Veil or Evil? Spotlighting Women Portrayal through Semiotics Analysis

Abstract

The phenomenon of woman and man portrayal have been merely discussed world wide. Many viewpoints such as: media, politics, health, cultural studies, gender concerned on this topic. However, only a few of them was trying to seek out the language features attributed for women representation. Accordingly, to fill in this gap, this research aims at describing semiotical sign analysis of woman portrayal in media. A number of four corpus of Serambi Indonesia were analyzed based on two signification semiotics interpretations by Barthes (1967). The result eventually revealed that the language features attributed for women in the newspaper are woman as animal, as properties, as trigger of sins, as peaceful guard, those are considered as terms of denotative signification meaning. Meanwhile, the connotative meaning divided into two understandings; veil and evil, introducing positive and negative representation towards women. Finally it is expected that for further studies involve systemic functional linguistics or corpus linguistics towards other discourses as media to further develop the conclusions drawn from this present study. Keywords: Woman, Aceh, semiotics, portrayal, signification.