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Comprising the most current scholarship from leading experts in the fields of
gender and media studies, Gendered Transformations offers readers a new
foundation from which to reexamine traditional perspectives on gender and
media. Organized into sections concerning representational politics, embodied
performance, and social constructions of reality, these essays explore a wide
variety of concerns from a similarly wide variety of perspectives. As Liesbet
van Zoonen states in the introduction to this volume: 'In the current cultural
condition of multimediality and intertextuality it makes more sense,[…]
[to] see how particular media and media combinations are articulated
with [particular issues] in situated diachronic and synchronic contexts.' A
thought-provoking contribution to a number of disparate fields, Gendered
Transformations offers a rare interdisciplinary approach to gender that
reflects the most recent developments in media theory and methodology.
Tonny Krijnen is Assistant Professor in the Media and Communication Department of the
Erasmus University Rotterdam, Netherlands. Claudia Alvares is Associate Professor in
Culture and Communication at Lusofona University, Portugal. Sofie Van Bauwel is Assistant
Professor in the Department of Communication Studies at the University of Ghent, Belgium.
. ,-&-)& *%(++%
Gendered Transformations
Theory and Practices on Gender and Media
European Communication Research
and Education Association (ECREA)
This series consists of books arising from the intellectual work of ECREA members. Books
address themes relevant to the ECREA's interests; make a major contribution to the theory,
research, practice and/or policy literature; are European in scope; and represent a diversity
of perspectives. Book proposals are refereed.
Series Editors
Nico Carpentier
François Heinderyckx
First published in the UK in 2011 by Intellect,
The Mill, Parnall Road, Fishponds, Bristol, BS16 3JG, UK
First published in the USA in 2011 by Intellect, The University of Chicago Press,
1427 E. 60th Street, Chicago, IL 60637, USA
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval
system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying,
recording, or otherwise, without written permission.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Preface 1
Liesbet van Zoonen
Chapter 1: Silent Witness: News Sources, the Local Press and the
Disappeared Woman 9
Karen Ross
Conclusion 221
Claudia Alvares, Sofie van Bauwel and Tonny Krijnen
Index 227
Nicole Kidman, the famous Australian actress, thinks that the standard Hollywood
portrayal of women as weak sex objects probably contributes to violence against them.
The actress is a good-will ambassador for the UN Development Fund for Women
(UNIFEM) and testified in October 2009 for a United States House committee that
investigates possible international legislation about violence against women. Kidman
said furthermore that Hollywood has also produced less demeaning portrayals of
women, and that she herself tries not to contribute to these images: 'I can't be responsible
for all of Hollywood, but I can certainly be responsible for my own career.' News media
immediately picked up the celebrity's critique and published it widely, yet often adding
a comment about Kidman's own performance in feeble roles or as sexy celebrity. On the
internet, reactions were more cynical, and 'hypocrite' was one of the friendlier terms
used to discuss Kidman's statement.1 When Kidman appeared in the same month on the
cover of Gentleman's Quarterly, dressed in black lingerie only, that did little to enhance
her credibility.
This little incident demonstrates the complexity of discussions about gender and
media in the twenty-first century. To begin with Kidman's straightforward connection
between media images and real-life violence against women used to be contested among
academics and feminists as the 1980s controversy about the slogan 'Porn is the theory,
rape is the practice' testifies. Yet, nowadays, serious news media support such a claim, as
they did when the American Psychological Association published their report about the
sexualization of girls in 2007. Then too, the press release saying that sexualized images
harm girls and young women found an easy way into mainstream news media, and
governmental task forces have been set up around the world to prevent possible further
damage (Van Zoonen & Duits, under review). This consensual uptake of the harmful
Gendered Transformations
media effects paradigm does not mean academic media research has finally managed to
prove such negative influence, on the contrary. Traditional effects researchers are moving
away from the effects paradigm towards a mediation model in which media exposure is
only one factor among many (e.g. Slater, 2007), while cultural studies researchers have
always focused on situated uses and interpretations of sexualized images (e.g. Attwood,
2005). A second complicating factor comes from Kidman's double articulation as a
women's activist and a Hollywood celebrity. As the best paid actress of Hollywood she
is deeply entrenched in the cultural codes of the industry and thus has a visual presence
that is inevitably typified by style, glamour and sexiness. Moreover, a number of her
film roles are not easily qualified as portraying strong anti-stereotypical women. The
likely sincerity of her motives notwithstanding these factors in concert work against her
authenticity as an activist and her claims about the harm Hollywood might cause (see also
Street, 2002). Finally, the incident shows the essential intertextuality and multimediality
of contemporary culture: in this case news, film, internet and glossy together comprise
the arena in which Kidman's claims are made, interpreted and contested.
Feminist media scholars trying to make sense of the Kidman episode are confronted
with a claim about their academic turf that is at the intersection of scholarly controversy,
celebrity culture, gender conventions and political opportunism; a sheer insurmountable
challenge. The pioneers in their field certainly had a much easier task. When Betty
Friedan wrote The Feminine Mystique in 1967 she singled out women's magazines and
their advertisements as the prime media responsible for perpetuating the myth of the
happy housewife. The Feminine Mystique not only became one of the sparks that set off
the second wave of the women's movement, the book also inspired more research about
the media and their contribution to what was then usually called 'sex roles'. Content
analysis was the method of choice at the time, and advertising images popular research
targets. Invariably, these early projects found that the media portrayed women and men
in stereotypical roles and did not offer the alternative images and examples that would
stimulate and support women´s emancipation. Feminism in the academy and in the
activist arena was firmly intertwined and many a research project was part of monitoring
and lobbying the media industries.
When I entered the field in 1985 this relatively straightforward situation had
already began to crumble: a clear split had emerged between the 'sex roles' approach
that had found a home in social psychology, and the 'gender identity' approach that
informed cultural studies. Both types of scholars, especially the younger ones like
myself at the time, had no self-evident relation with activism outside the academy. The
media landscape, however, had not changed much yet; in the Netherlands and most
of continental Western Europe we only had public broadcasting, two channels with
late afternoon and evening air time; the magazine market was diversified but limited;
national and local newspapers still thrived. All in all the landscape was easily surveyed,
and it seemed as if the situation was ideal for the field of gender and media studies to
develop into 'normal science' as Thomas Kuhn meant it some 50 years ago: a relatively
stable object of study, clearly demarcated disciplinary boundaries and communities
of dedicated scholars across the globe which would meet and exchange research
in the gender sections of the international communication organizations, with the
International Association for Media and Communication Research (IAMCR) covering
a truly global community, the International Communication Association attracting
mainly US scholars. The main research themes were clear and concerned production,
texts and audiences. Thus, we knew that in general women were under-represented
as professionals in all media industries both in quantitative and qualitative terms, but
many specific sites of media production had not been analysed yet. We also knew that
media texts, whether you would analyse them through content, semiotic, narrative or
discourse analysis contained stereotypes, told male-dominated stories and used women
as visual spectacle, but there were little historical or comparative analyses yet. And we
began to find out, through ethnographically oriented audience studies that women and
girls appropriated these texts in manifold and contradictory ways, although we tended
to highlight their resistant readings rather than their confirmatory ones. This was more
or less the situation when working on Feminist Media Studies in the early 1990s: it was
entirely possible to summarize the field through 'canonical' research like Janice Radway's
Reading the Romance (1984), or Ien Ang's Watching Dallas (1985) and new big research
projects were building on that legacy, such as Ann Gray's study of women's use of video
recorders (1992) or Joke Hermes' study of readers of women's magazines (1995). It
was also entirely possible to identify which areas were ready for more research and the
accumulation of feminist media knowledge. There was a real sense of excitement in the
small community of feminist media scholars and our work was beginning to feed into
other areas of gender studies on the one hand, and media studies on the other.
