Feminismo/s (Jan 2025)
She’s Such a Bitch! The Representation of Women as Bitches in Gender-Based Violence Campaigns
Abstract
This paper examines the representation of women as «bitches» in gender-based violence campaigns. It analyzes a purpose-built corpus consisting of 22 campaigns from 17 countries dated from 1999 to 2023 that represent women as «bitches». Many of these campaigns have been financed by general and state governments; others, by non-governmental organizations or associations in defense of children. Some campaigns have been created on the internet; others are based on the lyrics of popular songs and even on street graffiti. Some take the form of posters, television and radio commercials and even documentaries. They constitute, therefore, a wide and diverse repertoire of gender-based violence campaigns. The project considers the linguistic, visual and acoustic representations of women as bitches given that several campaigns juxtapose photographs of battered women and real female dogs, characterize women as literal bitches by portraying them kneeling and with a leash around their necks held by a man and evoke the canine image through word play and onomatopoeia. The study employs the metaphor identification procedure for the spotting and coding of the metaphoric «bitch». Through the lens of Conceptual Metaphor Theory, the paper shows that gender-based violence campaigns resort to «bitch» to illustrate how this commonplace slur contributes to the dehumanization, objectification, sexualization and belittlement of women. It also shows that, despite the cultural and linguistic differences of the countries where the campaigns have been produced (Spain, Mexico, Colombia, Peru, China, the UK, Canada, the USA, Australia, France, Lebanon, Italy, Norway, Denmark, etc.), «bitch» is at the core of gender-based violence. The article, ultimately, demonstrates the close link between «bitch» and (the language of) gender-based violence.
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