Investigating stereotypical gender qualities towards female and LGBTQ politicians: an appraisal analysis of Thailand’s political discourse

This study aims to investigate stereotypical gender qualities of female and LGBTQ politicians of Thai patriarchal political discourse through the attitudinal appraisal over female and LGBTQ politicians in the mainstream English-language press in Thailand. With this concern, two objectives were set. The first objective was to investigate the attitudinal appraisal towards female and LGBTQ politicians’ performances and characteristics during political activities in the mainstream English-language press in Thailand. Second, the results of the attitudinal appraisal towards female and LGBTQ politicians’ political performances and characteristics were examined to explore stereotypical gender qualities of women and LGBTQ people in patriarchal political discourse. The data of this study were collect from two English daily online newspaper: Bangkok Post and Khaosod. The period of data collection was between May 2019 and December 2021. To investigate the attitudinal appraisal towards female and LGBTQ politicians’ performances and characteristics during political activities, only headlines of news articles containing a name or referential name of female or LGBTQ politicians were collected. Within each collected news article, clause complexes containing either female or LGBTQ politicians as an actor with his or her units of evaluation of gender and sexual orientations will be included as data of appraisal analysis since the main focus of this study is to only scrutinize how performances and characteristics of female and LGBTQ politicians were appraised based on their gender qualities. Martin and White (2005)’s Appraisal Theory (attitude, engagement, and graduation) was selected as an analytical framework. To explore stereotypical gender qualities of women and LGBTQ people in patriarchal political discourse, the results which were derived after the appraisal analysis at the earlier stage were primarily set as a starting point in order to explore gender qualities of female and LGBTQ politicians in political discourse. The data-driven approach was employed by allowing the gender qualities emerge from what those politicians was evaluated. The results reveal that the issues of attire, body, hair style, leadership, incapability, childishness, rudeness, and corruptness were employed in appraising towards female politicians, and for LGBTQ politicians, they were negatively appraised in terms of abnormal gender. For engagement domain, heterogloss was found the most comparing to monogloss. Attribute under heterogloss was frequently employed to report evaluative statements. This suggests that the writer is distancing himself or herself from the term being quoted and showing disapproval and detachment from responsibility for what is being reported. The last domain, graduation, there was only force, or the language resources used to show intensity used to strengthen the negatively evaluative statements. Intensity measurement via superlative, up-scaling quality, and gradable words of quality were linguistically employed to intensify evaluative meanings. Finally, the emerging evaluated political performances and characteristics of female and LGBTQ politician while performing their duties can be understandably explained through the lack of fit perception since those politicians were penetrating their normative practices and performing the behaviors and characteristics reserved for men and the glass ceiling concept was predominately enacted.