Emily Harmer

Julie and the Cybermums: Marketing and Women Voters in the UK 2010 General Election

Certain groups of female voters have long been recognized as potentially vital in deciding the outcome of elections. This paper explores and compares efforts made by the British Conservatives to focus on addressing the concerns of mothers with children. The party made a significant attempt to cultivate this kind of woman during the 2010 campaign through the use of a layperson, Julie, whose personal testimony and image was central to this effort. Here comparisons are drawn with the intriguingly similar figure of Sylvia used by the Conservatives 40 years before. Discussion also focuses on another important gendered aspect of the election relating to the growth of new social media platforms and especially how they are represented through the still-important medium of agenda-setting newspapers to promote certain perspectives that can be highly partisan in their selectivity if not their intent.

The visual challenge of celebrity politics? Female politicians in Grazia

In early 2010, celebrity magazine Grazia published a nine-page photo-shoot of female candidates for the main contending parties in the UK general election. The spread was immediately controversial: mainstream newspapers happily referred their readers to the magazine (e.g. Rawi 2010; Singh 2010). Feminist critics and bloggers, however, condemned the publication for its sexist focus on appearance (e.g. Kainradl 2010; McFaith 2010). However, simply celebrating or criticising this kind of coverage where female politicians are concerned can be reductive. The articulation of politics in celebrity culture has become a simple fact of political life that cannot be reversed or avoided. The challenge for critical analysts and political practitioners alike is to understand in which forms and contexts celebrity coverage functions as a relevant and helpful means of communication for politicians, and in which style and circumstances it devalues them and their office or candidacy. In general, the celebrity coverage of female politicians involves gender-specific risks because ‘it confines female politicians to notions of femininity which are not easily transposed to the political field’ (van Zoonen 2006, p. 291). Celebrity culture of the past, tied firmly to the Hollywood star system, was built on stable notions of female beauty, enigmatic appeal and corporeal perfection. Already in 1977, French political scientist Roger-Gerard Schwartzenberg noted that while male politicians can import some elements of the star system by performing ‘charming leadership’, this is not an option for a female politician: ‘People would accuse her of frivolity, of flirtation’ (1977, p. 93)1. Current female celebrity may seem less restrictive because of its continuous selfreflexivity and play with excessive femininity (see, for example, Madonna and Lady Gaga’s celebrity images). However, female celebrity is also ever more performed as sexualised spectacle, to the extent that many critics now claim that alternative imaginations of the female body are hard to come by (Papadopolous 2010). The current prerequisites of female celebrity, built on continuously changing exploitations of the sexualised body, provide a complex and often unfavourable environment for female politicians who mainly neither have the age nor the body to find a comfortable and accepted place there. The Grazia photo-shoot is thus one of young female candidates, of whom no one has a visibly ‘deviant’ body, and whose average age is just 31 years. British political parties have been routinely using women’s magazines to appeal to female voters during election campaigns. Margaret Thatcher, for instance, was interviewed by the publication Women’s Own in 1987. The production of glamorous celebrity photographs, however, seems to be a recent development.

‘Are you tough enough?’ Performing gender in the UK leadership debates 2015

Leaders’ debates have become a feature of contemporary election campaigning. While an historical feature of the US landscape, in the United Kingdom, they are a more recent phenomenon. The second UK 2015 general election leadership debate comprised seven candidates, of which three were women. Using qualitative thematic analysis and adopting the notion that gender is ‘performed’, we explore three features of coverage of the debate. First, the ways in which the debate itself was constructed as a masculine activity through a series of highly gendered metaphors; second, how newspaper frames reinforced gendered notions of masculinity and femininity in respect of political leadership; and third, how the success of women in the debates was constructed as the emasculation of their male rivals. Crucially, we focus not just on the ‘feminisation’ of women in the political arena, but also on the ways in which masculinity is posited as the criterion for the evaluation of politicians of all genders.

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

Abstract 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.

Pink Buses, Leaders’ Wives and “The Most Dangerous Woman in Britain”: Women, the Press and Politics in the 2015 Election

Emily Harmer reflects on the limitations of the coverage devoted to women in the 2015 campaign. Aside from a dearth in reporting, the chapter explores some of the inherently sexist language in popular newspaper representations of female politicians. This was self-evident in the treatment of Nicola Sturgeon, who was widely regarded as having performed well in the (and her) first leaders’ debate appearance. The most prominent woman in the campaign, Sturgeon subsequently received a torrent of criticism- much of it gendered- from sections of the print media that constructed her as a threat. Female representatives from other parties were comparatively marginalised although Harmer does note and reflect on the not insignificant media attention devoted to the male leaders’ spouses as well as women citizens in a more general sense.

Women in Politics and Media: Perspectives from Nations in Transition:

coercive nature (Bakir, submitted). Rather than exploring how intelligence elites seek to shape public debates when faced with a momentous whistle-blowing event, the editors utilise Dayan and Katz’s (1992) global media events as a unifying theme. Unfortunately, this is not a convincing unifying theme for this collection, not least because Snowden’s leaks do not constitute a pre-planned institutional event (unless wild initial charges that Snowden was working for the Russians/Chinese all along are borne out). A more productive route would have taken a deeper dive into the other unifying themes presented by the editors: namely, the state-journalism relationship, and global investigative journalism Nonetheless, this is a valuable book. It is written in accessible language. It brings clarity to a complex debate concerning data surveillance, privacy and security. It has transnational content rather than focusing on the United Kingdom and United States (where most academic attention has hitherto been). Its concentration on opinion journalism usefully complements existing published studies on Snowden and mass surveillance (that focus on hard news stories). This book will interest scholars of journalism and digital mass surveillance, journalism and the security state, and global news agendas.

