How a Female Cartoonist Has Become Even More Famous Than Her Male Peers: A Cognitive Linguistic Approach

Abstract

Political cartooning has always been a male-dominated profession. Though this could be partly explained by the fact that many female cartoonists suffer sexism at work, it reignites the dreaded “women aren’t funny” argument, a preconception that largely stems from the stereotype of a polite, reserved woman. Indeed, women such as star architect Zaha Hadid have launched their careers into the stratosphere in spite of discrimination. A systematic analysis of a female cartoonist’s work may thus not only shatter tired gender stereotypes―it may explain why there are apparently fewer female humorists in general. This study, informed by insights from cognitive corpus pragmatics, aims at explaining why Doaa Eladl is the Arab world’s most famous female cartoonist. Part of her success, it is suggested, lies in challenging some societal and cultural stereotypes that women are often pinned with, but also in having an idiosyncratic style. She frequently uses taboo metaphors and discusses sensitive topics such as FGM and sexual harassment. But far more interesting is her occasional resistance to the WOMAN AS OBJECT metaphor. To reach wider audiences, Eladl often publishes English-language versions of her cartoons and employs metaphorical source domains from Christianity. She has comic heroes that have become the reader’s dear friends, but also meme-like cartoons that contain photoshopped stills. All this has implications for gender studies, humor research, metaphor scholarship, and media (digital or otherwise).

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Ahmed Abdel-Raheem

Ahmed Abdel-Raheem is a post-doctoral fellow at the University of Bremen and a part-time lecturer at both Leuphana University Lüneburg and Martin Luther University of Halle-Wittenberg. His articles (32 in total) have appeared in journals such as Semiotica, Social Semiotics, Language Sciences, Intercultural Pragmatics, Visual Literacy, Cultural Cognitive Science, Journal of Pragmatics, Information Design Journal, Text and Talk, Pragmatics and Cognition, Discourse and Society, Discourse and Communication, Review of Cognitive Linguistics, and Metaphor and the Social World. He is author of the monograph “Pictorial Framing in Moral Politics: A Corpus-based Experimental Study” (2019, Routledge). He serves on the board of journals such as Discourse and Society and Multimodality and Society and acts as a reviewer for many other journals, including Text and Talk, Metaphor and Symbol, Language and Communication, Imagination, Cognition, and Personality, Cross-Cultural Research, etc. E-mail: [email protected]