The Portrayal of the First Female Saudi Lawyer: A Multimodal Critical Discourse Analysis of Online Newspaper Articles

Abstract

This study utilized a developed MCDA (Multimodal Critical Discourse Analysis) framework proposed by Machin and Mayr (2012). It intends to uncover how interceded verbal and visual choices cooperate to show a shift in the construction of the female Saudi lawyer’s identity in two articles, Saudi and Iranian. The framework is indebted to Van Dijk's (1998) work in which CDA was viewed as a multidisciplinary field where ideology was the basic theory. The MCDA showed that both articles, i.e., Iranian and Saudi, maintained different ideologies in their representations of the first female Saudi lawyer's achievement and used different linguistic and visual choices to portray this achievement.