Cartooning and sexism in the time of Covid-19: Metaphors and metonymies in the Arab mind

ABSTRACT

Using a large-scale corpus of 706 coronavirus cartoons by male and female Arab artists, this study takes a fresh and more cognitive look at sexism in multimodal discourse. Specifically, it examines the role of salience and grammar (and hence of metaphor and metonymy) in gender bias and/or in discrimination against women. It argues that both men and women are vulnerable to the influence of stereotypical and outdated beliefs that create unconscious bias. But this raises the crucial issue of whether we can speak of 'overt' sexism in images. Issues around terminology and conceptualization are thus also investigated. Importantly, this paper makes the following contributions to feminist and cross-cultural pragmatics (i) it brings a distinctly Arabic perspective to gender and language;(ii) it expands socio-cognitive pragmatics beyond spoken and written communication;(iii) it shows a close coupling between an Arabic grammar and other aspects of culture;and (iv) it has the potential for impact beyond academia, specifically in the sphere of coronavirus care or of health communication. [ FROM AUTHOR] Copyright of Discourse & Society is the property of Sage Publications, Ltd. and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full . (Copyright applies to all s.)