The Maple Leaf’s Public Pedagogical Interaction with the Sexualized and Masculine Cultural Discourses of the Canadian Armed Forces

Abstract

This qualitative research presents a feminist critical discourse analysis of The Maple Leaf’s (TML) depiction of women in the Canadian Armed Forces (CAF) and sexual misconduct before and after the release of Operation HONOUR using Gee’s (2011) toolkit of discourse analysis. The purpose of this research was to explore the newspaper’s public pedagogical influence, which either teaches or challenges the CAF’s discourses of the military as both a way of life and as a part of military membership (Taber, 2011a). This research used Biesta’s (2014) three categories of public pedagogy to examine TML’s ability to promote a critical lens, which is essential for activism that can contribute to a transformation of the CAF’s culture. The research examined 20 pre-2014 and 20 post-2017 articles to determine how the articles depicted women and the equality, barriers, diversity, and incidents of sexual misconduct they faced. Overall, this study found that the language in most of the articles taught and reinforced the two CAF cultural discourses. After 2017, however, authors depicted that women belong in all areas of the military and discussed sexual misconduct more frequently. This research provides 11 recommendations for changing TML’s language to improve its representation of military women and sexual misconduct.