The mid-1990s, however, was also the period when public broadcasting monopolies in
Western Europe were crushed by deregulation, commercial channels found their way to
increasingly fragmented audiences and the internet became user-friendly and ubiquitously
popular. For the development of feminist media studies into a solid and acknowledged
research enterprise, these developments were devastating. Within two years, say 1994–
1995, our field of research had multiplied, but most of our students thought the internet
more interesting and commercial television more fun than the old world of newspapers
(dull), public television (passé) and magazines (so 1980s). Moreover, didn't we know all
there was to know about these old media already? What more could we find about the
stereotypes of women in advertising? Who was still interested in yet another study of
the marginal position of women in the media workforce? Hadn't we already proven that
women were active audiences, appropriating degrading images and stories into their own
relevant and less damaging meanings? Didn't this wonderful new digital medium deliver
us the means to transform these active meanings into real material media products of
our own, or at least to break away from the confines of dichotomous embodied gender
Gendered Transformations
discourse. Only some of us (myself not always included, I admit) doggedly and slowly
moved forward on the track of 'normal' science, specifying our general understanding
of the manifold ways in which media limit and enable the progress of women, into ever
more situated projects. While the steady flow of publications in the journal Feminist
Media Studies shows much of that work, it seemed, nevertheless, as if the kind of big and
exciting publications that defined the naissance of the field almost disappeared, unless
they concerned the internet. This was as much a result of the compelling appeal of the
new over the old, as it was of research councils and other funders massively moving their
money to the challenges that digital technologies offered to society, culture, politics…
the economy, health care, education…entertainment, work, business…and so on, and
so forth.
I have often wondered why my 1994 book Feminist Media Studies (about the old
media without a word about the internet) just keeps selling and selling and is still, sixteen
years after publication, widely used as a textbook for gender and media courses. It makes
me tremendously happy, of course, but it is strange that a book from 1994, covering
work from way before that, keeps its relevance, especially when everyone agrees that
the world has changed dramatically in the past decade, not only due to digitization
and commercialization, but also due to the fall of the Berlin Wall, massive migration
movements and, unmistakably, 9/11 and its aftermath. All that is solid melts, but the
field for feminist media studies remains stable? Very unlikely. One issue which did
come up with some prominence was that of postfeminism, identifying the perverse
transformation of feminist ideals into neoliberal consumer models of femininity (e.g.
McRobbie, 2008). Yet, with the benefit of hindsight, it may be that the changes in the 'old'
media were so much less spectacular in comparison to those that the internet turned out
on a day to day basis, that they were only visible to an ever-diminishing group of feminist
media scholars.
It seems as if now, with the normalization of the internet and the convergence of
offline and online culture and practice, our field is beginning to recover; we see some
movement to take up the 'old' issues again. The report of the APA about the sexualization
of girls (2007) has many flaws and doesn't carry my kind of feminism, but it did bring
the objectification of the female body back on academic, policy and funders' agendas.
The recently launched journal Girlhood Studies may suffer from a telling amnesia when
it comes to acknowledging the field's history (Duits & Van Zoonen, 2009), but it does
offer a new and appealing outlet for traditional feminist work. The volume at hand is a
similar example of 'forward to the past'. It is the initiative of a group of young feminist
media scholars who academically grew up with the internet and postfeminism, but
who are also old enough to know the outcomes and challenges of earlier periods; a
prerequisite for producing work that acknowledges both the new complexities of the
field as that it builds on previous insights. The included chapters present a combination
of classic topics appearing under new social and cultural conditions and approached
with innovative methodologies (e.g. equality in the media workforce); of topics that
always received less attention than their societal relevance justifies (women, media,
politics); of well theorized but less often actually researched topics (gender identities
in the mediated settings of television and internet). Significantly, the volume does not
structure the chapters on the basis of medium types, although this would have been easy,
with the press, television and internet being the main carriers discussed. In the current
cultural condition of multimediality and intertextuality it makes more sense, however,
to be driven by particular issues like the ones in this book (politics, performativity,
socialization), and see how particular media and media combinations are articulated
with them in situated diachronic and synchronic contexts. The volume thus offers a
much needed research-based accumulation through which we can begin to understand
the new challenges, and support Nicole Kidman…or not.
– Loughborough, 2009
1. See http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/10/22/nicole-kidman-hollywood-c_n_329
709.html for a juxtaposition of the news with sexy images of Kidman, and http://de-
bad/ for the hypocrite discussion. Both retrieved on 7 November 2009.
Attwood, F., 'What do people do with porn? Qualitative research into the consumption,
use and experience of pornography and other explicit media', Sexuality and Culture,
9:2 (2005), pp. 1095–5143.
Duits, L. & Van Zoonen, L., 'Avoiding amnesia: 30+ years of girls' studies', Feminist Media
Studies, 9:1 (2009), pp. 111–115.
Gray, A., Video Playtime. The Gendering of a Leisure Technology, London: Routledge,
Gendered Transformations
Radway, J., Reading the Romance, Chapell Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press,
Slater, M., 'Reinforcing spirals: The mutual influence of media selectivity and media effects
and their impact on individual behaviour and social identity', Communication
Theory, 17:3 (2007), pp. 281–303.
Street, J., 'Bob, Bony and Tony B: The popular artist as politician', Media, Culture &
Society, 24 (2002), pp. 433–441.
Van Zoonen, L. & Duits, L., 'Coming to terms with sexualization' (under review).
