AN EXPLORATION OF THE REPRESENTATION OF IMMIGRANT WOMEN IN A SAMPLE FROM THE SPANISH PRESS

Abstract

The number of women immigrating to Spain in search of a better life has increased in recent years. However, very few news items pay attention to the reasons why they emigrate. A corpus of 30 pieces of news related to immigrant women was collected from February 2012 to April 2013 from the digital version of the main Spanish newspapers El País, El Mundo and ABC. The main hypotheses in this research are: Immigrant women are not very visible in the Spanish press; they are mainly represented as vulnerable and as victims; and they are normally connected to social problems. To confirm or to disprove said hypotheses, this article employs critical discourse analysis, including visual grammar, to analyse the main topics of the pieces of news dealing with immigrant women, and the main linguistic and visual characteristics used to describe them. It transpires that immigrant women are portrayed in the Spanish press as dependent, passive and confined to their homes. Moreover, the majority of the articles on immigrant women associated them with prostitution. The partial representation of immigrant women observed in the corpus of examples does not favour the development of a society established on principles of democracy and equality. In this sense, it is necessary to rethink the depiction of immigrant women in the press, in order to question their role in modern-day migratory movements.