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Discrimination in discourses 365

18. Discrimination in discourses

Martin Reisigl

1. Introduction

Discrimination has become an issue that discourse analysis increasingly focuses
on, especially critical discourse analysis and the research on intercultural com-
munication. “Discrimination” means to put individuals, who are considered to
be different from others, at a disadvantage. The word prototypically refers to
“negative discrimination” and relates to an ethical, normative dimension, to a
political as well as legal evaluation and judging against the background of
democratic principles of justice and the conviction of the validity of human
rights. In this respect, “discrimination” means to treat a specific social group or
single members of the group, who are set apart from other groups or members of
other social groups, unfairly, unjustly, for example by repressing or suppressing
them, decrying them, discrediting them, debasing them, degrading them, de-
faming them, keeping political rights from them and establishing unjustifiable
social, political, economic, educational or other inequalities, by segregating
them, excluding them, etc.
In my article, I will primarily be concerned with various forms of verbal dis-
crimination, i.e. with discrimination by language use, and with visual discrimi-
nation. Apart from this introduction, the chapter is divided into five sections.
Section 2 aims to explain the concept of “social discrimination” from a general
and a disciplinary point of view. Section 3 offers an overview of different types
of social discrimination. Section 4 contains a brief delineation of various con-
cepts of “discourse” that are relevant for the issue in question. Section 5 pre-
sents a discourse analytical framework that allows the approach to discursively
realized social discrimination in a methodical way. Furthermore, section 5 con-
siders various strategies of discrimination in the area of visual communication.
In the final section, I argue that a critical analysis of verbal and visual discrimi-
nation is best accomplished from an interdisciplinary approach and can be an
important means of anti-discrimination policy and politics. 1

2. Concepts of “social discrimination”

The action verb “to discriminate” originates from the Latin “discriminare”. The
Latin verb derives from the noun “discrimen”, which means “distinction”, “dif-
ference”, “separating” and “sorting out”. Accordingly, “discriminare” origin-