The Intimidating Other: Feminist Critical Discourse Analysis of the Representation of Feminism in Estonian Print Media

The article studies anti-feminist rhetoric in post-socialist Estonian print media, specifically the Postimees, the most widely read quality daily in the country, in a ten-year period (1996–2005). The textual corpus is analyzed with a method informed by the critical discourse analytical work of Chouliaraki & Fairclough (1999) and Lazar (2005), focusing on lexical framing and social (re-)contextualization of the created frames. The analysis demonstrates that print media, as a social gate-keeper, have contributed to the creation of a localized discursive “feminism”, anti-feminist by nature, as a useful ideological gate-keeping tool: it wards off influences that might potentially threaten the status quo and, at the same time, disciplines Estonian women and men into accepting the tenets of the dominant neo-liberalist ideology as the only common sense in the context of gender and other social issues.