Covering Muslim Women

Despite a proliferation of research on Islam and Muslims in the media, very little work has focused on Muslim women, a much-debated social group that merits special consideration. This article aims to investigate how Muslim women are represented in BBC News website texts using a purpose-built corpus (1.9 million words in 3269 articles). The research employs analytical tools from the discourse-historical, sociocognitive, and sociosemantic approaches to critical discourse studies. These are combined with corpus-based methodologies to investigate the semantic macrostructures that tend to be associated with Muslim women and the discursive strategies employed in the representation of the hijab . The study is novel in its exhaustive approach to identifying salient and underreported issues related to Muslim women in news discourse. It also introduces a more integrated analysis that combines manual and automated techniques and tackles the quantification of qualitative results where possible. Findings suggest that Muslim women’s representations are largely restricted in terms of regional coverage. Semantic macrostructures related to conflict and crime are prevalent. The hijab remains a nodal discourse surrounding Muslim women whose function as a descriptive feature is often unclear, raising serious questions about its relevance. A number of recommendations are made for journalists to become cognizant of their own context models when reporting on Muslim women.