen Ahrens* and Sophia Yat Mei Lee** *Hong Kong Baptist University and National Taiwan University **The Hong Kong Polytechnic University

4.1

Introduction

One of the main purposes of political speeches is to persuade others of one’s opinion. Nowhere is this more apparent than on the floor of a democratically elected legislative body, where legislators gain floor time to convince others of the validity of their points of view. One method political leaders employ to this end, either consciously or unconsciously, involves incorporating appropriate conceptual metaphors into their speeches. Recent work has focused on the analysis of metaphors used by presidents and prime ministers (Charteris-Black 2004, 2005, 2007, Chilton and Ilyin 1993, Lu and Ahrens 2008, Semino and Masci 1996). However, less attention has been spent on political leaders at the next level of statesmanship: the senators, cabinet ministers and members of parliament, an area which several chapters in this volume now address (Chs 5, 7–9 and 12). In this chapter, we examine the use of lexemes associated with two conceptual metaphor models in US senatorial speech from 2000 to early 2007 in order to determine if gender, political party affiliation, or a combination of both gender and party in the US Senate influences the conceptual models invoked by the senators. We find that as a group, senators do not invoke a particular conceptual model on the basis of gender. Instead, the conceptual model most often invoked across all groups is the model that Lakoff (1996/2002) postulates to be associated with the Democratic political party.

4.2

Conceptual models used in American politics

Lakoff (1996/2002) postulates that the American political system is based on a conceptual model of a family and that the two modern US 62

Kathleen Ahrens and Sophia Yat Mei Lee 63

political parties, the Democratic Party and the Republican Party, have their own particular version of this general model. Each version reflects the conceptual world view of that political party which is, in turn, postulated to be based on the moral values which that party holds. For example, Lakoff (1996/2002) argues that the Republican Party utilizes the Strict Father (SF) model, which is based on a traditional nuclear family where the father has the primary responsibility to support and protect the family. The primary metaphors for this model are MORALITY IS STRENGTH and MORALITY IS AUTHORITY. Within the conceptual metaphor theory (Lakoff and Johnson 1980, Kövecses 2002), a more abstract concept is understood in terms of a more concrete concept (relatively speaking). Thus, in the previous case, MORALITY is the abstract concept in the target domain understood in terms of a more concrete source domain, such as STRENGTH.1 Lakoff (1996/2002) postulates that the Republican Party in America bases its values on this model and that Republicans primarily use metaphors (such as MORALITY IS STRENGTH) which support this model. Some policy entailments that arise from this particular world view include the idea that self-discipline and self-denial allow one to build moral strength and that there is a moral authority and moral order in the family, and by extension in the social and political universe. The alternative model, the Nurturant Parent (NP) model, is postulated by Lakoff (1996/2002) to be used primarily by the Democrats. The NP model is based on a family where responsibility is shared among family members, and there is mutual caring and support given to all family members. The primary metaphors for this model are MORALITY IS NURTURANCE and MORALITY IS EMPATHY. Thus, according to Lakoff, both political parties acknowledge and incorporate the primacy of the family into their political models. However, the Republicans use the family model to emphasise that strength and authority are the primary responsibilities of a family leader (and by extension, a political leader), while Democrats use the model to emphasise that nurturance and empathy are the primary characteristics of a family or political leader. In addition to differing in terms of underlying assumptions of a family and their extensions to the political world, these models differ with respect to women’s roles in the moral order. In the SF model, men are considered to have moral authority over women, while in the NP model, neither men nor women have moral authority over the other gender (Lakoff 1996/2002). This fact may explain the ‘party’ gap; that is, Democratic women held double the number of seats of their Republican counterparts in 2007 (50 versus 21 House members, 11 versus 5 senators,


and 6 versus 3 governors).2 This could be argued to be the case precisely because the moral value system of the Democrats supports women as leaders. Yet, there still are female Republican leaders at the highest levels of government in the United States. These women do, de facto, have authority over the men and women in their staff. They are the voice of representation for the men and women in their state. Given that the conceptual models give rise to different ways of viewing women’s roles, does being part of the Republican Party mean that these female leaders incorporate the MORALITY IS STRENGTH conceptual model into their world view? In order to answer the above question, we need to first address what it means to incorporate a conceptual model into one’s world view. One possible way of evaluating this issue is to determine what conceptual metaphors are used by speakers and then determine if these metaphors are part of the proposed conceptual model. For example, as CharterisBlack (2005) points out, Republican president George W. Bush uses many moral accounting metaphors, which are considered to be part of the SF model (Lakoff 1996/2002). However, Charteris-Black did not specifically investigate whether Republicans and Democrats used one model (that is, NP or SF) more than the other. To look at the literature on the hypotheses generated by the Lakovian family model, we need to turn to Cienki (2004, 2005a, b) and Ahrens (Forthcoming). Cienki (2004, 2005a, b) examines conceptual metaphor use of George W. Bush (Republican) and Al Gore (Democrat) in the televised debates before the US Election in the year 2000. In Cienki’s (2005a) paper, he found that the verbal gestures used by the two candidates supported the models, although the data were sparse. However, none of Cienki’s papers demonstrated support for the consistent use of verbal metaphors which exemplified the conceptual metaphors proposed in Lakoff’s models. Cienki (2005b) notes that since direct evidence for the validity of the proposed model is lacking (that is, evidence based on verbal metaphors), it might be necessary to come up with a new methodology that tests non-metaphorical entailments. Ahrens (Forthcoming) suggests such an approach by investigating whether there are different frequency patterns in presidential usage for lexemes relating to ‘strength/authority’ (in the SF model) and ‘nurturance/ empathy’ (in the NP model). To test this hypothesis, corpora from online sources, including the State of the Union Addresses for American presidents from 1980 to 2006 and radio addresses for the same period, were created. Indeed, the data demonstrate that Reagan, a Republican, used more lexemes related to the SF model, while the Democrat Bill Clinton


used more lexemes related to the NP model. In this chapter, we take a similar approach by looking at the pattern of lexeme usage by Democratic and Republican senators with respect to the terms related to the SF and NP conceptual models.

4.3

Lexeme selection

Following Ahrens (Forthcoming), we employed a similar methodology to create a corpus of speeches and examine the frequency of lexical use of words associated with the SF and NP models. The choice of relevant lexemes was determined by using WordNet 3.0 (http://wordnet.princeton.edu/), an online lexical reference system in which nouns, verbs, adjectives and adverbs are organised into synonym sets, each representing one underlying concept. The appropriate sense in WordNet was then selected for each of the following four words: strength and authority (the top two source domains for the SF model) and nurturance and empathy (the top two source domains for the NP model). Next, concrete nouns and verbs (underlined below in (1)–(4)) were selected from the WordNet definitions and direct hypernyms. After they were selected, we then discussed and discarded any verb or noun that was considered either too polysemous or too vague to be useful in the analysis (indicated with shading in (1)–(4)). (1) Selected sense and its direct hypernym for ‘strength’ Selected sense: (n) force, forcefulness, strength (physical energy or intensity) Direct hypernym: (n) intensity, intensiveness 3 (high level or degree ; the property of being intense) (2) Selected sense and its direct hypernym for ‘authority’ Selected sense: (n) authority, authorization, authorisation, potency, dominance, say-so (the power or right to give orders or make, decisions) Direct hypernym: (n) control (power to direct or determine) (3) Selected sense and its direct hypernym for ‘nurturance’ Selected sense: (n) nurturance (physical and emotional care and nourishment) Direct hypernym: (n) care, attention, aid, tending (the work, of providing treatment for or attending to someone or something )


(4) Selected sense and its direct hypernym for ‘empathy’ Selected sense: (n) empathy (understanding and entering into another’s feelings) Direct hypernym: (n) sympathy, fellow feeling (sharing the feelings of others (especially feelings of sorrow or anguish)) Nouns were searched for in both singular and plural word forms as well as in verb form if the lexeme was categorically ambiguous, as ambiguities would exist for plural nouns and the third person singular verb form. In addition, verbs were searched for in present tense (first and third person), past tense and past participle forms. All lexemes and associated word forms are listed in Appendix 4.1.

4.4

Corpora design

The corpora we used were created from the US Senate floor speeches available in html text on the official government websites of male and female US senators (that is, name.senate.gov). All floor speeches were downloaded to text files. Next all headers and introductory remarks made by someone other than the senator were removed. The list of senators included in the corpora are given in Table 4.1, along with the gender, the political party, the state the senator is from, the number of words in each corpus and the time frame of the speeches included in the corpus. The time period under consideration includes the very end of Bill Clinton’s presidential administration (for Senator Kennedy and Senator Kerry’s speeches), with the majority of senatorial speeches taking place during the administration of G.W. Bush, the forty-third president of the United States. The last speeches were taken in May 2007 (for Senator McCain). These speeches were given during a time of relative prosperity (that is, they were gathered before the financial crisis of 2008), but they also occurred during the time that America was engaged in a ‘war on terror’ in Afghanistan and Iraq. In the year 2000, the Republicans had a slim control of the Senate, until one of their members defected to the Democrats, at which point in time it came under Democratic control. This lasted only until the elections of 2002, and then the Republicans remained in control until the elections of 2006, at which point the Democrats regained control, mostly on the basis of Americans’ dissatisfaction with the fact that America was still at war (or even went to war in the first place), or dissatisfaction with the way the war was progressing. Thus, during the time period under study, Republicans held control of the Senate for the majority of the time.

Kathleen Ahrens and Sophia Yat Mei Lee 67 Table 4.1

Information about US Senate corpora

Politician

Gender

Party

State

Corpus size (number of words)

Time frame

Dianne Feinstein

Female Democrat

California

52,787

1/2006– 4/2007

Barbara Boxer

Female Democrat

California

19,896

3/2005– 9/2006

Hillary Clinton

Female Democrat

New York

74,196

2/2001– 2/2007

Barack Hussein Obama

Male

Democrat

Illinois

46,606

2/2005– 1/2007

Edward Moore Kennedy

Male

Democrat

Massachusetts

127,427

5/2000– 2/2002

John Kerry

Male

Democrat

Massachusetts

47,354

3/2000– 4/2007

Elizabeth Dole

Female Republican

North Carolina

41,790

2/2003– 1/2007

Kay Bailey Hutchinson

Female Republican

Texas

124,026

1/2005– 4/2007

Lisa Murkowski

Female Republican

Alaska

1,480

11/2005

John McCain

Male

Republican

Arizona

16,965

1/2005– 5/2007

Lindsey Graham

Male

Republican

South Carolina

30,069

2/2004– 9/2005

Lamar Alexander

Male

Republican

Tennessee

171,437

2/2003– 4/2007

In terms of the protocol in the US Senate, debate takes place in an orderly manner, unlike in the House of Commons, discussed in CharterisBlack’s chapter (this volume). The first rule of debating (taken from the Standing Rules of the Senate at http://rules.senate.gov/senaterules/rule19. php) highlights the formality of the discourse of debate on the Senate floor: When a Senator desires to speak, he shall rise and address the Presiding Officer, and shall not proceed until he is recognized, and the Presiding Officer shall recognize the Senator who shall first address him. No Senator shall interrupt another Senator in debate without


his consent, and to obtain such consent he shall first address the Presiding Officer, and no Senator shall speak more than twice upon any one question in debate on the same legislative day without leave of the Senate, which shall be determined without debate. Thus, the US Senate allows a speaking environment where a prepared position on a given topic is presented to persuade their fellow senators to vote in a particular way. These speeches are recorded in the Congressional Record, which is made available to the public in libraries and online (http://thomas.loc.gov), and nowadays many floor speeches appear on the websites of the senators themselves. In this study, we took the floor speeches that were listed on each senator’s own official website, and not those listed in the Congressional Record. We did this because we assume that the senator is making available the floor speeches that they consider most important. For example, although Diane Feinstein gave many floor speeches in June 2006 (as seen on http://thomas.loc.gov), she only listed two on her own official website (http://feinstein.state.gov): ‘Democratic Women’s Checklist for Change: Stem Cell Research’ (28 June 2006), and ‘Statement on the Flag Protection Amendment’ (27 June 2006). To sum up our hypotheses before we move on to the data analyses, if ideology is the overriding factor, male and female Republican senators will have comparable levels of usage of both SF lexemes (high) and NP lexemes (low) in their Senate floor speeches, while Democratic male and female senators will have the opposite pattern. This finding would be the strongest support for Lakoff’s proposal that Republicans and Democrats have different views of morality as expressed in different conceptual models. However, if gender overrides ideology, then we may find that women senators of both parties have a high usage of NP lexemes, and a low usage of SF lexemes. To foreshadow our findings, what we will show below is that neither of these predictions holds. Instead, we find that the NP lexemes are used most often in the speeches of all senators: male, female, Democrat and Republican.

4.5

Data analyses

For the data analysis, we calculated the total token count and normalised that to the number of total tokens per 10,000 words to analyse the overall pattern of usage. The frequency of use of NP and SF lexemes for four groups (Democratic female, Democratic male, Republican female, Republican male) was then compared with the overall frequency of use in the British National Corpus (BNC) using the z-statistic.4 The first


three groups all use NP and SF lexemes more frequently than is found in the BNC (p < .001), while the Republican males use NP lexemes less frequently than in the BNC (p < .001), with no difference in frequency of use for SF lexemes as compared with the frequency of occurrence in the BNC (p = .208). Thus, the first three groups utilize both SF and NP lexemes in their speeches more often than expected, while the male Republicans use NP lexemes less frequently than expected and SF lexemes only as frequently as expected. In addition, in order to follow up the research hypotheses mentioned above, a direct comparison is made between the proportion of SF and NP lexemes used by the groups under study: (1) males versus females; (2) Democrats versus Republicans; (3) female Democrats versus female Republicans; (4) male Democrats versus male Republicans; (5) male Democrats versus female Democrats; and (6) male Republicans versus female Republicans. Table 4.2 shows the comparisons of NP versus SF lexemes among different groups. As the ratio of frequencies of NP lexemes and SF lexemes in corpus is .614 (200,265/ 326,418) rather than 1, we test whether the ratio in a group’s speech is different from .614 statistically.5 As can be seen from Table 4.2, both male and female senators used significantly more NP lexemes than SF lexemes relative to the corpus (z = 4.915, Table 4.2 Comparisons of NP versus SF lexemes (raw frequency) as contrasted by different groups Group

Total NP lexemes

Total SF lexemes

Corpora size

z

p

Male

1,017

1,345

439,858

4.915

.001

Female

1,052

1,416

314,175

4.603

.001

Democrats

1,321

1,823

368,266

4.521

.001

Republicans

748

938

385,767

5.199

.001

Female Democrats

520

758

146,879

1.936

.026

Female Republicans

532

658

167,296

4.595

.001

Male Democrats

801

1,065

221,387

4.258

.001

Male Republicans

216

280

218,471

2.466

.007


p < .001; z = 4.603, p < .001, respectively).6 Democrats and Republicans both used significantly more NP lexemes than SF lexemes relative to the corpus (z = 4.521, p < .001; z = 5.199, p < .001, respectively). In addition, both female Democrats and Republicans used significantly more NP lexemes as compared with SF lexemes (z = 1.936, p < .026; z = 4.595, p < .001, respectively). Moreover, when we compare the floor speeches of male Democrats and male Republicans, we find that both groups use more NP lexemes than SF lexemes (z = 4.258, p < .001; z = 2.466, p < .007, respectively). Male and female Democrats also used significantly more NP lexemes than SF lexemes (z = 4.258, p < .001; z = 1.936, p < .026, respectively). Lastly, male and female Republicans used significantly more NP lexemes than SF lexemes (z = 2.466, p < .007; z = 4.595, p < .001, respectively). These findings do not accord with the predictions of the Lakovian model (1996/2002), or with previous findings (Ahrens, forthcoming). One reason for this may be that the model is simply wrong, or that some key lexemes or key collocations are skewing the results, or that it is not appropriate to use this type of analysis on groups, as the results become diluted across individuals. In order to explore the latter two possibilities, we will compare the two most frequent collocational patterns for males and females, as well as Democrats and Republicans, and then we will examine the lexeme usage of three senators that went on to vie for the 2008 presidential election: Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama and John McCain.

4.6 Most frequent lexemes and their collocational patterns After we searched for each word form individually using Wordsmith 3.0, we entered the number of tokens found into an Excel file, and totalled the number of word forms for each lexeme. We found that two lexemes predominated in each group we looked at. We then examined the collocational patterns for the top two lexemes, by looking at one to five positions to the left of the keyword as well as one to five positions to the right of the keyword. After examining all these patterns, it was found that the collocational patterns one word to the left of the keywords had systematic differences (see Appendix 4.2), except for the keyword ‘provide’.7 4.6.1

Male vs female

In terms of NP lexemes, both male and female senators used ‘care’ and ‘provide’ most often (males = 7.25 tokens per 10,000 words and 9.03 tokens per 10,000 words respectively; females = 9.42 and 13.3 tokens


per 10,000 words respectively).8 In terms of NP lexemes, ‘health care’ is the top collocational pattern for ‘care’ in its nominal form for both men and women (male = 4.48 and female = 3.41). In fact, ‘health care’ accounts for one-third of the female uses of ‘care’ (that is, 107 out of 296 instances) and two-thirds of the usages of ‘care’ for men (197 out of 319 instances). The fact that the issue of ‘health care’ received priority in Senate floor discussion for the time period under analysis may be one reason for the predominance of NP over SF lexemes. Yet, it is also necessary to see how ‘health care’ is used in context to determine if the speaker is arguing for or against it or has a neutral stance; that is, to determine if the use of ‘health care’ should be categorised as an NP lexeme. In fact, when the data are examined more closely, it can be difficult to interpret. Almost every senator is for ‘health care’ as an abstract concept (which would seem to be in line with our coarsegrained method of counting it as an instance of a lexeme being used in the NP model), but the devil is in the detail: who deserves it, who pays for it and who administers the health care programme (that is, the government or private insurance companies). Thus, depending on the level of discrimination one would like to see, it may be that the current frequency-based lexical analysis is too coarse-grained to get at the differences between how men and women are using language. In terms of SF lexemes, both groups used ‘force’ (male = 5.18 and female = 6.37) and ‘right’ (male = 11.34 and female = 17.67) most often. Moreover, when we look at the collocational patterns of men and women for one word to the left of the keyword (L1), we find that both men and women have ‘air force’ (male = 0.18 and female = 0.44) as the top collocating pattern for the nominal use of ‘force’ in the singular form.9 For the nominal plural form of ‘right’, the top two L1 collocational patterns for men and women are ‘voting rights’ (male = 0.7 and female = 1.15) and ‘civil rights’ (male = 1.14 and female = 0.92). Thus, we can conclude that in terms of a broad comparison between men and women senators, there is no obvious difference in terms of their lexical usage of items or collocational patterns for the lexemes examined from the NP and SF models. 4.6.2

Democrats vs Republicans

Similarly to the male vs female comparison, both Democrats and Republicans used ‘care’ (Democrats = 10.21 and Republicans = 6.2) and ‘provide’ (Democrats = 14.77 and Republicans = 7.02) most often in terms of NP lexemes, and both political parties used ‘force’ (Democrats = 7.47 and Republicans = 3.97) and ‘right’ (Democrats = 19.14 and Republicans = 9.05) most often in terms of SF lexemes.


In terms of the collocational patterns, we notice that there is a similarity in frequency patterns between Democrats and Republicans. For the NP lexemes, ‘health care’ is the top collocational pattern for ‘care’ in its nominal form for both political parties (Democrats = 2.06 and Republicans = 0.16). In terms of SF lexemes, we find that both Democrats and Republicans have ‘air force’ (Democrats = 0.08 and Republicans = 0.49), ‘task force’ (Democrats = 0.11 and Republicans = 0.16), ‘police force’ (Democrats = 0.05 and Republicans = 0.08) and ‘military force’ (Democrats = 0.22 and Republicans = 0.05) in the top five collocating patterns for ‘force’ in its nominal singular form. The top three collocational patterns for the nominal plural form of ‘right’ include ‘voting rights’ (Democrats = 1.68 and Republicans = 0.13) and ‘civil rights’ (Democrats = 2.06 and Republicans = 0.08). However, there is an interesting difference in the frequency of usage of the top three patterns for ‘rights’, as Democrats use ‘civil rights’ and ‘voting rights’ much more frequently than their Republican counterparts. For example, if we look at ‘voting rights’ it is mentioned only five times by Republicans, all by the same senator, Senator Graham, in the two exchanges in Examples (5) and (6): (5) When it comes to voting rights, as I understand – and we talked a lot about it, and we probably know more than all of us ever dreamed we would know about the Voting Rights Act – that you were implementing a policy of President Reagan that wanted to pass the Voting Rights Act in its form that you received it. Is that correct? (Graham, 13 Sept. 2005) (6) We talked about the Voting Rights Acts. Proportionality test in the Reagan administration’s view was changing the Voting Rights Act to create its own harm. Is that correct? (Graham, 14 Sept. 2005) In these exchanges, Senator Graham is not indicating support for voting rights; he is merely inquiring about the details of the act itself. Democrats, on the other hand, discuss voting rights extensively (62 times overall), and in doing so, show clear support for the concept of voting rights for all citizens, as Examples (7)–(9) demonstrate: (7) I don’t believe we can permit these provisions to expire and leave the next generation of Americans without full protection of their voting rights. That is why I am very proud to be a


cosponsor of the Fannie Lou Hamer, Rosa Parks, Coretta Scott King, and Cesar E. Chavez Voting Rights Act Reauthorization and Amendment Act of 2006. (Feinstein, 20 July 2006) (8) Mr. President, I have fought hard to support the voting rights of the disenfranchised voter. (Clinton, 16 Oct. 2002) (9) The memory of Selma still lives on in the spirit of the Voting Rights Act. Since that day, the Voting Rights Act has been a critical tool in ensuring that all Americans not only have the right to vote, but the right to have their vote counted. (Obama, 20 July 2006) In the above examples, all three senators are arguing for support of the right of all American citizens to vote without impediment. This inclusivity is a central tenet of the Democratic Party, and of the NP model, which Lakoff suggests (1996/2002) involves the fair distribution of nurturance, that is, the fair distribution of rights that an individual needs to grow and participate in society. The above account of Democrats and Republicans suggests that there is no significant difference between the two groups regarding which SF and NP lexemes or collocational patterns occur most frequently in the Senate speeches. Moreover, both Democrats and Republicans use NP lexemes more than SF lexemes, suggesting that the NP model might be considered a prevalent way of conceptualising in the US Senate, which suggests that the model proposed by Lakoff (1996/2002) regarding how Democrats and Republicans view the world does not receive straightforward support from a lexical frequency pattern analysis. However, this may be because the supraindividual analysis hides individual patterns of speech, an issue to which we turn below.

