Gender violence appears to have entered the Argentinean media spotlight, as demonstrated by the increasing amount of press coverage dealing with different types of male aggression on women. In my work, I study the representation that three national newspapers in Argentina, i.e. Página 12, La Nación and Crítica de la Argentina, make on cases of physical violence against women by men. I draw on critical discourse analysis and critical gender studies to move from the linguistic form into the ideological content of the texts. In particular, I follow an analytical heuristic that focuses on the 'naming', 'voicing' and 'agency' devices employed by the journalists in order to arrive at the gender ideologies that support the language surface. Five out of six ideologies correspond to a patriarchal discourse which (1) deems poor women more prone to the violence, (2) holds women silent and passive in the face of male abuse, (3) blames women for the violence they suffer from, (4) views women as disposable objects, and (5) punishes women for breaching the public/private divide. A sixth ideology was also revealed in some of the articles. Ideology (6) challenges the patriarchy-based ideologies by establishing that women are not inferior to men, and consequently, women's emancipation from violent men must be fostered. The driving force behind my study of press representations of gender violence in Argentina springs from the conception of language as social action. Overall, this thesis stands as a work which demonstrates the value of media literacy, a movement that falls within the realm of "educommunication", which promotes a critical stance before the media messages around us
