Linguistic Gender Identity Construction in Political Discourse

The present study is concerned with exploring the linguistic identity construction of Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton in the context of USA 2008 Democratic Party primaries. Thus, the speeches delivered by Obama and Clinton during the aforementioned political event are examined in order to detect the aspects of identity that each politician resorted to in the process of projecting a political identity. The study takes a special interest in the ways in which gender identity is projected by each candidate. Moreover, the notions of gender bias as well as gender representations as conveyed by each politician are investigated. The study attempts to contribute towards an understanding of the role played by gender, as an important social division, in the way Obama and Clinton represent themselves in an electoral event, aiming at a discursive delineation of the specific identity aspects that Obama and Clinton communicate, with a focus on how gender identity is constituted and interpreted.