Navigating the tensions between transnational feminism and diplomacy. A corpus-based analysis of the United Nations’ discourse on violence against women in English and French.

1. INTRODUCTION

The United Nations (UN) is an influential global entity which is committed to protecting and promoting human rights. Since the 1990s, it has made the protection and promotion of women’s rights one of its central areas of concern, as stated in the 1995 Beijing Declaration and Platform for Action:

We [...] Dedicate ourselves unreservedly to addressing these constraints and obstacles and thus enhancing further the advancement and empowerment of women all over the world, and agree that this requires urgent action in the spirit of determination, hope, cooperation and solidarity, now and to carry us forward into the next century. (UN, 1995, p. 2)

Since its creation, the UN has been working hand in hand with feminist non-governmental organisations (henceforth NGOs) from all over the world to protect to defend and promote these rights, like the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom, the Women's Global Network for Reproductive Rights, Sisters in Islam, Fòs Feminista and Osez le féminisme !, to name but a few. Indeed, the UN charter, which was drawn up in 1945, allows NGOs to actively participate in the discussions that take place at the UN:

The Economic and Social Council may make suitable arrangements for consultation with non-governmental organizations which are concerned with matters within its competence. Such arrangements may be made with international organizations and, where appropriate, with national organizations [...]. (UN Charter, 1945, art. 71).

The precise terms of this participation are set out in resolutions of the Economic and Social Council, also known as ECOSOC[1]. Since then, feminist NGOs have only become more and more involved in UN discussions. Between 2010 and 2020, no less than 450 NGOs have taken part and issued 200 declarations each year. They have also participated in conferences set up on the UN’s initiative, including the four World Conferences on Women.

The internal activities of the UN more broadly consist in committees which meet several times a year. These meetings result in the production of a plethora of written documents. Some of them are confidential and can only be accessed by UN staff, while others are available to the general public, like press releases and reports. The processes of writing and translating these documents into the various official languages of the UN involve multiple constraints: the UN relies on specific guidelines (see e.g. UN, 1984) and unwritten routines dictated by diplomatic concerns, in order to produce texts which are as much as depoliticised as possible and minimise the risks of misunderstanding between representatives of the member states (Raus, 2019; Johnson & Ovcharenko, 2022).

All these constraints eventually led to the alteration and erasure of certain elements of feminist discourse. This paper aims to show that these alterations and erasures are achieved through a phenomenon referred to as "discursive smoothing.", which is defined as follows:

Discursive smoothing is defined as the process of removing traces of heterogeneity, debate, difficulty, conflict or extreme positions from one’s discourse, either by mitigating or by omitting elements which could generate opposition, thereby producing a consensual type of discourse. (Atzeni, 2024, p. 42).

This phenomenon can be observed when controversial topics—like gender issues—are discussed: a speaker usually needs to adapt their discourse in order to avoid offending their addressees.

Using discursive smoothing as a conceptual framework, this paper aims to show how and why controversial elements of feminist discourse are altered and even erased in the United Nations’ discourse on violence against women. Another objective of this paper is to determine to what extent the process of translation may contribute to the alteration and erasure of feminist ideas within the UN’s discourse.

To address these questions, I will first present the theoretical framework guiding this research, along with the methodologies employed. Then, I will focus on a description of the observed linguistic and translational preferences within the UN’s discourse, obtained from a computerised corpus of UN texts on the issue of violence against women. These preferences, which contribute to the discursive smoothing of UN discourse, will be analysed in light of the possible motivations for their adoption.

By investigating these linguistic and translational choices, this paper aims to shed light on the mechanisms employed by the UN as it attempts to make its discourse on violence against women more neutral. 

1. THEORETICAL BACKGROUND

This study’s aim is to detect the specific linguistic phenomena which contribute to smoothing the UN’s discourse. To do so, it relies on the exploration of two computerised corpora. In contemporary discourse studies, a significant number of studies rely on such corpora, and this research is no exception. Using a computerised corpus makes it possible to analyse a very large amount of linguistic data, providing analysts with a heightened level of objectivity (Stubbs, 1994, pp. 202-218; Hardt-Mautner, 1995, p. 3; Baker et al., 2008, p. 277). Additionally, it offers the prospect of uncovering phenomena that might otherwise remain invisible to the naked eye (Sinclair, 1991, p. 100; Partington et al., 2013, p. 11).

