Representations of Syrian women in mainstream U.S and British press: Victims or heroes?

Orientalism is a framework of thought and representation developed by the West to construct and dominate the East. According to Edward Said, Orientalism, which has its roots in colonialism, depicts the East as backward, exotic, lazy and despotic while the West is described as advanced, civilised, morally superior and rational. This binary opposition not only marginalises the East but also reinforces the West's self-perceived superiority. In modern contexts, Neo-orientalism continues to demonise Muslims, portraying them as an "other" and reinforcing stereotypes through media narratives that portray Eastern/Arab women as oppressed and in need of Western intervention. This study analyses the representations of Syrian women in the US and British mainstream media during the Syrian civil war through the concept of Orientalism and tries to reveal how these representations reflect Orientalist discourses and how they change in different contexts. The study analyses the news texts published in the New York Times and Washington Post in the US and the Guardian and Times newspapers in Britain in 2014, 2015 and 2017 in general, and in the cities of Raqqa, Rojova/Kobani, Aleppo, Idlib and Homs in particular in 2012- 2019, and reveals how the media perpetuate Orientalist discourses, reinforce stereotypes and silence women's voices. Using a mixed method combining content analysis and critical discourse analysis, the dominant discourses and implicit meanings in these representations are revealed. By utilising Ruth Wodak's discourse-historical approach, the study tries to reveal the political ground on which the discourses are formed by evaluating the background and context of the events together. Keywords Orientalism, representation, postcolonial feminism, critical discourse analysis