Creating a Monster

The United States Democratic primary campaign of 2007–8 witnessed widespread misogynistic and anti-feminist portrayals of Senator Hillary Clinton across all types of media. In particular, Clinton was regularly depicted as monstrous and/or cyborgian, collapsing the boundaries between male and female, human and animal, and organism and machine. Such portrayals indicate a gender crisis in contemporary American culture which intensifies when women attempt to enter positions of power in the public arena. Research has shown that television, radio and print media coverage of American political candidates has consistently relied on gender stereotypes that undermine the campaigns of women politicians. However, portrayals of female candidates in online media remain largely unexplored. This paper discusses the implications of online media for women's political campaigns and for the democratic process itself. Through an analysis of digital imagery, I argue that simulations of Clinton circulating on the Internet during the primaries sought to produce a political reality in which Clinton's bid for the White House could be rendered improper and unnatural. In so doing, I suggest the continuing potential of online media to produce detrimental representations of female politicians.     

Women politicians in the UK press: not seen and not heard?

This article asks questions about the ways in which female politicians are depicted in press coverage. Previous research has explored the ways in which female politicians are constructed as “other” from the male politician norm, where “men were taken to stand for the whole human population.” Other work has shown that coverage emphasises their appearance or femininity. However, there has been less research on the visibility of women in politics in our media: women not only need to be involved in politics, they need to be seen to be doing political work. Through a content analysis of British press coverage using samples from the last twenty years, we examine the relative visibility of women MPs compared to men, the extent to which their voice is heard, and the context of the coverage. We argue this may well contribute to deterring women from taking part in parliamentary politics.     

Public to private and back again: the role of politicians’ wives in British election campaign coverage

The wives of politicians are a longstanding feature of electoral campaign coverage in the UK, and yet until now there has been no systematic study examining their role and mediated representation in political reporting. By drawing upon a sample of 630 newspaper items from five daily newspapers, this article will demonstrate that between 1918 and 2010 the representation of political wives has changed in three main ways. Firstly, their role in the campaign process changed from focusing more on their political function as active campaigners, to becoming more focused on their private lives. Secondly, the coverage has narrowed from focusing on a broad range of politicians’ wives, to being centred almost entirely on the spouses of political party leaders. The final change is that the press reportage of politicians’ spouses has become increasingly negative and critical of their presence on the campaign trail.     

Covering Clinton (2010–2015): meaning-making strategies in US magazine covers

With a trailblazing political career, Hillary Clinton has been the focus of media attention for decades. This study examines 21 US magazine covers of the former First Lady and 2016 Democratic presidential candidate from 2010 through 2015—prior to her official bid for presidency—to investigate what these depictions of Clinton say about her and the relationship between gender, power, and politics. Based on a visual discourse analysis, we found that Clinton is presented as power-hungry, emasculating, and a surreptitious politician, with these magazine covers both overtly and subtly warning citizens about her authenticity and ambition. Such coverage reinforces misogynistic representations that disadvantage female politicians.     

“I Dumped My Husband For a Turkish Toyboy”

In this article, we analyse how British tabloid newspapers represent relationships between mature British women and the younger Turkish toyboy lovers they meet (and sometimes look for) on their holiday; a practice that is often considered as the female counterpart to male sex tourism, albeit labelled differently as “romance tourism.” Employing a combination of thematic, lexical, narrative, and visual analysis, we examine how the British tabloids make sense of the contradicting social categories and power relations at play in these encounters, in particular with respect to age, gender, nation, and economic position. We consider these contradictions as typical for the intersectionality of gender identities, and use the tabloid stories about romance tourism as a means to study how such intersectionality becomes manifest in everyday practices. We find that the tabloids construct only one dimension of identity as key to women's lives, that is the one of motherhood and more abstractly of caring for others. In addition, they present women as highly vulnerable to exploitation by foreign, exotic others, who are portrayed either as evil con men or—in the sporadic upbeat, happy-ending story we found—as dependent and passive objects of women's desires.     

Social Construction of Public Intellectuals in Vietnam: Current Situation and Possible Changes

In the literature on political support, much empirical effort has been devoted to the link between economic performance and satisfaction with democracy. Nevertheless, analyses are often inconclusive in their findings. This study tries to renew the interest in the topic by using multilevel models to analyse 108 surveys from the repeated cross-sectional Eurobarometer data between 1985 and 2013, and focuses on southern European countries which share political and economic characteristics. Thus, the article links economic trends to changes in satisfaction with democracy in Greece, Italy, Portugal and Spain, also emphasizing the relevance of transformations in their political systems. The results demonstrate that low economic performance seems to negatively affect citizens’ satisfaction with democracy in the four countries and across the whole period analysed. This also holds true for different model specifications and when other potential factors such as the format and the performance of the institutional context are controlled for. By providing empirical evidence based on a longitudinal analysis, this article contributes to the wider debate on how economic conditions influence opinions about democracy.     