4.7 Frequency patterns and collocational patterns of Clinton, Obama and McCain In what follows, a particular contrast is drawn below between Senator Barack Obama and Senator Hillary Clinton, as they were the two leading contenders for the Democratic Party nomination for president in 2008. A contrast is also drawn between Senator Obama and Senator McCain as they ended up being the respective nominees of the Democratic and Republican parties in that same election.10

74 Politics, Gender and Conceptual Metaphors Table 4.3 Comparisons of NP versus SF lexemes (raw frequency) as contrasted between Obama, Hillary Clinton and McCain Political party

Total NP lexemes

Obama

151

H. Clinton

354 50

85

McCain

Total SF lexemes

Corpora size

z

p

291

46,606

–1.706

.044

390

74,196

5.128

.001

16,965

–0.237

.406

For the comparison between Obama and Hillary Clinton, we find in Table 4.3 that Obama used more SF lexemes than NP lexemes (z = –1.706, p < .044), but this difference does not reach significance.11 Clinton, on the other hand, used more NP lexemes (z = 5.128, p < .001). Thus, Clinton is following the overall pattern to use more NP than SF lexemes, while Obama does not. Interestingly, they selected the same subgroup of items in both NP and SF categories. They used ‘care’ (Obama = 8.58 and Clinton = 17.93) and ‘provide’ (Obama = 11.16 and Clinton = 16.17) most often in terms of NP lexemes. Unlike the general trend of the choice of SF lexemes as discussed in the previous sections, they both used ‘right’ (Obama = 29.4 and Clinton = 22.64) and ‘decision’ (Obama = 8.15 and Clinton = 6.47) most often in terms of SF lexemes. In contrast to Clinton and similarly to Obama, there was no significant difference for NP and SF usage for McCain (z = –0.237, p < .406). McCain’s collocations patterned differently from those of Obama and Clinton as he used ‘provide’ and ‘understand’ (11.2 and 6.48, respectively) most often in terms of NP lexemes, and ‘force’ and ‘right’ (11.79 and 11.20, respectively) in terms of SF lexemes. In terms of frequency patterns, both Obama and McCain used more SF than NP lexemes, and although this difference was not significant, it was different from the overall pattern found for other senators and for Clinton. Thus, it is important to contrast the findings for individual senators with the groups as a whole in order to see where each senator stands in terms of lexical choice in relation to his or her colleagues.

4.8

Discussion

Several findings emerge from this study, but several caveats remain. First, based on frequency comparisons with BNC usage, Republican male senators show a different pattern from the other three groups (who use both SF and NP lexemes more frequently than is found in the


BNC). With respect to the lexemes under study, male Republicans do not employ the SF lexemes more often than would be seen in terms of average frequency. This is unexpected, given the hypotheses proposed by Lakoff (1996/2002) that Republicans employ an SF world view. At the same time, it is not surprising that they employ NP lexemes less frequently than the average, as that does fit in with Lakoff’s proposal that the NP conceptual model is not part of the Republican world view. However, the fact remains that they do not use either SF or NP lexemes more than would be expected given their frequency of occurrence in the BNC, which indicates that as a group they are the most conservative in their lexical use. In terms of directly comparing frequency of use of NP and SF lexemes, we find that, across the board, NP terms are used more frequently than SF terms for all groups. This is unexpected in light of the fact that, as mentioned above, Republicans controlled the Senate (and had a Republican in Presidential Office) for the majority of time for the period under study. One might therefore assume that the paradigm that would be invoked most often would involve the Republican world view, even by those who may not hold that world view. However, that is not what we see in these results. In addition, the ‘collision’ we find between gender and the conceptual metaphor models posed for American politics by Lakoff (1996/ 2002) is not the one we expected, as we postulated that perhaps Republican women senators might invoke the SF model, which assumes that men have power over women. Instead, we find that all groups are using lexemes associated with the NP model, a model that assumes shared power and responsibility between the two genders. Thus, the ‘collision’ comes from the fact that male Republican senators are using lexemes associated with the NP model more than with the SF model (but see also the caveats given below with regard to the strength of this finding). This finding can be contrasted with previous findings on lexical frequency patterns found for the four US presidents since 1980 (Ahrens, forthcoming), which demonstrated that Bill Clinton and Reagan, in particular, used expressions that dovetailed with the conceptual model associated with their respective political parties. The presidents were talking to the American people on issues that they selected themselves in the State of the Union addresses and radio addresses (and were not related to specific bills that needed to be passed, as on the Senate floor). This aspect certainly differs from the types of speeches that are given in the Senate. But what is interesting to note is that Hillary Clinton does pattern differently from Obama on the Senate floor, while Obama and McCain pattern similarly, and they became the two presidential


candidates (for the Democratic and Republican Party respectively) in the 2008 election, with Obama winning the election. It seems from the analysis done above and previously (Ahrens, forthcoming) that more information can be gained from an analysis of lexical frequency patterns at the individual level, as opposed to looking at a particular cultural group.12 However, this study has several limitations which preclude arguing categorically that the NP model pervades and makes up the language of the Senate. First, given the number of examples involved, we were unable to examine if the sense of the word matched the sense that is associated with the particular conceptual model. For example, ‘right’ can also be used in the sense of ‘turn right at the corner’. This sense would not reflect an SF world view, and would lead to a different interpretation of our findings. Although we printed out and looked over all the instances under discussion, and we did not feel that this was a serious area of concern, it is still an area that could be improved on in future research. Second, not all lexemes that we looked at were used to the same extent. ‘Provide’ and ‘care’ were the top two choices for NP lexemes, while ‘force’ and ‘right’ were the top two choices for all groups for SF lexemes. This is to be expected, of course, since the words were not chosen as exemplars of lexemes that would necessarily be used in the Senate speeches, but instead were selected following empirically constrained and replicable steps based on linguistic criteria. However, the fact remains that the results we discussed above rely to a large extent on a narrow set of lexemes within the original list of possible items. In addition, it should also be noted that the discussion on the Senate floor takes place in a rarefied atmosphere with a narrow and predefined audience, which could be one reason why the lexical frequency patterns we see here are so similar across groups. This might also be the reason that the phrase ‘health care’ occurs so often, as it is an issue that has been discussed frequently by the senators during this time period. Thus, the nature of what is discussed in the Senate may be skewing the results toward the NP model, and is an issue that needs to be examined in further studies. Third, we were unable to more than cursorily examine how lexemes were used in a particular context. That is, the frequently used lexemes given above appear in proper noun usage (that is, as in ‘Air Force’ and ‘Civil/Voting Rights’) or in fixed phrases (that is, ‘care’ often appears in the phrase ‘health care’). This is potentially cause for concern, especially if the usage is not in line with the conceptual model it is associated with, as we saw with the discrepancies in frequency of use of ‘civil


rights’ and ‘voting rights’. It is hoped that future studies will be able to look more closely at the use in context (in addition to overall frequency and collocational patterns) so that a more accurate and detailed analysis can be obtained. To sum up the current findings, it can be concluded that there are no differences in lexical usage with respect to the NP and SF models for male and female senators, as the frequency and collocational patterns are very similar and examination of individual usages shows no particular patterns. Democratic and Republican senators, however, show one interesting frequency of use difference with respect to collocation, as in the case of how ‘rights’ is used in context. In addition, our findings demonstrate that the Lakovian hypothesis that Democrats hold an NP model world view of government and Republicans hold an SF model world view of government does not find support from a lexical frequency pattern analysis of lexemes associated with these two models based on speeches from the Senate floor. The analysis of individual senators, however, seems to be somewhat more promising in that each senator can be contrasted with their overall group, which has the potential to shed light on how a senator aligns with or differs from the patterns found in his or her own party.

4.9

Conclusion

The line of research on lexical frequency patterns taken in this chapter can be viewed as an extension of recent work on political conceptual metaphor use, which focused on identifying metaphorical expressions (Cienki 2005a, Charteris-Black 2004, 2005) within corpora.13 However, as Cienki (2005a) notes, often linguistic metaphorical expressions are too few on which to base a conclusion. The study herein is designed to overcome to some extent this particular difficulty, while retaining the capability to test conceptual models. This chapter proposes that one such way to do so is to identify the source domain involved in the conceptual metaphor, select the appropriate sense from WordNet, and then select the keywords from the selected sense and its hypernyms and search for those lexemes (in all word forms) in the corpora. In addition, the findings in this chapter suggest that it may be more productive to examine these patterns of use at the individual (versus group) level, and that collocational patterns should be investigated, as should (ideally) each example found, in order to ascertain that the keyword has been used in that particular context in a way that agrees with the conceptual model that it is associated with. This latter goal is


ambitious (and fraught with difficulties about what it means to ‘agree with’ a conceptual model). Nonetheless, it would be beneficial to integrate aspects of corpus- and frequency-based analyses with aspects of textual and discourse analyses in order to have a richer understanding of both language use and meaning.

Acknowledgements We gratefully acknowledge the support from the National Science Council (grant number: NSC-96-2411-J-002-069-MY3). We would also like to thank Crystal Hsin-Shao Chang, Paul You-Jun Chang, Chung-Ping Cheng, Justine Sheng-Hsiu Chiu, Siaw-Fong Chung, Ren-Feng Duann, Shu-Ping Gong, Katarzyna Proctor, Louis Wei-Lun Lu and Sherry Wu, for their help, comments and suggestions on earlier drafts of this chapter. Any errors remain ours.

Appendix 4.1

List of word-forms used

Lexemes associated with the SF model Authority (authorities) Authorization (authorisation) Control (controls, controlled, controlling) Decision (decisions) Determine (determines, determined, determining) Direct (directs, directed, directing) Dominance Force (forces, forced, forcing) Forcefulness Intensity Order (orders, ordered, ordering) Potency Power (powers) Right (rights) Strength (strengths) Lexemes associated with the NP model Aid (aids, aided, aiding) Anguish (anguishes, anguished, anguishing) Attention Care (cares, cared, caring) Empathy


Feeling (feelings) Nourishment (nourishments) Nurturance Provide (provides, provided, providing) Share (shares, shared, sharing) Sorrow (sorrows) Sympathy (sympathies) Tend (tends, tended, tending) Treatment (treatments) Understand (understands, understood, understanding)

Appendix 4.2 groups

Collocational patterns across different

Force (L1)

Rights

Care

Female Corpus size 314,175

(14) air force (8) military force/ task force (3) use force

(36) voting rights (29) civil rights (18) the rights

(107) health care (23) take care (17) the care

Male Corpus size 439,858

(8) air force (4) a/police force (3) and/full/ the force

(50) civil rights (31) voting rights (22) the rights

(197) health care (15) child care (8) medical/ take care

Democrats Corpus size 368,266

(8) military force (4) a/task/ use force (3) air/and/ the force

(76) civil rights (62) voting rights (35) the rights

(180) health care (21) child care (20) take care

Republicans Corpus size 385,767

(19) air force (6) task force (4) full force

(5) minority/the/ voting rights (3) abortion/civil/ property rights (2) their rights

(124) health care (12) medical care (11) take care

Notes 1 Source domains often are experientially based, that is, we know the concept of strength through our own body’s relative ability to lift heavy objects (Lakoff and Johnson 1999). 2 The US Senate and the US House of Representatives are part of the US Congress. Senators and representatives are chosen directly by a one-person,


3

4

5

6 7

8 9 10

11

12

one-vote balloting system. There are 100 senators (two per state) who serve staggered six-year terms, so that approximately one-third of the Senate is elected every two years. The House and the Senate equally share in the legislative process, although the US Constitution gives the Senate the sole power to ratify treaties and approve major presidential appointments. Intensiveness was also excluded as it was considered very similar to ‘intensity’ in meaning but much less frequently used, and was not found in our corpus. More information about the British National Corpus can be found at http:// www.natcorp.ox.ac.uk/. Unfortunately, no corpus of a similar size (100 million words) can be found for American English, so we used the BNC to determine the frequency of each word form in this general corpus before comparing it to the frequency of the word form in the senatorial corpus gathered for this study. As Professor Cheng Chung-Ping (personal communication, 12 Jan. 2009) notes, if one wants to compare proportions of two kinds of lexemes, say A1, A2, in one’s speech, the proportion of A1 (p1) and the proportion of A2 (p2) cannot be compared directly because frequencies of lexemes differ in corpus. However, this can be dealt with by testing the ratios of frequencies based on the result of Scott and Seber (1983). For example, if the ratio of frequencies of two kinds of lexemes in corpus is a constant, say a, in other words, p1 / p2 = a in corpus, then what is at issue is whether the ratio in one’s speech is higher than the ratio in corpus. So the null hypothesis can be set as p1 = a * p2, or equivalently, p1 – a * p2 = 0. Thus, what is being compared is the difference between p1 and a*p2 rather than the difference between p1 and p2. If the null hypothesis is rejected, and p1 – a * p2 < 0, it means that this person or group says more A2 lexemes than A1 lexemes relative to the corpus. If the null hypothesis is rejected, and p1 – a * p2 > 0, the person or group says more A1 lexemes than A2 lexemes relative to the corpus. The alpha level for significance is set at .05 when comparing groups. It might be that no clear collocation pattern emerged for ‘provide’ either in the L1 window or any other window examined for any group because it can only occur as a verb, while ‘care’ and ‘force’ and ‘right’ all occur in both verbal and nominal forms, and the nominal forms is where we found collocational patterns occurring. All remaining numbers referring to collocational frequencies indicate the number of total tokens per 10,000 words, and are raw frequencies. Figures for the top three collocational patterns of ‘force’, ‘rights’ and ‘care’ can be found in Appendix 4.2. Note that the discussion below is based on speeches given in the Senate, and not on the campaign speeches of these candidates, which would be an interesting area of comparison for future study. As the statistical tests here are exploratory, the issue of inflated Type 1 error should be taken into account. The Bonferroni correction was used when comparing the proportion of SF and NP lexemes used in the individual’s speech. Thus, in Table 4.3, the alpha level is set at .05/3 = .017. See Steen (1994), Gibbs (1999) and Cienki (2005a) for further discussion of this notion of whether metaphorical models should be posited at the ‘supra-individual’ level.

Kathleen Ahrens and Sophia Yat Mei Lee 81 13 Work on lexical frequency patterns in general in political language can also be found in Ahrens (2006), Hart et al. (2005) and Lim (2002, 2008).

References Ahrens, K. 2006. ‘Using a Small Corpus to Test Linguistic Hypotheses: Evaluating “People” in the State of the Union Addresses’. International Journal of Computational Linguistics and Chinese Language Processing, 11(4): 377–92. Ahrens, K. Forthcoming. ‘Examining Conceptual Worldviews through Lexical Frequency Patterns: a Case Study of US Presidential Speeches’, in Hans-Joerg Schmid (ed.) Windows to the Mind. Applications of Cognitive Linguistics Series. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. Charteris-Black, J. 2004. Corpus Approaches to Critical Metaphor Analysis. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Charteris-Black, J. 2005. Politicians and Rhetoric: the Persuasive Power of Metaphor. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Charteris-Black, J. 2007. The Communication of Leadership: the Design of Leadership Style. London and New York: Routledge. Chilton, P. and M. Ilyin. 1993. ‘Metaphor in Political Discourse: the Case of the “Common European House”’. Discourse and Society, 4(1): 7–31. Cienki, A. 2004. ‘Bush’s and Gore’s Language and Gestures in the 2000 US Presidential Debates: a Test Case for Two Models of Metaphors’. Journal of Language and Politics, 3(3): 409–40. Cienki, A. 2005a. ‘Metaphor in the “Strict Father” and “Nurturant Parent” Cognitive Models: Theoretical Issues Raised in an Empirical Study’. Cognitive Linguistics, 16(2): 279–312. Cienki, A. 2005b. ‘The Metaphorical Use of Family Terms versus Other Nouns in Political Debates’ in Lagerwerf, Luuk, Wilbert Spooren and Liesbeth Degand (eds) Identifying Information and Tenor in Texts. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 27–39. Gibbs, R. 1999. ‘Taking Metaphor out of our Heads and Putting it into the Cultural World’, in Raymond Gibbs and Gerard Steen (eds) Metaphor in Cognitive Linguistics. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 145–66. Hart, R., S. Jarvis, W. Jennings, and D. Smith-Howell. 2005. Political Keywords: Using Language that Uses Us. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Kövecses, Z. 2002. Metaphor: a Practical Introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Lakoff, G. 1996/2002. Moral Politics: What Conservatives Know that Liberals Don’t. [2nd edn published as Moral Politics: How Liberals and Conservatives Think.] Chicago: Chicago University Press. Lakoff, G. and M. Johnson. 1980. Metaphors We Live By. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Lakoff, G. and M. Johnson. 1999. Philosophy in the Flesh: the Embodied Mind and Its Challenge to Western Thought. New York: Basic Books. Lim, E. 2002. ‘Five Trends in Presidential Rhetoric: Analysis of Rhetoric from George Washington to Bill Clinton’. Presidential Studies Quarterly, 328–66. Lim, E. 2008. The Anti-Intellectual Presidency: the Decline of Presidential Rhetoric from George Washington to George W. Bush. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

82 Politics, Gender and Conceptual Metaphors Lu, L. and K. Ahrens. 2008. ‘Ideological Influences on BUILDING metaphors in Taiwanese Presidential Speeches’. Discourse and Society, 19(3): 383–408. Scott, A. J. and G. A. Seber. 1983. Difference of Proportions from the Same Survey’. The American Statistician, 37: 319–20. Semino, E. and M. Masci. 1996. ‘Politics is Football: Metaphor in the Discourse of Silvio Berlusconi in Italy’. Discourse & Society, 7(2). Steen, G. 1994. Understanding Metaphor in Literature. New York/London: Longman.

5 Non una donna in politica, ma una donna politica: Women’s Political Language in an Italian Context Gill Philip Bologna University

5.1

Background

Politics in Italy is a complicated business. There is a bewildering number of parties representing every possible hue of the political spectrum. New parties spring up almost yearly – some fielding only one candidate – and coalitions are formed and dissolved with remarkable ease. Stemming from this situation is a widespread interest in the politicians themselves, and the ways in which they negotiate, pontificate and manipulate through language. No Italian political figure is better documented in this respect than Silvio Berlusconi, who has exploited his background in the mass media to the full. His adoption of football metaphors (Semino and Masci 1996) was one of a number of successful rhetorical strategies which, by appealing to the wider populace, won him the first of his three premierships. Similar strategies were adopted the second time, attracting a greater number of in-depth linguistic studies (see, for example, Amadori 2002; see also Bolasco et al. 2006 for a quantitative analysis); however, his third successful election campaign in 2008 was characterised by a remarkable absence of such rhetoric and a shift towards the more sober political style of the elder statesman. While there can be no doubt that Berlusconi’s persuasive language has provided linguists with ample material for study, tracing the rhetoric of one politician alone overshadows the changes in politics and society which have taken place over the past decade and a half. Italy’s importance as a global economic power is now well established, and its politics are therefore of interest and relevance beyond its borders; and while many Italians hold to traditional roles and values, the once clearly delineated gender roles of man as breadwinner and woman as homemaker are 83


dissolving, at least in the public sphere. Women are postponing childbearing, and birth rates have been at ‘crescita zero’ [zero growth] for over a generation. These demographic signs reflect the increase in career opportunities for women, and their ever-increasing prominence in the country’s economy. The rising prominence of women in the Italian workforce is also reflected in parliament. Numbers of female ‘deputati’ [members of parliament] grow with every election called, and more of them are acceding to positions of power. Although it is still true that women are more likely to be assigned to ministries without portfolio than be entrusted to oversee the ‘hard politics’ of Defence or Home Affairs, the Prodi-led government, which was in power when this study was undertaken, saw women heading the ministries of Health, and International Trade and Commerce – often deemed to be male preserves – in addition to the more archetypically feminine concerns of Citizens’ Rights and Equal Opportunities, Family Policy, and Youth Policy. This increasing presence of women ministers has sparked an interesting sociocultural debate originating from and perpetuated by the mass media: the ‘femininity’ of many of these ministers is often questioned, and allegations regarding their ‘ambiguous’ sexuality are rife. The ambiguities appear to stem not so much from what the ministers say, but from how it is said. The language of women has long been held to display peculiar traits (see Jesperson 1922: 237–54). One of these is that women’s vocabulary is less extensive than men’s, ‘follows the main road of language’ (ibid.: 248) and that it tends to refer ‘to their immediate surroundings, to the finished product, to the ornamental, the individual, and the concrete; while the masculine preference is for the more remote, the constructive, the useful, the general, and the abstract’ (Havelock Ellis 1894, cited in Jesperson 1922: 48–9). This chapter focuses on the metaphorical content of Italian women politicians’ speech1 to investigate if such ‘feminine’ traits can indeed be identified, and if they cannot, whether an absence of such traits may lie at the basis of the media speculation mentioned above.

5.2

Hypothesis

If women in general are believed to use more ‘feminine’ language than men, this might also be revealed in the metaphors they use; and if women ministers are somehow perceived as ‘unfeminine’, this may be because their metaphors are not particularly ‘feminine’. For instance, the tired stereotype of the woman-as-negotiator might be turned on its

Gill Philip 85

head if women ministers appear to engage in ‘conflict talk’ in their discourse, as suggested by WAR metaphors2 (see Section 5.5). In this study, a wide range of metaphor themes3 are identified, and these will be labelled as ‘masculine’, ‘feminine’ or ‘gender neutral’. It should be stressed at this point that the division into ‘masculine’ and ‘feminine’ consciously draws on stereotypical and often outmoded notions of gender roles and merely serves to aid the initial classification of the data (see Fondas 1997: 260–1 for a brief overview of masculine and feminine traits and their role in gender theorising). The ‘feminine’ label is assigned to metaphors which appear to be related to the woman’s traditional role as mother and homemaker, including childbirth and child rearing (Friedman 1987), nurture (feeding, and by extension, food preparation and cooking), care for the elderly, sick and injured, domestic chores including cleaning, and craftwork (Flannery 2001), the house and its material contents. Also included are metaphors related to weakness, subordination and surrender, all character traits which are stereotypically feminine (Fondas 1997). ‘Masculine’ metaphors draw mainly on the historical male roles as hunter and warrior and thus include war. This wideranging domain is broken down into a number of several subdomains in this study including violence and aggression, and (violent) crime, hunting (Flannery 2001: 630), and metaphors relating to work tools and machinery (see Murphy 2001). In addition to these role-related metaphors, character traits including competitiveness, dominance and strength, which also feature within war and sports metaphors, are also labelled as ‘masculine’ (Fondas 1997). Metaphors which cannot credibly be assigned to either gendered group are classed as ‘gender neutral’, though they may not be labelled at all in the course of the analysis (in Section 5.4). Once the metaphors have been identified and discussed for each of the ministers (Section 5.4), comparisons will be drawn between different ministers’ uses of recurring source domains (Section 5.5). Discussion of the data will consider ministerial remit, gender, and sociocultural issues in interpreting the metaphors found.

