Representation of Women’s Citizenship Activity in the Polish-language Media Discourse. Around the Case of Tomato Soup and van Gogh

Abstract

The aim of the article is to reconstruct the discursive representation of women’s citizenship activity based on the media description and comments in Polish language, referring to the event of October 14th, 2022, organised by Just Stop Oil coalition at the National Gallery in London. The research material covered various genres: articles/information published on the Internet, posts on social media (Facebook), and comments on articles/posts. In total, 70 articles/posts and 3,830 comments were analysed. For the analysis, Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) in the approach represented by Ruth Wodak and Martin Reisigl was used (Reisigl & Wodak, 2005; Wodak, 2001). The study material sought for applications of discursive strategies (nomination, predication, argumentation, perspectivation, intensification/mitigation) in relation to the act itself and to the social female actors involved in this act. The results show, among others, that the discourse on citizenship activity reconstructed on the basis of the analyses carried out builds many symbolic boundaries that “arrange” the evaluation and the argumentation accompanying it. The features and properties attributed to social female actors, explicitly negatively valued, obscure the act itself, questioning its meaning as a result. On the other hand, the “explanatory,” “ironic” discourse and the discourse of indignation cannot cross the border between private and public spheres at the level of argumentation.