Critical Discourse Analysis of Gender Representation in Hausa-Language Newspaper Editorials in Kano State

Critical discourse analysis provides a productive framework for examining how gender identities and relations are constructed, reproduced, and potentially challenged in indigenous language media texts. This study investigates gender representation in Hausa-language newspaper editorials published in Kano State between 2021 and 2024, examining how editorial discourse constructs women's social roles, political participation, and economic agency. A corpus of one hundred and twenty editorials from Hausa-language publications including Al-Mizan and Aminiya was assembled and subjected to critical discourse analysis drawing on Fairclough's three-dimensional framework and recent feminist discourse analysis methods. Lexical analysis of terms used to refer to women in editorial discourse reveals a predominance of relational referential terms including wife, mother, and daughter over agentive professional or political terms, even in editorials whose primary subject is women's political participation. Syntactic analysis of transactivity patterns shows women more frequently positioned as goals rather than actors in material process constructions. Modal analysis of recommendation-focused editorials reveals a persistent pattern of conditional framing of women's public roles, with agency endorsement consistently qualified by domestic priority conditions. Diachronic comparison across the four-year corpus shows limited evidence of representational change, suggesting stability in editorial gender ideology during the period. The study engages critically with debates about the relationship between Islamic discursive tradition and women's representation in northern Nigerian media. Implications for gender-responsive media policy are discussed. Keywords: critical discourse analysis, gender representation, Hausa newspaper, Kano State, media discourse.