To grasp these phenomena and the reason why they occur, certain elements related to the concept of discourse have to be introduced. From a socio-historical standpoint, discourse can be characterised as a set of context-dependent practices situated within specific fields of social action. It is socially constituted and constitutive, linked to a macro-topic, and associated with argumentation about validity claims like truth and normative validity, involving diverse social actors with varying perspectives (Reisigl & Wodak, 2009, p. 89, in Angermuller et al., 2009, pp. 2-4).

In this respect, a collection of texts spanning different genres can be considered a type of discourse. In the context of this study, we compiled two corpora made up of texts from two distinct genres—press releases and reports—addressing the same issue, published by institutions that express their particular viewpoints on this issue and asserting the validity and truthfulness of their discourse. These two corpora serve as representations of the UN’s discourse on violence against women, and of the discourse of transnational feminist activists, respectively.

This corpus-assisted research was carried out using the framework of Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA). As highlighted by Van Dijk, critical discourse analysis focuses on social issues (such as racism and sexism) and aspires to provide a critical analysis of individuals or institutions holding power, those responsible for social problems, and those who might have the means to address them:

Instead of focusing on purely academic or theoretical problems, [critical discourse analysis] starts from prevailing social problems, and thereby chooses the perspective of those who suffer most, and critically analyses those in power, those who are responsible, and those who have the means and the opportunity to solve such problems. (Van Dijk, 1986, p. 4).

As such, CDA invites analysts to focus on the connections between the linguistic phenomena observed in a given discourse and the power relations exercised by various actors involved in the same discourse, following the assumption that the linguistic choices of the person or institution which produces the discourse can be interpreted as reflections of a certain state of society and as indicators of potential future changes. Moreover, it acknowledges the dual impact of discourse on social problems, as discourse can either replicate existing social structures, preserving the status quo, or stimulate changes in relationships among various social actors, potentially fostering social change. This approach is relevant to this study since the UN, which operates internationally with political decision-makers, is a significant social actor. Additionally, the discourse on violence against women, intricately tied to feminism, involves many different social actors with an unbalanced repartition of power and potentially incompatible points of view, which may intensify the tensions between them.

Among the numerous methodologies which can participate in the application of CDA, we choose to conduct our analysis of the corpus by following the principles of Discourse-Historical Analysis (DHA) as set out by Wodak (Wodak, 2001, p. 41). This approach relies, in addition to analysing texts from a linguistic perspective, to analyse the context in which they were produced: indeed, it consists in observing the lexis and concordances in a given corpus, analysing the communicative situation, which takes into account the target audience and the aims of the discourse. Eventually, it takes into consideration historical and geopolitical factors and assesses their potential influence on the discourse.

1. CORPORA AND METHODS

The corpora used to carry out this study are called the UN corpus and the Activist corpus. The UN corpus is made up of 5.5 million words. It consists of English and French press releases and reports published by the UN and UN Women between 1996 and 2019, which all tackle the issue of violence against women. The Activist corpus is a corpus of press releases issued by transnational feminist NGOs, both international and French, published between 1996 and 2023. This 800 000-word corpus is made up of texts published by the organisations listed in Appendix.

The texts from the UN corpus were gathered from the official websites of the United Nations and UN Women, using the advanced research features of their websites and a script for extraction. The reports were collected from the UN's digital library. The selection of these texts involved a two-step process: initially, the texts with titles that contained both 'violence' and 'women' were chosen. This was followed by a second step to ensure that texts addressing violence against women, even if lacking both keywords in their titles, were included in the corpus: to do so, a list of additional terms related to violence against women was established, and these terms were used as keywords to find additional texts (see Atzeni, 2022, for more detail). As for the Activist corpus, the first step was to select transnational feminist NGOs, and then to check whether they publish press releases in English or in French on their respective websites. Only those for which at least ten press releases could be found were selected. The texts were then collected from the websites of these NGOs. Both corpora were organised in such a way that the texts could be separated according to their year of publication. Besides, metadata were added to the Activist corpus so that its texts could be separated by NGO. 

