Abstract
Exploring the historical gendered fixed roles for women and men in the private, i.e. heterosexual relationships, demonstrates that these prove equally detrimental to women. The femminicidio, the crime in which men kill their on-going or former partners, is a widespread phenomenon worldwide as well as in Italy. Qualitative and quantitative language investigations show that politics is dealing with this issue as an abstract phenomenon which affects women. Reporting on the topic in Italian newspapers reproduces dangerous narratives which recount how male jealousy and hurt feelings are at the core of this gendered crime. Furthermore, specific language is used to bridge the gap between a void in the legislation and this systematic atrocity perpetrated by men against women.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
References
Abis, Stefania, and Paolo Orrù. 2016. Il femminicidio nella stampa italiana: un’indagine linguistica. Gender/Sexuality/Italy 3: 18–33.
Bednarek, Monika, and Helen Caple. 2017. The discourse of news values: How news organizations create ‘newsworthiness’. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Boonzaier, Floretta. 2008. ‘If the man says you must sit, then you must sit’: The relational construction of woman abuse: Gender, subjectivity and violence. Feminism & Psychology 18 (2): 183–206.
Bou-Franch, Patricia. 2013. Domestic violence and public participation in the media: The case of citizen journalism. Gender and Language 7 (3): 275–302.
Brezina, Vaclav, Tony McEnery, and Steven Wattam. 2015. Collocations in context: A new perspective on collocation networks. International Journal of Corpus Linguistics 20 (2): 139–173.
Busá, Maria Grazia. 2014. Introducing the language of the news. London: Routledge.
Catalano, Ana. 2009. Women acting for women? An analysis of gender and debate participation in the British House of Commons 2005–2007. Politics and Gender 5 (1): 45–68.
Coulthard, Caldas, and Carmen Rosa. 1993. From discourse analysis to critical discourse analysis: The differential re-representation of women and men speaking in written news. In Techniques of description: Spoken and written discourse, ed. John Sinclair, Micheal Hoey, and Gwyneth Fox, 196–208. London: Routledge.
Diamanti, Ilvo. 2014. The 5 star movement: A political laboratory. Contemporary Italian Politics 6: 4–15.
Dittrich-Johansen, Helga. 1995. La “donna nuova” di Mussolini tra evasione e consumismo. Studi Storici 3: 811–843.
Dobash, R. Emerson, and Russell Dobash (eds.). 1998. Rethinking violence against women. London: Sage.
Ehrlich, Susan. 2003. Representing rape: Language and sexual consent. London: Routledge.
Emil, Ludwig. 1970. Colloqui con Mussolini. Milano: Mondadori.
Fagoaga, Concha. 1994. Comunicando violencia contra las mujeres. Estudio sobre el mensaje periodístico 1: 67–90.
Fairclough, Norman. 1995. Media discourse. London: Hodder Education.
Formato, Federica. 2014. Language use and gender in the Italian parliament. PhD thesis, Lancaster University.
Haaken, Janice. 2010. Hard knocks: Domestic violence and the psychology of storytelling. London: Routledge.
Hardie, Andrew, and Tony McEnery. 2006. Glossary of corpus linguistics, A. glossaries in linguistics. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
Hearn, Jeff. 2004. From hegemonic masculinity to the hegemony of men. Feminist Theory 5 (1): 49–72.
Hook, Donald D. 1984. First names and titles as solidarity and power semantics in English. IRAL-International Review of Applied Linguistics in Language Teaching 22 (3): 183–190.
Ifantidou, Elly. 2009. Newspaper headlines and relevance: Ad hoc concepts in ad hoc contexts. Journal of Pragmatics 41 (4): 699–720.
Ingraham, Chrys. 2006. One is not born a bride: How weddings regulate heterosexuality. In Introducing the new sexuality, ed. Steven Seidman, Nancy L. Fisher, and Chet Meeks. London: Routledge.
Jeffries, Lesley. 2015. Language and ideology. In Introducing language and linguistics, ed. Louise Cummings and Natalie Braber, 379–405. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Johnson, Michael P. 1995. Patriarchal terrorism and common couple violence: Two forms of violence against women. Journal of Marriage and Family 57: 283–294.
Karadole, Cristina. 2012. Anti-violence centres and shelters in Italy: History and meaning of women’s struggles against male violence. Interdisciplinary Journal of Family Studies 17 (2): 238–242.
Kilgarriff, Adam. 2012, September. Getting to know your corpus. In International conference on text, speech and dialogue, 3–15. Berlin and Heidelberg: Springer.
Kilgarriff, Adam, Vit Baisa, Jan Bušta, Miloš Jakubíček, Vojtěch Kovář, Jan Michelfeit, Pavel Rychlý, and Vít Suchomel. 2014. The Sketch Engine: Ten years on. Lexicography 1: 7–36. http://www.sketchengine.co.uk.