Representations of Women Voters in Newspaper Coverage of UK Elections 1918–2010

Contemporary research has shown the propensity for women voters to be constructed in highly gendered terms in media coverage of electoral campaigns. They are represented as mothers and wives, whose familial roles impact on their political priorities. This chapter will show that these trends have their roots in historic election coverage by presenting an analysis of British newspaper coverage between 1918 (the first election that women were able to vote and stand as candidates) and 2010. The chapter draws upon a quantitative and qualitative analysis of five national newspapers’ election coverage. The analysis shows women have been consistently represented as wives whose vote reflects that of their husbands, and as mothers whose political concerns are almost exclusively bound up with the health and well-being of their families. Much of the time, they are represented as being predominantly concerned about the cost of living, until the 1970s when health and welfare became the biggest concern. Despite some important changes, the persistence of heavily gendered representations in the public construction of politics is limiting as it serves to portray women in simplistic terms as a homogenous mass which excludes women who do not conform to these stereotypes.

Seen and Not Heard: The Popular Appeal of Postfeminist Political Celebrity

This chapter aims to contribute to the wider debate outlined in this book and conducted in the world beyond about the nature of contemporary feminism by looking at the politics of being a woman in electoral news coverage. Despite news coverage being an aspect of formal politics, the chapter focuses not on formal political actors (women politicians), but on political leaders’ spouses who despite having no role in the political process nevertheless received unprecedented levels of attention during the most recent UK election. The spouses of politicians have maintained some presence in political campaigns in British politics throughout the twentieth century and into the twenty-first. The 2010 UK general election was particularly interesting in this regard because it marked the first time when these unelected women received a higher proportion of electoral media coverage than women candidates (Harmer, forthcoming). Scholars have often attributed the attention paid to politicians’ spouses as a consequence of increased attention on the private lives and personalities of political leaders (Langer, 2011; Stanyer, 2013). Although the spouses of political leaders are not necessarily political actors in the traditional sense, this chapter will demonstrate that the newspaper coverage of the 2010 election served to cast them as political celebrities who were intended to appeal to women voters.

Women Political Leaders and the Media

This book would be an ideal text for undergraduate students of political communication, designed as it is with ‘questions’ at the end of each chapter. However, these questions seem to be checking that the reader has been paying attention rather than directing them to more useful developments of the issues raised. One of the nagging questions at the end of this book, which Wheeler offers no answer to, is why it is primarily male CP1s who are successful. There is fleeting mention of Angela Merkel and Hillary Clinton, and a longer discussion of CP2s such as Audrey Hepburn and Angelina Jolie, but this is primarily in terms of their ‘glamour’ juxtaposed against personal risk. This is perhaps a question for further study, while Wheeler’s book remains a very engaging, informative survey.

Feminism in the News: Representations of the Women's Movement Since the 1960s

construct a theoretical framework to analysegirls’ agency. In particular, Ringrosehighlights the need to theorise agencywhilst deconstructing neoliberal discourses of the “choosing” rational subject. Chapter five (“Rethinking Debates on Girls’ Agency”) demonstrates that the “Foucauldian, governmentality inspired approach” (p. 67) has offered an important framework to grasp how neoliberal subjects are governed through discourses of “choice.” Ringrose does, however, note that these Foucauldian approaches can err too far on the side of discursive determinism. Chapter Six, therefore, draws on a range of theoretical traditions to construct a new approach to researching girls’ agency. In particular, her framework encompasses Judith Butler’s theories of subjectivation, psychosocial research, and Deleuzian analytical tools, such as schizoanalysis and affective assemblages. By putting intodialoguedifferentmethodological perspectives, Ringrose capably bridges several theoretical traditions. Chapters Seven and Eight set this new approach into motion by applying it to the analysis of empirical data. Chapter Seven examines how racially and economically marginalised girls negotiate girls’ friendships and entry into dating cultures; and Chapter Eight explores girls’ engagements with sexualised media content, particularly in relation to online social networking sites. These two chapters complement the discerning analysis of the wider media and cultural context (Chapters Two–Four), aptly apply the theoretical approach outlined in previous chapters, and represent the voices of “real” girls. Reflecting the earlier call for an analysis that can capture constraint and agency, both chapters challenge postfeminist notions about gender equality by, for example, illustrating the regulatory force of concerns over appearance. At the same time, they highlight places of disruption where girls navigate sexism in highly creative ways. Chapter Nine, the conclusion, brings the threads of the book together by reflecting on some possible responses to the gendered, sexual, classed, and raced inequalities highlighted in the book. Skilfully using several theoretical traditions, analysing media, policy, and education discourses, and drawing on empirical research, the book provides a compelling analysis and will be a key text for research on postfeminism, gender, and education.