The Images of Indonesian Women Workers in the Arabic-Language Sites on the Internets: A Critical Language Analysis
Problems of Indonesian workers, especially domestic servants, often become the spotlight of mass media at home and abroad. Several researches have studied on Indonesian women workers from the aspects of human rights. This article discusses the headlines about Indonesian women workers contained in the Arabic-language sites on the Internet, using a critical linguistic approach to determine the extent to which the attitude of the Arab mass media in highlighting this problem. After conducting a research on selected vocabularies and grammatical structures used, this article finds that the headlines on Arabic-language sites on the Internet are mostly tendentious in exposing Indonesian women workers. This can be analyzed from the themes that appear in the media that are mainly in negative news. The choice of words, nominalization, passivation and others have contributed to marginalize Indonesian housemaids in Saudi.
