La imagen de la mujer en las campañas institucionales andaluzas sobre igualdad de género: Un estudio de las notas de prensa

Press releases, published by the Andalusian Institute for Women (IAM, belonging to the Andalusian regional government), are used for disseminating campaigns that celebrate March 8th – International Women Day-. These releases are a subgenre of institutional discourse that permits metadiscursive analysis, since it displays the dominant ideology about the topic of genre equality. This article presents an analysis of press releases during two government periods – the social-democratic and the conservative periods- in the last 8 years in Andalusia. The analysis focuses on the topics, social actors’ representations (the sender -the IAM- and the social group that constitutes the target group of this policy, i.e., Andalusian women), the social roles that assigned to them, and finally, these social groups face and the produced polite and impolite behavior. The theoretical background is constituted by Critical Discourse Analysis and the Social Analysis of Discourse. The qualitative analysis shows that equality is the main ideology, but the values that define this ideology are different in the two periods. A focus on social justice and women emancipation arises in the social democratic period and a focus on productivity is dominant in the conservative period. Politeness is produced in this discourse, but at times impoliteness arises when the institution adopts a superior role with respect to women, or when it privileges its political purposes in the achievement of the equality goals.