5.3 5.3.1

Data and methods Data selection and preparation

This study starts from the hypothesis that it is ministerial remit that conditions the use of a politician’s language more than any other single factor. This hypothesis will be tested in an Italian context by examining a corpus of speeches, press interviews and press releases covering the period June 2006 to May 2007 for five Italian women ministers over a single

86 Politics, Gender and Conceptual Metaphors Table 5.1

Corpus size (running words) and composition Speeches4

Communiqués

Interviews5

/

Subcorpus*

Total

R. Bindi E. Bonino L. Lanzillotta G. Melandri B. Pollastrini

FamPol Trade&Com RegPol YouthPol&Sport EqualOpps

119,085 110,058 14,273 98,328 45,264

32,067 78,926 5,172 4,664 3,107

13,658 31,132 9,101 30,543 42,157

73,360 – – 63,121 –

387,008

123,936

126,591

136,481

* FamPol = Family Policy; Trade&Com = International Trade and Commerce; RegPol = Regional Policy; YouthPol&Sport = Youth Policy and Sport; EqualOpps = Citizens’ Rights and Equal Opportunities

year. Using the full year’s political activity allows for any seasonal factors to be ironed out, and helps to counteract the potential skewing of the data as a result of short-lived political or sociopolitical issues; limiting the data to a single year ensures the homogeneity of the data set, an essential consideration in an Italian context where governments rarely survive to see out their full term. The text data were downloaded from the ministerial homepages, located via the Italian government homepage (www.governo.it). Full details of the composition of the corpora are provided in Table 5.1. The corpus is made up of all the available speeches and communiqués (press releases) of five female ministers: Rosy Bindi, Giovanna Melandri, Emma Bonino, Linda Lanzillotta and Barbara Pollastrini:6 as Table 5.1 shows, interview data were only available for Bindi and Melandri. The corpus represents a cross-section of political departments of varying levels of prominence – reflected in the size of each minister’s output – and covers a reasonably representative sample of government interests at the time of compilation. Although genre-based analysis was not envisaged, the three distinct text types were stored as separate text files, which made it possible to identify some basic features which were of direct relevance to the identification and interpretation of metaphors, namely that the concise, information-rich communiqués contained negligible occurrences of metaphor, unlike the persuasive language of speeches and presentations where most of the identified metaphors occurred. In interviews, the ministers were often seen to be at the mercy of the interviewers, who seem set on putting words into their mouths (see Section 5.4.1). The raw text was minimally coded to facilitate retrieval with query software, but was not lemmatised or POS-tagged because tools for doing so are not generally

Gill Philip 87

available for Italian. Each document was assigned a ‘speaking header’ to allow full details to be located if necessary.7 5.3.2

Locating metaphors in corpora

While metaphor studies working with general language (see especially Pragglejaz group, 2007) have a very wide-ranging view of metaphor, this study, which works with a series of specific text domains, has adopted a less inclusive stance: within a specialised discourse, some metaphorically motivated words may be more usefully classed as items of terminology and therefore eliminated from the study of metaphor in that discourse. Justification for this approach to metaphor will be explained in this subsection, drawing on existing studies of metaphorical language in economics, one of the domains to be examined in Section 5.4. Previous studies of economics discourse (Henderson 1982, 1999, Mascull 1996) have identified a wide range of metaphors which are used consistently enough in the text domain to be considered recurrent metaphor themes. Some of these themes, however, particularly metaphors of GROWTH and ORIENTATION, such as THE ECONOMY IS A PLANT (Henderson 1982) and PROFITS AND LOSSES ARE UPS AND DOWNS (Partington 1998) respectively, seem more terminological than metaphorical. By terminological, the implication is that (i) there is limited variety in the forms used, typically only one lemma, (ii) the preferred form recurs frequently, and (iii) the preferred form is statistically significant (here, chi-square) within the domain in which it is used. Being terminological, its use is not governed by choice, but by necessity. The keyword list for the 110,000-token Trade&Com corpus (see Appendix 5.1) supports this view not to treat metaphorically motivated terms as metaphors proper. Here the metaphorically motivated terms ‘crescita’ [growth], ‘flussi’ [flows] and ‘sviluppo’ [development], can be found, but no other metaphorical items. Additionally, there are no synonyms for these three words in the corpus (see Philip 2008), and the metaphors do not occur in related semantic areas: only one metaphorical cluster (Cameron and Stelma 2004) in the entire corpus exploits a water metaphor which, however, has no bearing on MONEY IS WATER, which maps onto fresh water (streams and rivers), not the sea (Example 1). (1) Il mondo non è il posto dove rischiamo di naufragare, ma la nostra ancora di salvezza contro i rischi di impaludamento che corriamo se restiamo nei nostri piccoli mercati locali. (Trade&Com_speech/doc046)8


The world is not the place where we risk being shipwrecked, but our safety anchor against the risks we run of becoming stuck in our small local markets. The fact that no synonyms appear for the metaphorical terminology and, perhaps more importantly, no metaphorical use is registered for domains which are central to the discourse (determined by calculating the keywords, see below), seems to corroborate Hoey’s (2005: 82) claim that the senses of polysemous words tend to avoid each others’ textual environments. It would be very odd indeed if the central subject matter of the specialised corpus – the metaphorical target domain(s) – should simultaneously function as metaphorical source domains in the same data.9 This observation serves as the basis for extracting metaphor source domain candidates semi-automatically from corpus data. Other metaphors identified, however, exploiting source domains such as ROMANCE, WAR and HEALTH (Mascull 1996), are not central to the discourse of economics and do not feature amongst its terminology. These source domains are realised in text by a variety of semantically related forms, none of which occurs frequently or is statistically significant. Their use is a matter of choice, not necessity, so they may reveal aspects of the speaker’s stance which go beyond the subject matter in hand. Most scholars have sought to overcome the problems of locating metaphors in corpus data by analysing a sample of the data then using the findings of this preliminary analysis as the basis of queries carried out on the entire corpus (Partington 2003, Charteris-Black 2004, and Semino and Koller, this volume), an approach which combines traditional discourse-analytic techniques with corpus methodology. Although this approach provides a detailed picture of all metaphorical activity in the texts studied, there are some drawbacks to such a method, including the time taken in carrying out detailed preliminary analysis, and the constant risk of missing metaphors which were not identified during the manual analysis. The analysis carried out in the present study started off from the hypothesis that the ‘aboutness’ of the corpus would correspond to metaphor target domains, never metaphorical source domains, and that the lower frequency and statistically insignificant lexis should be divided into (i) congruent with the ‘aboutness’, and therefore nonmetaphorical and (ii) incongruent with the ‘aboutness’ and therefore potentially metaphorical. Words assigned to the latter category might

Gill Philip 89

form semantic or lexical sets which would then become potential metaphor source domains. WordSmith Tools (Scott, 1998) was used to carry out all of the corpus analysis described in this chapter. First of all a raw frequency list was generated for each of the six subcorpora, plus a ‘master list’ for the six corpora combined. The central content of each subcorpus was determined by using the ‘keywords’ function (see Scott 2001: 115–16), which extracted the ‘outstanding’ words in the subcorpus compared to the reference corpus (see Table 5.2). Using the combined political corpora rather than a general reference corpus as the reference ensured that the terms identified as key were central to each of the ministries, and not to politics in general.10 Once extracted, the keywords were grouped into semantically related categories, which sum up the ‘aboutness’ of the corpus and also represent likely metaphorical target domains. Tables containing these groupings are provided for each of the subcorpora in Section 5.4. In order to locate the potential source domain lexis, the focus of inquiry lies with the low-frequency content words (LFCWs), which were grouped into semantically related categories. ‘Low frequency’ is defined relative to the keyness counts and raw frequency: the cut-off point in the present study is signalled by the lowest-frequency keyword (for example, ‘affitto’ [rent] and ‘credito’ [credit] in YouthPol&Sport, both occurring 29 times). Thus LFCWs are defined as the bottom 15 per cent of tokens Table 5.2

Top 10 keywords in Trade&Com corpus Trade&Com

Keyword

%

Keyness

P-value

COMMERCIO*

328

0.36

375

0.09

287.82

0.0000000000

IMPRESE

388

0.43

539

0.14

268.39

0.0000000000

INTERNAZIONALE

282

0.31

386

0.1

198.86

0.0000000000

COMMERCIALE

210

0.23

230

0.06

192.9

0.0000000000

MERCATI

232

0.26

280

0.07

191.35

0.0000000000

PAESI

331

0.37

525

0.13

188.51

0.0000000000

INTERNAZIONALIZZAZIONE

175

0.19

188

0.05

164.01

0.0000000000

È

Frequency

%

Reference Frequency

1,001

1.11

2,703

0.68

160.18

0.0000000000

PIÙ

463

0.51

1,001

0.25

143.86

0.0000000000

PRODOTTI

159

0.18

181

0.05

124.29

0.0000000000

*Translations are (from top to bottom): commerce, businesses, international, commercial, markets, countries, internationalization, is, more, products.


(approximately 85 per cent of types, around half of which are hapax legomena, and in any case occur less than seven times). The groupings which were congruent with the target domain categories were merged with them, while incongruent groupings were separated out as ‘potential source domains’. Tables containing these LFCW groupings are provided for each of the subcorpora in Section 5.4. These ‘source domain’ LFCWs were then concordanced, initially to verify that they were indeed metaphorically used, and then to identify consistent mappings which would indicate the presence of metaphor themes. The method outlined above is an approach to metaphor identification which makes provision for the different degrees of metaphoricity present in specialised discourse. By separating terminology from other metaphorically motivated language, this method creates a distinction between metaphors which seem to be imposed by the discourse and those which are more likely to be a matter of free choice. Using these methods, the metaphors used by Italian women ministers are revealed in Sections 5.4 and 5.5.

5.4 5.4.1

Metaphors in the ministries Bindi: family policy

In Italy, the family is very much a political unit as well as a private one; the state is secular, but the Church exerts considerable influence, especially on matters related to relationships, procreation and the family. When this corpus was compiled, the civil partnership legislation (DICO)11 was being debated, and religious authorities reacted vociferously to the implication that homosexuals could ‘marry’. The FamPol keywords reflect this situation: ‘chiesa’ [church] and ‘laicità’ [secularity], ‘democratico’ [democratic] and ‘conciliazione’ [reconciliation] are all present. The other keywords found in Table 5.3(a) are more obviously related to the ministerial remit. Having established the thematic content of the subcorpus, the remaining, incongruous lower-frequency content words were grouped loosely into semantic or lexical sets based on their literal and most salient meanings (summarised in Table 5.3(b)). The categories were refined or conflated as new items were added, and single-item classes (one-off metaphor mappings) are not considered in this analysis. FamPol is the largest of the corpora, so the number of source domains identified is quite wide and varied. As the figures in Table 5.3(b) show,12 the most prevalent by far are the ‘masculine’ areas of WAR and VIOLENCE. These will be discussed in Section 5.5. Other recurrent source domains

Gill Philip 91 Table 5.3(a)

Keyword groupings in FamPol

Semantic field

Types

Examples

Family

9

‘natalità’ [birth rates], ‘maternità’ [maternity], ‘anziani’ [elderly]

Children

6

‘asili nido’ [crèches], ‘minori’ [minors], ‘bambini’ [children]

Welfare

7

‘povertà’ [poverty], ‘solidarietà’ [solidarity], ‘assegni’ [cheques]

Relationships

5

‘coppie’ [couples], ‘matrimonio’ [marriage]

Religion

4

‘chiesa’ [church], ‘laicità’ [secularity], ‘cattolici’ [Catholics]

Politics

4

‘politica’ [politics], ‘partito’ [party], ‘democratico’ [democratic]

Table 5.3(b)

LFCW groupings in FamPol

Semantic field

Types*

Examples

War

108

‘vincere’ [to win], ‘conquista’ [conquest], ‘scontro’ [clash]

Food preparation

48

‘cucinare’ [to cook], ‘pelare’ [to peel], ‘tritare’ [to mince], ‘alimentare’ [to feed]

Domesticity

23

‘tappeto’ [carpet], ‘polvere’ [dust], ‘finestra’ [window]

Body parts

21

‘piede’ [foot], ‘pugno’ [fist], ‘orecchio’ [ear]

Vision

18

‘miopia’ [short-sightedness], ‘sguardo’ [glance]

Health

17

‘ferito’ [wounded], ‘incurabile’ [incurable]

Sea

14

‘ancorati’ [anchoring], ‘approdo’ [berth], ‘sponde’ [shores]

Crime

10

‘delinquenza’ [delinquency], ‘criminale’ [criminal]

Natural disasters

8

‘scossone’ [tremor], ‘valanghe’ [avalanches], ‘terremoti’ [earthquakes]

Tools

8

‘strumenti’ [instruments], ‘perno’ [linchpin], ‘aratro’ [plough]

* Here and elsewhere the number of distinct word forms (types), not the overall number of instances (tokens), is indicated: all types are low frequency ( of your beauty…’, which belongs to the domain of covert military practices. The majority of examples, however, are less remarkable in the sense that they belong quite predictably to the domain of overt military operations. Examples include ‘New SK-II Signs Treatment Totality […] penetrates the skin’s surface to tackle multiple signs of ageing’ (SK-II 21); ‘Revitalift White is now empowered […] to attack brown spots and UV-induced pigmentation’ (L’Oréal 23); ‘Caviar Day Cream SPF 15 […] helps to combat formation of fine lines and shields skin from environmental aggression’ (Bella 34); and ‘This program targets on firming sagging skin, mobilizing fat […]’ (The Health Club 44). In sum, PRODUCTS ARE WEAPONS is expressed linguistically and visually through a variety of ways such as classification, product naming and product descriptions. (ii) BRANDS ARE MASTER STRATEGISTS The brand, as a powerful ally, takes charge of strategising the overall battle plan; the latter conceived, for


instance, as a ‘multi-action approach’ (Biotherm 5); an ‘integrative skincare programme’ (Origins 39); or ‘a bottom-up strategy to work from the base of your toughest wrinkles, right up to its surface’ (Clinique 105). More specifically, the battle stratagem reflects readiness (for example, ‘BeWeil Prepared. Introducing the perfect preparation […]’ (Origins 39), where ‘BeWeil’ is a pun on the expert’s name, Dr Andrew Weil, who developed the product range for Origins); and carefully coordinated stages of action, together with the skilful deployment of specialised artillery and their effects. In some adverts, the stages of action are only partly represented. For example, ‘The Skincare is your first step towards keeping your skin perfectly hydrated and supple. […] enables your skin to create its own moisture to defend against early ageing in three ways. Helps skin create moisture. Helps skin lock in moisture. Strengthens skin’ (Shiseido 45). Or, ‘Bio-Performance Super Lifting Formula. Used as the last step in your skincare, this formula works in three ways to fight the effects of time […]’ (Shiseido 80). In other advertisements, the stages are fully elaborated. For example, the L’Oréal advert (73) in Figure 10.1 for a product range called ‘Visible Results Skin Perfecting Essence’ lists entirely its four-step approach and, in a manual fashion, spells out successive military action (‘eliminates’, followed by ‘immediate and intensive action’, followed by ‘protection’):

STEP 1 Cleanse Visible Results Cleansing Foam […] STEP 2 Tone Visible Results Gelified Toner • Eliminates dead skin cells […] STEP 3 Treat Visible Results Skin Perfecting Active Essence • Immediate and intensive action for soft, radiant skin […] STEP 4 Moisturise Visible Results Skin Perfecting Moisturiser […] • Provides SPF 15 protection Figure 10.1

L’Oréal advert

Michelle M. Lazar 223

Articulation of battle plans in the advertisements encompass a wide range of offensive and defensive strategies, which include countering and eliminating threats; damage control and repair; and strengthening one’s defence system and taking precautionary measures: Together with our unique Detox Complex to neutralize and eliminate epidermal pollutants, and PETP to stimulate skin cell regeneration, Hydra-Detox Bio-DEFENSIS wraps your skin in a protective bubble […] (Biotherm 3) Cleansing is everything. The secret to attaining perpetually younglooking skin lies in a hardworking cleanser that contains age-defying ingredients and, more importantly, one that doesn’t strip the moisture barriers. And with the sun as our number one enemy, damage control is a must. (Olay 81) Go beyond fighting the signs of ageing with breakthrough Activa-Cell. […] to enhance and stimulate the skin’s natural defense and repair processes to counteract the many aggressions that lead to skin ageing. (L’Oréal 73) Build a better moisture barrier now […]. A constant moisture supply helps repair barrier strength, prevents further loss of moisture. (Clinique 76). Market competition among brands to be the chosen allies of women/ warriors leads to brands offering different and better strategies than their rivals. Clinique (9), for instance, distances itself from other brands by offering a purportedly alternative strategy to deal with blemishes: ‘There’s no need to blast away at blemishes.’ Using a coordinated three-step system, visually represented by three bottles of cleanser, clarifying lotion, and moisturiser, Clinique claims that its product range is both ‘gentle enough to use twice a day, every day’ and is ‘fast: Within days, skin starts to clear and resist future breakouts.’ The supposedly unique gentle and quick relief strategy means that the treatment of blemishes need not be unnecessarily harsh. Instead, Clinique’s approach to eliminating the enemy (that is, blemishes) is purportedly more humane and enlightened, as indicated in the headline ‘Kill them with kindness’, and the tagline ‘We come in peace’ (reminiscent of sci-fi non-hostile alien encounter discourse). The equation of killing with peace, although an interesting oxymoron, is not uncommon in war rhetoric. President George W. Bush used a similar WAR IS PEACE rationalisation in legitimating the military


campaigns against Afghanistan in 2001 and Iraq in 2003 (see Lazar and Lazar 2007 for details of this rhetorical strategy). (iii) BRANDS/PRODUCTS ARE RESCUERS BRANDS ARE POWERFUL ALLIES is conceptualised specifically also as RESCUERS. The brand and its products (which are metonyms of the brand) come to the aid of (1) the bodyas-territory/nation, and of (2) women-as-warriors. The body, depleted of its own resources, is personified as languishing – ‘moisture-starved’ (Shiseido 50) and ‘undernourished skins’ (Clinique 20); and in desperate need of external aid. As a result, the brand sends rescue missions in the form of products-as-aids: frees skin of epidermal impurities and delivers intense moisturization all at once (Biotherm 43) rescue moisture-starved, mature skin with a cream that knows exactly how wrinkles are formed. […] Shiseido Benefiance Intensive Nourishing and Recovery Cream (Shiseido 107) save your skin [with] new Continuous Rescue Antioxidant Moisturizer (Clinique 20) Shiseido Benefiance brings you three new products to […] protect your skin from further distress (Shiseido 50). War-wearied warriors also need rescuing. In an example from Marie France Bodyline (26), this is presented in a narrative format, in which the woman is both warrior and damsel-in-distress, and the brand is hero: I’ve been battling my weight problems since adolescence, and it was a challenge for my modeling career and self-confidence […]. Then Marie France Bodyline came along. Thanks to their timely intervention, I finally have the figure I’ve always wanted in just three months. Now, my dreams […] are no longer pipe dreams. Thank you, Marie France Bodyline! [Featured beside the narrative copy is a representation of a contented and confident-looking model, the outcome of the successful rescue.] (Marie France Bodyline 26) The rescue narrative in this advert echoes Lakoff’s (1992) analysis of the conceptualisation of US involvement in the Gulf War of 1990–91 as a fairy tale, thus supporting more generally the close conceptual links between fairy-tale rescue narratives and war.


(iv) BRANDS ARE IDEOLOGUES Finally, in some adverts it emerges quite conspicuously that BRANDS ARE IDEOLOGUES. Origins (54) is an excellent case in point, whose range of skincare products are intriguingly named: ‘A Perfect World (White tea skin guardian 30 ml, $67)’; ‘A Perfect World (Antioxidant Moisturizer with white tea 50 ml, $73)’; ‘Make a Difference (Skin rejuvenating treatment 50 ml, $67)’; ‘Make a Difference (Skin rejuvenating treatment lotion 150 ml, $43)’; ‘Youthtopia (Skin firming cream with Rhodiola 50 ml, $91)’; and ‘Peace of Mind (On-the-spot relief 15 ml, $22)’. The idyllic names of the products seem to promise a ‘new world order’, a state in which beauty struggles cease to exist. As it has been documented that a ‘new world order’ in the realm of current international politics is an ideological construct (Lazar and Lazar 2007), so too it is in the realm of beautification (with aspirations for ‘a perfect world’, and a ‘youthtopia’). The promise of bringing about a ‘new world order’, therefore, presents one way of understanding the micro metaphor BRANDS ARE IDEOLOGUES. Yet at the same time, what is proposed in the Origins’ advertisement is not a ‘new’ or alternative world order removed from the existing conceptual world of BEAUTIFICATION IS WAR. Rather, manifested in this advert are supreme beauty ideologies that tacitly underlie the rationalisation of most other beauty adverts, which also obsess about bodily perfection and youthfulness. Viewed in the context of the advertisement’s marketing of beauty creams and lotions, ‘A Perfect World’ refers specifically to the pursuit of perfection in beauty, which is echoed also in other advertisements; recall, for example, ‘AIM for Perfection’ (Marie France Bodyline 41) and ‘You too can target the vision of perfection!’ (Expressions 28). Similarly, ‘Peace of Mind’ suggests on-the-spot relief from skin imperfections. As skin rejuvenation treatments, ‘Make a Difference’ carries the specific sense of the youthful difference the lotion makes to one’s skin, and the neologism, ‘Youthtopia’, by fusing youthfulness with the sense of ‘utopia’ makes the beauty ideology of youthfulness patently clear. Therefore, the appearance of a ‘new world order’, within the reach of individual consumers, is not a different way of being, but forms the ideological bedrock of the BEAUTIFICATION IS WAR conceptualisation where conventional feminine beauty ideals prevail. The blurring between something different-yet-the-same is central to the BRANDS ARE IDEOLOGUES conceptualization.