Homing blogs as ambivalent spaces for feminine agency

This article discusses a form of lifestyle blogging where women blog about their homes and everyday lives. In these homing blogs, self-representations are characteristically spatially demarcated within the private sphere of the home. As these repeated representations of women in their homes take place in the public space of the internet, homing blogs work towards naturalizing the home as a women’s sphere. Written and commented on mostly by other women, homing blogs represent a feminine form of self-expression and communication that functions as a discursive expression of ongoing social, economic, and cultural changes in affluent Western societies. In this article, Finnish versions of these homing blogs are analysed in the cultural and political context of contemporary Finland, and discussed as a form of intimate publics that reverses the gender politics of other historical, semi-public spaces for the exercise of women’s agency, such as the salon.     

A Stalled Revolution? Change in Women's Labor Force Participation during Child-Rearing Years,Europe and the United States 1996–2016

While women's labor force participation rates (LFPRs) in the United States stalled over the last quarter-century, European countries exhibited a variety of trajectories. We draw on demographic and gender theories of women's life course to understand changes in women's LFPR during their prime child-rearing years. We build expectations about how aggregate trends may be driven by shifts in the prevalence of key demographic events such as child-rearing (i.e., compositional) versus shifts in the association of these events with women's LFP (i.e., behavioral). We use data from the European Union Labour Force Surveys and the US Current Population Survey in Kitagawa–Blinder–Oaxaca decomposition models to decompose trends in women's LFPR from 1996 to 2016 across 18 countries by educational attainment, partnership status, and parental status for women aged 20–44. Compositional and behavioral shifts positively contribute to higher LFPR in most countries, but lower rates in several others. Behavioral change is not widely shared across groups of women. Partnered mothers without college degrees are the main contributors to behavioral change and show the greatest variability across countries. We suggest greater research attention to this “missing middle,” as their LFP is key to understanding change during this period.     

The effect of media sexism on women’s political ambition: evidence from a worldwide study

This paper presents results from one of the first global studies on the relationship between media sexism and the share of candidates for the lower chamber of national parliaments who are women. Data on media sexism come from the Global Media Monitoring Project, the most reliable worldwide source for media coverage from a gender perspective. The data on share of female political candidates come from the Inter-Parliamentary Union. The results show that that there is, even when controlling for the number of women in parliament, electoral system, gender quotas, level of human development, level of women’s rights, freedom from corruption, and media access, a significant relationship between media sexism—measured as (i) the share of all news subjects that are women and (ii) the share of all news subjects portrayed in the function of experts who are women—and the share of women candidates for parliament: the higher the level of media sexism, the lower the share of women candidates. The theory discussed zooms in on a bystander effect: We hypothesize that sexist portrayals of women in the media stifle ambition among women who, in a less sexist media environment, would be willing to stand as political candidates.     

From first daughter to first lady to first woman president: Park Geun-Hye’s path to the South Korean presidency

This paper examines the role of gender and familial ties in Park Geun-Hye’s political trajectory to become the first female president of South Korea. Even though her entry into politics was heavily indebted to her kinship ties to her father Park Jung-Hee, an authoritarian leader who led South Korea from 1963 to 1979, she has consolidated her position within the party and among Korean voters as a viable, competent politician over the last fifteen years. Analyzing Korean news reports, campaign pamphlets, and her autobiography, this study reveals that Park used stereotypes of women as problem solvers in difficult times to open doors for her political entry. During the presidential campaign in 2012, Park was adept at stressing her positive “feminine” traits, overcoming the perceived weaknesses of female politicians by emphasizing her long political credentials and strengths in diplomacy and national security issues. Park presented herself as the embodiment of both change and experience through her campaign slogan “the well-prepared female president” and the public reacted favorably to the appeal.     

When Jill jacks in

This study uses discourse analysis to examine representations found in Swedish newspapers of the murder of a Kurdish woman perpetrated by her father. It discloses representations of a media event that reiterate intersecting norms concerning ethnicity, gender and social class, which together delineate boundaries and significant core values for a hegemonic notion of the Swedish. Notions of ethnicity, class, and gender are articulated together, forming a dichotomy between a modern, tolerant Sweden and an obsolete, conceited other. In putting forward integration as the solution to honor-motivated male violence against women, the discourse presumes and reiterates the Swedish as signified by gender equality and, because social class and ethnicity are articulated together, integration becomes synonymous with social mobility. By presenting a culturalized interpretation of the killing, the discourse conceals possible connections between the male violence perpetrated by immigrants and the more common violence perpetrated by non-immigrants.     

