Narrating Femicide: Linguistic Sexism and Discursive Strategies in Italian and Spanish Press Coverage of the Cases of Giulia Tramontano (2023) and Vanesa (2024)

Abstract

Narrating Femicide: Linguistic Sexism and Discursive Strategies in Italian and Spa- nish Press Coverage of the Cases of Giulia Tramontano (2023) and Vanesa (2024)

This study aims to analyse, from a linguistic and gender perspective, the way in which the Italian and Spanish press report cases of femicide. In recent years, the number of women who have become victims of femicide has increased, and newspapers of all ideological orientations have reported on these events. At the same time, a growing body of research has examined the terms and linguistic resources employed by journalistic discourse when referring to victims. With the aim of expanding the existing theoretical framework, this study adopts a contrastive approach to examine how the Italian and Spanish press have covered the femicide cases of Giulia Tramontano and Vanesa (El Prat de Llobregat). The corpus was selected by identifying analogous cases in Italy and Spain based on both temporal proximity and similarities in the circumstances of the events, thereby ensuring the comparability of the materials analysed. For the Italian press, more than 400 excerpts related to the femicide of Giulia Tramontano (27 May 2023) were collected from La Repubblica and Il Giornale, published between May 2023 and December 2025. As for the Spanish press, the corpus comprises appro- ximately 50 excerpts concerning the femicide of Vanesa (9 April 2024), published in El País, Heraldo de Aragón, La Vanguardia, ABC, and El Debate. The analysis is limited to the months following the event due to the absence of further documented developments thereafter. The texts are first analysed according to their national context and subsequently compared in terms of the linguistic and lexical structures employed by the press in both countries. The aim is to identify the ways in which linguistic sexism may manifest itself in journalistic discourse and to assess the extent to which editorial policies influence the reporting of femicide cases.

Received: 2026/30/07

Admitted: 2026/06/04