Multimodal Critical Discourse Analysis of Gendered Language and Ideology on Social Media Platforms

This paper will analyse women representation in social media discourse by applying Multimodal Critical Discourse Analysis and will investigate how women are represented linguistically and visually on social media platforms like Instagram, Sanpchat, X and Utube. The data has been gathered from verified and unverified social media accounts with the help of convenient random sampling. The material is in the form of photos, written texts, and videos for a thorough examination. The chosen accounts include X handles like Richard Cooper, the Instagram accounts parity_colorism and thesolidaritysisters. The select Snapchat handles include DRESS CODE, Girls Only. Care has been taken that these posts represent both male and female worlds and the researcher will make the case that the social media content is fundamentally ideological, and that regular events, actions, and issues posted on social media articulate dominant (and occasionally alternative) ideological discourses about the prejudiced nature of our society. It shall be argued that gender politics is present in all types of social media comments and platforms, not so much in terms of formal politics but a more banal and everyday kind. The marketing of these accounts is the hidden motivation behind posting such posts and they do not support the idea that these technologies are democratic or impartial by nature. This paper will also investigate the social contexts within which symbolic forms are employed and deployed to determine whether such forms establish or sustain relations of domination and whether ideological analysis of all elements of the social media content come together to tell the same story that is, patriarchal capitalism. Considering the insights that social media discourse is structured by male dominance; that every discourse is historically produced and interpreted and that dominance structures are legitimated by ideologies of powerful groups(male), this paper will specifically consider gender and social media discourses in the broadest sense, to testify overt relations of gender bias and social inequality. It will also dissect sexism and female objectification by using the Dialectical Relational Approach and suggest ways to reduce gender bias through social media.