The Seduction of the Surface: From Alice to Crash

Drawing on a qualitative analysis of Swedish newspaper debates in 1979 and 1995, this article examines how Swedish newspapers refer to biological sex difference as central to drinking practices. The study shows that women are a special category of concern in debate about gender and drinking in both 1979 and 1995. Further, it shows that Swedish newspapers draw upon biology in different ways in the two years. In 1979, debate about drinking during pregnancy and Fetal Alcohol Syndrome (FAS) is central and newspapers link biomedical research on FAS to the moral idea that mothers do anything to avoid harm to children. In 1995, debate about girls' drinking habits is central and newspapers link sex hormones and neurotransmitters to the moral idea that girls shouldn't “drink like men.” These differences are discussed in the context of Swedish media interest in evolutionary psychology and biomedical solutions to alcohol problems during the 1990s.     

Exploring Media Representations of Argentina's President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner

In the last decade, Latin America has seen several women taking up the top job. However, even as Presidents, far from being treated as equal with their male counterparts, they still suffer from media coverage filled with prejudice about their status as women. This article examines the media landscape portraying a woman in power; namely the president of Argentina, Cristina Fernández de Kirchner (CFK), by looking at news pieces published in two main national Argentinean newspapers, Clarín and La Nación. In order to document this trajectory, I identify three “roles” that media assigns to CFK: the Stupid Girl, which accounts for the questionings of her validity as a candidate; the Wicked Widow, which speaks of CFK after her husband died in 2010 through the lens of a revival of that stereotype; and finally a role that arises from the moment in which CFK catches media attention by becoming the first lady in 2003, the Frivolous Diva. The first section briefly introduces CFK's trajectory as a prominent leader. Then, the body of the article discusses the three roles introduced earlier. Finally, the conclusion argues that despite the media's power, sometimes they fail at getting their message across, making obvious their gendered discursive operation.     

Harassment Patterns and Risk Profile in Spanish Trans Persons

This article describes the harassment patterns and the risk profile in trans people living in Spain. A sample of 212 trans persons, aged 10–62, participated in this cross-sectional study. Results showed a high percentage of harassment (59.9%) and frequency of daily harassment (12.6%), especially verbal attacks (59%) that occurred in public spaces (49.1%) and within educational contexts (46.2%). Harassment is more prevalent in trans women than men. Those who disclose their gender identities at a younger age experience higher percentages and frequency of harassment than those who disclose at an older age. They also suffer more harassment of different types. The risk profile of harassment indicates that older trans women are more likely to suffer harassment than younger ones, and the risk decreases each year they delay their gender identity disclosure. The elimination of transphobic attitudes and the promotion of gender justice should be priority strategies in Spain.     

Absent Non-Fathers: Gendered representations of voluntary childlessness in Swedish newspapers

This article applies a media frame analysis in order to highlight representations of voluntary childlessness in Swedish newspapers. The analysis identifies how childfree couples are framed as carefree, fulfilled and content. Childfree women on the other hand are framed as struggling with problems, stereotypes and doubts. Childfree men are absent and implicitly framed as unconcerned and unaffected. Even in the only newspaper article that draws attention to men and voluntary childlessness the voice of the childfree man is absent. Instead of a childfree man a father of six is interviewed and presented as an exception. To explain these different frames this article argues that gender stereotypes, maternalism, pronatalism and heteronormativity influence who is constructed as newsworthy when news media report on voluntary childlessness. While the feminine identity and women's social role is conflated with motherhood, the link between fatherhood and masculinity is weaker. Because men's parenthood roles are indistinct so are men's roles as non-parents. As a result a father to a daughter in a previous relationship can be represented as part of a carefree and childfree couple. Consequently, childfree women are more newsworthy than childfree men, and a father of six is more newsworthy than a non-father.     

