‘Through a woman's eyes’ narratives of the nation: Gender as and beyond a category of analysis

Abstract

Given the centrality of bodily experience to cognitive theory and to the notion of conceptual metaphor, gender turns out to be a possible category of research for a culturally oriented cognitive-based linguistic analysis of persuasion in political discourse. More specifically, conceptual metaphor, for its very characteristic of embodiment, is intrinsically interesting because of issues of both gender perception and representation. The relation between metaphor and gender becomes particularly productive owing to what Lakoff defines ‘idealized cognitive models’. From this point of view, it could be interesting to observe how gender notions could not only inform complex systems of metaphors, as common sources in mappings, but also open up new analytical perspectives to address the matter of persuasion in discourse. In this latter sense ‘Woman’ vs. ‘Man’ may turn out to be useful categories for placing both the argumentative foundation of a discourse and the persuasive mode of appealing its audience. Focusing on contemporary American political discourse, this paper develops possible ways of analysing G. W. Bush Jr.'s ‘preventive war’ persuasion strategy through the category of gender.