Women in Their Own Reflection: Self-Representation of Women Politicians in the Slovenian Press

The authors have analyzed different discursive strategies through which women politicians express themselves in the Slovenian press. Based on a constructivist paradigm, which defines gender as a discursively constructed category, the authors have applied discourse analysis to discover how women politicians articulate and reproduce certain dominant myths of femininity in accordance with hegemonic discourses, paying special attention to the notion of sexist language. Female politicians in Slovenia spontaneously express their femininity through different myths about women: woman as a body and sex object, woman as a martyr, woman as a loving and caring individual, and woman as an enigma and threat. As women politicians in Slovenia are interpellated in a broader dominant ideological discursive framework, they do not challenge hegemonic beliefs and myths in society.