Constructing Epistemic Patriarchy through Victimhood Inversion: A Glottopolitical Analysis of Milei’s Davos Speech and Its Repercussions in the newspaper La Nación

Abstract

This article conducts a glotopolitical analysis of the speech delivered by Argentine president Javier Milei at the 2025 World Economic Forum in Davos and its immediate repercussions in the newspaper La Nación, from a gender perspective with a decolonial approach. The aim is to uncover the underlying linguistic ideologies that enable the naturalization and construction of an epistemic patriarchy through the rhetorical device of victimhood reversal. The study concludes that the uses of language in this speech reveal an active matrix of power that naturalizes patriarchal hierarchies, produces cultural enemies, and legitimizes forms of discursive violence operating within a “pedagogy of cruelty” through processes of dehumanization. Likewise, the coverage by La Nación shows that, even within a conservative media sphere aligned with Milei’s political and economic interests, there is a clear limit when feminism and the LGBT community are attacked and criminalized, revealing significant tensions in the way the far right seeks to establish its project in the Argentine public sphere.