The fight against gender violence is one of 4th Wave Feminism's main worries. Feminist journalists and discourse analysts insist that, when addressing gender violence, a new discourse of solidarity and hope -rather than the traditional one of fear and threat- needs to be deployed (Arruzza et al.; Barjola 2018; Cooper et al. 2020). This new discourse, which is starting to permeate not only the more public and political discourse of the mass media, but also private, everyday conversations, is made evident in the slogans created by feminists in rallies organized worldwide in the last years, which contain many calls to stop gender violence and victim blaming, and, most importantly, to encourage women to rebel while giving themselves permission to enjoy (Requena 2020). Anti-gender violence discourse, in addition, is a prototypical field in which polarized strategies come naturally, as two opposing groups are clearly construed: the in-group including feminists and battered women and the delegitimized out-group of male aggressors.
Drawing on critical and socio-cognitive approaches to multimodal discourse (Abdel-Raheem 2019; Alonso & Porto 2020; El Refaie 2009; Forceville 2020; Forceville & Van de Laar 2019; Hart 2017, 2018; Kress 2010; Machin & Mayr 2012; Author 2021, 2022; Wawra 2018), this paper focuses on how the struggle against gender violence is conceptualized in political and institutional campaigns as represented in 30 posters for November 25 (International Day for the Elimination of Violence Against Women) published on paper and on social media platforms like Twitter or Instagram (2020 to 2022).
Preliminary results show clear us-them multimodal discursive strategies realized within the interactions of (i) verbal -personal pronouns, deixis and negation- and (ii) pictorial modes -specific colour ranges, participants and objects. The multimodal polarizing strategies analysed show how different institutions try to call attention on gender violence while construing new cognitive and social frames in which women are conceptualized as members of the same community; a community in which they are active citizens and not submissive victims.
Key words: multimodal strategies, polarization, political posters, anti-gender violence discourse
Main references:
Abdel-Raheem, A. (2019), Pictorial Framing in Moral Politics: A Corpus-Based Experimental Study. London/New York: Routledge.
Alonso, I., Porto, M.D., (2020). Multimodal framing devices in European online news. Language & Communication 71, 55–7.
Cooper, B., Tanner, Ch. C., & Morris, S. (2020). Feminist AF: A Guide to Crushing Girlhood. New York. W.W. Norton & Company.
El Refaie, E. (2009). Multiliteracies: How readers interpret political cartoons. Visual Communication 8(2): 181–205.
Forceville, C. (2020). Visual and Multimodal. Applying Relevance Theory. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Kress G. (2010). Multimodality. A Social Semiotic Approach to Contemporary Communication. London: Routledge.
Maíz-Arévalo, C. (2008). "Don't beat me no more". Domestic violence from a multimodal approach. In Antón-Pacheco, A. (Ed.) Sites of female terror: en torno a la mujer y el terror. Madrid: Aranzadi, pp. 299-312.
Requena, A. (2020). Feminismo vibrante. Si no hay placer no es nuestra revolución. Barcelona. RocaEditorial.