10.4

Conclusion

This chapter undertook to show, through the analysis of language, images and colour, how the domain of warfare fits in with the problem–solution advertising schema to systematically conceptualise the domain of


feminine beautification. The appropriation of war to structure the domain of beauty practices presents the achievement of the body beautiful as a deadly serious matter. It involves identifying enemies and effectively eliminating them with the help of knowledgeable and trustworthy allies, skilfully planned strategies and powerful state-of-the-art weapons. Embarking on the warpath spells zero tolerance for bodily imperfections, and requires perseverance and (self-) discipline. The critical feminist analysis of BEAUTIFICATION IS WAR reveals interesting contradictory elements in the construction of ‘modern’ feminine identity. On the one hand, the blended image of the action-hero, warrior and feminist activist to produce an ‘empowered’ feminine identity for consumers as active take-charge subjects. Charteris-Black (2004: 14) notes, too, that conflict and war generally confer positive associations that appeal to such emotions as strength, courage and determination. On the other hand, however, militarisation associated with hegemonic masculine practices (Enloe 2000) frames women’s exercise of agency within a form of dominant patriarchal masculinity. It would seem that for women to ‘do’ power seriously is to do it like men, more specifically, to draw upon a masculinised context of institutionalised violence. More disturbingly, the site of struggle in the context of beauty advertising is shifted specifically on to women’s bodies, that is, the terrain of battle and control is women’s own bodies. This is a radical shift from conceptualising the enemy-as-other to the enemy-as-self, leading to a fractured feminine identity and alienation of women’s relationship with their own bodies as constantly problematic. Women’s bodies in the present day, therefore, continue to be subjected to the patriarchal gaze, albeit in resignified post-feminist terms of critical self-scrutiny and what women themselves want and can accomplish.


Appendix 10.1 S/No

List of advertisements

Brand

Source

Product category

Local/regional/ international

1.

Shiseido

20/7/07, ST

Skincare

International (Japan, US, Europe)

2.

Lancôme

20/7/07, ST

Skincare

International (France, US, and so on)

3.

Biotherm

20/7/07, ST

Skincare

International (Europe, North America, Asia (China, Hong Kong, Japan, Singapore)

4.

Biolyn

18/7/07, ST

Hair care

Local (Singapore)

5.

Biotherm

13/7/07, ST

Skincare

International

6.

Imedeen

31/5/07, ST

Skincare

International (including Singapore)

7.

Dior

17/8/07, ST

Cosmetics (lipstick)

International (Europe, America, Asia-Pacific including Singapore)

8.

Biotherm

17/8/07, ST

Skincare

International

9.

Clinique

17/8/07, ST

Skincare

International (US, UK, Europe, China, India, Japan, and so on)

Skincare

Local (Singapore)

10.

Bionn 6/8/07, ST International

11.

Shiseido

21/10/06, ST Skincare

International

12.

BodyPerfect

5/6/07, ST

International (US)

13.

Reneu MediCentre

10/12/07, ST Body and skincare

Local (Singapore)

14.

Svenson

10/12/07, ST Hair care

Regional (Asia – Hong Kong, China, South Korea, Singapore, and so on)

15.

Reneu MediCentre

3/10/07, ST

Body and skincare

Local (Singapore)

16.

California Fitness

28/5/07, ST

Beauty fitness

Regional (Asia – China, Hong Kong, Malaysia, Singapore and Taiwan)

17.

Lancôme

14/1/07, ST

Skincare

International

18.

Elizabeth Arden

31/3/06, ST

Skincare

International (US, Switzerland, Canada, Spain, China, Singapore, and so on)

Body care

228 Politics, Gender and Conceptual Metaphors Appendix 10.1

List of advertisements – continued

S/No

Brand

Source

Product category


19.

Lancôme

5/10/07, ST

Skincare

International

20.

Clinique

5/10/07, ST

Skincare

International

21.

SK-II

5/10/07, ST

Skincare

International (US, UK, Australia, China, Japan, Singapore, and so on)

22.

Marie France 17/9/07, ST Bodyline

Weight loss

International (Hong Kong, Macau, Switzerland, Malaysia, Indonesia, Brunei, Thailand, South Korea, China, Singapore)

23.

L’Oréal

12/11/07, Today

Skincare

International (France,US, UK, Norway, Brazil, South Korea, Singapore, and so on)

24.

Elizabeth Arden

28/9/07, ST

Skincare

International

25.

Shiseido

27/9/07, ST

Skincare

International

26.


Weight loss

International

27.

Dior

Skincare

International

28.

Expressions 12/7/06, ST (International)

Weight loss

Local (Singapore)

29.

De Beaute

12/7/06, ST

Slimming

Local (Singapore) with a branch in Malaysia

30.

Beyond 24/5/06, ST Beauty (International)

Slimming

Local (Singapore) with outlets in Malaysia

31.

Biotherm

11/5/06, ST

Skincare

International

32.

Shiseido

14/4/06, ST

Hair care

International

33.

Origins

29/3/07, ST

Skincare

International (US, Canada, France, Germany, South Korea, Taiwan, UK)

34.

Bella

23/4/07, ST

Skincare

Local/regional (Singapore, Malaysia, Hong Kong, China, and so on)

5/1/06, ST

Michelle M. Lazar 229 Appendix 10.1


S/No

Brand

Source

Product category

35.

Expressions

13/11/07, ST Slimming

Local (Singapore)

36.

Givenchy

15/11/07, ST Cosmetics (mascara)

International (France)

37.

FIL

1/11/07, ST

Local (Singapore)

38.

Clinique


International

39.

Origins


International

40.

Shu uemera

25/10/07, ST Urban

Skincare

International (US)

41.


Body care/ slimming

International

42.

Reneu MediCentre


Local (Singapore)

43.

Biotherm

6/7/07, ST

Skincare

International

44.

The Health Club

3/10/07, ST

Slimming

Local (Singapore)

45.

Shiseido

18/5/07, ST

Skincare

International

46.

Biotherm

28/4/06, ST

Skincare

International

47.

ReSTogen™ Hair Essence

13/9/07, ST

Hair care

Local (Singapore)

48.

BodyPerfect

24/4/07, ST

Slimming

Local (Singapore)

49.

Estée Lauder

20/5/07, ST

Skincare

International (US, Canada, China, France, Germany, Russia, South Korea, Spain, UK)

50.

Shiseido

21/1/06, ST

Skincare

International

51.

Philip Wain 12/7/06, ST (International)

Slimming

Regional (Hong Kong, Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand)

52.

L’Oréal

7/4/07, ST

Skincare

International

53.

Beyond Beauty

21/6/07, ST Urban

Slimming and Local (Singapore) bust enhancement

54.

Origins

25/8/07, ST

Skincare

55.

Bella


Local (Singapore) Regional

56.

Amore

6/11/07, ST

Fitness

Local (Singapore)

57.

L’Oréal

8/11/07, ST

Skincare

International

58.

Svenson

21/11/07, ST Hair care

59.

Marie France 12/11/07, ST Slimming Bodyline

Skincare


International

Regional International



S/No

Brand

Source

Product category


60.

Ettusais

13/4/07, ST

Skincare

International (Japan, Singapore, and so on)

61.

Nivea


International (Germany, UK, China, South America, Middle East, and so on)

62.

Reneu MediCentre

16/11/07, ST Body and skincare

Local (Singapore)

63.

Bella

5/7/04, ST

Skincare


10/2/04, ST

64.

Philip Wain

Fitness

Regional

65.

Fancl 24/3/06, ST (International)

Skincare

International (US, Japan, Singapore)

66.

L’Oréal

4/5/07, ST

Skincare

International

67.

Bella

18/7/05, ST

Skincare


68.

Philip Wain

6/4/04, ST

Slimming

Regional

69.

Slimming Sanctuary

24/3/04, ST

Slimming

Local (Singapore) with a site in Malaysia

70.

Chanel

14/5/04, ST

Skincare

International (France, Germany, Italy Spain, UK, Canada, US, Latin America, Asia)

71.

Bionn 8/11/04, ST International

Skincare

Local (Singapore)

72.

Beijing 101

23/6/03, ST

Hair care

Regional (China, Singapore)

73.

L’Oréal

7/5/04, ST

Skincare

International

74.

Estée Lauder

4/8/05, ST

Skincare

International

75.

Imedeen


International

76.

Clinique

3/9/04, ST

Skincare

International

77.

Olay

leaflet (n.d.)

Skincare

International (US, Canada, Mexico, Chile, Argentina, Spain, Germany, Austria, Italy, Russia, India, China, Australia, Turkey, Singapore)

Michelle M. Lazar 231 Appendix 10.1


S/No

Brand

Source

Product category


78.

Estetica


International (France, Singapore)

79.

Olay

18/11/04, ST Urban

Skincare

International

80.

Shiseido

24/9/04, ST

Skincare

International

81.

Olay

20/10/05, ST Urban

Skincare

International

82.

L’Oréal

pamphlet (n.d.)

Skincare

International

83.

Life Pharm (Intenz)

2/6/04, ST

Skincare

Local/regional (Singapore, Hong Kong, Indonesia, Taiwan, Thailand)

84.

Sothys Paris

5/3/07, ST

Skincare

International (France, Australia)

85.

Neutrogena

4/3/07, Skincare Sunday Times

International (US)

86.

Lancôme

6/4/07, ST

Skincare

International

87.

Shiseido

9/2/07, ST

Skincare

International

88.

De Beaute

31/1/07, ST

Slimming

Local (Singapore)

89.

Lancôme

leaflet (n.d.)

Skincare

International

90.

L’Oréal

4/2/07, Skincare Sunday Times

International

91.

Marie France 17/10/05, ST Slimming Bodyline

International

92.

Lancôme

6/5/04, ST

Skincare

International

93.

Bella

21/3/05, ST

Skincare


94.

Origins

4/8/05, ST

Skincare

International

95.


Slimming

International

96.

Lancôme


International

97.

Sisley Paris

9/11/04, ST Skincare Life! Weekend

International (France)

98.

Clarins Paris

leaflet (n.d.)

Slimming

International (France, US)

99.

La Prairie

1/10/04, ST

Skincare

International (Switzerland, Australia, Europe, Asia)



S/No

Brand

Source

Product category


100.

Clinique

2/4/04, ST

Skincare

International

101.

Estée Lauder

16/1/05, Sunday Times

Skincare

International

102.

Shiseido


International

103.

Clarins

27/2/04, ST

Skincare

International (France, Singapore, UK, US, Spain, Germany, Japan, Malaysia, South Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong, China)

104.

Dior

27/2/04, ST

Skincare

International

105.

Clinique


International

106.

Shiseido

23/9/05, ST

Skincare

International

107.

Shiseido

21/1/05, ST

Skincare

International

108.

Dior

21/1/05, ST

Skincare

International

109.

Clinique

5/11/04, ST

Skincare

International

110.

Origins

18/9/07, ST

Skincare

International

111.

Dior

20/1/06, ST

Skincare

International

112.

Clinique

9/5/07, ST

Skincare

International

113.

Proclear

13/12/07, ST Eye care

International (US, Singapore, and so on)

114.

My Beauty Bar

3/1/08, ST Urban

Local (Singapore)

Eyebrows

ST: Straits Times

Notes 1 This research was developed from funding received from the NUS Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences Academic Research Fund (Project No. R-103-000-012112). I am grateful to the editor, Kathleen Ahrens, for her meticulous comments and suggestions on earlier drafts of this chapter. 2 In order to ascertain the prevalence of war metaphors in beauty adverts, a couple of students in my ‘Textual Construction of Knowledge’ class (a postgraduate module which I teach at NUS) recently analysed a random issue (September 2008) of a local women’s magazine (Singapore Women’s Weekly). They found that 80 per cent of the beauty adverts featured in the single issue used war metaphors.

Michelle M. Lazar 233 3 Ageing and time are also further qualified in terms of stage (the first signs of ageing, Lancôme 19, or defy further aging, Shiseido 106); visibility (fight the visible signs of time, Elizabeth Arden 24); quantity (fight the seven signs of aging, Olay 81); specificity (fight signs of skin aging, Elizabeth Arden 18; visible signs of photo-aging, Clinique 112); and comprehensiveness (defeat every sign of aging, L’Oréal 23). 4 See Lazar and Lazar (2007) for the coining of the term ‘enemisation’ and for its processes and functions in political discourse. 5 Obsession with light skin is a predominant feature in the definition of Asian feminine beauty. 6 The other two adverts are for slimming and spa services (Beyond Beauty), and for facial skincare products (Bella). 7 Since completing the writing of this chapter, I have seen two other adverts (on the Internet) that visually represent the PRODUCTS ARE WEAPONS concept. One is an advert for Cover Girl, in which the model (actress Keri Russell) wields a lip gloss as a state-of-the-art weapon against assailants. The second advert is by Olay, in which several bottles of moisturisers are pictured closeup, with their black nozzles all pointing at an angle resembling a row of canons. The tagline read ‘Fight 7 signs of aging’.

References Charteris-Black, J. 2004. Politicians and Rhetoric. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Connell, R. 1987. Gender and Power: Society, the Person and Sexual Politics. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Enloe, C. 2000. Maneuvers: the International Politics of Militarizing Women’s Lives Berkeley: University of California Press. Forceville, C. Forthcoming. ‘Non-verbal and Multimodal Metaphor in a Cognitivist Framework: Agendas for Research’, in G. Kristiansen et al. (eds) Applications of Cognitive Linguistics: Foundations and Fields of Application. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. Koller, V. 2004. ‘Businesswomen and War Metaphors: ‘Possessive, Jealous and Pugnacious’? Journal of Sociolinguistics, 8(1): 3–22. Kövecses, Z. 2002. Metaphor: a Practical Introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Lakoff, G. 1992. ‘Metaphor and War: the Metaphor System Used to Justify War in the Gulf’. Thirty Years of Linguistic Evolution. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Lakoff, G. and M. Johnson. 1980/2003. Metaphors We Live By. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Lazar, M. M. (ed.) 2005. Feminist Critical Discourse Analysis. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Lazar, M. M. 2006. ‘‘‘Discover the Power of Femininity!” Analysing Global Power Femininity in Local Advertising’. Feminist Media Studies, 6(4): 505–17. Lazar, A. and M. M. Lazar. 2007. ‘Enforcing Justice, Justifying Force: America’s Justification of Violence in the New World Order’, in A. Hodges and C. Nilep (eds) Discourse, War and Terrorism. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

234 Politics, Gender and Conceptual Metaphors McRobbie, A. 2004. ‘Post-feminism and Popular Culture’. Feminist Media Studies, 4(3): 255–64. Montgomery, S. L. 1991. ‘Codes and Combat in Biomedical Discourse’. Science as Culture, 2(3): 341–91. Sontag, S. 1991. Illness as Metaphor and AIDS and its Metaphors. London: Penguin. Vestergaard, T. and K. Schroder. 1985. The Language of Advertising. Oxford: Blackwell.

11 Power as a Conceptual Metaphor of Gender Inequality? Comparing Dutch and Spanish Politics Petra Meier and Emanuela Lombardo University of Antwerp and Madrid Complutense University

11.1

Introduction

This chapter explores the question of whether and how power is used as a conceptual metaphor in gender inequality in politics. We analyse to what extent a selection of Dutch and Spanish policy texts on the issue of ‘gender inequality in politics’ refer to power, and if they do so, what metaphors they employ for describing it. The central hypothesis is that these policy texts on gender equality in politics contain conceptualisations on power that might constitute important gendered barriers in the access to power. We further postulate that studying these conceptualisations will reveal important discursive and normative potential barriers to a gender equal distribution of power. In a previous study on gender inequality in politics (Meier et al. 2005), for example, we found that policy texts on the issue often contain a ‘benchmarking fallacy’. This fallacy suggests that gender inequality can be dealt with in terms of numbers, without tackling underlying structural problems. In this chapter, we turn to the issue of whether the concept of ‘power’ is present with respect to gender inequality in policy texts, and further explore the extent to which these texts go beyond the ‘benchmarking fallacy’ of women in politics. In order to analyse the policy documents on gender inequality in politics in search for power, we employ a critical frame analysis methodology. Critical frame analysis (Verloo 2007) is based on written or recorded spoken discourse or language, not on non-verbal communication. As in theories of conceptual metaphors (Lakoff and Johnson 1980), in critical frame analysis a language is examined to reveal a person’s thoughts (Deignan no date). It reveals how sociopolitical actors frame a policy problem (of gender inequality in politics, in our 235


case) and the solutions they put forward in order to solve it. This analysis enables us to detect the way political actors think of power and how they present it. We analyse 14 Dutch and 12 Spanish policy texts on gender inequality in politics in the decade from 1995 until 2004. The year 1995 was selected because it was the year the United Nations World Conference on Women was held in Beijing. This conference represents a milestone in world governments’ formal commitment towards gender equality. The cases we select, the Netherlands and Spain, allow for an interesting comparison due to the fact that the former used to be a forerunner in equality policies while Spain was considered a latecomer. The difference in the two cases leads us to expect a different representation of power in the policy documents. The argument is developed in three sections. First, we sketch the context of the two cases studied, the Netherlands and Spain, over the last decade within our theoretical framework. Second, we discuss how we study theoretical conceptualisations of power with the help of critical frame analysis methodology and how we approach metaphors. Third, we study the conceptualisation of power by political actors in the policy texts of the two countries selected. Finally, we come to a deeper reflection on the extent to which political actors consider power from a gendered perspective in policy documents on gender inequality in politics.

11.2 Gender inequality in politics: the Spanish and Dutch contexts The Netherlands is often cited as an example of a country with a stable high number of women in politics. Having obtained the right to vote and to stand for elections in 1919, the number of women in parliament remained under 10 per cent until the 1970s. By the middle of the 1980s it had risen to 20 per cent. Since the 1990s women have made up slightly more than one-third of members of parliament (MPs). During the 1990s this was exceptional among the European Union (EU) member states, especially when leaving the Scandinavian countries out. Except for the 1987 elections, the share of female senators has generally been slightly lower than that of their female colleagues in parliament. Women’s positions in political decision-making have not really been an issue since the middle of the 1990s. At the 1972 elections, the main actor of the Dutch women’s movement (Man-Vrouw-Maatschappij) first campaigned for more women (Oldersma 2005). This encouraged

Petra Meier and Emanuela Lombardo 237

parties for the next 20 years, particularly the larger ones, to pay attention to the issue. In this they were also pushed by electoral considerations and by their own women’s groups (Leyenaar 1998). Since the beginning of the 1990s most parties have measures to promote gender equality, such as setting a quota or target figures for positions within the parties or for electoral lists. In 1992, the government published a position paper (a measure repeated in 1996) and initiated a project to ‘promote women in politics and in public governance’. But on the whole the topic of gender relations in political decision-making was not such a hot issue in the 1990s, with the exception of the annual progress reports on ‘women in politics and public governance’ published by the Ministry of Domestic Affairs (which were formally closed in 1999 and included in broader plans for equal opportunities policies). In addition, advisory positions focusing on gender were abolished, because the government considered that a gender perspective would be picked up within the advisory bodies. The abolition of these positions did not provoke much debate. In fact, since the 1995 Beijing Conference, only two issues related to women’s position in political decision-making have been debated in the Dutch parliament. They are highly interesting in that they go beyond the traditional discussion of how to deal with women in politics. The first debate concerned the replacement of MPs on maternity leave. After a first bill was rejected in 1994, a new act was adopted in 2004, which opened the door for an amendment of the Dutch Constitution in order to put the replacement of MPs on maternity leave into practice. In this act, the grounds for replacement were extended from solely having to do with maternity to illness and medical treatment for all MPs up to a maximum period of 16 weeks (which is the legal time period of maternity leave). The second debate was on the legitimacy of the conservative Christian party Staatkundig Gereformeerde Partij (SGP) to exclude women from regular membership, and, hence, from the access to power. The issue was extensively debated in 1990 on the occasion of the act meant to adopt the UN Women’s Treaty (CEDAW). Renewed attention was paid to the issue in 1993 when the equal treatment act was under debate. This debate flared up again in 2000 through CEDAW’s subsequent critique of the Dutch government for not complying with the UN Women’s Treaty by sanctioning the SGP, and the Clara Wichmann Institute, a women’s juridical NGO, then started a procedure to prosecute the SGP. At the end of 2007 the court ruled that the SGP discriminates against women by not allowing them access to political functions (the party has accepted women as members since 2006).1


Spain offers a different context from the Netherlands concerning the issue of gender inequality in politics. It has been an EU member state with a rather low number of women in political decision-making until the end of the 1990s. From the end of the Franco regime in 1977 to the end of the 1980s women made up about 6 per cent of the MPs in the national parliament (Astelarra 1990). During the 1990s their number rose to 15 per cent, and then reached 36 per cent in 2004 and 35.7 per cent in 2008. Hence, over the last few years Spain has joined countries with a high number of women in elected political positions, such as the Netherlands. However, the number of women remains lower in the Senate, making up 29 per cent in the 2008 general election. The position of women in political decision-making became an issue at the end of the 1980s. From then onwards, debates, fed by left-wing parties, mainly focused on quotas. In 1988 the Socialists (PSOE) launched a debate on quotas and approved a 25 per cent minimum quota for women for party functions and for electoral lists. In reaction to this measure, the Leftist Party (IU) set a quota of 35 per cent and although the number of women elected did not rise to the quota set, it started its way upwards (Lombardo 2008). In 1996 the Conservatives (PP) came to power and rejected quotas. Nonetheless, the third National Plan for Equal Opportunities (1997–2000) contained a section on ‘power and decision-making’, indicating that the issue had reached their agenda as well. In 2000, the Socialists, Leftists and a mixed group of parliamentarians submitted bill proposals on an egalitarian access to electoral positions, but none of them passed. In 2002, regions such as the Baleares and Castilla-La Mancha approved bills on the introduction of quotas in electoral lists. These were taken to the Constitutional Court by the conservative government (Bustelo et al. 2004, Bustelo and Lombardo 2007). This led to a suspension on the part of the Spanish Constitutional Court of both quota laws, which also happened to other regional bills introducing quotas in candidate lists, the Andalusia electoral parity law and the Basque equality law. In March 2004 the Socialist Party won the general election and created the first parity government in Spain with the appointment of an equal number of female and male ministers (eight of each sex) and of a female vice president of government.2 This account of the different development of the issue of gender inequality in politics in the two selected cases helps us to set the context in which the analysed policy documents emerge. We would expect to find representations of the concept of power in the policy texts that would reflect this different development, with more elaborate concept-


ualisations of power in the more experienced Dutch context with regard to gender policies. We will study conceptualisations of power underlying Dutch and Spanish policy texts in the subsequent sections.

