Gender Representation in Migration Discourses in Cameroon

A Multimodal Analysis of Cameroon Tribune, and The Guardian Post Newspapers

Abstract

The passing years of the 21^st century have witnessed massive migrations of citizens from developing countries to developed ones for reasons ranging from education, work, marriage, war, persecution, poverty or environmental crises. Since migration has become one of the defining global issues or concerns of the 21^st Century, it has also attracted academic and non-academic interests including newspaper reporting worldwide. The main objective of this study is to identify and examine the different gender representations in migration discourses in newspapers. It seeks to attempt a multimodal discourse analysis of the way gender is portrayed with regard to migration in Cameroon Tribune, and The Guardian Post newspapers in Cameroon between August 2020 and September 2021. The data to be analysed is drawn from 30 newspaper issues purposively selected for the study. The corpus is from news items, commentaries and human interest stories handling issues of migration. The units of analysis are words and word groups; clauses and clause complexes; paragraphs and texts. The analysis is also couched in Van Leeuwen’s (1999/2008) modeling system within the multimodal semiotic resources which looks at colour, font style, font size for typography and language. It is expected that the findings of the study shall provide ground for justification or not for news writers to strive for gender equity as they use semiotic resources alongside language in making meaning in their reports. News reports would have to avoid under/misrepresentation of women and see the need for the promotion of the ideology of equity in gender representations.