Larcombe, Wendy. 2005. Compelling engagements. Feminism, rape law and romance fiction. Sydney: The Federation Press.
Leech, Geoffrey. 1999. The distribution and function of vocatives in American and British English conversation. In Out of corpora: Studies in honour of Stig Johansson, ed. Hilde Hasselgård and Signe Oksefjell, 107–118. Amsterdam: Rodopi.
McEnery, Tony, and Andrew Hardie. 2011. Corpus linguistics: Method, theory and practice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Meyers, Marian. 1997. News coverage of violence against women: Engendering blame. London: Sage.
Monckton-Smith, Jane. 2012. Murder, gender and the media. Narratives of gendered love. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
Nossem, Eva. 2015. Potere e autorità nei dizionari. Gender/Sexuality/Italy 2: 110–124.
O’Hara, Shannon. 2012. Monsters, playboys, virgins and whores: Rape myths in the news media’s coverage of sexual violence. Language and Literature 21 (3): 247–259.
Pahl, Jan (ed.). 2016. Private violence and public policy: The needs of battered women and the response of the public services. London: Routledge.
Partington, Alan. 2010. Modern Diachronic Corpus-Assisted Discourse Studies MD-CADS on UK newspapers: An overview of the project. Corpora 5 (2): 83–108.
Partington, Alan, Alison Duguid, and Charlotte Taylor. 2013. Patterns and meanings in discourse: Theory and practice in corpus-assisted discourse studies CADS. Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing.
Potts, Amanda, and Federica Formato. forthcoming. Women victims of men who murder: XML mark-up for nomination, collocation and frequency analysis of language of the law. In The handbook of language, gender and sexuality, ed. Judith Baxter and Jo Anguri. London: Routledge.
Rederlechner, Mirjam, and Beate Ratz. 1993. Giving birth to a new nation: A critique of the programme for the demographic renewal of Croatia. Rights of Women Bulletin (Spring): 13–15.
Rye, B.J., Sarah A. Greatrix, and Corinne S. Enright. 2006. The case of the guilty victim: The effects of gender of victim and gender of perpetrator on attributions of blame and responsibility. Sex Roles 54: 639–649.
Santaemilia, José, and Sergio Maruenda. 2014. The linguistic representation of gender violence in written media discourse: The term ‘woman’ in Spanish contemporary newspapers. Journal of Language Aggression and Conflict 2 (2): 249–273.
Schaeffer, John D. 1990. Sensus communis: Vico, Rhetoric and the limits of relativism. Durham: Duke University Press.
Schrock, Douglas P., and Irene Padavic. 2007. Negotiating hegemonic masculinity in a batterer intervention program. Gender and Society 21 (5): 625–649.
Scott, Mike. 1997. PC analysis of key words—And key key words. System 25 (2): 233–245.
Tabbert, Ulrike. 2016. Language and crime: Constructing offenders and victims in newspaper reports. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
Thapar-Björkert, Suruchi, and Karen J. Morgan. 2010. Exploring blame and responsibility in interpersonal violence “But sometimes I think. They put themselves in the situation”. Violence Against Women 4: 16–32.
Tognini-Bonelli, Elena. 2001. Corpus linguistics at work. Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins.
Van Dijk, Teun. A. 1998. Ideology: A multidisciplinary approach. London: Sage.
Walby, Sylvia. 1990. Theorizing patriarchy. Oxford: Blackwell.
Wood, Julia T. 2001. The normalization of violence in heterosexual romantic relationships: Women’s narratives of love and violence. Journal of Social and Personal Relationships 18 (2): 239–261.
Wykes, Maggie. 1995. Passion, marriage and murder. In Gender and crime, ed. Russell P. Dobash, Lesley Noaks, and R. Emerson Dobash, 49–76. Cardiff: University of Wales Press.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Appendices
Appendix 1: Single Words
In this appendix (and in the following one), I present the list of the first 50 single words (and multi-words in Appendix 2), arranged in descending order of their keyness score.
In the translation column I provide information that could be useful, e.g. whether the past participle is masculine or feminine and therefore referring to a woman or a man; similarly, I have indicated the grammatical gender of some specific nouns (Table 5.25).
Appendix 2: Multi-words
See Table 5.26.
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2019 The Author(s)
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Formato, F. (2019). Women, Crime and Gender in the Private Sphere: Femminicidio. In: Gender, Discourse and Ideology in Italian. Palgrave Studies in Language, Gender and Sexuality. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-96556-7_5
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-96556-7_5
Published:
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-319-96555-0
Online ISBN: 978-3-319-96556-7
eBook Packages: Social SciencesSocial Sciences (R0)