Militarisierung, Kriminalisierung und Xenophobie

Zur diskursiven Konstruktion der asiatischen Hornisse im französischen Mediendiskurs

Abstract

The article examines how the Asian hornet (Vespa velutina) is represented linguistically and visually in French media discourse. It focuses on the question of how the media construct this invasive species as a threat and, in doing so, reproduce anthropocentric patterns of interpretation. The study is based on a thematically focused corpus of 138 French-language online texts published between 2009 and 2025, comprising a total of 70,617 words. The corpus includes national and regional press articles, municipal websites, and contributions from professional associations and beekeeping organisations. Methodologically, the article combines critical discourse analysis, corpus-assisted analysis of collocations, naming patterns and metaphors, as well as image-linguistic analysis of selected visual representations. The article shows that French media discourse on the Asian hornet is strongly normative and anthropocentric. Three dominant interpretative patterns are identified: first, militarisation, in which the hornet appears as a hostile intruder and its spread as an invasion or territorial attack; second, criminalisation, in which it is constructed as a culpable perpetrator and the honey bee as a victim; and third, a xenophobic-nativist framing, in which origin, foreignness and threat are semantically closely intertwined. At the same time, the study shows that, although a marginal counter-discourse does exist, it remains quantitatively insignificant. Overall, then, the dominant pattern is a media construction of the Asian hornet as a threatening actor that society is called upon to combat.