Gendered Transformations
Chapter One:
Silent Witness: News Sources, the Local Press and the
Disappeared Woman
Karen Ross
In a media environment in which most broadcast news items are around eight seconds
long, on the grounds that this is the typical attention span of the average adult, it is perhaps
unsurprising that journalists have moved away from traditional forms of political reportage
towards an interpretive rather than a 'straight' reporting style. News stories have become less
about what was actually said in any given parliament by a particular politician, and more
about what the journalist thinks such utterances mean. While selection processes have
always played a part when decisions need to be made about what should go on the front
page or be included in the evening news on TV, the contemporary news media landscape
has seen a real shift in both what actually counts as news and whose voice should be heard.
Our contemporary fascination with celebrity means that the views of a pop star on a
political issue of the day are given equal weight to those of an elected parliamentarian, all of
which are then refracted through a journalistic lens which extracts the most 'entertaining'
elements and puts them out as the day's news. While this analysis can be regarded as a little
cynical, there is nonetheless a real problem with political news discourse in the twenty-
first century given that it persistently seeks out sleaze over substance but, at the same time,
continues to prefer elite voices over those of the citizen.
At the time of writing (June 2009), Britain is in political meltdown as waves of MPs
resign over the 'expenses' scandal, but the voices raised in alarm about the venality of
our elected members are those of journalists, not the citizens whose taxes have actually
been hijacked to benefit precisely those people who are supposed to be representing
'us'. It is with this issue of news sources that this paper is concerned. I argue that the
Gendered Transformations
media operate a clever sleight of hand by using particular sources in particular ways
to frame a story, but without appearing to have any influence whatsoever. This clever
strategy is regularly employed so that across the mainstream news media at least, there
appears to be a shared understanding of what the issues of the day are and how they
should be understood and interpreted. The constant use of elite voices at the expense of
the less media-savvy but equally valid commentators who constitute the 'public', means
that hegemony is preserved, awkward questions go unasked and a particular view and
perspective on the world is maintained.
A cursory glance at any newspaper demonstrates that a majority of mainstream news
stories, other than editorials, round-ups and opinion pieces, routinely include either
a quotation from a source or some paraphrasing of a source's words (Sundar, 2001).
The use of sources is thus an extremely important part of the story's construction and
orientation as well as, ultimately, the point of view being supported (see Tuchman,
1972). Crucially, in the wider context of news content and news production, questions of
gender and 'class' bias have been consistently raised over recent decades, both in terms
of the restricted range of story types in which women and citizens appear (Tuchman et
al., 1978; European Commission, 1999; WACC, 2005), but also in relation to women's
relatively subordinate positions within mainstream newsrooms (Gallagher, 1995;
Meehan & Riordan, 2002; De Bruin & Ross, 2004; Mahtani, 2005). This chapter considers
the ways in which gender plays out in, for example, the selection of news sources, and
the use of female decision-makers, elite commentators or members of the public. The
salience of gender, in terms of a journalist's propensity to use women or men as sources
in their work, is also considered. I take a case-study approach by sampling three English
regional newspapers whose content is interrogated using a gendered frame analysis as
the primary explanatory framework. Issues of gender are often ignored in much of the
research which analyses media texts, thereby eliding important differences in the ways in
which gender is both performed but also marginalized. I begin by discussing the broader
landscape of news discourse before moving on to consider the findings of the larger
study upon which this paper draws. I then, finally, reach some tentative conclusions.
The national vs the local: The big guns and the small fry
Over recent decades, the news industry has come under considerable scrutiny and has
mostly been found wanting in terms of its contribution to the public understanding of, say,
politics, or even in terms of providing a balanced news diet to a hungry audience. There is
a clear requirement to exercise judgement over content and voice, simply on the grounds of
available space, let alone the commercial imperative to increase market share (of viewers,
readers or listeners). It is precisely the mechanisms by which those decisions are made that
have formed the basis of much media scholarship about the media's role in framing and
Silent Witness: News Sources, the Local Press and the Disappeared Woman
agenda-setting (Entman, 1989, 2008; Bennett, 1990; Dearing & Rogers, 1996; Iyengar, 2001;
McCombs, 2004). The relatively uncontroversial theory which has emerged from studies
of news over recent decades suggests that the 'frames' within which stories work contain
particular ideological biases which are presented to the news consumer as simple 'truth'
(Eldridge, 1995; Philo, 1999; Hardt, 2004). It is precisely this pretence at neutrality which
so exercises media commentators, not least because the public tends to believe that the
news really is what has happened on any given day, and does not regard it as a constructed
package which is entirely partial. For feminist media scholars, the persistent and almost
exclusive framing of women as victims (usually of male violence), eye candy or the mother/
sister/wife of a newsworthy man constitutes yet another layer of the news media onion
which incorporates patriarchy within the hegemonic practices of mainstream newsworkers
(Myers, 1999; Carter et al., 1998; WACC, 2005; Byerly & Ross, 2005; Ross, 2007).
However, much of the work that is focused on news discourse, framing and source
selection in Western contexts is based on analyses of mainstream and, predominantly,
national media. Yet, there is good reason to believe that local and regional media have a
different role to play with the public and could be expected to be less constrained by the
demands of 'big' news culture. One of the obvious ways in which local media differ from
the nationals is in their specific local appeal, and their ability to take advantage of their
very localism to engage readers with news that they really want, which includes stories
which feature their neighbours, their community, their local services and, at certain
times, their elected representatives. As part of this agenda, the question arises as to the
extent to which citizens' voices are heard, in particular, those of the 51 per cent of the
population which isn't male.
Who is invited to speak as a commentator on and in the news says vitally important
things about who 'counts' in society, and whose voices have legitimacy and status. The
hierarchy of news values identified by Gans (1979) 30 years ago, which made clear that
some sources were more equal than others, is alive and well in the twenty-first century
journalist's toolbox: citizens are simply not as equal as government spokespeople, and
women are almost never as equal as men. The infatuation which journalists have with
the authoritative male source means there is little room for other kinds of voices, namely
those of women, minorities, the general public or challengers to the status quo. This
repetitive use of the same kinds of elite voices, the same kinds of gendered perspectives,
inevitably leads to a commonsense understanding of 'how things are', thereby regularizing
an opinion and making it seem like fact. Even when the discordant or anti-establishment
voice is allowed a brief spell in the media sun, these voices are usually the 'acceptable'
face of radicalism and are unlikely to stray too far off the path of tolerable dissent. And, if
Joe Public struggles to register on the journalistic radar, Joanne Public is almost entirely
invisible as a citizen, although she is occasionally asked to speak in her role as mother
(Stephenson, 1998; Wykes, 1998; WACC, 2005).