These corpora were explored using textometry, a method founded on statistical methods that make it possible for analysts to study long texts. In the context of this study, a French open-source textometry software, TXM, was used (Heiden et al., 2010). TXM encompasses various functions, including a concordancer, various tools for statistical analyses, and a tool for multidimensional analysis known as Correspondence Analysis. Among these tools, progression charts were used, as well as TXM’s concordancer to observe the contexts in which certain words were used. Progression charts enable one to illustrate how the frequency of a word or sequence of words changes over time as one navigates through a corpus in chronological order. The functionalities of TXM also enabled us to browse the most frequent words in the corpora, and to filter the results according to various morphosyntactic properties.

Once the results were extracted from these corpora, they were confronted with other data in application of the principles of DHA: the geopolitical context which surrounded the UN during the period under study (1996-2019) was carefully studied using both elements quoted in the UN corpus itself and information from external sources. The comparison between the geopolitical timeline and the evolution of linguistic phenomena in the corpus set up the basis for some hypotheses and further analyses. The linguistic results also included a terminological dimension which was explored with the help of UNTerm, the official terminological database of the UN[2].

1. THE SMOOTHING OF THE TERM “FEMICIDE” AND ITS FRENCH EQUIVALENTS

As the present study focuses on violence against women, a natural starting point of our analysis was to look for terms related to this topic and observe their evolution in the UN corpus. Of particular interest were the terms which designate acts of violence: since they are central to the topic, they are among the most frequent terms of the corpus and are used continuously throughout the 1996-2019 period. Among them, the case of “femicide” has drawn our attention because of the controversies which surround it, and its activist origin which may at first appear incompatible with the UN’s style.

The data extracted from the UN corpus suggest that in the 1990s, and more precisely from 1996 on, the term “femicide” began to make its way into UN discourse. The graph in Fig. 1 illustrates the progression of this term in the corpus. The curve that corresponds to femicide is blue, and the others correspond to concurrent terms used to designate the murders of women. This progression chart shows that in the last years of the period under study, that is, between 2010 and 2019, “femicide” became the predominant term used by the UN to designate the murders of women.

Fig. 1.

This second graph (see Fig. 2) shows the progression of the various terms used in the French part of the UN corpus to describe the murders of women. Unlike what can be seen in the English part of the UN corpus, the predominant term used to designate the murders of women is meurtre sexiste, while fémicide and fémnicide, which are the equivalents to “femicide” and “feminicide”, are significantly less frequent[3].

Fig. 2.

The concordance extracts in examples (1) to (3) display examples of contexts in which “femicide” and its French equivalents are used in the UN corpus. In these examples, as in a significant number of examples from this corpus, the meaning of femicide is smoothed, that is to say, it is used alongside homicide, as if its definition were “a homicide of which the victims are women”.

• Studies have shown that in some countries between 40 and 70 per cent of female murder victims are killed by an intimate partner. South Africa is among those countries, making it one of the countries with the highest femicide rate. A 2009 national study showed that homicide was declining, that there was a reduction in female homicide but that the reduction was lesser among intimate partner femicides while "rape homicides" had proportionately increased.

• Further improve the collection of comparable data on gender-related killings of women or femicides by setting up at the federal level a system charged with collecting data from all jurisdictions; (b) Consider expanding the mandate of homicide panels to homicide / femicide panels or establishing or designating other bodies to perform such a role [...].

• L’une de ses [l’ONUDC] grandes réalisations, utile pour aborder la question du meurtre sexiste, est la classification internationale des infractions à des fins statistiques [...] Le féminicide y figure comme une forme d’homicide volontaire, mais il est possible de le rattacher à des sous-catégories plus précises pour apporter des informations supplémentaires sur certaines formes de meurtre sexiste.

This use of femicide as an equivalent to homicide can be identified as a form of discursive smoothing, since this definition of femicide diverges from its initial definition, which originates from feminist activists. The term femicide was first introduced by American activist Diana Russell on the occasion of the International Tribunal on Crimes against Women which took place in 1976.

