Language plays a crucial role in maintaining prejudice and discrimination against different groups of people. In the context of immigration, media outlets often construct the identity of migrants through false and often derogatory descriptions. This project seeks to answer the following: how and to what extent does media discourse affect migrants and their perceptions of themselves in the host country? This project analyzes how language creates discrimination against migrants, but specifically LGBTQ migrants in Italy, and how stigmatizing language in the media affects migrants’ perceptions of themselves in Italy.
The methodology is split into two parts. The first part is a semiotic and semantic analysis
of Italian newspaper articles. Through two Italian newspapers, il Corriere della sera, and Libero
Quotidiano, this project investigates how the Italian media in the last 20 years contributed to a
stigmatizing discourse about migrants. The two newspapers are different in the respect of their
political ideologies, but the research demonstrates that the media discourse about migrants has
used a language that stereotypes them and their identities. Il Corriere della sera, a center-left
newspaper, has used negative language in the last 20 years when describing immigrants and
immigration similar to Libero Quotidiano, a far-right newspaper which tends to evoke offensive
stereotypes of immigrants.
Furthermore, thanks to the Durden International Initiative Fund, I was able to complete my
field research in Italy in January 2022. I analyzed whether the media’s discourse had an effect on
LGBTQ migrants in Italy and how these subjects confront the discrimination that is created from language. These oral histories with migrants are an important part of this project because the information that I research is a part of the reality lived by these migrants. Additionally, this project demonstrates the effect that language may have on the survival of LGBTQ migrants and how they live in a society that does not support them. This project thus takes on two theoretical approaches: cultural studies and gender studies. In the context of cultural studies, I perform a textual analysis of Italian newspapers and the language used to describe immigrants. In the context of gender analysis, I seek to understand how intersectionality plays a role in LGBTQ migrants’ navigation of their lives in a more homogenous society. Generally, migrants must deal with historical and generational stereotypes of their national, ethnic or racial background, often combined with negative perceptions of their gender identity and sexual orientation. Therefore, I seek to understand how migrants confront many forms of discrimination, amplified by media rhetoric, because of their complex identities.
Through my field research, I find that media discourse does not have a clear nor direct
effect on the migrants that I interviewed in Italy. Many of the migrants that I interviewed have the perception that they are not discriminated against by the language used in the media. In fact, they do not pay attention to the more negative commentary in the media regarding immigrants. Instead, most of those interviewed feel more threatened by everyday interactions with the heterosexual, white-Italian population. Therefore, the immigrants I interviewed indicated that they see physical and verbal attacks as more threatening forms of discrimination. I conclude that we have normalized a more negative immigration discourse in our consumption of media and that more attention should be paid to the semantic underpinnings of seemingly harmless rhetoric.