Feminizing Political Discourse : British and Spanish Debates on Domestic Violence

The role of women in society has changed drastically in the last one hundred years. The old rules that governed society are no longer valid and more important, now women participate in the creation of the new rules. The question here is to which extent gender still conditions women's contribution to society: is it an advantage, a disadvantage … or is it simply irrelevant? This book focuses on gender as a social component and as a factor in the linguistic strategies used in gender - related contexts. The corpus chosen for the analysis is made up of the debates leading to the creation of the «Domestic Violence, Crime and Victims Bill» (British Parliament) and «Ley de Protección Integral contra la Violencia de Género» (Law of Integral Protection against Gender Violence). Our functional approach embraces both Critical Discourse Analysis, for which power imbalance is of great importance, and Discursive Psychology, which views language as an action with a purpose. From these disciplines and different considerations relevant to this study a new model has been created. This model separates two different levels: situation and presentation, and more importantly, shows how one element can be present on both levels. In this sense, gender can be a social determiner of the speaker but also a factor in linguistic persuasion.