The aim of this Tribunal was to show that women were subjected to the same acts of violence all around the world and that most murders of women were not isolated cases, but that they reflected the systemic violence women are subjected to all around the world (Horton, 1976, p.83). She theorised the concept of femicide in order to highlight the systemic aspect of the murders of women across the world, their misogynistic roots, and the responsibility of men in their perpetration (Radford & Russell, 1992, p. 3; Russell, 2011). Another feminist, Marcela Lagarde, included in her definition of femicide the concept of impunity, accusing states and institutions of complicitness in crimes against women (Fragoso, 2019, p. 88 ; Gruber, 2020, p.8).

These definitions of femicide have obviously triggered debates across the world, especially in legal circles who opposed the inclusion of the term in law, as was the case in France for instance[4], although this did not preclude its inclusion in the legal systems of several other countries, notably in South America, nor its recognition by the World Health Organisation. In such a favorable context, it is no surprise that the term also entered the UN’s discourse in the course of the period under study.

This controversial dimension of femicide is not compatible with the interests of a diplomatic institution like the UN. Indeed, the UN relies on rhetoric to exert its power, and its rhetoric is effective only when it is consensual; but the use of controversial terms is more likely to result in disagreement or resistance from parts of its audience, which could ultimately threaten the power of the UN. As a rhetorical tool, discursive smoothing can be a way for the UN to reach consensus more easily in order to maintain its legitimacy, especially in a context of diplomatic crises as the 2000s and the 2010s. In this period, the UN's legitimacy faced many challenges due to tensions and conflicts over human rights, many of which were brought up by member states as reaction to international or UN-related events. For instance, the UN’s Human Rights Commission, which was the main body of the organisation on the topic of human rights, faced severe criticisms after its presidency was given to states which were accused by other states of human rights violations, like Libya. This ongoing negative perception led to the dissolution of the commission in 2006. Other crises, such as Israel’s refusal to comply with their Universal Periodic Review[5] in 2012, and the United States’ withdrawal from the Human Rights Council in 2018, continued to threaten the position of the UN on the diplomatic stage.

Following this logic, it is no surprise that the controversial features of the definition of femicide have been erased in the UN’s discourse, as it makes the term less likely to prompt opposition from the organisation’s member states. As a result, the term femicide as used by the UN is reduced to the observed meaning of a “homicide whose victims are women”.

1. TRANSLATIONAL PREFERENCES ACROSS LANGUAGES

The constraints which explain the smoothing of “femicide” in UN discourse also have an influence on other aspects of this discourse, one of them being the way it is translated. The comparison of the English and French parts of the UN corpus revealed a few discrepancies between the two versions of the text of this corpus.

To obtain these results, we primarily focused on the translation of terms related to violence against women and more broadly to feminism. The first step was to investigate the texts from the corpus for which there were both French and English versions, as it enabled us to compare the translations sentence by sentence. When an interesting phenomena was identified, we proceeded to use the browsing functions of TXM as a second step which enabled us to see whether this phenomena could be generalised to the whole corpus, or whether it had evolved over time.

The most intriguing phenomena we came across during this analysis is related to the translation of the term “gender”: in the French versions of our texts, it is almost systematically rendered as “sexe”, which literally translates as “sex” in English. As the distinction between gender and sex is at the heart of many feminist theories, the fact that this distinction is treated differently in both languages is indeed surprising[6]. Moreover, this translational mismatch extends to other terms that are morphologically derived from “gender”, which are replaced in French by derivatives of “sexe”: hence the term “gender-based violence” can be translated as violence sexiste or violence sexuelle, depending on the context.[7] The adjectival value of the word “gender”, used as a modifier in a compound noun, is sometimes also rendered as the term sexospécifique, which is not commonly used in French outside of the scientific literature on sociology.[8] The term genre, which would be the literal French translation for “gender”, has many occurrences in the French part of the UN corpus, but it never means gender. It only occurs as the translation of the English word “genre”.

