How Kurdish Female Fighters are Represented by the Media.

Abstract

The purpose of this dissertation was to investigate how Kurdish female fighters are represented in the media. According to Dilar Dirik (2014), the Western media has given a great deal of attention to Kurdish female fighters, but, according to Emanuela C. Del Re (2015), it has “focused on the sensational aspects rather than on analysis of the facts”. The objective of this paper was to determine whether the Italian, English and Turkish press provide in-depth analysis when they describe their motivations and reasons for fighting or whether they merely treat their ideas in a shallow way. The method adopted by the author to conduct the research was quantitative content analysis. Moreover, the author sought to analyse whether the Italian media and the English media shared the same perspectives and used the same frames when describing the female fighters. Finally, the research was aimed at determining whether there was a perspective shared by all Western newspapers and whether this was different from that of the Turkish media. Ultimately, it was found that female emancipation was not treated merely a good tool to improve the PKK’s image in the international press coverage and thus in Western public opinion.