Gendered Transformations
The study upon which this chapter is based was principally concerned with two related
questions: first, are women and men differently represented as (local) newspaper sources in
gross volume and status terms and by story topic? And secondly, does the sex of a journalist
influence his or her selection of women and men as sources in their copy? A third interest
of this paper lies in identifying the balance of 'elite' sources and those from the general
public, again differentiated by gender. In order to explore these questions, I sampled three
local newspapers published in the Midlands region of England: the Birmingham Post (BP),
the Coventry Evening Telegraph (CET) and the Leicester Mercury (LM). I chose to analyse
local rather than national newspapers precisely because the local and regional press claim
greater freedom to present local stories of local interest and could thus be expected to use
a wider and more diverse range of sources. Given that mainstream journalists will often
suggest that they don't source women because they rarely have status authority, we might
expect to see more of them used as sources in the local and regional press precisely because
they do occupy status roles at a local level, and because we might expect the local press to
source more 'community' voices, including those of women.
Given that the literature relating to the national press suggests that public voices are
more likely to be sought out during election campaigns, the monitoring period for the
case study was chosen to include the build-up to the 2005 British general election, the
election campaign period itself and the period immediately after the election in order to
identify if this was also the case for the local press. I monitored the press over a ten-week
period, choosing one day each week for analysis, using Monday 13 March in the first
week, Tuesday 21 March in the second week and so on, continuing until Friday 16 May.
This amounted to a total of ten weekdays over the ten-week period. The three newspapers
were selected mainly as a convenience sample since I had ready access to all three, but
also because they share a broad, regional geographical boundary, serve broadly similar
communities and have similar circulations in relation to population size.
As this study is interested in the generality of news stories and their sources, rather than
particular types of story or particular categories of source, the first twenty stories in each
newspaper were coded in terms of story type, gender of source/s, status of source/s and
other variables such as the sex of the reporter. Occasionally, fewer than twenty stories were
coded for an individual newspaper because news items ran out early on and were replaced
by features, lifestyle or sports sections. For the purposes of this study, I only coded those
items which were 'straight' news stories, including 'soft' news, but excluded news summaries,
editorials, opinion pieces and letters to the editor. I also filtered out all stories which did not
include at least one quoted source, and ignored those which were 'national' rather than 'local'
in flavour since the study was only concerned with the local news agenda rather than repeats
of national news. A total of 30 newspapers were thus monitored (three newspapers each day
over ten monitoring days), a total of 538 articles analysed and 925 individual sources coded.
Silent Witness: News Sources, the Local Press and the Disappeared Woman
At this point it is perhaps worth saying a few words about the vital statistics of each
of the selected newspapers. The Birmingham Post was first launched (as the Birmingham
Daily Post) in 1857 and is now part of the Trinity Mirror group and has a circulation of
around 13,000. It is a daily paper published Monday–Saturday and, at the time of writing
(autumn 2005), has a female editor, Fiona Alexander. It styles itself as a 'thoughtful'
paper—it is the only regional broadsheet in Birmingham—and claims to be more
'cerebral' than its sister paper, the Birmingham Mail: its own publicity says that it has the
'business readership' at its heart.1 The Coventry Evening Telegraph was founded in 1891 as
Coventry's first daily newspaper and is also now a member of the Trinity Mirror Group. It
has a circulation of around 58,000 and is an evening paper, published Monday–Saturday.
It has an all-male editorial team (editor: Alan Kirby) and a readership profile which is
split one-third, two-thirds, ABC1 and C2DE. The Leicester Mercury was first published
in 1874 and is now a member of the Northcliffe group. It has a circulation of around
84,400 and is an evening paper, published Monday–Saturday. Its senior editorial team of
eleven staff (editor: Nick Carter) includes two women (deputy editor and features) and
its readership profile is very similar to that of the Coventry Evening Telegraph.
To start with, then, what kinds of stories make it into the local press? As we might
imagine, the news agenda is very different to that of the nationals, with 'human interest'
stories being far and away the most frequent story category. There was a clear clustering
of story types between the three newspapers, suggesting that there is a broadly accepted
'sense' among local journalists of what a local newspaper should contain. Given that the
monitoring occurred before, during and after the 2005 British general election, what is
perhaps surprising about the breakdown of story categories is the relatively low number
of stories that are either about politics in general (nine stories) or the general election in
particular (five stories). While we would not expect the local press to be covering national
political or election stories to any great extent, it would be reasonable to expect to see
something about local campaigns and candidates. Yet, only the Birmingham Post had a
sufficient volume of stories about the general election to make this category one of its top
five most popular. The Birmingham Post certainly has the feel and style of a broadsheet
newspaper, unlike the CET and the LM which are very clearly marked out as local red tops
by their use of relatively short articles, the high number of unattributed items and a large
number of photographs and advertisements. The Birmingham Post, on the other hand,
tends to include longer articles and often covers 'national' stories, which might be one of
the reasons for its more 'serious' engagement with politics. If we begin to break down the
data a little more, we find that there are clear gender skews both in the status of female and
male sources, but also in terms of the kinds of stories in which women and men appear.
Gendered Transformations
What we see from Table 1 is that women are three times more likely to be asked
to speak as members of the public than men, and they have a significant presence as
education workers and spokespeople for the charitable and voluntary sectors, areas of
*the miscellaneous category included: civil servant: father; alleged criminal; celebrity; political
party worker; victim; government minister; and victim: each of these categories comprised less
than 1 per cent of all responses.
Silent Witness: News Sources, the Local Press and the Disappeared Woman
work which are typically undertaken by women. By contrast, men are twice as likely
as women to be asked to speak as representatives of business, three times more likely
to speak as local councillors and nearly three times as likely to speak as police officers.
But these gender-biased proclivities on the part of journalists are not a consequence
of women's absence from these occupations. For example, of 68 local councillors used
as sources, 60 were men (89 per cent), despite the fact that in 2004, 29 per cent of all
councillors were women,2 an average which is more or less constant across the three
regions in which the sample newspapers are published. Similarly, of 58 police officers
used as sources, nine (15 per cent) were women, even though in the West Midlands
Constabulary, an area which covers two of the three sample newspapers, 24 per cent of
police officers are female.3 So, additional factors must be determining the selection of
particular sources by journalists, such as a persistent choice of the usual (male) suspects,
or a simple denial of women's authority to speak.
The absolute number of sources is still heavily biased towards men, so that even in
the category of 'human interest', which appears to favour women, the actual numbers
of women and men quoted in these 122 stories are 75 and 138 respectively. In only two
categories (local celebrity and sex-discrimination) do absolute numbers of female sources
(four, three) exceed those of men (three, one). In only one category (pets/animals) do
women and men achieve parity (four sources each), but everywhere else, women are
outnumbered by a ratio of at least 1:2, and this figure is often even higher. It is only as
'members of the public' where the absolute numbers of women and men sourced across all
story types were almost identical (112 and 111 respectively). It is extremely disappointing
to find, on average, the same gender skew in local press reporting as has been discovered
in studies of national newspapers. This is particularly the case since it might have been
expected that, relieved of the need to slavishly report the major national stories, journalists
would look a little more imaginatively at their local community for source inspiration.