The predominance of the term sexe and other terms that are derived from it like sexuels and sexistes in French feminist discourse stems from the influence of French feminist movements. Indeed, French feminisms, and particularly differentialist and materialist feminisms, have traditionally emphasized the importance of biological sex as being the primary factor in understanding gender inequalities and violence against women. This may also explain why the term meurtre sexiste is predominant over other terms féminicide ou fémicide, which are predominant in English texts but not in their French versions. As illustrated by Lépinard, the concept of sex was central to the differentialist branch of French feminism (also referred to as courant de la différence) as it is considered as the basis of the expression of the identities of women:

The courant de la difference claimed that sexual difference surpassed any other difference. According to its adherents, sex defines identity, self-perception, experience (through motherhood in particular), language, and the psyche in such an irresistible way that it overpowers other social differences. (Lépinard, 2007, p. 7)

Moreover, although French materialist feminists were more open to the concept of gender, their highlight on the oppression of women, which they placed above every other form of oppression, put an emphasis on the distinction between men and women which was quite similar to the concept of sexual difference defended by the differentialists (Lépinard, 2007, p. 8).

This perspective, in which the primacy of biological sex shapes the power dynamics between men and women, and where gender is seen as the creator of sex, has had a more significant influence in France compared to more contemporary feminist theories such as post-modern queer theory, which is centered on deconstructing identity or even intersectional feminism. These more recent theories, as described by Schaal, were often critical of the ideas of differentialist and materialist feminists, and only emerged in France at the beginning of the 2000s with the so-called third wave of French feminism (Schaal, 2016, p. 175).

These feminist movements have contributed to shaping the language that is used to discuss gender-related concepts and issues in French, leading to the prevalent use of terms related to sexe in feminist discourse. For example, in 2018, the term violences sexistes et sexuelles, which could be translated as “sexual and sexist violence” was introduced and has now become the predominant term used to discuss violence against women in France:

Toutefois, la formule violences sexistes et sexuelles n’est passée dans le langage courant qu’en 2018, popularisée par Marlène Schiappa, alors secrétaire d’État à l'Égalité entre les femmes et les hommes, lors du dépôt et du vote du projet de loi du 3 août 2018 renforçant

la lutte contre les violences (JORF 2018a). Auparavant, la formulation violences faites aux femmes était privilégiée [...]. (Damois, 2023, p. 19) [9]

Thus, using terms related to sexe in the French version of the UN’s discourse rather than terms related to “gender”, a concept that is subject to debate among feminist movements in France, made it easier to produce a consensual discourse for a French-speaking audience. This is why this specific choice of translation may be seen as another form of discursive smoothing.

1. COMPARISON WITH ACTIVIST DISCOURSE

To better understand to what extent the UN’s discourse differs from more politicised and less diplomatically-constrained forms of discourse, we conducted a comparison of the UN corpus with the Activist corpus. The starting point of this comparison was the examination of the most frequent words in both corpora. Because the topic of the texts from both corpora is the same, many of these words were common to both corpora; however, a specific class of words did draw our attention, namely the compound words in “anti-”. While in the UN corpus, terms in “anti-” generally express a positive polarity towards feminist values, the opposite can be observed in the Activist corpus.

More specifically, in the UN corpus, the 10 most frequent “anti-” compound adjectives are mostly positive towards feminist values, with examples such as “anti-violence”, “anti-trafficking” or  “anti-discrimination”. These adjectives are generally associated with nouns that denote official texts and plans, such as “law”, “policy”, “measure”, “programme”, “message”, or “campaign”. In comparison, the 10 most frequent adjectives beginning with “anti-” in the Activist corpus cover the same proportion of occurrences as in the UN corpus, but carry a negative value: examples include notably “anti-rights”, “anti-gender”, and “anti-feminist”. These terms are often associated with words denoting people and institutions that explicitly take part in the issue of violence against women, such as “group”, “actor”, and even “states”. Examples (4) and (5) from the Activist corpus and examples (6) and (7) from the UN corpus illustrate this phenomenon.

• Anti-rights actors frame authoritative interpretations of UN treaty bodies and UN Special Procedure mandates on rights related to gender and sexuality as “creating new rights.” By propagating inaccurate readings of human rights standards, anti-rights actors and regressive states often aim to invalidate altogether the work of Special Procedures mandate holders (...).

• Today’s decision in Dobbs v. Jackson reflects the tightening grip of authoritarian forces in the United States. The attack on women’s and others’ bodily autonomy is something that global feminist movements know well from the alarming advances that anti-gender, anti-rights groups have made across the globe.