11.3 Critical frame analysis and the study of power through conceptual metaphors If power manifests itself in policy discourses, it should appear in some form in written policy texts on gender inequality in politics. To carry out our analysis of the representations of power reflected in the Dutch and Spanish policy documents on gender inequality in politics, we employ the methodology of critical frame analysis. Critical frame analysis originated in social movements theory (Snow and Benford 1988, 1992) and was further developed within the Mainstreaming Gender Equality in Europe (MAGEEQ) research project (www.mageeq.net) in that insights from public policy (Bacchi 1999, Giddens 1984) and gender theory (Walby 1997, Verloo and Roggeband 1996, Connell 1987) were incorporated. Critical frame analysis aims at mapping how policy actors interpret a policy problem, either in implicit or explicit ways, and the solutions to the latter. The key concept of a frame is of an unintentional conceptual schema that filters our understanding of reality by driving our attention towards certain aspects of reality (often related to where our sociocultural bias mostly leads us), while at the same time they can make us neglect others (Goffmann 1974). When applied to policy discourse, a ‘policy frame’ is defined as an ‘organizing principle that transforms fragmentary or incidental information into a structured and meaningful problem, in which a solution is implicitly or explicitly included’ (Verloo 2007: 33, 2005: 20). Policy frames that can make us problematise certain policy issues and leave others untouched are made of different dimensions. Critical frame analysis is particularly suited to the study of power in policy discourses on gender inequality in politics because it detects both visible and invisible dimensions of power thanks to a detailed and in-depth analysis of the different dimensions of a policy frame. In particular, it helps us to identify the representation of the problem or its diagnosis, the solution to the problem or its prognosis, and the balance existing between the two (for instance, by observing whether a policy document leaves a particular problem representation with no solution). It further reveals what roles are attributed to the groups considered (Who is considered to be the norm group and who the problematic group? Who is supposed to act to solve the problem? And who are the target


groups of the proposed measures?). It also helps us identify the causes or roots of a problem, the means to solve it, and the mechanisms that reproduce and solve the problem. Other dimensions of a policy frame that enable us to analyse the less visible aspects of power concerning the legitimisation of non-problems (is there something in the text that is considered as a non-problem?) and the legitimisation of non-action (how is non-action legitimised in the texts?), and the normativity that is expressed in a text (what is seen as ideal/preferred and what is seen as bad/detrimental?). The dimension of voice, that is, who is given a voice to speak in the document or is referred to in a text, is important to assess which actors have the power to set and control the agenda and which actors are excluded from the possibility of framing policy issues (see Verloo 2007 for a list of these dimensions). In critical frame analysis, conceptual metaphors are one of the signs that reveal a person’s thought (Lakoff and Johnson 1980, 1999). However, we do not develop a detailed analysis of all of the metaphors that we encounter in the chosen policy texts, but rather select metaphors that express the representations of power. In this sense, our analysis differs from the tradition of discourse analysis, which focuses more on the close analysis of language using a social psychological focus on patterns of speech and linguistic and rhetorical devices that are used in a text that is often an interview (see Bacchi 2005). By contrast, our analysis is closer to an analysis of discourse, which is more interested in the meanings and interpretations of specific issues that emerge in written policy documents within particular political and social contexts and that produce particular understandings of such issues (see Bacchi 2005, Verloo 2007). Being aware of the dangers in discourse analysis of overgeneralising on limited linguistic evidence (Deignan 2005), we wish to clarify from the beginning that we treat metaphors not as our only linguistic evidence, but rather as one of the ways that help us identify the representations of power that appear in the written discourse of policy actors. Through the use of keywords that refer to power without necessarily naming it, we have selected the metaphors that more explicitly refer to power in the context of the policy texts on gender inequality in politics, but do not necessarily cover all implicit and explicit metaphors of power in the texts. The aforementioned dimensions of a policy frame, such as among others, diagnosis and prognosis of a policy problem, are the main tools that enable us to grasp the meaning of power that appears in the texts and its relation to gender equality. We will analyse the referred dimensions of a policy frame in the selection of Dutch and Spanish policy texts on gender inequality in


politics, searching for ways in which power is represented through metaphors. The selection of texts includes primarily official documents declaring policies on gender equality elaborated by the main political and administrative institutions,3 such as legislative texts, political plans and programmes, parliamentary debates, and political speeches and declarations.4 Selected policy documents undergo an in-depth analysis, the results of which are included in a systematic and detailed summary that has been called a supertext, on the basis of which the different dimensions of a policy frame are mapped.5

11.4 Power and conceptual metaphors in Dutch and Spanish policy texts on gender inequality in politics In this chapter, our analysis explores whether, how and through which metaphors, power is represented in the Spanish and Dutch texts on gender inequality in politics (see Bustelo et al. 2004, van Lamoen et al. 2004). Notwithstanding the fact that we postulated differences between the Dutch and Spanish texts, we did not find any fundamental ones. Spanish texts do not explicitly define power and only mention it through occasional, abstract and vague references. Of the 14 Dutch texts studied, only 4 contain an explicit reference to power in connection with issues of gender equality.6 In general, in both countries, the concept of power is employed as a synonym of the ‘realm of power’, a concept that indicates elective and decision-making political positions. For instance, in most Dutch and Spanish government equality plans, the section of the text that refers to elective and decision-making political positions is named ‘power and decision-making’.7 Power appears to be mainly understood as the presence in higher functions of (political) decision-making, referring to women’s participation in these institutions. The note on behalf of the Dutch women’s policy machinery from May 1999, underlines, for instance, that power concerns the ‘presence of women in the formal political institutions and societal organizations’ (N5: 3). This is the so-called ‘quantitative’ dimension of power. The document also mentions the ‘qualitative’ presence of women, referring to the structural attention for women’s interests and needs, but in the rest of the document the author deliberately leaves this issue aside. Furthermore, the concept of power tends to be closely interconnected with that of equality, the latter being defined in a traditional liberal way of an equal access to all spheres of society (for instance N9). The inequality of women resides in the fact that they do not hold enough powerful


positions as compared to men. Power, in this perspective, is reduced to a quantitative entity; it becomes a synonym for the number of women in political decision-making. Dutch policy documents underline for instance that the problem is the ‘distribution of power’ (for instance N1), meaning that positions of political decision-making are not equally distributed among men and women. The problem is to be understood as an underrepresentation of women in positions of political decision-making. Given this numerical focus, power is also conceived as a zero-sum game: whatever power women will manage to achieve is power they have taken from men. This notion of a zero-sum game can be found in a Dutch text underlining that ‘a characteristic of the possession of power is that it is not easily nor voluntarily given away’ (N5). Most policy discourses further seem to assume that, to be equal, women simply need to be integrated in power structures, the same structures that may actually be reproducing women’s subordination. Achieving equality is not necessarily presented as a question of changing existing power structures but of offering women the possibility to enter them. Dutch and Spanish texts frequently refer to the need to ‘promote equal access and participation of women in power and decision-making structures in all spheres’ (S2).8 Some of the keywords searched in Spanish texts were ‘acceso al poder’ [access to power], ‘comparto del poder’ [sharing power], ‘participación en el poder’ [participation in power], ‘representación política’ [political representation], ‘igualdad en el poder’ [equality in power], ‘igualdad en la toma de decisiones’ [equality in decision-making], ‘presencia’ [presence], ‘paridad’ [parity]. Some of the keywords found in Dutch texts were ‘verdeling van macht en invloed’ [distribution of power and influence], ‘verdeling van (politieke) hulpbronnen’ [distribution of (political) resources], ‘deel uitmaken’ [participate in], ‘aanwezigheid van vrouwen’ [presence of women], ‘doorbraak van vrouwen in hogere functies’ [breakthrough of women in higher positions]. One of the metaphors most commonly used is that of ‘access’ to positions of political power (that is, representative and decision-making positions). This gives us the idea that power is something that is behind a closed door that needs to be opened for women to enter this sphere. The barrier to women’s access is often described as ‘glass ceiling’,9 where the image of the glass shows the gap between the formal and the substantive opportunities to access political positions. While formally nothing hinders women from accessing positions of political decision-making, there still are invisible barriers. In Spain, demands for sharing power and achieving a more balanced share of power come in particular from actors belonging to the PSOE


and IU. Quotas for women in political institutions are part of the solutions proposed to overcome the obstacles that hinder women’s access to power structures on (numerically) equal terms with men. Whatever the obstacles may be, quotas are meant to bypass them.10 The type of quotas that is proposed by the Socialist Party, the main supporter of this measure, requires that ‘candidatures of electoral lists will have a balanced presence of men and women so that their composition does not exceed 60 per cent and is not inferior to 40 per cent of either sex’.11 What is interesting as well is that the main metaphors used in these texts refer to weight and numbers, and they appear in all Spanish texts with keywords such as ‘balanced presence’, ‘balanced participation’, ‘balanced representation’, ‘share’.12 For example, the rationale behind the introduction of quotas in politics is often described through the metaphor of a ‘balanced presence’, that suggests the image of a scale where women and men have the same weight on the plates. The language of mathematics often returns in the mentioning of a numerical ‘proportion’ of 60/40 for each sex’s possibility to be elected or appointed in political positions (S8). Using the language of mathematics can be a strategic device that female politicians employ, deliberately or not, to legitimate the issue of gender inequality in politics vis-à-vis their male colleagues. And it is a language that can more easily be understood by men. In the Dutch policy documents, the focus is rather on the extent to which the target figures for women in positions of political decisionmaking are met. The language used is that of an economic trend, describing the evolution in the numbers of women in decision-making in terms of ‘growth’, ‘substantive growth’, ‘stagnation’ and ‘decline’ (N10, N11). A couple of Dutch policy texts focus more extensively on the obstacles themselves, distinguishing for instance between individual, structural and cultural factors. The individual factors refer to the level of education, professional experience, time available, personal ambition and motivation, but they are recognised to have become less important. Institutional factors are defined as those involving the distribution of power and refer to the gender bias contained in electoral systems or the selection criteria for candidates in politics. Cultural factors refer to gender rules and regimes, mainly unwritten rules, values, norms and social practices, all of which are institutions influencing how much power women ‘manage to gather’. Notwithstanding the more extensive focus on obstacles to a balanced distribution of power positions in the Dutch case, solutions are similar to those presented in Spanish documents. A redistribution of


power is thought not to come by itself but rather needs steering through stimulating measures such as quotas or target figures, as can be found in a gender impact assessment of the electoral system. But the obstacles themselves are not tackled, the existing structures and institutions producing and perpetuating power relations are left untouched – if any solution is suggested at all. A couple of texts refer to power in a different way. A linguistic example used in one Spanish text presents ‘power’ as a ‘cake’ to ‘share’. Power is perceived as the capacity to make things happen that would otherwise not happen. The metaphor of the ‘cake’ enables female politicians, who were the authors of the speech, to suggest to their male colleagues an image that they can easily perceive, as it speaks in the traditional language of power as a tempting capacity to possess, but that at the same time fits the purpose of proposing a redistribution of ‘the cake’ between the sexes. The underlying suggestion of the text, however, goes in the opposite direction to the traditional idea of power in order to dominate someone else, since it states that, by sharing the ‘cake of power’, women might be able to construct a new world order. In the words of a Socialist female MP: ‘we women want to share the cake of power, not because we are crazy about it […] because we want to participate in the construction of a new world order’.13 In this sense, the concept of power that emerges is one of ‘power over’ in order to come to ‘power to’, and female policymakers are presented as actors who will transform the world. The aforementioned Dutch paper on the position of women in decision-making, produced by a feminist scholar on behalf of the women’s policy machinery, underlines not only the deficient distribution of power but also that of influence. Here, power is defined as the ability to decide on the organisation of society (see N5: 1). The argument goes that there is both too little quantitative and qualitative presence of women in decision-making, the latter referring to a lack of structural consideration of women’s issues or gendered interests and needs. But no further explanation is provided for how the quantitative and the qualitative aspects of women’s representation relate to each other, and how more women in the realm of power would involve both different decisions from those generally taken and a reorganisation of society. But the fact that power can be the capacity to transform something, as it is understood by Arendt (1969), is clearly underlined, even though it is not stated as such let alone developed any further. An alternative conceptualisation of power in a more (normative) transformative sense emerges in the Basque Plan on gender equality


(S3). The key concepts developed in this document are ‘empowerment’ and ‘power to’. Measures are oriented to achieving women’s empowerment in its double aspect: of acknowledging their capacities to exercise influence, power and leadership, and of promoting the effective exercise of influence, power and leadership. It is a matter of strengthening women’s social, economic and political position on the basis of the conception of ‘power to’ rather than ‘power over’, which would imply the elimination of existing gender power relations. The expression ‘power to’ includes a metaphorical movement towards potential capacity, change and future action. Power, in the Basque Plan, is conceived as capacity (‘power to’) rather than as control (‘power over’), opening the way to the transformative potential of an alternative conceptualisation of power. Moreover, unlike the other analysed texts for Spain on gender inequality in politics, gender relations in the Basque Plan are explicitly defined as power relations, although there is no mentioning of the patriarchal structures in which power relations are situated. Women’s empowerment and increased autonomy are represented as possible solutions to the problem of gender inequalities in politics. Empowerment is explicitly connected to the importance of strengthening the women’s movement, giving feminist actors voice in the political debate.14 In this normative discourse, women’s empowerment should take its point of departure in the concept of ‘power to’. The plan argues about the need to strengthen women’s capacities, both at the individual and collective levels, in view of a ‘new model of leadership’ that would supposedly be more transformative. The text recognises the presence of obstacles to women’s exercise of ‘power to’, as existing political structures are excessively hierarchical for allowing women – and men – to exercise ‘power to’. Neither the concept of women’s ‘power to’ nor the way in which such a radical change of structures should occur is extensively developed in the Basque Plan. Besides, in spite of its progressive aspects, this discourse is not immune to the influence of the implicit male norm: while women’s roles and contributions in the transformation of society are underlined in a way that creates the idea of women’s responsibility, references to men’s roles in this transformation are absent. A concept of power as something related to setting and controlling the agenda by taking non-decisions that would not benefit dominant groups (Lukes 2005) is reflected in most Dutch policy documents as well as in the discourse of the Spanish Popular Party (PP). The latter shows a liberal emphasis on the individual, together with a denial of the problem of unequal power between the sexes. In this discourse, women’s under-representation is considered not a problem in itself, because equal


opportunities supposedly enable capable individuals (men and women) to compete for power, and let the best individuals achieve power positions. Not only is unequal gender power (interpreted as women’s underrepresentation) legitimised as a ‘non-problem’, but also ‘non-action’ is the solution proposed in the discourse of the PP: ‘(…) the debate you [MPs proposing quotas] bring here today is an old debate (…). We defend a feminism of opportunities, not of imposition. (…) Against your quotas, we want responsibilities that respond to our efforts, capacity and value. We do not want to be a number imposed on a list.’15 Different rhetorical resources are employed in this Spanish policy document. The Socialist Party’s demand for quotas is discredited by the Popular Party with the label of ‘old feminism’. The label ‘old-fashioned’ attached to quota promoters would supposedly consist in the ‘imposition’ that quotas would exercise on parties, while the progress is rather conceived in terms of minimal state intervention. Furthermore, by defining women who oppose quotas as capable, competent and worthy, the PP speaker implicitly suggests a negative association of women who are in favour of quotas and who would be elected due to quotas as incompetent, incapable and unworthy. The argument is that there is no need for legal ‘intervention’ (that is, quotas), the boundaries set to action being the voluntary will of individuals. Change, in this view, will simply come ‘naturally’ since men and women are equal in dignity and capacities: ‘In my view such a strong interventionism of having to make parity by law must not exist, since this [equality] should be natural, given that we, men and women, are equal in dignity (…) and capacity, under equal conditions, to compete with men.’16 Most Dutch documents, even those analysing gendered obstacles when it comes to having or getting power, contain subtle legitimisations of non-action by not formulating any concrete suggestions to solve the problem depicted and by postponing concrete action. All in all, we detected very few explicit definitions of the concept of power in the analysed texts on gender inequality in politics. Moreover, explicit references to male domination in politics are extremely rare in the diagnosis of the problem. Neither Spanish nor Dutch texts explicitly mention men as part of the problem of women’s underrepresentation. The Dutch text closest to such a statement mentions that institutional advantages for men have to be erased, thus recognising a gender-differentiated access to power, and the Spanish Basque Plan (S3) refers to incentives for men to take paternity and parental leave. But the focus is on the design and impact of institutions, not on men. Policy documents underline the unequal distribution of power


between the sexes, but focus on how women lag behind or need to catch up. Issues of causality and responsibility never address men. Women have the problem of not having much power and they should move so as to attain it. This appears in the tendency in the Spanish and Dutch texts to frame the problem of gender inequality in politics as ‘women’s under-representation’ rather than ‘men’s over-representation’. The issue is a larger participation of women: increasing women’s inflow, increasing their mobility and preventing their exit.

11.5 Conclusions: gender and the implicit dimensions of power In this chapter, we studied a particular potential barrier for women in political decision-making, more precisely the framing of power in policy documents on gender inequality in politics and the conceptual metaphors employed to describe power. Contrary to our expectations, Dutch and Spanish policy documents on gender inequality in politics do not differ profoundly with respect to the conceptualisation of power, notwithstanding the historical differences between these countries when it comes to the position of women in politics. Dutch texts do not contain qualitatively more references to power. Gender equality policies might have introduced target figures way before the Spanish requests on gender quotas and focus on subtle barriers such as the lack of maternity leave for women politicians, but with respect to power, the discourses are similar in both countries. When considering the representations of power and the related metaphors that are reflected in the analysed policy documents on gender inequality in politics, we have to conclude that definitions of power are rare, vague and limited. Only a small minority of policy documents speak of power, and if they do, they tend to be brief on the issue. The concept of power is closely interconnected with a liberal understanding of equality, limiting the concept of power to a quantitative entity that reflects the number of women in politics. Power is the observable and measurable ‘access’ of women to positions of political decisionmaking that is hindered by obstacles metaphorically summarised in the conventionalised expression of a ‘glass ceiling’. Power, in this respect, is mainly considered to be a form of control over, in this case, positions of decision-making. Power is also seen as a zero-sum game: whatever certain actors have, others do not have it. But it is not seen as a relational concept. Of the current relational definition of power only B (women) is addressed, not A (men). This finding suggests that it is


precisely the absence of the mentioning of the male subject in the power relation that reveals the presence of implicit dimensions of power even in policy documents that are supposedly written to promote gender equality in politics. In his recently revised theory of power, Lukes (2005) argues that one of the levels at which power operates is a situation in which an issue is unquestioned to the extent that it is not even formulated in the actors’ minds nor is it openly discussed in political debates. In this case, the taboo seems to be male power over women. The problem of men’s power is not explicitly formulated in the documents precisely because it is so dominant that it exercises hegemony over all discourses and, consequently, the situation simply does not appear as problematic to the political actors involved, including female policymakers who advocate gender equality. Male political power is revealed and confirmed by its invisibility as a problem, by its being normalised by the majority of the texts, even those of feminist actors. Still, men’s presence as the invisible unstated norm suggests the unquestioned (even ‘obvious’) perpetuation of their power over the subordinated female subjects. In this sense, the maintenance in power of the male group is protected against possible changes by continuous processes of normalisation of hegemonic discourses (Foucault 1980, 1995). In sum, the Dutch and Spanish policy documents on the issue of gender inequality in politics might not explicitly mention power, but they speak for themselves with respect to the existing power relations. They subscribe to and reproduce the existing imbalanced gender relations in political decision-making as the norm, which might produce an important barrier for women to such positions. However, findings also indicate that, though isolated, texts on gender inequality in politics develop some alternative conceptualisations of power as ‘power to’ that embed a transformative potential for politics through a metaphorical movement from ‘power over’ to ‘power to’. One of them is the concept of individual and collective empowerment that was found in the Basque Plan, that has some relation to Arendt’s notion of power as capacity to ‘act in concert’ (Arendt 1972: 151) for a political purpose. Power in the Basque text is conceived as capacity that stems from both women’s individual empowerment through training programmes for improving their political skills and the strengthening of the women’s associative movement through training, promotion of exchanges, funds and coordination programmes. These measures go in the direction of promoting women’s capacity to act together with the common political purpose of achieving a more gender equal society. Other alternative conceptualisations of power use the classical and familiar


metaphor of the ‘cake of power’, but to promote a different idea from that of ‘power over’, which is the one that women would use power for transforming the world. This suggests new models of female leadership, where the concept of power as capacity replaces that of power as domination. But again, in none of these alternative cases is the relational dimension of power addressed as the focus is on women only. Still, the difficulties for female politicians to carve out a space in male-dominated political institutions for expressing their voices in favour of greater gender equality in politics transpire in the rhetorical devices they adopt to legitimate their demands. One example that we mentioned is the female politicians’ use of the language of mathematics (quotas, percentages, targets) as a legitimating and easy-to-grasp rhetoric for their male colleagues. Another is the recurrent use of the term ‘balance’, a concept that, by suggesting the picture of a scale, evokes ancestral images of justice. This is to say that although we criticise the lack of a relational dimension of power in policy texts on gender inequality in politics, we must be aware of the sometimes patriarchal environment of female politicians and policymakers. The alternative conceptualisations of power suggest that there are attempts in policy texts on gender inequality in politics to propose different models of transformative political leadership and there is evidence that gender advocates in the analysed texts employ a variety of rhetorical strategies for promoting gender equality, win supporters and ward off opponents. At the same time, though, the male power in the political sphere appears so strong that it seems to silence any direct challenges to it even in those documents where one would expect to find them.

Acknowledgements We wish to thank Mieke Verloo and the members of the MAGEEQ Project, where research for this chapter was carried out, the European Commission (5FP) for funding the study, and Kathleen Ahrens and her editorial team for their helpful comments on an earlier version of this chapter. Emanuela Lombardo would like to thank the Spanish Ministry of Education and Science and the European Social Fund for funding her research through the 2006 Ramón y Cajal Programme.

