Women’s Annihilation by the Mass Media: How Words and Language Help Shape Our Reality and Perpetuate Power Dynamics

Words are more than simple combinations of letters displayed on a blank piece of paper. Words are woven into our social and political lives. Words can be weapons wielded by the powerful or tools for social resistance and change. As stated by linguist Sally McConnell-Ginet,

"Words (and meaningful silences) matter enormously in our lives. They enable us to cooperate, collaborate, and ally with one another and exclude, exploit, and subordinate one another. They script our performances as certain kinds of people in certain social locations. They are politically powerful, both as dominating weapons that help oppress and as effective tools that can resist oppression’’. 

Violence against women, femicide, and gender discrimination pervade every area of contemporary society without geographical and cultural limits. Even today, an alarming number of women are targets of physical and psychological violence at the hands of their male counterparts. Direct violence, often fatal, is accompanied by linguistic violence, which is more hidden and spread implicitly at multiple levels. Media framing plays a pivotal role in the social construction of reality and, consequently, in the reproduction of power dynamics and imbalances. Browsing the pages of national and international newspapers, one can see that many, if not all, newspapers that report on violence against women employ a lexical and discursive structure that indirectly justifies the executioner and blames the victim, in a scheme s based on the concurrence of blame and distorts the real nature of the crime. Violence is multifaceted, and the ways it can be reproduced, expanded, and extended are so. Language is one.

‘How can the media be changed? How can we free women from the tyranny of media messages limiting their lives to hearth and home?’ 

This is how sociologist and feminist philosopher Gaye Tuchman ends her celebrated essay “The Symbolic Annihilation Of Women By The Mass Media,” encapsulating the concerns that continue to drive much feminist media analysis worldwide. Despite enormous transformations in national and global media landscapes, the fundamental issues that preoccupied Gaye Tuchman in 1978 are still prevalent: power, violence, and hegemony in the narration of violence itself.

By largely ignoring women or portraying them in stereotypical roles of victim or consumer, the mass media has symbolically annihilated women. This destruction has further strengthened the patriarchal vision that classifies women as dependent and incapable of living their own lives without male ‘guidance’. Women’s magazines once focused on domestic pursuits such as marriage, household chores, and childcare. What made this pattern even more problematic was the media's role in shaping young girls’ wants and aspirations.  

Media coverage has created expected roles and perpetuated inequality through the reproduction of stereotyped discourses and sexist narratives and a mediated invisibility that is achieved not simply through the non-representation of women’s points of view or perspectives. Even though this narration has slightly changed nowadays, where women are ‘visible’ in media content, their representation still reflects the biases and assumptions of those who define the public agenda and, consequently, the mediatic one: men. 

Even when covering cases of femicide, specific language and discourses chosen by the media obscure the gendered and sexist basis of the violence taken out on women's bodies, portraying it as a mere homicide. A dominant patriarchal discourse implicit in newspaper coverage and a representation of femicides that ignores its structural and ideological foundations have been prevalent, as well as the recurrent use of a psychiatric discourse to label the femicide as an act of pure madness of the man, reducing such phenomenon within the predictable framework of a normal homicide, caused by mental illnesses, emotivity or monstrous impulses. Here, redefining language and recreating it in feminist terms can be a form of resistance.

To conclude, it is not enough for the media to report how the femicide dynamics developed and focus on turbid details to feel like they satisfied one’s duty of informing the public. It is not enough to represent only those legal and political institutions that want to treat femicide as an isolated case. It is not enough to give an account to friends and relatives of the killer who claimed he loved the woman he just assassinated. It is not enough and never will be to address the system of oppression and latent subjugation that women experience in their daily lives, even in the narrations of violence themselves. The media helps shape society’s perception and public opinion of victims and offenders. Femicide is the result of a deeply embedded and rooted ideological structure, which shapes one’s beliefs and one’s behaviors, not only in femicide itself but also in the narration of it. 

As Sally McConnell-Ginet once stated, ‘words matter so much precisely because so little matter is firmly attached to them,’ and they do matter — especially when they have the power to annihilate, violate and underpin one’s safety, and, consequently, one’s empowerment.