Women’s Stereotypical Representation:Visual Texts Analysis of 11 Algerian Newspaper Caricatures

Abstract

This dissertation aims to reveal and identify women’s stereotypical representation in newspapers caricatures in Algerian visual text; Shedding more light on the caricatures of women used by Algerian cartoonists in newspapers. Because she is “she,” woman, could not even escape from the pen of the caricaturists. This research aims to understand the important reasons behind stereotyping women in general, and in the Algerian newspaper caricatures in particular. The objective is to show the unacceptable way of describing women’s roles in the Algerian newspapers.I adopted the Social semiotic approach of Kress and Van Leeuwen (2006) while collecting my samples. I select some caricatures from images and do the analysis perspective. Basing upon Kress and Van Leuven’s three metafunctions;representative metafunction,compositional metafunction and interactive metafunction a total of (11)pictures were randomly collected from Algerian newspapers in order to collect the required data.After the analysis of the data gathered from the mentioned tools.Results prove that the majority of Algerian newspapers represent women as victims of domestic violence in or out of home,portray them in a stereotypical way reducing their roles for taking care of thehouse and kids. Even more Females are represented as subordinate,sex objects.