Abstract
The ideological construct of gender typically positions women below men, and “others” certain types of women even more, especially those distinguished from idealised femininity by aspects of their sexuality. This paper explores the representation of sex work and sex workers in the South African media in 2009 and 2010, a time during which there was an increase in news coverage of sex work during the 2010 FIFA World Cup. Analysis of the two data sets revealed that sex work is still often perceived as immoral and dangerous, and that sex workers – overwhelmingly represented as women – are criminalised for their actions while client agency is largely obscured, which is in line with previous studies of South African newspapers. However, a strong liberal representation of sex workers was also found in one data set, which advocates the decriminalisation of sex work in the context of human rights. The use of the term “sex work” and its derivatives, rather than “prostitution”, was found to index this progressive stance.
Highlights
South African society is arguably more equal today in terms of gender relations than 100 years ago
Our study aims to address this gap by analysing the discursive construction of sex workers in the press using – as do the studies mentioned above – the combination of critical discourse analysis and corpus linguistics, which teases out solid linguistic evidence from ideologically-rich media representations
We opened this article with two factors which were seen as contributing to the subordinate status of sex workers: their legal status under South African law, and the prevalence of negative representations in South African media
Summary
South African society is arguably more equal today in terms of gender relations than 100 years ago. Two factors that further contribute to this stigmatised construction are, firstly, that South African law has traditionally criminalised sex workers but not their clients and, secondly, constant media representations of sex workers as sub-human, diseased, immoral women (Sex Workers Education and Advocacy Taskforce (SWEAT) 2010). This study, using the relatively new combination of critical discourse analysis and corpus linguistics (see, for example, Baker, Gabrielatos, Khosravinik, Krzyzanowski, McEnery and Wodak 2008), explores how the South African news media – The Sowetan and the Mail and Guardian newspapers – construct sex workers, and what implications these constructions have for South Africa’s societal beliefs regarding sex work, gender and sexual intercourse
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