“A man-hating lesbian feminist”: a study of the collocations of the word feminist

Abstract

The use of sexist language reveals a great deal about a society´s attitudes towards women. Studies have previously shown that the English language holds far more negative and pejorative terms for women than for men. This essay examines the collocations of a single term, feminist, in order to explore society´s attitudes towards women in Britain today. Focus lies on contemporary newspaper language and the data is collected from the Bank of English corpus. All the texts that are studied were published between the years 2000 – 2005. The collocations are categorised as conveying negative, positive or neutral attitudes and the results show that although the neutral instances are in the majority, the number of negative collocations is extensive. The number of different terms, however, is higher among the negative collocations and the expressions in this category are often very harsh, conveying strongly derogatory attitudes. The positive category is by far the smallest one and when viewing the results as a whole, it can be concluded that negative attitudes towards feminists, and towards women, in Britain today are extensive.