New Communication Technologies and Old Discrimination: Multisemiotic Analysis of Gender Inequality in Politicians’ Photographs

Abstract

This report presents a contribution to multisemiotic theory by means of the multimodal analysis of a sample of Russian women politicians’ photographs. The focus of research is on the interaction between the viewer and the picture that is, according to Kress and Van Leeuwen, the interactive meanings in images, and gender inequality in viewer’s perception. According to Van Leeuwen multisemiotics can investigate interactive meanings in images and other visual resources and indicates how these resources are used in specific historical, cultural and institutional contexts, and how people talk about them in these contexts – plan them, teach them, justify them, critique them, etc. (Van Leeuwen, 2005: 3). The data comes from 150 photographs of the Russian women politicians and 150 photographs of the Russian men politicians. 300 photographs were specifically chosen by the authors in order to be acceptable for coding. The study was conducted in two stages. In the first stage, authors encoded the full photograph corpus according to interpersonal metafunction’s codes based on the Kress and Van Leeuwen’s Systemic Functional Linguistics for images and chose 12 photographs of political leaders (6 men and 6 women). In the second stage, the group of Russian informants evaluated facial expressions on these photographs and answered to the questions. The results show that Russians have tendency to discriminate the women facial expressions and offer them humiliating statements. To some extent, it is a problem a presentation of women in photos because the women in the photograph are presented with other angles than men.