How Do Traditional Gender Roles Relate to Social Cohesion? Focus on Differences Between Women and Men

The aims of the present paper are to explore how traditional gender roles (focusing mainly on attitudes towards the division of labour between men and women) relate to social cohesion and to examine whether this relationship differs among men and women. The multi-dimensional concept of social cohesion is measured by two general components: a behavioural dimension (consisting of civic and political participation and the intensity of non-kin social relations) and an attitudinal dimension (institutional trust and solidarity). The analysis, based on the data of the European Values Study from Luxembourg, reveals that being more traditional is related to higher attitudinal cohesion: i.e. higher institutional trust and solidarity. Conversely, traditional attitudes are associated with less cohesive behaviour, namely with a lower intensity of non-kin social relations and political participation. Tradition-oriented women show significantly lower levels of political participation than their male counterparts, whereas traditional men tend to demonstrate less solidarity than women.     

Reporting The Women's Movement

This article examines and compares how four British and American newspapers reported the second-wave feminist movement during its most active political period, 1968–1982. Through the use of both content analysis and critical discourse analysis, this study reveals that despite socio-political differences, both US (The New York Times, the Chicago Tribune) and UK (The Times, Daily Mirror) newspapers used a similar range of discourses when addressing the women's movement and its members. While coverage overall can best be described as fragmented and contradictory, I argue that on the surface, there was significantly more “positive” or supportive articles on the women's movement than previous scholars have noted. However, these news stories rarely addressed the ways in which capitalism and patriarchy oppress women as a group, and often created a demarcation between “legitimate” and “de-legitimate” feminists, the latter being anyone who deviates from traditional feminine norms. Such constructions therefore were not only politically incapable of challenging women's oppression, but helped construct feminism as a dirty word, a connotation which still exists today. This paper will also address the emergence and eventual dominance of oppositional discourses, examining the patriarchal and capitalist ideologies used in both countries to rebuff the movement, its members and their goals.     

The Cultural Functions and Social Potential of Queer Monuments: A Preliminary Inventory and Analysis

Public monuments function as cultural agents, reifying dominant public narratives or fostering change. Either way, their representation of people and events intervene in public discourse and contribute to cultural, economic, political, and social environments. Queer monuments, defined here as heritage sites that honor gender and sexual minorities, represent communities that have often been excised in dominant public narratives. This article provides a preliminary global inventory of queer monuments and describes three of their major functions: (1) to provide visibility and reduce stigma; (2) to educate the public on the abuse and attempted extermination of gender and sexual minorities; and (3) to stimulate public debate and discourse about gender and sexual minority rights. This still rare type of monument is growing more common and prompting more active and equitable representations in public space. Queer monuments have the potential of lessening stigma and improving the lives of sexual and gender minorities.     

Media and the Intersectional Other

This article presents the findings of an intersectional study on migrant women on German television. Besides content and textual analyses, we conducted focus groups with audiences and interviews with migrant media workers. As the representation of Others was explored through the nodes of production, consumption, and identity, a complicated intersectional practice emerged. We found the televised representations of migrant women to be dominated by (often veiled) women as signifiers of non-integration but also by instances when gendered ethnicity was used as a marketable attribute. The audiences and producers employed various distancing strategies: they criticized specific programs for blatant stereotyping as much as didactic counter-stereotyping while downplaying systemic shortfalls of the coverage. These distancing strategies were intensified by the acceptance of individualized ideologies of success and commodified logics of media production. Ultimately, class appeared as the central demarcating category. On German television a problematic class distinction was articulated through ethnic and gender difference. Female migrants were often “othered” as lower-class. This class discourse absolved middle-class viewers and media workers from engaging in the systemic struggles over female/migrant identities, thus undermining the potential for gender and migrant solidarity and for the dynamic creation of cultural citizenship as a mode of belonging.     

“I'm Nobody”

Television and film writer Joss Whedon has produced a number of popular culture works which explore representations of what female bodies are seen to be capable of and how these representations affect what female bodies can do. Texts such as Buffy the Vampire Slayer (1997–2003), Serenity (2005), and Dollhouse (2009–2010) are as much celebrated for subverting gender and genre conventions as they are criticized for reinforcing sexualized images of women and violence. Instead of approaching Whedon's texts in terms of their representations of gender, and how feminist or otherwise these representations are, this paper explores the ways in which Whedon's texts suggest that subjectivity is textually and discursively constructed. In particular, I will stage a reading of his latest television program, Dollhouse, as a representation of the somatechnical construction of bodies and identity. Somatechnics refers to the inextricable connection between the soma, the material corporeality of bodies, and the techne or techniques and technologies through which bodily being is produced and lived. By making visible the somatechnics of bodily being and the ways gender and embodiment are experienced through and produced by cultural and discursive technologies, Dollhouse emphasizes the role of power in the construction of embodied identity rather than something which always or inevitably oppresses and constrains bodies gendered as female.