Linda Trimble

Melodrama and Gendered Mediation

When they wrested party leadership positions from men in what is widely described as leadership “coups,” the leadership challenges initiated by Helen Clark and Jenny Shipley in New Zealand and Julia Gillard in Australia were prime-time media spectacles featuring live television broadcasts and sensationalized opinion and analysis. This paper analyzes television reportage of these three leadership challenges and argues that while the news coverage was shaped by contextual factors, it also evidenced gendered mediation—news frames and evaluations that reflect gender-based assumptions about the performance of power. Television news scripted these events as prime-time melodramas, employing violent coup discourses and sensationalized plot lines to tell the stories. As a result, media coverage highlighted the threat of the feminine, reinforced the public man/private woman binary, and re-inscribed patriarchal norms of political leadership.

Is It Personal? Gendered Mediation in Newspaper Coverage of Canadian National Party Leadership Contests, 1975–2012:

Our study examines the phenomenon of personalization in news coverage of candidates for the leadership of Canadian national political parties. Because the politicization of the personal through newspaper coverage of bodies and intimate lives has different meanings for women and men politicians, we argue that it is important to account for gender differences in levels of personalization. Our analysis of the Globe and Mail newspaper reporting of thirteen party leadership races held between 1975 and 2012 includes eleven competitive women candidates, four of whom won the leadership contest. Conducting a content analysis of 2,463 newspaper articles published over the course of this thirty-seven-year period facilitates comparison of the levels of personalized coverage over time, by leadership contest, and by candidate gender and success. Findings reveal that the amount of personal coverage did not increase over time, as the personalization literature hypothesizes. However, reporting was significantly more likely to “make it personal” for women candidates, as suggested by the literature on media coverage of women politicians. We argue that gendered mediation is largely driving the personalization of political reporting in the Canadian national context

Jumping the Shark

What is the effect on media coverage of politics when political actors conform to market aspects of media logic by “jumping the shark”—staging dramatic political events to fit the demands of the media—thus reflecting what Strömbäck characterizes as the fourth phase of mediatization? Our paper answers this question with a large-scale, longitudinal analysis of how The Globe and Mail, Canadas leading national newspaper, covered 13 Canadian party leadership contests held between 1975 and 2012. We analyzed changes in the amount and style of reporting over the course of this 37-year time period, finding that the Globe has provided less coverage of party leadership competitions overall. The diminishing number of stories printed on the subject increasingly feature opinion writing, photos, combative language and the elevation of the individual candidate over the party organization. Our findings support a key element of the mediatization thesis: the shift from political logic to media logic as an organizing principle for political communications.

Still Different After All These Years?: A Comparison of Female and Male Canadian MPs in the Twentieth Century

This article compares the backgrounds, political experiences and social characteristics of men and women who served in the Canadian House of Commons during the twentieth century. This examination is based on two hypotheses: (1) that the former polarisation of female and male politicians has given way to harmonisation; (2) that harmonisation has occurred because womens profiles have changed to become more like those of men. This study finds that a straightforward linear model of initial polarisation between women and men followed by a period of convergence resulting in harmonisation receives only partial support. Gender continues to act as a causal variable shaping the characteristics and careers of federal politicians, but its effects are complex and multi-dimensional.

Politicizing Bodies: Hegemonic Masculinity, Heteronormativity, and Racism in News Representations of Canadian Political Party Leadership Candidates

Based on the argument that bodies are politicized when their gendered, sexualized, and racialized features are woven into mediated political discourses, our study investigates newspaper coverage of candidates for the leadership of Canadian national political parties. A systematic intersectional analysis of reporting on 30 candidates who competed in 13 leadership contests found that only certain bodies are seen to embody and personify political leadership. High-profile women, a gay man, and a Black woman were noticed for their visual dissonance from the prototypical body of the political leader, as news coverage highlighted their physical characteristics in ways that marked them as aberrant and inauthentic in their desire for political power. Men with physiques incompatible with idealized masculinity were also presented as incapable of offering commanding performances on the political stage. We conclude that deeply held cultural norms, based on hegemonic masculinity, heteronormativity, and racism, are expressed in news mediation of political leadership competitions.

Representation of Canadian Women at the Cabinet Table

This examination of the appointment of elected women to Canadian federal, provincial and territorial cabinets from 1917 to 2002 analyzes both the numbers of women appointed to cabinets and the nature of their cabinet posts, revealing that while female legislators have had a competitive advantage over their male counterparts when it comes to cabinet representation, the allocation of cabinet duties continues to reflect a gendered division of labour.

Julia Gillard and the Gender Wars

The Australian news media used the metaphor of the gender war(s) to describe Julia Gillards political strategies and speech acts in the final nine months of her term as that nations first woman prime minister. In particular, the metaphor was mobilized in response to Gillards October 9, 2012, parliamentary speech on sexism and misogyny. Based on a critical discourse analysis of the gender wars allegory as it was applied to Gillard by three Australian newspapers, my article analyzes the meanings revealed by metaphoric constructions of the former prime ministers speeches as unusual and unjust forms of political warfare. I argue that the trope of the gender wars cast Gillards political tactics as a violation of deeply held cultural norms about appropriate behavior on the so-called political battlefield, and it worked both to discipline Gillard for raising issues of sexism and gender inequality in politics and to bracket gendered power relations out of everyday understandings of political competition.

Gender, Competitiveness, and Candidate Visibility in Newspaper Coverage of Canadian Party Leadership Contests:

Are women politicians who mount competitive campaigns for high political office as visible and prominent in news coverage of their candidacies as their male competitors? Few studies have systematically or longitudinally investigated the relationship between candidate gender, competitiveness, and media visibility during election or party leadership campaigns. Moreover, studies of media visibility tend to focus exclusively on the presence of candidates in news stories, as measured by one or more mentions per story. Examining six textual and visual elements in Globe and Mail reporting of eleven Canadian national leadership campaigns held between 1975 and 2012, we discover that it is candidate competitiveness and novelty and not candidate gender that influences the media visibility of party leadership hopefuls. Canada provides a useful case study when exploring the relationship between gender and media visibility because many women have sought, and four have won, the leadership of national parties.

Political battlefield: aggressive metaphors, gender, and power in news coverage of Canadian party leadership contests

ABSTRACT Our study analyzed aggressive figures of speech used by the Globe and Mail to describe the personas, performances, and prospects of women and men leadership candidates for the (Progressive) Conservative Party of Canada in 1976, 1993, and 2004. We codified four distinct forms of power communicated by the aggressive metaphors—power over, power to, power with, and power as—to investigate what these battleground metaphors communicate about gender and political power. Our content analysis and discourse analysis of the phrases applied to each of the candidates revealed gendered assumptions about political leadership. All three women candidates in our study—Flora MacDonald (1976), Kim Campbell (1993), and Belinda Stronach (2004)—were discussed as formidable foes, capable of using considerable force in their efforts to win. Indeed, Campbell became Canada’s first and only woman prime minister. Yet, much of the aggressive mediation confirms the gendered mediation thesis that aggressive metaphors exclude women and reconstitute politics as masculine. Many of the combative phrases cast doubt on a woman candidate’s ability to successfully compete on the political battlefield.