Appendix 11.1 N1

List of analysed texts

Emancipation under Execution, Short Term Policy Plan Emancipation in Execution, 22 November 1995


N2 N3

N4

N5

N6 N7 N8

N9

N10

N11 N12

N13 N14

S1

Gender Impact Assessment on the Proposition for a Mixed Electoral System, July 1996 Cabinet Standpoint on Women in Politics and Public Governance 1996/Letter from the Minister of the Interior (22777, no. 8), 13 November 1996 Women in Politics and Public Governance (KS 22777-11), Minutes of general meeting of the Parliamentarian Committee for Social Affairs and Employment debating the position of women in politics and public administration, 20 January 1999 Power and Decision-Making: on Emancipation and Participation. Exploration of the Field on Behalf of the Dutch Women’s Policy Machinery, May 1999 Mid Term Policy Plan on Emancipation 2000, 15 November 2000 A World to Gain. TECENA’S Final Report on the Advisory System with Conclusions and Recommendations, December 2000 Letter from the Minister of the Interior and Kingdom Relations informing the Second Chamber of Parliament about the cabinet’s resolutions concerning possible arrangements for pregnancy and delivery leave for politicians, 6 April 2001 Minutes of the General Meeting of the Parliamentarian Committee for Social Affairs and Employment consulting the Secretary of State on Social Affairs and Employment A. Verstand on the cabinet’s reaction (letter 01-10-2001) to the CEDAW’s reaction to the 2nd and 3rd national report (28009-7), 28 November 2001 Minutes of Plenary Parliamentary Debate on an arrangement proposal for the replacement of political representatives during sickness and pregnancy, 7 February 2002 Answers to parliamentary questions on women elected in municipal councils, 28 March 2002 Questions members of second chamber to Minister of the Interior on the number of women in the new cabinet and answers provided by the Minister, 13 September 2002 Policy Article 12, Annual Presentation of Emancipation Policy Resolutions, September 2003 Bill amendment Constitution on amendment regulations regarding the election of the Lower and Upper House, the provincial and the local councils on a temporary replacement of their members due to pregnancy, delivery or illness. Report of the permanent Committee of the Interior, 25 March 2003 III Plan for Equal Opportunities between Women and Men 1997– 2000


S2 S3 S4 S5 S6 S7 S8 S9 S10 S11 S12

IV Plan for Equal Opportunities between Women and Men 2003–06 III Equality Plan Basque Country 1999–2000 IV Governmental Action by the Catalonia Generalitat in Equal Opportunities for Women (2001–03) IV Equal Opportunities Plan for Women and Men in the Region of Madrid 2002–05 The Socialist Party’s (PSOE) Equality Plan, 26 April 2002 Parliamentary debate on women’s rights, 22 April 1997 Law proposal 16 November 2001 on a reform of the electoral law 5/1985, 19 June Law 11/2002 June 27 for modifying the Castilla-La Mancha electoral law 5/1986 23 December Debate on three law proposals on guaranteeing equality among men and women in their access to electoral positions, 8 April 2003 Electoral programme of the Socialist Party PSOE 2004 Electoral programme of the Leftist Party IU 2004

Notes 1 These last events have not been included in the analysis because it deals with documents prior to 2006. 2 In March 2007 an Equality law between women and men was approved (Law 3/2007) that obliges political parties in their electoral lists to respect a share of no more than 60 per cent and no less than 40 per cent of either sex in each group of five candidates. 3 For the list of analysed texts see Appendix 11.1. The selection of documents was based on the construction of a timeline that identified key moments of debate among different sociopolitical actors throughout the period of study. Starting from these key moments, texts were added until they did not include new information. We also analysed secondary sources (texts produced by the written press, the feminist movement and gender experts), but here we focus on official policy documents. 4 More precisely, the texts include policy plans (3 Dutch and 5 Spanish texts), positions of the cabinet on particular issues (1 Dutch text), 1 letter from a minister to Parliament (1 Dutch text), minutes of meetings of parliamentary committees (3 Dutch texts), minutes of plenary parliamentary debates (1 Dutch and 2 Spanish texts), questions by MPs and ministerial answers (2 Dutch texts), legislation (2 Spanish texts), political party’s electoral programmes (2 Spanish texts) and policy programme (1 Spanish text). Dutch texts are between 1 and 55 pages long, the total corpus size is 170 pages. Spanish texts are between 3 and 52 pages long, the total corpus size is 134 pages. 5 A ‘supertext’ enables the hidden significance of a text to be made explicit through a list of ‘sensitizing questions’ (Verloo 2007). 6 Keywords searched in Spanish related to ‘igualdad en el poder’ [equal power] and ‘comparto del poder en la toma de decisiones’ [sharing decision-making


7 8 9

10

11 12

13

14

15

16

power]; in Dutch to ‘macht en besluitvorming’ [power and decision-making], ‘verdeling van macht en invloed’ [distribution of power and influence], ‘macht en besluitvorming over emancipatie en participatie’ [power and decisionmaking on emancipation and participation]. See N1 or S1 Equality plans in Appendix 11.1, but this is common also to other Dutch and Spanish documents. Similar quotations can be found in all Spanish texts analysed. The quotation of the ‘glass ceiling’ is from S2 Equality plan but can also be found in N4 Parliamentarian Committee meeting, N5 Note for women’s policy machinery, N6 Emancipation plan; N11 Parliamentary questions and answers and N13 Equality policies’ resolutions speak of the need for women to break through without mentioning the glass ceiling itself. Quotas as a means to promote women’s access to power structures can be found in the following Spanish policy texts: S2 Equality plan; S7 Parliamentary debate; S8 Law proposal; S9 Law; S10 Parliamentary debate; S11 and S12, Electoral programmes. The quotation is from S8 (Law proposal), but it is similarly phrased in policy documents from the PSOE and IU. The frequency of this type of metaphor varies in Spanish texts, but for instance the reference to a ‘balanced’ representation, participation or presence of women in politics can be found at least three times in a text, and sometimes five, seven or more times. While the concept of sharing power can be found in several texts analysed from the parties of the left, the quotation of the ‘cake of power’ comes from a Socialist female MP in S10 (Parliamentary debate). ‘Measures proposed aim at raising society awareness of the importance of a more balanced participation of women and men in the different spheres and levels of decision-making, at better preparing women for their participation in the public sphere and at the strengthening of women’s associative movement’ (S3, Basque Equality Plan). The PP MP continues by presenting the PP as a role model that has already solved the problem within the party by putting more women in decisionmaking positions (S10, Parliamentary debate). PP speaker, S10 (Parliamentary debate).

References Arendt, H. 1969. On Violence. New York: Harcourt, Brace and World. Arendt, H. 1972. Crises of the Republic. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. Astelarra, J. (ed.) 1990. Participación política de las mujeres. Madrid: Siglo XXI. Bacchi, C. 1999. Women Politics and Policies. The Construction of Policy Problems. London: Sage. Bacchi, C. 2005. ‘Discourse, Discourse Everywhere: Subject “Agency” in Feminist Discourse Methodology’. Nordic Journal of Women’s Studies, 13(3): 198–209. Bustelo, M. and E. Lombardo (eds). 2007. Políticas de igualdad en España y en Europa. Madrid: Catedra. Bustelo, M., E. Lombardo, E. Peterson and R. Platero. 2004. Country Study Spain. Political Participation. Vienna: IWM.

Petra Meier and Emanuela Lombardo 253 Connell, R. W. 1987. Gender and Power: Society, the Person and Sexual Politics. Cambridge: Polity Press. Deignan, A. 2005. Metaphor and Corpus Linguistics. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Deignan, A. (no date). ‘Conceptual Metaphor Theory’, http://creet.open.ac.uk/ projects/metaphor-analysis/theories.cfm?paper=cmt, date accessed 7 December 2007. Foucault, M. 1995. Discipline and Punish. The Birth of the Prison. New York: Vintage. Foucault, M. 1980. Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings 1972–1977. New York: Pantheon Books. Giddens, A. 1984. The Constitution of Society. Cambridge: Polity. Goffmann, E. 1974. Frame Analysis. An Essay on the Organisation of Experience. Harmondsworth: Peregrine Books. Lakoff, G. and M. Johnson. 1980. Metaphors We Live By. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Lakoff, G. and M. Johnson. 1999. Philosophy in the Flesh: the Embodied Mind and its Challenge to Western Thought. New York: Basic Books. Leyenaar, M. 1998. ‘Vom demokratischen Feigenblatt zur Parität. Politische Partizipation von Frauen in den Niederlanden’, in B. Hoecker (ed.) Handbuch politische Partizipation von Frauen in Europa. Opladen: Leske und Budrich. Lombardo, E. 2008. ‘Gender Inequality in Politics: Policy Frames in Spain and the European Union’. International Feminist Journal of Politics, 10(1): 78–96. Lukes, S. 2005. Power. A Radical View, 2nd edn. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Meier, P., E. Lombardo, M. Bustelo and M. Pantelidou Maloutas. 2005. ‘Gender Mainstreaming and the Bench Marking Fallacy of Women in Political DecisionMaking’. The Greek Review of Social Research, B1(117): 35–62. Oldersma, J. 2005. ‘High Tides in a Low Country: Gendering Political Representation in the Netherlands’, in J. Lovenduski et al. (eds) State Feminism and Political Representation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Snow, D. and R. Benford. 1992. ‘Master Frames and Cycles of Protest’, in A. D. Morris and C. McClurg-Mueller (eds) Frontiers in Social Movement Theory. New Haven: Yale University Press. Snow, D. and R. Benford. 1988. ‘Ideology, Frame Resonance and Participant Mobilization’. International Social Movement Research, 1: 197–217. van Lamoen, I., P. Meier and Y. Jeuken. 2004. Update Preliminary Country Study. The Netherlands. Political Participation and Representation. Vienna: IWM. Verloo, M. 2005. ‘Mainstreaming Gender Equality in Europe. A Critical Frame Analysis. The Greek Review of Social Research, B1 (117): 11–32. Verloo, M. (ed.). 2007. Multiple Meanings of Gender Equality in Europe. A Critical Frame Analysis of Gender Policies in Europe. Budapest: CPS Books. Verloo, M. and C. Roggeband. 1996. ‘Gender Impact Assessment: the Development of a New Instrument in the Netherlands’. Impact Assessment, 14(1): 3–20. Walby, S. 1997. Gender Transformations. London: Routledge.

12 Gendered Metaphors of Women in Power: the Case of Hillary Clinton as Madonna, Unruly Woman, Bitch and Witch Elvin T. Lim Wesleyan University

12.1

Introduction

Hillary Rodham Clinton was the first First Lady to move into the White House with a full-time professional career of her own, the first First Lady to win elected office in the US Senate, and the first woman to seriously contend for a major party’s nomination for the US presidency. As Hillary Clinton stood at the frontier of women’s struggle to break into the public sphere in their own right, she became the target for a number of highly stylised and gendered metaphors used to conceptualise her role in public life. Defenders and critics of Hillary Clinton have characterised her as a Madonna, an Unruly Woman and variants thereof: a Bitch, and a Witch.1 In this chapter, I critically examine the usage of these metaphors in books and newspaper articles about the senator by neutral observers, her supporters and detractors to unpack the layers of resistance that still exist against women in American public life. My thesis is that gendered conceptual metaphors, in variously imposing and/or retracting ‘masculine’ and/or ‘feminine’ traits, empower and disempower woman leaders.2 Indeed, while some gendered conceptual metaphors of women in power (Madonna and Unruly Woman) give only by taking, others (Bitch and Witch) mostly only take. When deployed by neutral observers and even supporters of Hillary Clinton in 2008, the gendered metaphor of the Unruly Woman typically assigned strength to Hillary Clinton, only at the cost of her likeability. When the Bitch and Witch metaphors were used to put Hillary Clinton in the worst possible light, her detractors, many of whom are women, inadvertently took from her gender generally just as they took from Clinton specifically. The 254

Elvin T. Lim 255

safest bet, I conclude, is to use gendered metaphors as sparingly as possible.

12.2

Women (still) in the double bind

In recent years, a post-feminist narrative has emerged among some political observers. Women no longer face obstacles in entering the workplace or the public sphere; they have, for all intents and purposes, achieved equality with men. In one declarative swoop, Bay Buchanan dismissed the historical oddity that no woman has ever lived in the White House other than as a political consort. ‘According to at least one national poll’, Buchanan (2007: 192) confidently asserted, ‘America has caught up with the rest of the world. It is ready to elect a woman president.’ Hillary Clinton came close, but the pertinent fact is that she did not make it. Indeed I aim to show that our language usage in the 2008 election cycle indicates that we are some way off a post-feminist era. Not only do traditional role expectations preclude women’s departure from the ‘private’ sphere of the family into the ‘public’ sphere, when women do enter into politics, they often have to negotiate the disjunction between social definitions of femininity and leadership in what Anderson and Sheeler (2005: 6) have termed a ‘double bind’. To be taken seriously in the public sphere hitherto dominated by men, women have had to shed their ‘feminine’ traits to become Unruly Women, the modal type of metaphor used to describe tough woman political leaders. However, in doing so these woman leaders were often perceived as domineering, arrogant and cold. Elizabeth I (The Virgin Queen), Dowager Empress Cixi (The Old Buddha), and Margaret Thatcher (The Iron Lady) are all remembered to be strong leaders, but they were thought so at the expense of their ‘femininity’ and likeability. In return for respect accorded to them as Unruly Women, woman leaders who adopted the metaphor paid their dues in likeability. If, on the other end of the double bind, a woman entering politics makes no serious effort to negotiate a ‘masculine’ demeanour and even embraces her ‘femininity’ as a Madonna or Beauty Queen, she is likely to be perceived as vulnerable, weak and out of her league. But, because she is only covertly or partially overturning traditional role expectations, she would also appear less threatening and more appealing. What she loses in respectability, she gains in likeability. Governor Sarah Palin, John McCain’s vice presidential nominee in 2008, well exemplifies this other side of the double bind. A former Miss Wasilla and Miss Congeniality, Palin could not have been a more perfect antithesis to Hillary


Clinton. There may be objective reasons for thinking Clinton to be unlikeable and competent and Palin to be likeable but incompetent, but it is surely more than coincidence that the two most prominent women in American politics in 2008 so perfectly occupied the two sides of the double bind. In other words, traditional expectations of how a woman should behave are mutually exclusive the moment she steps out of the private into the public sphere. The double bind squeezes woman leaders into a practically non-existent bandwidth of what is acceptable behaviour for them. When it comes to embracing ‘masculinity’ as a survival tactic in the public sphere, women are damned if they do, doomed if they do not. By this analysis, Hillary Clinton’s ‘likeability’ problem is likely more than an idiosyncratic problem of her character or personality, but merely a restatement of the double bind dilemma that woman leaders face. She was the Unruly Woman, par excellence; unlikeable, polarizing, but by God, in charge. ‘No one doubts Mrs. Clinton’s ability to make war’, as Peggy Noonan (2007) put it. Instead, Noonan continued, ‘one worries about what has always seemed her characterological bellicosity’. The gendered dimension of the ‘unlikeability’ charge was manifest when Podhoretz (2006: 69) observed, ‘when the nicest thing that’s said about someone by her colleagues is that she’s “hardworking”, you’re not going to win any Miss Congeniality awards’. The implication here was that the best thing Hillary Clinton could (should) have hoped for from her colleagues in the Senate was a consolation prize in a beauty pageant. And she could not even manage that, presumably because she was hunting for bigger game. On the campaign trail in 2008, Hillary Clinton confronted the double bind head on. In a debate on January 5 after her defeat to Barack Obama in the Iowa caucuses, moderator Scott Spradling, citing a CNN/WMUR poll, suggested point blank to Clinton that voters simply liked Barack Obama more than they liked her. Clinton famously responded, ‘that hurts my feelings’. Was she playing the ‘gender card’? No more than the debate moderator and her fellow candidates who were ungraciously squeezing her into a double bind that none of them had to confront. Even after Clinton conceded that ‘he’s (Obama is) very likeable’, Obama dug his heels in without a flinch, saying, ‘You’re likable enough, Hillary’ (The New York Times 2008). This was perhaps Obama at his ugliest in his nomination battle with Clinton, but the comment was not always perceived as such probably because the media and the public had accepted the double bind as a given premise for aspiring woman politicians.

Elvin T. Lim 257

Even though Hillary Clinton was able to purchase an image of toughness at the cost of her likeability, there were still other ‘masculine’ prerequisites for the office she sought that she did not meet (Kann 1998, Gordon and Miller 2001). Podhoretz (2006: 60–1) minced no words in communicating as much: ‘A president is, first and foremost, a leader. And the very image of the word leader invokes a masculine image, a father image … those indefinable “leadership” qualities are the reason many Republicans quietly doubt Hillary’s chances in 2008.’ In particular, the often repeated charge that Hillary Clinton is ‘polarizing’ (Troy 2006) showed that she faced a peculiar double bind as an aspirant to the Oval Office. The founders of the US Constitution placed a premium on great or heroic leadership and ‘patriot kingship’, not on petty, divisive and factious leadership when designing, and then filling, the Oval Office. The patriot king, the model of leadership envisioned by the founders, stood above faction and party, unifying the diverse components of the body politic by standing as an imposing and inspiring model of virtue (Ketcham 1987, Cohen 2003, Roper 2004). Against these mythic expectations, the ‘polarizing’ narrative of Hillary Clinton stood as a coded counterpoise to the ‘masculine’ metaphor of patriot kingship – a metaphor that Hillary Clinton could not possibly deliver by virtue of her biological sex. Clinton’s botched efforts to manage the ‘polarizing’ critique on the 2008 campaign trail highlighted the difficulty of traversing the gendered landscape of politics without tripping on the landmines laid for women. Her attack on Barack Obama as idealistic not only made her appear mean (unlikeable), it appeared to endorse the premises of the ‘polarizing’ critique used against her. In characterising herself as a realist and someone who took charge, she effectively conceded that he was above politics and more equipped to unify the nation with his inspirational rhetoric and post-partisan politics than she was. Her use of the ‘experience’ versus ‘change’ slogans also subtly reinforced a gendered reading of men as adventurous and women as more risk-averse. Whereas Obama championed the ‘audacity of hope’, Hillary Clinton represented her gradual evolution from First Lady to presidential candidate as ‘living history’ rather than overtly making history (Clinton 2003, Obama 2006). In all of this, Hillary Clinton’s successes on the campaign trail can be attributed in part to her ability to mine the rhetorical and metaphorical tools that were available and consonant with what was culturally familiar, just as some of her failures must be attributed to her failure to transcend them.


12.3 Gendered conceptual metaphors of Hillary Clinton in politics For better or, as I believe, for worse, gendered metaphors of power are not merely stylistic devices but foundational to the making and our understanding of political identities and realities. Hillary Clinton’s meteoric rise to political prominence accelerated a collision between extant understandings of power and women’s role in the public sphere. Indeed, her transition from First Lady to junior senator of New York was unique in American history and a particular catalyst for metaphorical inventiveness because for 17 days in 2001, she was, discordantly, both a Madonna as First Lady and also an Unruly Woman Senator trying to break out of her role as political consort. Her metaphorical ascriptions switched as quickly as her political fortunes did, becoming more invidious as her ambitions grew. The manner in which Hillary Clinton’s competition for power has been metaphorically conceived reveals the opportunities and constraints under which she acted. That is why the analysis of conceptual metaphors is necessarily a critical enterprise, because their usage is often driven or accompanied by implicit or unconscious habits of the mind. As Robert Ivie (1990: 73–4) observed, ‘all motives (are) entangled in metaphor’s linguistic web’. Metaphors are, as Richards (1936: 94) argued, a ‘borrowing between the intercourse of thoughts, a transaction between contexts’. They facilitate comprehension of a relatively more abstract or foreign concept (a target domain) by comparison to that which is known or experienced (a source domain).3 The target domain, for our purposes, is the relatively unknown phenomenon of women in power, and the source domain is our understanding and lived experienced of the role of women in society. It should be immediately evident why gendered metaphors of power – indeed all metaphors – are backward looking in so far as and when they describe the new and foreign in terms of the old and experienced. We are far more likely to have experienced and therefore understand women as mothers and beauty queens than as senators or presidents. In the case of Hillary Clinton, she has been metaphorically compared to a Madonna mostly when she was First Lady, and, especially on the campaign trail from 2006 to 2008, an Unruly Woman, and variants thereof: a Bitch and a Witch. I attempt here to pierce the linguistic surface of these metaphors to offer a statement on the resistance to the idea of women in power encapsulated in our metaphorical usage, as well as to trouble the ontologies embedded in them.

Elvin T. Lim 259

12.3.1

Madonna

The Madonna metaphor is the metaphorical expression of the ideology of ‘maternal feminism’ (Ruddick 1980, Dow 1996). Proponents of maternal feminism, also known as the ideology of ‘true womanhood’, do not dismiss, but instead affirm the psychological traits and moral virtues traditionally associated with women and advocate the introduction of maternal sensibilities into the public sphere (Johnston 1992). Maternal feminists do not think it is inappropriate for women to wield power, only that they should and would do so productively only by accepting the legitimate premises of traditional gender roles. In her first two years as First Lady, Hillary Clinton’s perceived highhandedness and intransigence turned off those who expected her to deploy a ‘maternal’ rather than a ‘rational-contractor’ approach to the healthcare reform agenda of 1993–94 (Held 1987). By 1995, she learnt her lesson and toned down her ‘unruliness’ when she devoted her energies to championing more traditionally feminine causes: children and women’s rights. One of the high points of her first ladyship was when she spoke at the Fourth United Nations Conference on Women. In her first book, It Takes a Village, she portrayed herself as mother and protector of the nation’s children (Clinton 1996). Not surprisingly, her approval ratings as First Lady revised upwards as she embraced her expected gender role (Cohen 2000). By blurring the boundaries between femininity and feminism, the Madonna advances the latter cause with the former method. As Madonna, Hillary Clinton won some and lost some. The double bind she faced in this stage of her life was that she was free to champion traditionally ‘feminine’ causes, but in focusing as such she upheld and reinscribed society’s expectations about women’s role in politics and the legitimate boundaries of their ‘care’. 12.3.2

The Unruly Woman

Unlike the Madonna, the Unruly Woman fundamentally rejects traditional gender roles. That is why the Unruly Woman offends those who believe in the ideology of maternal feminism. According to Edward Klein (2005: 13): ‘She (Hillary Clinton) was a mother, but she wasn’t maternal. She was a wife, but she had no wifely instincts.’ For Peggy Noonan (2007), Hillary Clinton ‘doesn’t have to prove she is a man, she has to prove she is a woman. Her problem is not her sex, as she and her campaign pretend. That she is a woman is a boon to her, a source of latent power. But to make it work, she has to seem like a woman.’


