THE IMAGE OF WOMAN IN MODERN UKRAINIAN NEWSPAPER DISCOURSE DURING THE WAR

Abstract

The media, in particular newspapers, often serve functions not only as information mediators but also as constructs of social reality, shaping gender roles, perceptions, and stereotypes. Newspaper articles about military realities cover a wide range of social issues, including changes in the social structure, refugee movements, and humanitarian disasters, and the impact of war on people’s daily lives. The article is based on newspaper texts and headlines in contemporary Ukrainian-language publications of the wartime period, the article describes the main qualities that that form the image of a woman. The purpose of the research is to analyse the priority of female roles addressed by the authors of newspaper texts in the process of their verbalization at the lexical, semantic, stylistic, and emphatic levels. The dynamic liveliness of the discourse and the rapid response to the changing socio-cultural realities of life allows newspapers to influence their target audience quite effectively influence their target audience during the war, using the communicative potential of language and various linguistic techniques: expressively coloured and stylistically reduced vocabulary, military terminology, neologisms, stylistic devices, metaphorical expressions, slang, etc. 
The article examines the representation of women in contemporary Ukrainian newspaper discourse in the context of the wartime period. It focuses on analyzing changes in the visualisation and modelling of women’s identity images in newspaper publications, considering their role as participants in the war and their significant contribution to supporting the war effort at various levels of society. The study draws on the theoretical foundations of gender studies and analysis of newspaper discourse, comprehending traditional and newer approaches to the coverage of women’s modified images in the press. A comprehensive analysis of the media indicates a tendency to change the hierarchy of gender stereotypes about women and to level them out because we see a shift in emphasis towards actualising women’s business, political, social, and military activity. In the age of information technology and mass communications, newspaper discourse plays a crucial role in shaping public perceptions.