This paper presents a pilot study on binary gender representation in all 133 obituaries published on the family and diary pages in two Nordic dailies. The material consists of 81 obituaries in the Swedish newspaper Dagens Nyheter (DN, Stockholm, Sweden) and 52 obituaries in the Finnish newspaper Helsingin Sanomat (HS, Helsinki, Finland) in February 2019. Thirty-one (31) obituaries were for women and 102 for men–that makes 23 per cent women and 77 per cent men.
The pilot study explores the societal positions of the persons appearing in the obituaries and looks closer at the person representations and patterns of gender construction. For example, the study shows that obituaries headlines for women explicitly in some cases refer to gender, while this is not the case in obituaries for men.
The obituaries person galleries in the Nordic context of these two large print papers draw a sharp line between the elite persons who are included in the genre and those others who are excluded from the genre. This study not only defines the included obituaries persons’ societal position, but also explores what linguistic constructions are used in giving these persons a “final” voice. It also explores which linguistic constructions are used as the obituary persons are put on a pedestal–societal positions, and personal and professional qualifications recognized by this newspaper genre.
The method used in the study is within the tradition of critical text analysis and is carried out as a qualitative close reading. The aim is at extending the study by comparing both quantitative and qualitative findings in this DN and HS material to an extended and longitudinal study of obituaries.
Media representation in the news genre worldwide give women a subject position in 24 per cent of the material (GMMP 2015). The portrait genre has a somewhat higher percentage of women as subjects, but also those numbers favor men–a study on the portrait genre is comprised of 41 per cent women and 59 per cent men (Siivonen 2007).
Obituaries differ from these related genres in two major ways. Firstly, obituaries obviously differ from other traditional news and media genres in being about persons who quite recently have died, and secondly, they differ from other genres in usually being produced at least partly outside the editorial room. Obituaries can be editorial texts, but mostly they are products of a cooperation between the editorial staff and the audience (next-of-kins, friends or colleagues of the person). This different production set-up could provide the obituary genre to include a diverse gallery of persons, a larger percentage of women, for example. This is however not the case.
References
GMMP. 2015. Global Media Monitoring Project. Wacc.
Siivonen, Jonita. 2007. Personporträttet som tidningsgenre. [The portrait interview as a newspaper genre. A qualitative close reading focussing on topical motifs, conventions of narration, and gender.] University of Helsinki. Swedish School of Social Science. SSKH Skrifter 25.