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Discrimination in discourses 385

on the horizontal axis and by the gaze. If a visually represented person looks at
the picture’s viewer and the depicted body is angled towards the viewer, this
bodily orientation suggests a high degree of interactional involvement, since
both the frontal posture and the direct gaze are highly phatic and sometimes also
conative (e.g. demanding). If the gaze and the posture of a depicted figure are
not directed at the viewer, but represented from an oblique angle, the appellative
quality is rather low, and the viewers assume the roles of “voyeurs” who are
looking at somebody who is not aware of being looked at (see van Leeuwen
2000: 339). It is within such relational contexts that symbolic objectivation can
become visual discrimination. Such is the case if persons of specific social
groups are – in contrast to other social groups – systematically represented “as
objects of our scrutiny, rather than as subjects addressing the viewer with their
gaze and symbolically engaging with the viewer in this way” (van Leeuwen
2000: 339). We are faced with such a form of discrimination if women are
shown as available sexual commodities.
The other five strategies of discrimination distinguished by Theo van
Leeuwen do not primarily relate to the interpersonal metafunction, but to the idea-
tional metafunction. They generally correspond to the above-mentioned strategies
of verbal discrimination, if one disregards the differences of semiotic modes.

5.6. An example of indirect and implicit discrimination
In the present context, I just analyse one concrete example of indirect and im-
plicit discrimination in order to illustrate a specific discriminatory argumen-
tation strategy in connection with discriminatory nomination, predication, per-
spectivation and intensification strategies.
The example gives an idea about coded antisemitism in the Austrian post-
war era (see Wodak and Reisigl 2002 for a detailed analysis of the example). It
documents how Jörg Haider, the former leader of the far-right Austrian Freedom
Party, employs the fallacious topos of name-interpretation in order to attack the
head of Vienna’s Jewish community, Ariel Muzicant, during a polemic “beer
hall speech” on February 28, 2001. The primary audience of Haider’s speech
were mostly party followers and party sympathizers. The secondary audience
was composed of those who saw and heard the speech extract transmitted in the
radio and TV news. The tertiary audience consisted of those who read the tran-
scribed speech (extract) in print media and the internet. Haider uttered his dis-
criminatory attack against Muzicant in the campaign period preceding the re-
gional elections in Vienna in March 2001, and in a political and historical
situation in which, among others, two discourses were intensely present in pub-
lic: the discourse about the so-called “sanctions” of the 14 EU member states
against the participation of the Austrian Freedom Party in the coalition govern-
ment and the discourse about the restitution of Jewish spoils robbed by Austrian