Representing Southeast Asia’s Female Leaders: An Unjust Perspective of New York Times on Woman in Politics

Abstract

The study investigates the representation of Southeast Asian female Political Leaders by the US media, New York Times (NYT). As one of 10 most influenced media in the US, NYT is assumed to uphold American beliefs on equality of race, culture, age, status and gender and avoid gender issues. This paper aims to reveal how female political leaders such as Corazon Aquino (Philippines), Megawati Sukarnoputri (Indonesia), Yingluck Shinawatra (Thailand), and Halimah Yacob (Singapore) are depicted and represented in the NYT’s four news articles written prior to their election. Halliday’s (2004) Systemic Functional Linguistics and Critical Discourse Analysis framework by Fairclough (1989) are applied to analyse and to elaborate the language patterns used by NYT for the purpose of revealing authors’ hidden perspectives and ideology on gender, especially from women’s representation in mass media. The finding discloses that NYT’s choices of language or discourse constructs negative image of female political leaders of Southeast Asia. Gender issues such as patriarchy, stereotype, and domestication exist pervasively in the coverage despite their political success of leading their countries. NYT obviously shows imbalance representation which gives attributions and labels to female political leaders in Southeast Asia through the traditional gender ideology of the authors, which then possibly relates to how American society shapes the discourse about female leaders’ involvement in politics in general.