Gender Differences in Political Discourse

Abstract

Public speakers have always had a sense of authority and power upon them, and this area was male area for a long time. Together with different social changes such as Women’s Movement, women became more emancipated, participating in public sphere to a larger extent influencing thus the area of political discourse too. Key question is whether gender and supposed gender characteristics and differences connected to interaction styles and public speaking affect creation of political discourse and differences in its structure between male and female politicians or they are not an important factor for political discourse. In other words, does gender affect a person’s political subjectivity? The thesis is that gender specific differences in language use and use of syntactic, semantic, pragmatic structures, lexical style and rhetorical strategies create differences in political discourse between male and female politicians. Can these differences help the hegemonic construction of female identity in political discourse? The aim of the paper is to analyze language differences in connection with supposed gender characteristics and place them into context of political discourse. Keywords: gender, discourse, political discourse, language, interaction, female identity