As well as gender skews in terms of source selection, more generally, although these
are less marked than gender differences in status, there are also some (albeit small)
differences in the kinds of stories in which women and men feature, as Table 2 below
shows. This is quite a positive finding as it suggests that journalists are moving away
from the habit of only asking women to talk about health and only asking men to talk
about the economy.
Importantly, a preponderance of male journalists in regional newsrooms cannot be
'blamed' for this persistent disavowal of women's views, as Table 3 below shows. Of the
total sample of 538 articles analysed for this study, 332 (62 per cent) had clearly identified
writers, and Table 3 shows the distribution of writers and the number of articles across
the three newspapers, disaggregated by gender.
It is clear that the Coventry Evening Telegraph and Leicester Mercury have more or less
equal numbers of male and female journalists (albeit based on attributed author articles
only), with the Birmingham Post appearing to conform to the gender skew evident in
Gendered Transformations
the national press. Perhaps its more 'serious' style requires it to have more serious (i.e.
male!) journalists, just like its national colleagues. While some research suggests that
female journalists are more likely to use female sources in their stories than their male
colleagues do (Zoch and VanSlyke Turk, 1998), the findings of this study challenge that
finding, as Table 4 shows.
In terms of the proportion of female and male sources used, there is a remarkable
consistency across all of the articles analysed, both those with named writers and those
without bylines (unattributed). This accords with other research which suggests that
men are more than twice as likely as women to be used as sources in news (WACC,
2005). However, as is also clear, there does not appear to be any significant relationship
between the sex of a source and the sex of the journalist using that source. Zoch and
VanSlyke Turk's (1998) work also suggested that where women were in a minority in their
newsroom, this could militate against them using more women as sources. However, this
Silent Witness: News Sources, the Local Press
and the Disappeared Woman
current study also contests that finding, since of the 330 articles analysed which had
attributed authors, 43 per cent were written by women, 54 per cent were written by men
and three per cent were the work of a female–male team
The constructed nature of news is not only a matter of journalists choosing to include
one story over another, but the individuals invited to speak in the story provide a
perspective legitimacy, a corroborating voice which marks out the authority of the story to
the audience. While there is considerable guidance contained within the various codes of
conduct relating to news media which explicitly require balance and fairness in reporting,
the empirical evidence against which these rhetorical demands might be measured rarely
Gendered Transformations
finds in their favour, and the results of this study are no different. Through the exercise of
its alleged commitment to providing news of interest to its local community, the local press
has an ideal opportunity to subvert both the national agenda, and thus national proclivities
towards the use of elite male sources, and the bias which privileges the maintenance of
the status quo. Yet what the findings of this, admittedly modest, study show is that who
speaks in the news and who writes the news is alarmingly similar in the local and the
national press. This is not just in terms of the dominance of elite voices over 'the public',
or of men's voices over those of women or of white voices over black, but is also in terms
of who writes the news, the beats which are awarded to journalists (i.e. women do culture
and home, men do politics and the economy, again) and the types of story which make
it into print. While this study does show that more women are becoming journalists in
the local press sector at least, the ratio of women to men in the newsroom certainly does
not reflect the ratio of women and men in the journalism classrooms, and women are still
more likely to be given traditionally 'female' beats, although not exclusively so.
Any number of feminist media studies suggest that the composition of newsroom
staff in terms of the balance of women and men influences the content produced by that
newsroom. If there is not always a different focus, then there is certainly a different tone
and style, because women have different experiences in the world and thus bring a different
perspective (Steiner, 1998; De Bruin, 2000; Melin-Higgins, 2004). In Rodgers and Thorson's
study (2003), they found that female and male journalists practised a differentiated
journalism in terms of style, tone and sources used, but that these differences were most
marked in smaller newsrooms and where there was a more even balance between male and
female newsworkers. This suggests that larger newsrooms, with a predominance of male
staff, strongly encourage a conformist outlook which produces a hegemonic journalistic
output in terms of 'routinizing' a male-ordered frame, a finding echoed by other studies of
gendered journalism (see also Van Zoonen, 1998; Robinson, 2004).
If content in some form or another is influenced by the sex of the journalist writing it,
and if sources are a crucial aspect of story orientation, then there could be a relationship
between the sex of the journalist and her or his choice of source. Encouraging a diversity
of views among news writers makes good business sense, since there is some evidence to
suggest that female news consumers are more engaged by the more personalized, intimate
and less adversarial approach that female journalists are considered to promote (Van
Zoonen, 1998; Peiser, 2000; Ross, 2005). One of the ways in which women 'do' journalism
that is identifiably different to their male colleagues is in their use of sources. In most
studies, men dominate as sources, and in their own work, Shoemaker and Reese (1996)
found that men were twice as likely as women to be featured as subjects or sources in
newspaper articles (see also Delano Brown et al., 1987; Liebler & Smith, 1997). Similarly,
Zoch and VanSlyke Turk (1998) looked at the topic focus of stories in relation to source
selection in three US newspapers over a ten-year period (1986–1996) and suggested
that women rarely feature in news of national or international importance. Armstrong's
Silent Witness: News Sources, the Local Press and the Disappeared Woman
analysis of gender as an influencing factor in the use of female and male sources found
that the latter were much more prevalent than the former. Interestingly and optimistically,
both Zoch and Van Slyke Turk (1998) and Armstrong (2004) found that female journalists
were far more likely to use women as sources in their pieces than their male colleagues.
The 'so what' question implicit in this study is answered, then, by arguing that who is
asked to speak in the news, as well as what that news is, says crucially important things
about whose voices count and who has status in society. While Nylund (2003) perhaps
overstates the case a little by suggesting that news is constructed almost entirely from the
use of quotes and journalistic interpretations of various source statements, it is clear that
the persistent use of certain categories of commentator influences story orientation and,
potentially, our understanding of the world. Does the news-consuming public only want to
hear men speaking in the register of privilege and defence of the status quo, or would they/
we like some diversity? Men still dominate the news, even when that news is even more at
the discretion of the journalist than for the nationals. Where is the ventilation of all those
other voices, other stories, other lives? Men and women are differentially understood as
doing (male-active) or being done to (female-passive). If what we see and read and hear are
men's voices, men's perspectives, men's news, then women continue to be framed as passive
observers rather than active citizens, despite the factual evidence to the contrary which
shows, for example, the high incidence of female-owned start-up businesses or the number
of women councillors. To be clear, women's occupation of decision-making positions is
considerably less than that enjoyed by men, but their marginalization in the local press
as business people, professionals, politicians and even members of the public, is hard to
understand without using a gender-based analysis which suggests that women's invisibility
in the press is a consequence of a deliberate strategy which denies their authority to speak.
