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Female circumcision (genital cutting) in Malaysia is largely understudied at present. This study unpacks the perceptions of Malay-Muslim women with regards to sunat perempuan (female circumcision) in Malaysia. Through stakeholder engagement discussions organised by a civil society organisation, 17 Malay-Muslim women shared their views in relation to the practice with a particular focus on: (1) their awareness and personal experience of it; (2) their opinions and knowledge about the practice; (3) beliefs related to the practice; and (4) the roles of relevant stakeholders in advocacy work related to the practice. The data were analysed thematically and interpreted based on the grammar of legitimation and social norms theory. The findings reveal several themes, involving the perceived benefits of the practice; tradition and conformity to social norms; conflicting emotions related to religion; and implicit pressure and fear of negative sanctions in relation to the practice. The findings shed light on the concerns faced by Malay-Muslim women in their decision-making process in relation to the practice of female circumcision in Malaysia. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Commenting on the future development of China, President Xi Jinping said, 'China's children today are not only undergoing and witnessing the realization of the country's first centenary goal, they are also a new force for achieving the second centenary goal and building China into a great modern socialist country.' This statement reflects a socially shared belief that Chinese children and youth are expected to shoulder the responsibility of nation-building. This study explores how the ideology of nationalism is disseminated through the popular Chinese reality TV show, X-Change, via the legitimation of the model Chinese youth. Using Rowan Mackay's multimodal legitimation framework to analyse six episodes from Season 18 of X-Change, this article explores how the model Chinese youth is semiotically constructed and legitimized. Findings from the analysis reveal how the model Chinese youth represents a specific normalized national identity. This is promoted through the embodiment of the urban–rural binary by the show's main characters and the representation of the exchange journey as the inner transformation of 'problematic' citizens. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Ecolinguistics studies the interactions between language and ecology. It investigates whether the stories created by language are destructive or beneficial to all the constituents of the environment. In search of positive stories for our environment, this article focuses on vegan campaigns which generally bring awareness about veganism that, in turn, advocates protection of nonhuman animals and abstention from their exploitation. Nonhuman animals are part of the ecosystem and the way they are portrayed in language may determine the relationship between human and nonhuman animals. As vegan campaigns refer to nonhuman animals as sentient living beings, it is important to analyze whether the language and image of these campaigns articulate their purposes and create beneficial stories for nonhuman species. This article explores the stories regarding nonhuman animals in 27 posters of the vegan campaign “Go Vegan World” and examines how these stories are shaped and whether they are aligned with vegan values. The study is approached from an ecolinguistic perspective with a focus on multimodality where the language was analyzed through van Leeuwen’s Social Actor and Social Action theory, and the image was analyzed with Kress and van Leeuwen’s Grammar of Visual Design. Further, the analysis involves the ecosophy defined as a personal ecological philosophy of relationships between human and nonhuman animals, plants, and the physical environment. The findings suggest that the campaign language and image shape three stories: salience where nonhuman animals are individuals with their own feelings and lives; conviction that nonhuman animals matter as much as humans; ideology where biocentrism is promoted. By comparing these stories with the article’s ecosophy, an ecolinguistic analysis showed that they are largely beneficial in representing nonhuman animals as sentient living beings who are equal to humans.

This paper discusses the dynamic role of translators in possibly promoting certain ideologies and political agendas by presenting stories through the lens of an ideologically laden meta-narrative. It compares the representation of ‘Daesh’ in the narratives of Arabic editorials and their English translations published by the Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI). MEMRI is a pro-Israeli organization, widely cited by leading Western media outlets, especially in the US. The study adopts the narrative theoryinformed analysis of Baker (2006) as its theoretical framework to examine how narrative is used to legitimize, normalize, and justify certain actions to the public. The findings suggest that through translation, MEMRI draws upon the meta-narrative of the War on Terror in furthering its ideologically laden agenda of terrorist Arabs and Muslims by publishing selective and decontextualized excerpts and mistranslation of concepts such as Daesh (داعش), Jihad (جهاد), and Jizya (جزية).

China, as the most populous developing nation globally, may exhibit the greatest urbanrural disparity compared to other developing nations. Perspectives on the rural-urban divide persist despite the significant political, economic, and social upheaval that have occurred in Mainland China over the past century. Drawing on Mackay's (2015) multimodal legitimation framework, this study examined how urban and rural were constructed and (de)legitimized by a series of multimodal resources, including visual, verbal, and audio modes. Using a critical discourse analysis perspective through a multimodal legitimation approach, this study explored how X-Change portrayed and influenced current Chinese perceptions of reality, with a specific focus on how these programmes depicted China's urban-rural divide. The findings revealed that both the urban and rural were multimodally constructed and (de)legitimized as a paradox. However, this study also found a reproduction of urban hegemonic discourse via the interplay of various semiotic resources and (de)legitimation strategies, suggesting that the urban very much forms the centre of society in the context of contemporary China. These findings contribute to existing scholarship on the rural-urban divide in Chinese Reality Television (RTV). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

