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 female genital mutilation (FGM) and sexual harassment. But far more interesting is her occasional resistance to the “women 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).

Notes

1 All cartoons are used with permission under Egypt’s “fair use” clauses 171 (4) and 172 (3) (https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Egyptian_Copyright_Law).

2 The Guardian columnist Aysha Hazarika writes the word women as wimmin to avoid including the men morpheme–although that is not the true etymology (see Baron 1986) and this element is not actually pronounced (Cameron 1985/1995). The very prevalent early etymology of woman has been documented by Dennis Baron as meaning either “womb-man” or “woe-to-man” (Baron, 1986, pp. 33–34).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Ahmed Abdel-Raheem

Ahmed Abdel-Raheem is a postdoctoral 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 (Routledge, 2019). 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, and Cross-Cultural Research.

E-mail: [email protected]