In Zoch and VanSlyke Turk's study of regional newspapers in the United States, they
found that women rarely featured in news stories of national or international significance
(1998), and this current study also demonstrates that Tuchman et al.'s prescient description
of women's 'symbolic annihilation' from the news agenda in 1978 holds just as true now,
more than 30 years later, as it did then. If the local press is to continue to call itself 'local' in
any meaningful way, it needs to work a lot harder to more genuinely reflect the views and
interests of local communities back to themselves, in all their glorious shapes and colours.
1. www.trinitymirror.com
2. The National Census of Local Authority Councillors in England 2004, London: Em-
ployers' Organizations for Local Government.
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Communication, 40 (1990), pp. 103–125.
Byerly, C. & Ross, K., Women and Media: A Critical Introduction, Oxford, Blackwell,
Carter, C., Branston, G. & Allan, S. (eds), News, Gender and Power, London and New
York, Routledge, 1998.
De Bruin, M. & Ross, K. (eds), Gender and Newsroom Cultures: Identities at Work,
Cresskill, NJ, Hampton Press, 2004.
Dearing, J.W. & Rogers, E.M., Agenda-Setting, Thousand Oaks, CA, Sage Publications,
Delano Brown, J., Bybee, C.R., Wearden, S.T. & Straughan, D.M., 'Invisible power:
Newspaper news: Sources and the limits of diversity', Journalism Quarterly, 64
(1987), p. 50.
Eldridge, J. (ed.), Glasgow Media Group Reader, Vol. 1: News Content, Language and
Visuals, London and New York, Routledge, 1995.
Entman, R.M., 'How the media affect what people think: An information processing
approach', Journal of Politics, 51:2 (1989), pp. 347–370.
Entman, R.M., 'Theorizing mediated public diplomacy: The U.S. case', International
Journal of Press/Politics, 13:2 (2008), 87-102.
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Gallagher, M., An Unfinished Story: Gender Patterns in Media Employment (Reports and
Papers on Mass Communication 110), Paris, UNESCO, 1995.
Gans, H.J., Deciding What's News, New York, Pantheon Books, 1979.
Hardt, H., Myths for the Masses, Malden, MA, Blackwell, 2004.
Iyengar, S., 'The method is the message: The current state of political communication
research', Political Communication, 18:2 (2001), pp. 225–230.
Liebler, C.M. & Smith, S.J., 'Tracking gender differences: A comparative analysis of
network correspondents and their sources', Journal of Broadcasting and Electronic
Media, 41 (1997), pp. 58–68.
McCombs, M., Setting the Agenda: The Mass Media and Public Opinion, Cambridge,
Polity Press, 2004.
Meehan, E. & Riordan, E. (eds), Sex and Money: Feminism and Political Economy in the
Media, Minneapolis, MN, University of Minnesota Press, 2002.
Peiser, W., 'Setting the journalist agenda: Influences from journalists' individual
characteristics and from media factors', Journalism & Mass Communication
Quarterly, 77 (2000), pp. 243–257.
Philo, G. (ed.), Message Received: Glasgow Media Group Research 1993–1998, Harlow,
Longman, 1999.
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Robinson, G., 'Gender in the newsroom: Canadian experiences', in M. de Bruin & K. Ross
(eds) Gender and Newsroom Cultures: Identities at Work, Cresskill, NJ, Hampton
Press, 2004, pp. 181–196.
Rodgers, S. & Thorson, E., 'A socialization perspective on male and female reporting',
Journal of Communication, 53:4 (2003), pp. 658–675.
Ross, K., Women and the News Agenda: Media-ted Reality and Jane Public, discussion
paper # MC95/1, Leicester, Centre for Mass Communication Research, University
of Leicester, 1995.
Ross, K., 'Women in the boyzone: Gender, news and herstory', in S. Allan (ed.) Journalism:
Critical Issues, Maidenhead, Open University Press/McGraw-Hill Education, 2005,
pp. 287–298.
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pp. 449–473.
Shoemaker, P.J. & Reese, S.D., Mediating the Message: Theories of Influence on Mass Media
Content, 2nd edn, White Plains, NY, Longman, 1996.
Steiner, L., 'Newsroom accounts of power at work', in C. Carter, G. Branston and S. Allan
(eds) News, Gender and Power, London and New York, Routledge, 1998, pp. 145–
Stephenson, M-A., The Glass Trapdoor: Women, Politics and the Media During the 1997
General Election, London, Fawcett, 1998.
Sundar, S.S. & Nass, C., 'Conceptualizing sources in online news', Journal of
Communication, 51:1 (2001), pp. 52–72.
Tuchman, G., Daniels, A.K. & Benet, J. (eds), Hearth and Home: Images of Women in the
Mass Media, New York, Oxford University Press, 1978.
Van Zoonen, L., 'One of the girls? The changing gender of journalism', in C. Carter,
G. Branston & S. Allan (eds) News, Gender and Power, London and New York,
Routledge, 1998, pp. 33–46.
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WACC, Who Makes the News? London, World Association for Christian Communication,
Wykes, M., 'A family affair: The British press, sex and the Wests', in C. Carter, G. Branston
& S. Allan (eds) News, Gender and Power, London and New York, Routledge, 1998,
pp. 233–247.
Zelizer, B. & Allan, S. (eds), Journalism after September 11, London and New York,
Routledge, 2002.
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selection and use', Journalism and Mass Communication Quarterly, 75:4 (1998), pp.
Gendered Transformations
Chapter Two
Tracing Gendered (In)Visibilities In
the Portuguese Quality Press
Claudia Alvares
This chapter aims to present a critical analysis of the results obtained in a European
Union funded research project on the discursive representation of women in two
Portuguese 'quality' newspapers, the Diário de Notícias and Público, between February
and April 2006. My objective is to draw attention to how Portuguese media discourse
conceptualizes the 'feminine' as the subject and object of texts. I will concentrate on the
framing of issues pertinent to feminism within a news agenda-setting context that draws
attention to topical issues usually ostracized from the front pages of the press. In this
manner, I propose to establish a link between the discourse of feminist theory and the
representation of women in the Portuguese mainstream press, inquiring into the degree
to which these media texts have been influenced by either liberal or radical feminisms.
The debate over the public and the private has been greatly expounded on by both
liberal and radical feminists. Although the dichotomy between them has opened up to
include discussions with socialist as well as postmodern feminists, I am here essentially
concerned with the influence of liberal and radical feminism on the way in which the
popular imagination has come to understand the concepts of public and private spheres.