Although Noonan did not distinguish sex and gender, it fair to say that she was opposed not to Hillary Clinton’s sex, but her misgendering. Clinton’s problem was that she failed to act the appropriate part of ‘true womanhood’. Far from being an object of reverence or sexual fantasy, the Unruly Woman is a threat to men precisely because she aspires to be more than a Madonna or a Beauty Queen. Bay Buchanan attributed Hillary Clinton’s ‘unruliness’ to the charge that she was never comfortable with her ‘femininity’. For Buchanan (2007: 18), her frequent changes in hairstyle betrayed ‘a deep sense of insecurity’. For John Podhoretz (2006: 62), Clinton could not pass for a Beauty Queen because she ‘never quite figured out what to do with her hair or her clothes, the fact that she’s not a raving beauty, and the fact that she has a manner that is almost pathologically unsexy’. In one fell swoop, Podhoretz reinscribed the double bind by trivialising the Beauty Queen and stigmatising Hillary Clinton as a failed woman. Yet it was precisely because Hillary Clinton was an ‘unwomanly’ woman that Hillary Clinton would be a formidable candidate for the presidency. Thus in taking, Podhoretz also gave (though not necessarily in equal measure), for he was giving notice that this was no ordinary woman that would rest content with male flattery and bribed with a tiara. The Unruly Woman metaphor has also been adopted by supporters of Hillary Clinton, because it is a familiar metaphor that could be used to highlight Clinton’s ‘toughness’. Thus Carville and Penn (2006) have argued that while previous Democratic candidates have lacked a ‘backbone’, Hillary Clinton was a viable candidate because she was ‘tough enough to handle the viciousness of a national campaign’. But the potential pitfalls of the metaphor reveal that it does not escape the clutches of the double bind. It merely highlighted the perception, according to Gerth and Van Natta (2007), that Clinton’s ‘forced, artificial demeanor’ did not endear her to voters. As we saw in the Iowa caucuses in 2008, Hillary Clinton was by no means the obvious choice of Democratic women, who appeared to have been persuaded by the ‘softer’, less transactional and more ‘inspirational’ appeal of Barack Obama. The irony of Clinton’s defeat in Iowa was that after spending years toning down her liberalism and her feminist radicalism, she learnt that she had to tone up her ‘femininity’ in order to win in New Hampshire. Carville and Penn were supporters of Hillary Clinton trying to shore up her eligibility to the Oval Office, but they did not realise that in offering her gender-weighted, as opposed to gender-neutral symbolic capital, they were giving as well as taking away from her.

Elvin T. Lim 261

A more recent example of when seemingly innocent or even wellmeaning usages of gender metaphors can have negative feedback effects is Hillary Clinton’s comparison of the public sphere to the kitchen, and correspondingly her campaign’s use of the ‘kitchen sink’ metaphor to describe their tactics. In a speech in November 2007, Clinton (2007) said ‘as Harry Truman said, if you can’t stand the heat, get out of the kitchen. I’ll tell you what, I feel really comfortable in the kitchen.’ Three months later after the Super Tuesday primaries when Obama opened up his lead against Clinton, Clinton aides and the media began to speak of a ‘kitchen sink’ strategy against Obama in the days leading up to the Ohio and Texas primaries. No one knows for sure how the term first caught on, but according to Healy and Bosman (2008), it was a ‘Clinton aide’ who had announced that the campaign would be launching a ‘kitchen-sink’ strategy against Obama. The term evolved from the English phrase ‘everything but the kitchen sink’, to denote something like ‘everything imaginable/possible’. To throw even the kitchen sink then, is to launch even the impossible. Intended or not, the ‘kitchen sink’ metaphor for Clinton’s tactics sustained the narrative that while Obama played by the rules, Clinton, the Unruly Woman, would stop at nothing. According to The Economist (2007), Mrs Clinton’s problems have forced her to abandon the high horse of inevitability for the boxing ring. Yet so far she has proved to be no great shakes as a pugilist. She excused her poor performance in a debate in Philadelphia by accusing her fellow (male) candidates of ‘piling on’ … She is certainly one of America’s most accomplished practitioners of the politics of personal destruction. But the skills that she perfected behind the scenes seem to be far less effective when they are practised in the limelight. The political sphere is characterised in this article as a dignified, aboveboard, noble space in which virtuous and talented men competed, not a place in which systematic exclusions and scheming have taken place to ensure the outcome of political contests. The Unruly Woman does not only break the rules of gender and politics, but she is further characterised as someone who breaks the rules of gentlemanly engagement in order to break the rules of gender and politics. The ‘kitchen’ and ‘kitchen sink’ metaphors were a bold attempt to respace and therefore to regender politics as a domestic space in which women are in charge, but in overreaching what was metaphorically possible with the ‘kitchen’ and ‘kitchen sink’, the Clinton campaign


ended up reinforcing the very stereotypes that their candidate’s metaphorical inventiveness was intended to destroy. The ‘kitchen sink’ metaphor reminded people of the traditional role of women (in the kitchen or home) and Clinton’s rebellion at it. The metaphor insinuated that whereas Barack Obama used the conventional weapons of war, Clinton would launch an improbable deus ex machina accessible only to her – a kitchen sink. In doing so, the metaphor said something about both Hillary Clinton’s ambition and her gender: here was a fanatically powerhungry woman who would launch a wildly unconventional (even unmanly) weapon of destruction at a gentleman competitor because she could not handle a bare-knuckle fight with him. The phrase caught on, and was used frequently, without quotation marks, to describe Hillary Clinton’s allegedly ruthless tactics. Thus Maureen Dowd (2008) observed as a matter of fact, ‘by threatening to throw the kitchen sink at Obama, the Clinton campaign simply confirmed the fact that they might be going down the drain’. To adopt and exaggerate role reversals disrupts gender hierarchies by focusing our attention on the social construction (and deconstruction) of gender. But the perceived incongruities evinced by role reversals also help, in some cases, to reinforce gender stereotypes. In generating discomfort among those unused to such role reversals, Unruly Women reinforce the ‘unnaturalness’ of their political agency because they fail (and often refuse) to address the illegitimate reaction of those disoriented by their actions. The Unruly Woman attempts to redefine boundaries, but because the metaphor also calls attention to the fact that the woman who attempts to do so blurs sexual and gender dichotomies, she succeeds only if she is able to calibrate her transgressions according to what her audience can stomach. When she is perceived to have gone too far, as some believe Hillary Clinton has, she graduates from Unruly Woman to Bitch, and then to Witch. 12.3.3

Bitch

For some of her critics, Hillary Clinton was a particularly offensive breed of Unruly Woman to be denigrated outright as a Bitch. Hillary Clinton was ‘no Pat Nixon or Mamie Eisenhower – a quiet political wife. Nor was she Barbara Bush, the hard-as-nails First Lady who was, nonetheless, still a lady’ (Podhoretz 2006: 35). In this observation, Podhoretz implied that a strong First Lady was still a lady if she was feline, but Hillary Clinton was not even that. To his credit, Podhoretz (2006: 67) went on to say exactly what he meant to say: ‘Just for vulgarity’s sake, let me put it this way: She’s got to be a bitch. And Hillary

Elvin T. Lim 263

is a bitch.’ Even when Hillary Clinton deigns to act her sex, she is accused of ‘whining’. Buchanan (2007: 192) subtitles a section of her book, ‘I Am Woman, Hear Me Whine’. Whereas the Madonna and Unruly Woman metaphors may be considered as backhanded compliments (for, respectively, motherliness and strength) when deployed, Bitch is squarely offensive. The Bitch is not only misgendered, as the Unruly Woman is, but dehumanised and animalised. As such, the Bitch is liberated from the double bind, at least in the sense that the metaphor takes without giving anything in return. (Bitch should not be mistaken for Son of a Bitch, which is, predictably and revealingly, a gendered metaphor of men in positions of power, and therefore occasionally construed as an accolade. In contrast, there are no redeeming qualities to a Bitch.) Unlike the graceful Madonna and the classy Beauty Queen, the Unruly Woman qua Bitch can be picked out by her temper and bursts of profanity, a metaphorical entailment of her threatening disruption of traditional gender roles. Thus Carl Limbacher (2003: 89–90) devoted an entire chapter of his book detailing Hillary Clinton’s ‘scorching tirades’. Gail Sheehy (1999: 11) observed that ‘She is angry. Not all of the time. But most of the time.’ 12.3.4

Witch

Although the Witch may have become a more socially acceptable metaphor than the Bitch (‘rhymes with witch’, Barbara Bush once referred to Hillary Clinton), she is in fact the most resented breed of Unruly Woman. That is because while the Unruly Woman is just a bad mother or a disobedient wife, the Witch is in open rebellion with society and God (the guardian of social norms). She is not just dehumanised and animalised like the Bitch is, but demonised. Witches are frequently identified by the shrillness of their voice and the deviousness of their laughter. Thus Rick Klein and Mike Chesney (2007) characterised Hillary Clinton as ‘shrill on the stump and evasive in debates and interviews. Her laughter makes her sound like the Wicked Witch of the West.’ The shrillness of the Witch’s voice is observed not merely as an inadvertent mannerism of an Unruly Woman, it becomes, in a Witch, an expression of deviousness. For Sheldon Filger (2006: 36), there is method in the Witch’s madness: ‘Her voice became hysterical, jumping several octaves, while her cheekbones protruded with excitement, simultaneously with her eyes glaring with hypnotic intensity.’ Maureen Dowd (2008) observed that Hillary Clinton’s campaign for the nomination can be summarised as ‘a primal scream against the golden


child of Chicago, a clanging and sometimes churlish warning that “all that glitters is not gold”’. Why this demonisation? In Hillary Clinton’s case, it was because she forged ‘a new kind of marriage’ in which she defended her husband’s infidelity in return for his political coat-tails (Podhoretz 2006: 36). The Clinton marriage was perceived to be ‘unnatural’, and therefore unholy because it was not merely (if at all) about the conventional and natural reasons of love and sexual intimacy but also about the unusual and unnatural reasons of ambition and expediency. Their marriage was perceived to be so ‘unorthodox’ that it ‘verged on partner swapping’, according to Carl Limbacher (2003: 162). To highlight its unnaturalness, Klein questioned the sex life of the former first couple: ‘Was it true they slept in separate beds? Were there any telltale signs on the presidential sheets that they ever had sex with each other? For that matter, did the Big Girl have any interest in sex with a man?’ As if the insinuation was not clear enough, Klein (2005: 12) continued, ‘or, as was widely circulated, was she a lesbian?’ Hillary Clinton was perceived to be an especially dangerous species of Unruly Woman just as a lesbian is especially threatening to men because, unlike other women, she is in direct competition with men for something that men want, be it female attention or political power. Thus according to Bay Buchanan (2007: 80), ‘In a Faustian bargain, Hillary bartered it (her idealism) all away – sold the very contents of her heart – for a pint of power.’ Like a Witch, she is a cold, heartless entity. Crucially, the bargain Buchanan described was not between Hillary and Bill, but between Hillary and the devil. Bill could offer no incentive alluring enough for the avaricious Witch. Her compact for power was such a transgression of the natural order that it could only be guaranteed by the devil himself. This metaphorical invention allowed Buchanan to say both that Hillary Clinton’s power was derivative and illegitimate, but also formidable. It explains the apparent inconsistency when Hillary Clinton’s critics accuse her of riding on Bill’s coat-tails while also portraying her as partner-in-crime with Bill, calling the couple ‘the firm of Clinton and Clinton’ (Buchanan 2007: 186). The potential elaboration of the Witch metaphor also explains why it would be politically suicidal for Hillary Clinton to divorce Bill – she would then become an old widow, and even more easily compared to a sexually spurned and depraved Witch trading sexual favours with the devil. The central metaphorical entailment of the Witch is the idea that she deceives. Just like the evil queen transformed herself into an old hag to trick Snow White into eating her poisoned apple, the Witch

Elvin T. Lim 265

must be made over in order that she may deceive her victims and achieve her ends. In the case of Hillary Clinton, she has been accused of attempting to bewitch the electorate with her ‘extreme makeover’. ‘For six years Hillary has been under the knife … as the experts attempted to transform her from that spirited and divisive left-wing media darling who made such good right-wing copy into a more serious national figure’ (Buchanan 2007: 186). After her makeover, the Wicked Witch of the Left became, according to Bay Buchanan (2007: 185), ‘The Stepford Candidate’. And thus John Podhoretz (2006: 8) articulated the conservative fear that Hillary Clinton would be ‘liberalism(‘s) … Trojan Horse’. Barbara Olson (1999: 4) has conceded that Hillary Clinton was not alone in the virtuosity of her image reconstruction compared to other politicians, but it is revealing that she would compare Hillary Clinton to Richard Nixon and judge in favour of him by the criteria of ‘conscience’. ‘The supreme irony’, Olson observed, ‘is that this 1960s liberal … has become even more darkly Nixonian in her outlook and methods – though without Nixon’s knowledge, statesmanlike substance, and redemptive Quaker conscience’. Hillary Clinton, by Olson’s reading, used methods even darker than the ones used by the only US president to resign in disgrace. And however corrupt Nixon was, Olson believed that he at least had a soul. In reaching, at least rhetorically, for supernatural explanations, many of the criticisms made against Hillary Clinton are attempts to rationalise the putatively irrational. As Podhoretz put it quite straightforwardly, ‘if a case is made that Hillary’s elevation will profoundly alter the balance between the sexes … every man might see Hillary as his antithesis, and every parent might see her elevation as a thwarting of his or her son’s ambitions’ (Podhoretz 2006: 59). The convenient way to make sense of the social, political and cognitive chaos that Clinton’s intrusion into politics would make was simply to characterise her as a Witch and to hunt her down. Consider the fact that the entire basis of Bay Buchanan’s book places an incredibly high bar for Clinton’s eligibility for the presidency that no observer of politics will expect of any politician: ‘has an honest transformation taken place, a heartfelt conversion?’ (Buchanan 2007: 11) But in what world has the path of power not been driven by ambition, marked by moral compromise and abetted by political U-turns? Certainly not in the case of Rudy Giuliani, who told CNN in 1999 that ‘I’m proabortion. I’m pro gay rights’, or Mitt Romney, who declared when he was running for the Massachusetts governorship that ‘abortion should be safe and legal in this country’ and promised that ‘you will not see me wavering’ on Roe v. Wade.4 Only Hillary Clinton’s makeover has spawned a


cottage industry exposing the ‘real’ Hillary Clinton. Consider another charge: ‘Hillary Clinton is traveling the country on a heavily orchestrated “listening tour”, carrying on insipid “conversations” and “chats” with audiences that are predominantly women. It’s enough to set the cause of women back a generation’ (Buchanan 2007: 194). Buchanan does not explain how Clinton’s ‘listening tour’ is any different from John McCain’s ‘Straight Talk Express’ or the ‘swings round the circle’ that practically every president or presidential candidate since at least Theodore Roosevelt has embarked on. Yet only Hillary Clinton has been characterised as a scheming, deceptive Witch. Here is what is suspect about the ‘Trojan Horse’ argument. If Clinton were so ambitious as to do whatever it takes to get to power, why would she come out of her centrist closet and risk getting booted out of power for her second term were she to be elected? Consider Bay Buchanan’s musing: ‘One wonders whatever happened to the Hillary who fought so long to keep her own name after she married … But Hillary lost her way, giving in to her insecurity by conforming’ (Buchanan 2007: 38). Yet the first sentence of Buchanan’s book contradicts her own conclusion that Hillary had lost her way and conformed: ‘Hillary Rodham Clinton has been many things throughout her life, but one thing she has always been is a dedicated, unapologetic liberal’ (Buchanan 2007: 1). Either Hillary Clinton is a sell-out or she is an unapologetic liberal. The Trojan Horse argument insists, inconsistently, that she is both. Damned if she does, doomed if she does not.

12.4

Gendered metaphors of women in power: beware

Metaphorical politics is an art, and one that women politicians and people describing them must engage with delicately because they are working with entrenched popular and cultural stereotypes embedded in the structure of language itself. Gendered metaphors of women in power, in particular, are dangerous because they force their users into placing women in a double bind the moment they are deployed. Ultimately, gendered metaphors of women in power cannot avoid perpetuating gender-sexual systems that privilege masculinity and males (Haste 1994). As these metaphors are rooted, at least in part, on extant and therefore retrogressive understandings of women’s roles, they should be deployed as sparingly as is possible. Instead of unreflectively using these metaphors as convenient figures of speech, even when they give to women leaders more than they take, we should question the ontologies embedded in their usage. We should not feel obliged to

Elvin T. Lim 267

conceptualise the unthinkable with unsatisfactory linguistic tools. The day we can disagree or even hate Hillary Clinton in a language which is not gender-biased is the day where we have transcended the real glass ceiling of equal respect among women and men.

Notes 1 I adopt the categories of Madonna and Unruly Woman from Anderson and Sheeler (2005). 2 I use ‘masculine’ and ‘feminine’ as categories that are reified in popular usage and cultural understandings, not to endorse their ontological reality. 3 I adopt the helpful language of ‘source’ and ‘target’ domains from Lakoff (1987). On ‘entailments’, see Lakoff and Johnson (1981: 287). 4 Giuliani cited in Podhoretz (2006: 232); Romney cited in Ruth Marcus, ‘Mitt Romney’s Extreme Makeover’, The Washington Post, 21 February 2007, A15, http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/02/20/ AR2007022001266.html (accessed 9 January 2008).

References Anderson, Karrin V. and Kristina H. Sheeler. 2005. Governing Codes: Gender, Metaphor, and Political Identity. Oxford, UK: Lexington Books. Buchanan, Bay. 2007. The Extreme Makeover of Hillary (Rodham) Clinton. Washington, DC: Regnery Publishing. Carville, James and Mark Penn. 2006. ‘The Power of Hillary’. Washington Post, 2 July 2006, B7, http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/ 2006/06/30/AR2006063001478.html (accessed 18 December 2007). Clinton, Hillary R. 1996. It Takes a Village and Other Lessons Children Teach Us. New York: Simon & Schuster. Clinton, Hillary R. 2003. Living History. New York: Scribner. Clinton, Hillary R. 2007. ‘Remarks at the Iowa Jefferson-Jackson Dinner’. 10 November 2007, http://www.hillaryclinton.com/news/speech/view/?id=4156 (accessed 17 June 2008). Cohen, Jeffrey. 2000. ‘The Polls: Public Attitudes toward the First Lady’. Presidential Studies Quarterly, 30: 375–81. Cohen, Jeffrey. 2003. ‘Presidential Greatness as Seen in the Mass Public: an Extension and Application of the Simonton Model’. Presidential Studies Quarterly, 33: 913–24. Dow, Bonnie. 1996. Prime-Time Feminism: Television, Media Culture, and the Women’s Movement since 1970. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Dowd, Maureen. 2008. ‘Begrudging his Bedazzling’. The New York Times, 27 February 2008, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/27/opinion/27dowd.html (accessed 16 June 2008). The Economist. 2007. ‘The Cracks Begin to Show: Hillary Clinton Inevitable No More’. 13 December, http://www.economist.com/world/na/displaystory.cfm? story_id=10286068 (accessed 16 June 2008).

268 Politics, Gender and Conceptual Metaphors Filger, Sheldon. 2006. Hillary Clinton Nude: Naked Ambition, Hillary Clinton and America’s Demise. Bloomington, Ind.: AuthorHouse. Gerth, Jeff and Don Van Natta Jr. 2007. Her Way: the Hopes and Ambitions of Hillary Rodham Clinton. New York: Little, Brown. Gordon, Ann and Jerry Miller. 2001. ‘Does the Oval Office Have a Glass Ceiling? Gender Stereotypes and Perceptions of Candidate Viability’. White House Studies, 1: 325–33. Haste, Helen. 1994. The Sexual Metaphor: Men, Women, and the Thinking that Makes the Difference. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. Healy, Patrick and Julie Bosman. 2008. ‘Clinton Campaign Starts 5-Point Attack on Obama’. The New York Times, 26 February 2008, http://www.nytimes.com/ 2008/02/26/us/politics/26clinton.html (accessed 16 June 2008). Held, Virginia. 1987. ‘Feminism and Moral Theory’, in Eva F. Kittay and Diana T. Meyers (eds) Women and Moral Theory. Totowa, NJ: Rowman & Littlefield, 111–28. Ivie, Robert L. 1990. ‘Cold War Motives and the Rhetorical Metaphor: a Framework of Criticism’, in Martin J. Medhurst, Robert L. Ivie, Phillip Wander and Robert L. Scott (eds) Cold War Rhetoric: Strategy, Metaphor, and Ideology. New York: Greenwood Press, 73–4. Johnston, Caroline. 1992. Sexual Power: Feminism and the Family in America. Tuscaloosa, Ala.: University of Alabama Press. Kann, Mark E. 1998. A Republic of Men: the American Founders, Gendered Languages, and Patriarchal Politics. New York: New York University Press. Ketcham, Ralph. 1987. Presidents above Party: the First American Presidency, 1789–1829. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Klein, Edward. 2005. The Truth about Hillary. New York: Sentinel. Klein, Rick and Mike Chesney. 2007. ‘The Note: Hillary Inevitable No More?’ ABC News.com, 20 November 2007, http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/TheNote/Story? id=3891128&page=1, (accessed 17 December 2007). Lakoff, George. 1987. Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things: What Categories Reveal about the Mind. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Lakoff, George and Mark Johnson. 1981. ‘Conceptual Metaphor in Everyday Language’, in Mark Johnson (ed.) Philosophical Perspectives on Metaphor. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Limbacher, Carl. 2003. Hillary’s Scheme: Inside the Next Clinton’s Ruthless Agenda to Take the White House. New York: Three Rivers Press. Noonan, Peggy. 2007. ‘Sex and the Presidency: Being a Woman is Mrs. Clinton’s Biggest Asset – and She’s Trying to Seem Like One. The Wall Street Journal, 19 October 2007, http://opinionjournal.com/columnists/pnoonan/?id=110010751 (accessed 14 December 2007). Obama, Barack. 2006 The Audacity of Hope: Thoughts on Reclaiming the American Dream. New York: Crown. Olson, Barbara. 1999. Hell to Pay: the Unfolding Story of Hillary Rodham Clinton. Washington, DC: Regnery Publishing. Podhoretz, John. 2006. Can She be Stopped? Hillary Clinton Will Be the Next President of the United States Unless … New York: Crown Forum. Richards, I. A. 1936. The Philosophy of Rhetoric. London: Oxford University Press. Roper, Jon. 2004. ‘George W. Bush and the Myth of Heroic Presidential Leadership’. Presidential Studies Quarterly, 34: 132–42.

