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The politicization of rape as a consequence of western modernity and religious conservatism: Competing media narratives on gender

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journal contribution
posted on 2020-10-01, 10:54 authored by Ece Algan
Through a feminist critical discourse analysis of newspaper columns from both secular/nationalist and religio-conservative outlets, this paper illustrates how the issue of increased violence against women that was made visible by the attempted rape and murder of a young university student, Özgecan Aslan, was instrumentalized by secular media outlets to critique the current government’s conservative family policies based on Islamic principles, while conservative pro-government media outlets used the murder both as a moral tale about the importance of a devout, humble life devoid of consumerism and other temptations of modern life that encourage lewd behavior. While patriarchy was not addressed as a root problem for rape, Özgecan Aslan ended up becoming a polarizing and tragic symbol of the consequences of either Western modernity or conservative Islamism, depending on the ideological composition of the media outlet in question, further helping both sides to legitimize their versions of patriarchy.

History

School

  • Loughborough University London

Published in

International Journal of Communication

Volume

14

Pages

5537 - 5555

Publisher

USC Annenberg Press

Version

  • VoR (Version of Record)

Rights holder

© The authors

Publisher statement

This is an Open Access Article. It is published by USC Annenberg Press under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0) licence. Full details of this licence are available at: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/

Acceptance date

2020-08-08

Publication date

2020-10-31

Copyright date

2020

eISSN

1932-8036

Language

  • en

Depositor

Dr Ece Algan. Deposit date: 30 September 2020

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