Women and Visual Rhetorical Strategies in Media Coverage of the Russian-Ukrainian War
Women and Visual Rhetorical Strategies in Media Coverage of the Russian-Ukrainian War

Summary/Abstract: In this article we aim to analyze how the images that are used in the news coverage of the Russian-Ukrainian conflict contribute to the framing and to the representation of the female imaginary in terms of the role played in military conflicts. In our approach, we start from visual rhetoric, understood in the sense of the author's strategic choice to persuade or to influence the opinion of the potential target audience. Thus, divided into thematic categories (political, military, social and miscellaneous news), we have analyzed the images from the news selected from the Romanian mainstream media, more precisely the protagonists in these images, through the scheme proposed by David Machin, taking into account the individual or group representation, the roles they play and the techniques of image making. The visual rhetoric reinforces the journalistic discourse used in the news and highlights the fact that women are an active part of the Russian-Ukrainian conflict, even if in the identified news the victimization or sexualization of the female figure occupies an important percentage.

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