Kvinnliga offer och manliga monster : en kritisk diskursanalys av hur svensk media framställer kvinnliga och manliga mördare

Sammanfattning: Many societies in the world have norms regarding gender roles, more specifically roles that determine how a person identifying with a specific gender are supposed to be and act. This essay contextualizes this phenomenon when using Norman Fairclough’s critical discourse analysis on two newspapers in Sweden to acknowledge whether the gender roles are present in the discussion of male and female murderers. The empirical material consists of ten articles from the newspapers Expressen and Aftonbladet, two of the biggest newspapers in Sweden. In the analysis I present quotes from these articles to show that there are different descriptions of male and female murderers, appearing mostly through the thorough search for explanations as to why the female murderers committed the deed. The articles concerning male murderers lacked similar investigations and showed instead a murderer who acted solely out of aggression. In the discussion the results from the textual analysis are connected to the social discourse where I discuss why the articles are written this way with the help of the theorist Raewyn Connell and her book Gender. Further I reach the conclusion that the journalists write in different ways about male and female murderers because the female gender role is not compatible with aggression (which is an attribute connected with the deed of murder) while the male gender role is, and later I discuss that this way of writing could affect the power relations between females and males in society. Key words: Women, men, murderers, media, gender roles, critical discourse analysis.