La descortesía encubierta en lo políticamente correcto hacia la mujer política en la prensa digital española

This paper aims to study the communication strategies of Spanish digital newspapers that threaten the face of female politicians. Methodologically, this research considers two fields of Linguistics: Pragmatic Linguistics and the studies of (Im)politeness, and Discourse Analysis. The hypothesis is that the examined media does not participate in the progress that society experiences in gender equality, although apparently it does so by using forms of political correctness. On the contrary, communicative strategies aim to attack the image of women. Therefore, this article focuses on verifying the communication strategies aimed at threatening the female politician’s face in order to distort and disavow their political exercise. With this purpose, a corpus of journalistic texts of different typologies collected in four Spanish digital newspapers of different ideological-political profile is analyzed. The results show that the media use political correctness, euphemisms and pseudo-euphemisms -as well as other discursive strategies linked to the reader- for hiding possible face-threats to women politician