Liberal feminism has traditionally placed the emphasis on ideals such as emancipation
and individual autonomy as aiding in the promotion of the socio-economic rights of
women. Radical feminism, on the other hand, posits a singular feminist essence against
a patriarchal universality. The term 'radical' in radical feminism connotes 'going to the
root' of feminism. This root is associated with patriarchal gender relations, as opposed
to legal systems (as in the case of liberal feminism). Radical feminism bases itself on a
Gendered Transformations
Various feminist theorists (Fraser, 1990; Felski, 1989; Benhabib, 1992) take issue with
the universality posited by the Habermasian conception of the public sphere, defined as
a 'realm of social life' open to all in which individuals come together to discuss political
issues relevant to the 'common good' (1989). They focus on the social exclusions which,
allegedly, influence the deliberative processes within the official public sphere. The object
of analysis thus becomes the activity of participants in counter-public spheres rather than
that of participants in an official public sphere. Because the feminist counter-public sphere
is founded on the specificity of a female identity, it distances itself from Habermas's project
in that the will towards emancipation is orientated towards the assertion of particularity
in relation to issues of 'gender, race, ethnicity, age and sexual preference' (Felski, 1989).
Moreover, it critiques a strict dichotomy between public and private realms, drawing
attention to the fact that the public and private are intertwined (MacDonald, 1995).
However, the feminist counter-public sphere can also be read as being premised on
the idea of universality as a result of presupposing the universal character of gender
oppression. In privileging the latter, the feminist counter-public sphere is often accused
of marginalizing struggles based on other exclusions, namely those of race and class.
Tracing Gendered (In)Visibilities In the Portuguese Quality Press
Bell hooks, for example, states that from its onset, working-class women associated the
feminist movement with a comfortable, 'upper middle-class' liberal feminist hegemony,
centred on romantic issues of freedom and equality (1989: 23–24).
McLaughlin (1993: 614), however, claims that feminist media studies should
recuperate the concept of the traditional public sphere, going beyond 'the tendency to
focus on internal, oppositional identity at the expense of a consideration of the media's
role in hindering the establishment of representative space necessary for democracy in
late capitalism'. Seyla Benhabib (1992: 52) has also defended the Habermasian ideal of
communicative rationality, holding up dialogical consensus as a form of overcoming
disagreements between factions through the 'capacity for reversing perspectives'.
The capacity of the media to effectively provide a truly representative space for
the exercise of participatory citizenship is linked to the degree to which it promotes
dialogue and debate concerning issues deemed as publically relevant. The theory
of agenda-setting, which can be traced back to McCombs and Shaw (1972), draws
attention to the fact that the news media exert influence on issue salience: in other
words, the more any particular issue is covered by the media, the greater importance
attributed to it by media consumers. This interconnection between media and public
agendas continues to resonate today, particularly among those who believe that the
media constitute a sphere of public debate through which citizens gain political
visibility and recognition.
Content analyses which focus on the representation of women in the media have
traditionally operated within the liberal feminist perspective, concentrating on the 'symbolic
annihilation' of women (Tuchman, 1995 [1978]: 406–407). A logic of sameness between
male and female rationality provided the basis for women's claim to equality: 'since women
are as rational as men, society carries a duty to give its female citizens equal opportunity to
take part in social organisation' (Gambaudo, 2007: 94). However, women's greater visibility
in the public arena leads to a distancing from the liberal focus on 'sameness' and equality.
Instead of placing emphasis on women's capacity to assimilate characteristics associated with
masculinity, such as rationality, proactivity and responsibility (Gambaudo, 2007; 94–95)—
traits that allegedly caused women to judge themselves from a male perspective—radical
feminism foregrounded women's right to difference. Radical feminism thus drew attention
to the fact that liberal feminism imposed a masculine model on women's recognition in the
public sphere, outside of which they remained invisible.
Despite often being criticized for overly foregrounding the denotative aspects of
texts, feminist content analyses are valuable since they draw attention to gendered
constructions through the study of media or literary texts. Central to any content
Gendered Transformations
Tracing Gendered (In)Visibilities In the Portuguese Quality Press
Gendered Transformations
Tracing Gendered (In)Visibilities In the Portuguese Quality Press
Chart 1: Homosexuality
Chart 2: Transexuality
Gendered Transformations
Chart 3: Maternity
hand. This example connotes lesbianism as offensive to the masculine psyche, which
cannot accept the idea of the 'uselessness' and 'powerlessness' of a hose, a hose that then
must be turned on the two women in a vengeful act of masculine affirmation.
Both have collected, throughout their lives, 'insults, humiliations, betrayals and
abandonments', leading them to leave Lisbon and seek refuge in a more tranquil town.
The predicates used to depict their lives until this moment of media frenzy point to
victimhood: whereas they were once visible 'victims', a target to be pointed at by the 'in-
group', they are now visible 'agents', attaining the dignity they crave through a short-lived
media infatuation with two women desperate for fame.
Homosexuality in Público
While the 1 February edition of the Diário de Notícias dedicated its first two pages to
news features on Teresa and Helena's attempt to marry, Público's first two pages for that
same day were dedicated to the foreseeable success of Ang Lee's Brokeback Mountain at
the forthcoming Oscars' ceremony. The film, which narrates the romantic entanglement
of two gay cowboys in the United States of the 1960s and 1970s, is hailed as breaking the
Tracing Gendered (In)Visibilities In the Portuguese Quality Press
film industry's conventional codes, and broaching a 'difficult and controversial' theme
(Siza, 2006a). Because the topic of lesbian marriage can be assessed along similar lines, it
is better introduced, according to Público's logic, by an international film agenda that is
the target of a certain elite cultural dialogue. Público's discourse on culture posits a 'self '
moulded in the best tradition of Western liberal values, namely freedom and tolerance.
Teresa and Lena are scantily referred to in the main news feature dating from 1 February
(Branco, 2006b). In fact, they only briefly appear as subjects in the first paragraph of the
article, when we are told that they will try to marry in Lisbon's Seventh Registry Office.
Their agency is soon colonized by that of a petition in favour of gay marriage that 'counts
MPs amongst its subscribers'. From then on, the discourse is completely centred on the
positions that political parties have on the issue, namely whether or not they intend to
defend an alteration of the Civil Code in Parliament.
Transsexuality in Público
Despite also concentrating on the punitive measures inflicted upon the minors, Público
appears to be particularly interested in whether or not Gisberta died by drowning. The
title 'Exams confirm that gisberta died by drowning' (Laranjo, 2006d) verifies that
Gisberta was indeed a victim of homicide, having been thrown into a well while still alive,
and was not 'simply' a victim of a corporeal offence. The insinuation, camouflaged by
juridical terminology, is that the difference between the two alternatives is significant, as
if a 'corporeal offence' were indeed something transvestites might be moderately used to.