To better understand QAnon's anti-immigration rhetoric, the study conducted a meta-discursive analysis of one of the group's active Telegram channels by drawing on Hyland's (2005) model of interaction. Specifically, engagement markers in their immigration-related discourse were analyzed to see how they contribute to endorsing the group's macro conspiratorial arguments. The results illustrate a complex rhetorical manipulation and nearly unanimous expression of hate toward immigrants, with the use of 'directives' and 'questions' being the most prevalent metadiscursive markers. The former suggests that the commenters were more assertive or commanding in their tone, while the latter located within rhetorical persuasion, aimed at stimulating negative attitude toward immigrants. Conversely, a low frequency of the 'shared knowledge' markers indicates a lack of interest to establish credibility and constructive dialogue with the audience. The study aimed to unpack the nature of anti-immigration extremist discourse on social media, and its potential to incite violence among public. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article unpacks the discursive (de)legitimation strategies used by the Malaysian government and Malaysian civil society organisations to construct and contest the legitimacy of female circumcision in Malaysia. This paper examines the ways in which female circumcision in Malaysia is legitimised and contested within the Malaysian news media. Malaysian mainstream and alternative news articles discussing the practice that was published online between the years of 2016 and 2020 were analysed based on previous studies on legitimation (Van Leeuwen, 2008) as the main analytical tools to examine the approaches taken by the Malaysian government and Malaysian civil society organisations to (de)legitimise the practice in Malaysia. Findings reveal that the Malaysian government actively supported the practice of female circumcision using the strategies (1) authority of tradition and authority of conformity, (2) impersonal authority of adat (Malay custom), (3) personal and expert authority (4) denial of female circumcision as a form of FGM/C, (5) mitigation of harm through medicalisation, (6) moral legitimation by cultural relativism, and (7) scientific rationalisation using religion. Malaysian civil society organisations mainly countered the hegemonic discourse using the synergistic strategies of moral evaluation and rationalisation with discourses of health and human rights as the motif of resistance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is a multimodal critical discourse study of self-representation in ISIS's e-magazine, Dabiq, employing Social Movement Theory and Van Leeuwen's Socio-semantic Inventory. By analyzing the linguistic and non-linguistic features in the representation of social actors and actions in Dabiq, ISIS's implied ideology at the macro level, which is to convince the prospective recruits and at the same time, to legitimize its brutality, is revealed from both textual and visual perspectives. The results showed an interplay of the contradictory representational choices, namely "lionization" and "victimization" that has enabled ISIS to create a powerful narrative. By portraying its so-called "knights" as undefeatable lions and glorifying their acts of violence, while, excluding its killed, injured or imprisoned agents both textually and visually, ISIS has attempted to provoke admiration among its current or potential followers. Significantly, they simultaneously depict an air of victimhood to further legitimize their act of terror and represent themselves as the godsent saviours of the victims, and confer a sense of security in their hearts. Victimization, however, has rarely been applied to the Mujahidin of the State who are fighting at forefronts, but rather to the State itself as a territory (Caliphate) and to the Muslims who are presumably plagued by the enemies' transgression and injustice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Female circumcision is a relatively understudied topic in the Malaysian context. It is also a topic that is considered sensitive due to its strong association with culture and religion. This paper explores the challenges and lessons learned from a larger project that focuses on the discourse analysis of female circumcision in Malaysia. The project involves collaborative work with a local NGO that works on the advancement of Muslim women's rights in Malaysia. This paper outlines the processes involved in data collection via focus group discussions and is written as a reflexive exercise based on the recommendations proposed by Olmos-Vega et al. (2023). This reflexive paper on the methodological challenges and lessons learned from the collaboration offers insights that can help other researchers make more informed research choices on working on collaborative research and on the use of focus groups as a method of data collection. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

International media have reported on the Islamic State of Iraq and Al-Sham (ISIS), an international terrorist organisation based in Syria and Iraq since 2014. Women, often young and unmarried, were leaving their homes and families to sneak into Syria and join ISIS, according to reports in the international media (Neumann, 2015). Sjoberg and Gentry (2011) assert that the media's portrayal of female terrorists and the factors that encourage women to support terrorist organisations have not been sufficiently investigated. This study examines the discursive strategies employed by ISIS-affiliated media outlets to represent female sympathisers as muhajirahs. Using Critical Discourse Analysis - the Discourse Historical Approach (Reisigl & Wodak, 2016), this paper will analyse the diverse and often contested ways in which the Self versus Other (Wodak, 2009) schemata is prominent in the representations of ISIS female sympathisers. The data were taken from ISIS-affiliated media, including the Manifesto from the Al Khansaa Brigade and six Dabiq magazines. This paper will focus on referential, predicational and argumentation strategies (topoi) in the selected ISIS-affiliated media. This paper intends to pave the way for an examination of gender and terrorism that explores the complexities of representations by examining gender through multiple lenses. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]