Title: Women,#Daesh# and discourse : A critical analysis
Author: Meabh McAuley
Place of publication: North Irland
Publisher: Queen’s University Belfast
Release date: 2022

Shortly after Daesh emerged on the global stage in 2013, it was almost impossible to avoid sensationalist news media stories about the mass violent atrocities that the group perpetrated across vast swathes of territory in Syria and Iraq. What differentiated this reporting from the news coverage of other conflicts, however, was its overwhelming focus on women. In particular, women were made “visible” by the news media in a way seldom seen as news agencies became fascinated with the stories of women as victims of, participants in, and fighters against Daesh. Much of what was written, however, fails to recognise the agency of women in the region. Rather than reporting on the women’s experiences, as told by them, the UK news media constructs harmful representations through an inherently patriarchal and Orientalist lens. This means that despite seeming to centre women and issues of concern to women, news coverage has made them “visible” only in particular ways, not in the fulsomeness of their agency and experience. Specifically, they are made “visible” only insofar as their stories reinforce gendered ideas about what it is to be a woman, and more specifically, what it is to be a woman in the Middle East. My thesis takes as its case the representations of such women constructed between 2013-2017 by the BBC, the Daily Mail, Sky News, and the Guardian. Operating within a feminist framework, my aims are two-fold. Focusing first on news discourse, I use a critical discourse analytical framework to investigate the ways in which women in Syria and Iraq are represented in 245 news articles. Recognising that the news media and the ideologies that they propagate have the power to shape public perception, my aim is to uncover and examine the assumptions relied upon to construct a specific image of the conflict and its participants. As part of this analysis, I consider the implications of such representations, namely their societal function and their impact on the construction of knowledge. Arguing that in order for women to be made truly visible, their voices must be heard, I also engage in a narrative analysis of the stories of women sourced through personal interviews with refugees living in Belfast, survivor (auto)biographies, social media posts, and third-party interviews. In engaging with such stories, my aim is to deconstruct and redefine the knowledge constructed through UK news media representations by examining the ways in which women’s stories challenge and disrupt it.[1]