Elvin T. Lim 269 Ruddick, Sarah. 1980. ‘Maternal Thinking’. Feminist Studies, 6: 342–67. Sheehy, Gail. 1999. Hillary’s Choice. New York: Random House. The New York Times. 2008. ‘The Democratic Debate in New Hampshire’. 5 January, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/05/us/politics/05text-ddebate.html?_r=2& pagewanted=15&oref=slogin (accessed 7 January 2008). Troy, Gil. 2006. Hillary Rodham Clinton, Polarizing First Lady. Lawrence, Kan.: University Press of Kansas.

Index Adams, Gerry 125 advertisements 4, 210–11, 222–3, 225, 227–32 affiliations, political 175 ageing 213, 215, 221, 223, 233 Aggression 44, 54, 56, 85, 213, 221, 223 aggressors 104, 214–15 Ahern, Bertie vii, 3–4, 117–19, 122–4, 126, 128–30, 133 Alexander, Lamar 67 Amsterdam 33–4, 61, 81, 111, 135, 164, 182–3, 233, 253 Asia 133, 227, 230–1 Australia 228, 230–1 AUTHORITY 38, 63–5, 78, 116 authority, moral 63 BATTLE

95, 100–1, 104–5, 213, 220,

226 211–12, 225–6 beauty 4, 114, 210–13, 216–18, 221, 225–6, 228, 232–3 practices 210–11, 226 Beauty Queen 255, 258, 260 Beckett, Margaret 146, 148–9, 155, 159, 161 benchmarking fallacy 253 Berlusconi, Silvio 36–47, 49–58, 83 bind, double 29, 255–7, 259–60, 263, 266 Bindi, Rosy 86, 90, 94, 106, 109 BIRTH 95–8, 103 BITCH 4, 254, 258, 262–3 Blair, Tony 139, 143, 145, 152–3, 159, 169 Blears, Hazel 5, 142, 146, 151–3, 155–7, 160 BNC (British National Corpus) 68–9, 74–5, 80, 115, 134 bodies, women’s 210, 213, 215–16, 219, 226 BEAUTIFICATION

body 4, 14, 32, 44, 79, 91–3, 95, 103, 110, 124, 209–10, 212–16, 218–20, 226 BODY 44, 212, 214–15 BODY PARTS 91–3, 95, 104, 110, 126 BODY BEAUTIFUL 212–13 body politics vi, 4, 182, 209–10, 257 Bonino, Emma 2, 36–44, 47–50, 52–7 BOON 188, 205, 259 Boxer, Barbara 67 BRANDS 212, 219–21, 225 British 126, 139 House of Commons 3 parliamentary debates 3, 139, 144, 146, 157 political discourse 26 British National Corpus see BNC Brown, Gordon 139 BUILDING 117–18, 125, 133 Bush, George 66, 81, 197–8, 204 BUSINESS 44, 104–5, 126 Cameron, David 29 candidates viii, 64, 76, 80, 83, 139, 146, 159–61, 164, 173, 184–91, 193–203, 205–6, 243, 251, 260–1 extracting metaphor source domain 88 party 185, 195, 201 third-party 185–6 CANDIDATES 197, 201–2 care child 79 health 71–2, 76, 79 Celtic Tiger 114, 122–4 children 37–8, 91, 114, 116, 129–30, 165, 187–90, 192–4, 205, 259 Chilton, Paul 20, 32, 62, 81, 118, 135, 140–1, 164 China 20, 94, 104, 107, 227–30, 232 Cienki, Alan 64, 77, 80–1, 184, 206 270

Index 271 Clinton, Bill 64, 66, 75, 145, 199, 204 Clinton, Hillary vi, vii, 4, 5, 67, 70, 73–5, 200, 254–69 CO-CAMPAIGNER 197, 199, 206 CO-CANDIDATE 197, 199, 203 197–8 CO-PUBLIC SERVANT CO-STRATEGIST 197–9 coalition 18, 37, 41, 53, 83 centre-left 37–8 cognition 140, 178–9 cognitive preferences 166–8, 179–80 collocational patterns 70–3, 77, 79–80 colour 124, 211, 219, 225 conceptual metaphor models 62, 75 conceptual metaphor theory 12, 14, 29, 34, 36, 63, 117, 140, 211, 253 conceptual models 62, 64–5, 68, 75–8 conceptualisations 14, 166, 209–10, 212, 216–19, 224, 235–6, 247 concordancing 92–3, 105–6, 170 CONSTRUCTION 48, 118 consumers 212–14, 221, 225–6 CONTAINER 16, 126 Contemporary Theory of Metaphor 34, 182 corpora 64, 66–7, 77, 86–7, 89–90, 96, 103, 105, 109, 170 corpus 15, 17, 28–32, 39–40, 58–60, 66, 69–70, 80, 86–90, 95–6, 109, 117–18, 120–2, 170–3, 179–80, 185 analysis 89, 172, 176 approaches to Critical Metaphor Analysis 5, 33, 81, 110, 135, 164, 206 linguistics x, xii, 135, 183, 253 of speeches 65, 85 critical discourse analysis x–xi, 33–4, 136 critical frame analysis 235, 239–40, 253 Critical Metaphor Analysis x, 119 cultures 13, 32, 120, 122, 167, 179–80

DARK 148–50, 152–3, 157, 162 De Valera, Éamon 114–16, 136 DEATH 95–7 decision-making 241–4, 247, 252 DEFENCE 104–5, 214, 220 Democrats 63–4, 66, 68–9, 71–2, 77, 79, 187–8, 192–3, 196, 198–200, 202–3 DESTINATIONS 19–20, 23, 127–8, 143, 151, 156 discourse xi–1, 9–10, 12–13, 32, 34–5, 44, 61, 67, 87–8, 105–6, 110–12, 154–5, 164, 240, 245–8, 252 Dole, Elizabeth 67 domains 54–5, 87–8, 104, 143, 147–8, 155, 167, 173, 180–1, 209–12, 217–18, 220–1, 225–6 abstract 166–7, 171 metaphorical source 3, 88 potential source 90, 92–3, 97–8, 100, 102–3 source 12, 16–19, 21, 23–4, 27, 44–57, 63, 65, 77, 79, 85, 88–90, 92–3, 97–106, 109, 121, 126, 129, 147, 151, 153–4, 162–3, 167, 170, 209, 258 target 12, 44–7, 63, 106, 109, 120–1, 126, 131, 170, 201, 209, 258, 267 DOMESTICITY 91–2, 101, 103 DREAM 44 Dutch 236, 243–4, 251–2

87, 92, 95–6, 128 elections 25, 27, 38, 53, 55, 64, 66, 73, 76, 84, 153, 159, 186, 236, 250 EMOTIONS 95, 98 empathy 28, 63–6, 78, 156 EMPATHY 63 empowerment 182, 210, 218, 245, 248 women’s 245 enemies 55, 100, 114, 211–16, 220, 223 ENEMIES 212, 214–15 enemisation 213, 233 ECONOMY

272 Index energy ENTITY

160, 214–15 127–8, 212

family 4, 100, 104, 117–18, 120, 124, 140, 188 FAMILY 100, 117–18, 120 FARMING LAND 126, 128 FEEDING 100, 103 FEELINGS 66, 79, 95, 97, 140, 155 female viii, 3, 9, 29, 42, 49, 66, 68–71, 79, 84, 100, 112, 114, 139, 162–3, 186 candidates 4, 139, 146, 185–6, 191, 195–6, 200, 202–3 Democrats 69–70 family members 198–9, 203 politicians 5, 19, 36, 39, 106–7, 139, 200, 243–4, 249 Republicans 69–70 female MPs 3–4, 139, 144, 149–51, 155, 157 experienced 148–50, 157, 159 less experienced 148, 150 feminine 1, 9–10, 13, 28–30, 38, 84–5, 97–9, 103, 145, 157, 195, 259, 267 traits 28, 84–5, 254–5 femininity 2, 5, 13–14, 28–9, 36, 55–7, 84, 255, 259–60 empowered 218, 226 feminism 114, 183, 216, 218, 234, 246, 253, 259, 267–8 fight 4, 24–5, 99–100, 104–5, 211, 213, 215, 218, 220 FIGHTERS 212, 216–18 fighting 25–7, 100, 104, 212, 216–18 FIGHTING 212, 216, 218 First Lady 4, 254, 257–9, 267 see also Clinton, Hillary floor, senate 2, 67, 75–7 floor speeches 66, 68, 70 FIRE 100–3 food ix, 92, 144, 159, 161 FOOD PREPARATION 85, 91–3, 101–3, 106 FOOTBALL 49, 53, 57 force 55, 71–2, 74, 76, 78–80, 127, 131, 266 France 18, 110, 228–32

frequency 17, 65, 68–9, 75–7, 80, 89, 96, 130, 139, 150, 172–3, 176, 184, 201, 203, 252 101–3, 147 GDR (German Democratic Republic) 11, 168–9, 181 gender v, x–xi, 2–3, 9–10, 13–15, 27–30, 33–6, 61–3, 118, 144–5, 148, 164–5, 179, 203, 260–2 cultural 178–9 equality xi, 235–7, 240–1, 244, 248–9, 253 identities 9, 13–14, 17, 210 inequality vi, 4, 235–6, 238–41, 243, 245–9 metaphors 261 roles 85, 179 Generative Metaphor 136, 165 German 18, 20, 30–1, 40, 181–2 politicians 16, 30 German Democratic Republic see GDR Germany x, xii–2, 9, 20, 35, 108, 168, 228–30, 232 glass ceiling 132, 242, 247, 252, 267 Gonne, Maud 114 Graham, Lindsey 67, 72 GROWTH 87, 128, 156, 243 GARDENING

Hain, Peter 141–3, 146, 148–9, 153–4, 156, 158, 160 Harman, Harriet 146, 148, 151, 153, 155, 157–60 HEALTH viii, 44, 88, 91–3, 95–6, 101–3, 147–8, 154, 157, 163 HOME 115, 121 HOMELAND 120–1, 129 Hong Kong iii, 122, 227–9 House of Representatives 79, 185–6, 188, 190, 192, 194, 203–4 husband 11, 187–8, 193, 199–200 Hutchison, Kay Bailey 67 Hyde, Douglas 115 hypernym 65–6, 77 ideational metafunction 12, 14 ideology xi, 12, 45, 68, 118–19, 141, 143, 156–7, 175, 203, 259

Index 273 ILLNESS

101–3

101–2, 104 India 94, 104, 108, 227, 230 intensification 19, 21, 28–9, 32 intensity 65, 78, 80 interviews 2, 9–10, 15–17, 19, 22, 24–9, 31–2, 36, 39, 56, 58, 60, 86, 109, 200, 263 INVASION 104 Iraq 41, 66, 224 Ireland 1, 113–17, 120–33 Irish 114–16, 122–3, 131, 133 politics 115, 133 Italian corpus 39–40, 57 politicians 16, 36 politics 37, 41, 43, 53, 57 senate 58 women ministers 3, 85, 90 women politicians 84 Italy v, xi, 1–3, 20, 30, 36–8, 41, 44, 46–7, 49, 51, 56–7, 83, 90, 93–4, 97, 104, 108, 110 IMPRISONMENT

Jenninger, Philipp 33 Johnson, Alan 142, 146, 154, 158, 160 JOURNEY 12, 17, 19, 21, 32, 40, 44, 116, 118, 120, 126–7, 142, 147–8, 154, 162 Kennedy, Edward Moore 66, 67 Kerry, John 66, 67, 198, 204 keywords vii, 17–19, 22, 27–8, 32, 40, 42, 70–1, 77, 88–90, 100, 102, 105–6, 109, 120, 146–7, 240, 242–3, 251 kitchen sink 261–2 Lakoff, George 20, 62–4, 73, 75, 107, 116–18, 140, 166, 184, 224, 267 Lakoff and Johnson 12, 19, 23, 36, 79, 109, 117, 166, 209, 211, 235, 240, 267 Lakoff and Turner 48, 112, 147, 166 LAND 120, 121, 132

language metaphorical 1, 87, 166–8, 170–1, 180 scripted 23, 27, 28, 109 LANGUAGE 116 Lanzillotta, Linda 86, 98, 109 legitimisation 140, 143, 240, 246 lemmas 16, 25, 87, 92, 97–8, 100, 104, 106 lexemes 2, 16–17, 22, 24, 62, 64–6, 70, 75–8, 80, 221 lexical frequency patterns 75–7, 81 lesbian 107, 191, 264 liberalisms 38, 260, 265 liberty 113, 169, 172 likeability 254–5, 257 LIGHT vii, 3, 118, 147–8, 152–4, 157, 162 Madonna 4, 254–5, 258–9, 260 male 69–70, 79, 185 candidates viii, 4, 154, 158, 186, 188, 191–5, 198, 202–3 Democrats 67–70, 192 MPs 3, 139, 148–50, 153–5, 157 politicians 3, 5, 9, 30, 36, 148, 157 Republicans 67–70, 75 Senators 2, 68–70, 74, 77 mappings, metaphorical 52, 93, 96, 98, 110, 120, 166, 168, 179 Markiewicz, Constance 113–14 masculine 1, 9, 10, 13, 29–30, 39, 56, 85, 97–9, 103, 144–5, 151, 157, 179, 254–5, 267 masculinity 2, 5, 13–14, 36, 55–7, 256 hegemonic 12, 33,164, 210 mastery 187–9, 192–7, 201–2 McAleese, Mary vii, 3–5, 113, 117–22, 124, 126–33 McCain, John vii, 66–7, 70, 73–5, 255, 266 Melandri, Giovanna 86, 94, 101, 103, 109 Members of Parliament see MPs Merkel, Angela 2, 9–11, 15–16, 18–19, 21–2, 24, 26–9, 31–3, 36, 39, 54

274 Index metaphor analysis 2–3, 29, 62, 211 density 2, 17, 21, 24, 50 identification 90, 171 linguistics 94, 99, 103, 119, 166 sources 104, 106 targets 93, 94, 99, 106 themes 3, 85, 90, 92–6, 103–6, 109 metaphoric type-token ratio (mTTR) 2, 17, 21, 24, 27, 50 metaphoricity 40, 90, 106 metaphors conventional 49, 122, 125, 147, 150, 157 feminine 5, 96 gendered 4, 10, 13, 254–5 masculine 1, 85, 105, 110, 144, 257 primary 14, 16, 63 role of 140, 143–4, 156 spatial v, 3, 167–80 militarisation 210, 226 minister, prime 36–7, 53, 55, 62, 120, 125–6, 133–4, 139, 209 MONOCONC 187, 203 MORALITY 63–4 mother 85, 114, 130, 191–2, 198, 258–9 MOTION 20, 127, 170–2, 174, 179 MOVEMENT 44, 99, 127, 151 MPs (Members of Parliament) 3, 62, 84, 139, 146, 148, 153, 176, 179, 236–8, 246, 251 Murkowski, Lisa 67 115–16, 118, 121, 125, 133 189, 195–6, 202 NATURAL DISASTERS 91–3, 103 NATURE 40, 44, 45 NAUTICAL 102 Netherlands 2, 236, 238 New Labour 10, 23, 139, 151–3, 157, 169 New York Times 114, 197–9, 204, 205, 256 NP (Nurturant Parent) vii, 63–5, 69, 71, 73–6, 78 lexemes 68–76 NATION

NATIVE BIRTH

NUCLEAR FAMILY 184, 187–97, 201–5 Nurturant Parent see NP

Obama, Barack 70, 73–5, 256–7, 260, 262 office, political 1, 10, 185, 190 ORGANISM 95, 116, 126, 128–9 orientation, political 2, 36, 55 parents 48–9, 115–16, 124, 188, 202, 265 parliamentary debates 139, 148, 168, 173, 241, 251–2 parties left-wing 45–6, 238 right-wing 37 pathos 140–2, 150, 154, 156 PERSON vii, 95, 118, 120, 126–7, 129–30 PLANTS viii, 48, 101–2, 116, 128, 131, 148, 154–5, 163 policy documents 235–6, 239–40, 246–8, 252 frame 239–41 texts 235–6, 238–41, 243, 249, 252 political communication viii, 140–1, 146, 152, 156 debates vi, 2, 4, 137, 185, 201, 245, 248 discourse x, xi, 10, 12, 20, 27, 29, 42–3, 46, 49, 54, 147, 157, 233 ideology 168–9, 172, 174, 177–8, 184, 202 language v, x, 1–3, 81, 109, 168 parties 2, 37–8, 53, 62–3, 66, 71–2, 75, 166, 184, 192, 251 speeches v, x, 7, 62, 122, 241 Pollastrini, Barbara 86, 100, 109 power conceptualisation of 236, 245, 247–9 distribution of 242–3, 252 gendered metaphors of 258 representation of 247 POWERFUL ALLIES 212, 219–21, 224 press releases 3, 85–6, 102, 106, 109 problem–solution schema 210–12

Index 275 212, 220, 221, 233 prognosis 239–40 pugilists 216–17, 261

PRODUCTS

qualitative analysis 9, 19, 29, 50, 211 quantitative analysis 29, 83

SPORTS

63–5, 78–9, 93, 125, 226, 263 Strict Father see SF SUBMISSION 95, 97 synonyms 87–8, 241–2 STRENGTH

Radical movement 38, 42, 55, 59 40, 91, 101–2, 145 Republican Party 63–4, 190 Republicans 63–79, 185, 187–8, 192, 196–8, 201, 203, 257 RESCUERS 212, 220, 224 rhetoric, political 140, 142, 184 rights 71–80, 100, 212, 216, 218 civil 38, 55, 71–2, 79 women’s 2, 151, 251, 259 Robinson, Mary 117, 134 ROMANCE 88 ROOTS 47–9, 102, 116, 163, 196

TARGET

saboteur 212, 215 Schröder, Gerhard 2, 9–10, 15, 30–1, 36 self-aestheticisation 210 self-legitimisation 143 senate 62, 66–8, 73, 75–6, 79–80, 185–6, 192, 205, 238, 254, 256 senators 4, 62–80, 254, 258 sex differences 167–8, 177 SF (Strict Father) 63–5, 75, 78 lexemes vii, 68–76 Short, Clare 146, 148, 150, 155, 159, 161–3 Singapore 2, 122, 209 SLEEP 44 Social Democrats see SPD Socialist Party 238, 243, 246, 251 Socialists 172, 174–5, 238 Spain x, xi, 2, 149, 236, 238, 242, 245 Spanish texts 241–4, 251–2 SPD (Social Democrats) 10–12, 19, 169–75

VEHICLE

RELIGION

vii, 28, 49–51, 53, 55–7, 85,

140

216, 219 target domains see domains, target TIGER 121–4, 126 Thatcher, Margaret 148, 159, 255 TOOLS 92, 94, 98–9, 102–3 transcripts 172, 181, 204 TREE 116 under-representation 242, 245–7 United States v, x, xi, 2, 4, 44, 64, 66, 169, 184–6, 198, 202 unruly women vi, 4, 254–6, 258, 260–4 116 90, 95, 100 VISION 40, 44, 47, 92, 98–9 visual images 131, 211, 215, 219 VIOLENCE

Wales

142, 154, 158, 160 x, 17, 19, 24, 26–7, 40, 44, 88, 90, 95, 98, 100, 102–5, 211–12, 223, 225–6 WARFARE 209–20, 213, 219, 225 WARRIORS 85, 212, 214, 216–17, 219, 223–6 WEAPONS 220–1, 262 WEATHER 101–3 WINDOWS 93, 131 WITCH vi, 4, 254, 258, 262–5 Wmatrix 117, 119 WordNet 65, 77 WordSmith Tools 16, 40, 89, 109, 117, 120 WAR

Yeats, W. B.

114

Politics, Gender and Conceptual Metaphors

Gender Politics

Rethinking Contemporary Feminist Politics (Gender and Politics)

Gender, Politics and the State

Autonomy, Gender, Politics

Autonomy, Gender, Politics

Gender and Welfare State Regimes (Gender and Politics)

AIDS and Its Metaphors

Politics, Gender, and Concepts: Theory and Methodology

Marketing Metaphors and Metamorphosis

The Politics of Gender and Education

Theorizing Feminist Policy (Gender and Politics Series)

Gender, Politics and Institutions: Towards a Feminist Institutionalism (Gender and Politics)

Faulkner: masks and metaphors

Gender and the politics of history

Justice, Gender, and the Politics of Multiculturalism

Politics, Feminism and the Reformation of Gender

Yearning: Race, Gender, and Cultural Politics

France Between the Wars: Gender and Politics

Metaphors Dictionary

Metaphors Dictionary

Arguments and Metaphors in Philosophy

Arguments and Metaphors in Philosophy

Arguments and Metaphors in Philosophy

Gender politics in Asia: women manoeuvring within dominant gender orders

Analyticity and Conceptual Truth

Semantics and Conceptual Change

Philosophy and Conceptual Art

Gender and American Politics: Women, Men, and the Political Process

Women, Gender, and World Politics: Perspectives, Policies, and Prospects

Politics, Gender and Conceptual Metaphors

Gender Politics

Rethinking Contemporary Feminist Politics (Gender and Politics)

Gender, Politics and the State

Autonomy, Gender, Politics

Autonomy, Gender, Politics

Gender and Welfare State Regimes (Gender and Politics)

AIDS and Its Metaphors

Politics, Gender, and Concepts: Theory and Methodology

Marketing Metaphors and Metamorphosis

The Politics of Gender and Education

Theorizing Feminist Policy (Gender and Politics Series)

Gender, Politics and Institutions: Towards a Feminist Institutionalism (Gender and Politics)

Faulkner: masks and metaphors

Gender and the politics of history

Justice, Gender, and the Politics of Multiculturalism

Politics, Feminism and the Reformation of Gender

Yearning: Race, Gender, and Cultural Politics

France Between the Wars: Gender and Politics

Metaphors Dictionary

Metaphors Dictionary

Arguments and Metaphors in Philosophy

Arguments and Metaphors in Philosophy

Arguments and Metaphors in Philosophy

Gender politics in Asia: women manoeuvring within dominant gender orders

Analyticity and Conceptual Truth

Semantics and Conceptual Change

Philosophy and Conceptual Art

Gender and American Politics: Women, Men, and the Political Process

Women, Gender, and World Politics: Perspectives, Policies, and Prospects

Recommend Documents