• In Asia-Pacific, public spaces in India will turn orange to promote awareness among local communities, and youth champions in Cambodia will take anti-violence messages online to galvanize action through social media.

• Noting the links between violence and discrimination against women migrant workers and trafficking in women and girls, States also provided information on anti-trafficking policies and programmes.

These observations suggest that the UN, unlike feminist activists, avoids mentioning the actions that may have a negative impact on the fight against violence against women, and more noticeably avoids mentioning the actors involved in this social issue, especially if they are states. This can be seen as a form of discursive smoothing, since focusing on positive actions and outcomes while deliberately avoiding mentioning the negative outcomes that one may encounter and the traces of underlying conflicts is more likely to reduce opposition and inspire consensus from the organisation’s member states.

1. CONCLUSION

In exploring the tensions between feminism and diplomacy within UN discourse on violence against women, this paper has delved into the complexities of the linguistic and translational choices a diplomatic international institution can make on a controversial topic. This research has focused on discursive smoothing, a phenomenon that is characterised by the removal of controversial or conflictual elements to reach a consensual tone in discourse.

Discursive smoothing takes on many forms in the UN’s discourse. In this paper, three kinds of effects it can have have been identified: first, discursive smoothing can alter the meaning of certain terms to strip them of their controversial features in order to make them more suited to a consensual discourse; second, it arises in the multilingual context of production of UN’s document through translational preferences, which favour the most consensual choices for the audience over the accuracy of the translation; and third, it positions the discourse towards a focus on positively framed terms, avoiding the explicit mention of negative outcomes and impediments that could lead to conflicts with the member states.

As a conclusion, this paper means to shed light on the delicate balance the United Nations strives to maintain between transnational feminism and diplomacy. While discursive smoothing serves diplomatic consensus and safeguards the UN's legitimacy in times of crisis, it comes at the cost of diluting certain crucial aspects of feminist discourse, among which the misogynistic and systemic aspects of violence against women, and more specifically of femicide, the necessity to address head-on the obstacles which stand in the way of the fight against violence against women, as well as the responsibility of men in the perpetuation of this violence.

NOTES

[1] The ECOSOC resolution E/RES/1996/31 allows NGO representatives to attend discussions in committees and conferences, make oral statements during discussions, submit statements that are circulated as official UN documents to members of UN committees, and to carry out special studies at the request of a committee.

[2] This database can be accessed through the following link: https://unterm.un.org/unterm2/en/ (accessed December 14th, 2023).

[3] The term meurtre sexiste has not actual equivalent in English. It could be translated into “sexist murder” but this term is not recognised by the UN.

[4] In 2019, lawyers and law specialists expressed their points of view on the possible inclusion of femicide to the French penal code, most of them being opposed to this inclusion. See https://www.dalloz-actualite.fr/node/non-feminicide-ne-doit-pas-etre-penalement-qualifie#.YjtDKDXjI2281, accessed December 15th, 2023

[5] The Universal Periodic Review is a process through which each UN member state is reviewed by the other states on the question of human rights.

[6] On the feminist theorisation of the difference between sex and gender, see Mikkola, 2008 and Johnson & Repta, 2012.

[7] The term violence sexiste can be translated as “sexist violence” in English, which is not recognised as a term by the UN, and violence sexuelle as “sexual violence”, which is recognised by the UN.

[8] The adjective sexospécifique can be translated as “sex-specific”, which does not belong to the official terminology of the UN per se, that is, it does not have a separated entry in the UNTerm database, but can be found as a modifier in official compound nouns, the main exemple being the term “gender mainstreaming” which is translated as intégration d’une perspective sexospécifique (“integration of a sex-specific perspective”).

[9] Our translation for this passage from Damois’ thesis is the following:  “However, the term “sexist and sexual violence” only became popularised in 2018 by Marlène Schiappa, who was then Secretary of State for Equality between Women and Me. At the time, she proposed and passed the bill of 3 August  2018 which was meant to reinforce the fight against violence against women in France (JORF 2018a). Previously, the term violence against women had been predominant in France […]”.