A Multimodal Discourse Analysis of Some Selected Domestic Violence Image Cartoons

Abstract

Domestic violence is a pattern of abusive behavior in any relationship usually committed in a domestic setting by one partner against the other. The current study investigates this type of violence as exhibited in cartoon discourse. The study tries to approach image cartoons of the domestic violence type to examine how meaning is made within different modes and which mode is the most dominant. Moreover, it attempts to check who is the most powerful member in the family, who is exercising violence, and on whom. Martin and Rose's (2007) model has been implemented to be used as a tool to examine both the visual and verbal components in each cartoon. The researcher randomly selected six cartoons from several domestic violence types to constitute the sample of the current study. It is found that different kinds of violence, mainly of the social and physical types, have been exercised by the male figure (the patriarch, i.e., the father, or the husband) in the family. Moreover, domestic violence cartoons make their meaning and express their messages through the visual mode more than the verbal one. This, in turn, may be ascribed to the fact that visual modes can provide their own affordances through which they can be interpreted globally.