Tokyo 2020 Olympic Games and Gender in Media: A Critical Discourse Analysis

The aim of this dissertation is to further the reader’s insight and understanding of discrimination in the context of human rights, in particular in the field of gender and transgender studies. This work will carry out an analysis of different newspaper articles regarding the recent Olympic games which took place in Tokyo. In specific, the articles regard the transgender athletes who, for the first time in the history of the games, competed in the gender category of their choice, despite the International Olympic Committee allowing transgender athletes to compete since 2004. The analysis will be based on articles written by both Italian and American newspapers in order to get a double point of view on the matter. Moreover, we’ll look at the differences between news publications based on their country of origin, in an attempt to understand whether the peculiarities of the two languages have influenced both the rhetoric of what’s being said and the very message they convey.