Devalued minds and bodies. Decapitalization of women in politicaldiscourses through the Latin American press

Abstract

This article examines discursive forms of political violence against women in the Latin American public sphere, with particular attention to the ways in which gender, bodily appearance, cognitive capacity and political identity intersect in processes of symbolic delegitimisation. Drawing on Critical Discourse Studies and critical sociolinguistics, it analyses a qualitative corpus of news articles and reports published in Latin American digital media. The corpus was examined through inductive coding in order to identify recurrent lexical repertoires, evaluative categories and discursive strategies used to discredit women politicians and public figures linked to the political field. The analysis focuses on two interrelated dimensions: bodily and aesthetic devaluation, expressed through fatphobic comments, ugliness-based insults and the policing of appearance; and cognitive devaluation, articulated through pathologisation, infantilisation and the questioning of women’s intellectual competence. The results show that these forms of verbal aggression do not operate solely as isolated insults, but also as mechanisms of symbolic discipline that displace women’s political agency from the sphere of public deliberation to that of bodily scrutiny and epistemic discredit. The article argues that such practices contribute to the political decapitalisation of women by eroding their authority, credibility and legitimacy in the public sphere. In this way, the study contributes to the analysis of gender-based political violence from a critical, intersectional and sociolinguistic perspective, highlighting the role of media discourse in the circulation and normalisation of patriarchal forms of exclusion.