The issue of whether or not the youngsters involved in the crime were conscious
of Gisberta being alive before throwing her into the well is allegedly fundamental to
Gendered Transformations
the State Prosecution Service. Público places itself in the latter's role, only to shroud its
concern over the 'morality' of the youngsters beneath a denotative interest in the juridical
mechanisms of the process. 'Morality' is something that Público wishes to refrain from
exercising on any explicit level, for it goes against the leftist 'urban chique' of the 'in-
group' it wishes to appeal to.
Maternity in Público
The category 'maternity' received particular attention from Público on 16 February
2006 due to the Health Ministry's decision to close down nine of the 50 maternity
wards in the country. One news feature opens by focusing on a human interest story,
that of hairdresser Margarida, who can no longer give birth to her second child at the
Barcelos Hospital due to ward closure. This human interest story rapidly turns into a
public interest feature because Margarida becomes a symbol for the general population
who disagrees with the government's measure. However, the news story soon adopts
a medical perspective on the ward referred to, whereby the reader is informed about
the few stays for delivery, the decrease in the number of births, the limited number of
Tracing Gendered (In)Visibilities In the Portuguese Quality Press
doctors, the existence of overworked health professionals and the precarious conditions
for babies with serious pathologies who have to be transported to Oporto for treatment.
By supporting the government's discourse on ward closure, after giving us some elements
with which to assess the disadvantage of that measure, Público seems to be adhering to
a semantic strategy of 'apparent empathy' (Van Dijk, 2005: 202), only to then stress that
women will, ultimately, benefit from safer conditions in larger hospitals.
In general, it can be said that Diário de Notícias is more attentive to issues of the
private sphere than Público. However, the former's perspective on themes which usually
remain ostracized from newspapers, such as homosexuality and transsexuality, reveals
that such topics are either broached from a normative standpoint or almost totally
ignored. While coverage of the possibility of marriage between two lesbians emphasizes
their monogamous and stable commitment, a type of relationship that many women in
heterosexual partnerships aspire to reach, coverage of Gisberta's death was scant and very
much geared towards the legal details of the process. The issue of maternity, on the other
hand, was less politically orientated in Diário de Notícias than in Público, since instead of
centering on the government's decision to close down a number of maternity wards, the
paper chose to dislocate the topic to other issues tangentially linked to that of maternity,
namely those of 'infertility' and 'congenital anomalies'. This may be interpreted as an
attempt to sidestep the political agenda regarding the closure of maternity wards; as if to
say, 'we will not focus on the subject when the government deems it correct to do so, but
rather when we feel the time is right…'. Nonetheless, implicit in the coverage of the topics
of infertility and congenital foetal abnormalities, is the idea that experience has shown
the importance of the public service sector in the detection of health problems that are
not usually openly discussed, particularly in non-urban settings.
Público focuses far less than Diário de Notícias on matters of the private sphere.
However, it has a preoccupation with keeping a 'modern' semblance, seeking to situate
issues that may be on the agenda within a wider 'European' context, the values of which
are those of the Enlightenment. The issue of gay marriage, for example, was framed by
the success of the film Brokeback Mountain at the 2006 Oscars ceremony. As such, the
topic definitely had its importance as a 'spectacle', but no more than that. In fact, Público
implies that it did not warrant serious parliamentary debate, in line with the opinions on
the subject of the two major Portuguese political parties.
This newspaper's coverage of the death of the Brazilian transsexual emphasizes that
responsibility for this outcome lies, above all, with the State and Catholic Church for
failing to provide a proper education to the young in care institutions. A democratic
argument is cast in accordance with Enlightenment ideals, and foregrounds the fact
Gendered Transformations
that anyone could have acted in the same manner as the youths had he or she had the
misfortune of being a 'victim' of a care institution. We are, therefore, all born equal. 'The
State' is that which introduces inequalities among us.
The State, however, is not the government. Público is, in fact, sympathetic towards the
government's decision to close nine of 50 maternity wards throughout the country so as
to maximize safety and efficiency. Sticking to this line of discourse, Público empathizes
with the plight of local populations but, nevertheless, paints a picture of the happiness in
store for them in the near future if the government plan is adhered to.
The whole issue of maternity is framed within a discourse of liberal feminist values.
Indeed, the 16 April 2006 issue of Público not only focused on ward closure, but also
carried various features which linked the public sphere with maternity. First-lady Laura
Bush, French socialist MP Ségolène Royal, and French feminist author Simone de
Beauvoir are all referred to in the context of, at times, contradictory subject positionings
between motherhood and the fulfilment of 'professional duties'. It is as if Público's focus
on a private sphere issue such as maternity was, in part, redeemed by the focus on
women who have high visibility in the public sphere and yet are mothers. Curiously, it
is precisely when Público feels threatened by the private sphere that it manages to reflect
a non-compartmentalized view of private and public spheres. Usually, however, it much
prefers to let the private be private and the public public, in line with a logic of non-
promiscuity between the two domains.
Despite giving more attention on a daily basis to the fusion of public and private
spheres, Diário de Notícias does not differ substantially from Público in the overall
frequency of the most common categories. Indeed, both papers defend liberal feminist
values, with a stronger focus on equality than on autonomy. The frequency rates for the
categories 'influence', 'cause promotion', 'political visibility' and 'celebrity' do not differ
greatly between the two newspapers, indicating the existence of a certain consensus
regarding the representation of women in the public sphere.
The greatest discrepancies in frequency rates between both newspapers pertain to issues
of the private sphere. In effect, the categories of conjugal relationships, maternity and the
female body appear considerably more often in Diário de Notícias than in Público. These
results indicate that Público is not particularly comfortable in dealing with matters of the
private realm on a daily basis. However, the fact that Diário de Notícias reveals a greater
permeability to the private sphere does not mean that it is significantly more in tune with
radical feminist issues. In fact, it appears that the latter are broached by both papers due to
the topicality of themes that are usually ostracized from the media agenda. It is precisely
in this context that the issues of homosexuality, transsexuality and reproduction—under
the guise of infertility and congenital anomalies—make their appearance.
Radical feminism emphasizes the affirmation of a specifically feminine universal
essence that opposes the normative logic of patriarchal values. As such, the possibility
of defining a specific form of female sexuality under the generic label of 'homosexuality',
Tracing Gendered (In)Visibilities In the Portuguese Quality Press
as well as specific characteristics of the female body—which exceed the idea of gender
as performativity (Butler, 1990 33)—under the generic label 'reproduction', are themes
that are on the radical feminist agenda. Because radical feminism, in its search for
the affirmation of an essence, at times questions a certain heterosexual normativity
(Thompson, 2001: 14), mainstream newspapers such as Diário de Notícias and Público
prefer to stick to the more conventional liberal feminist discursive framework that
centres on 'rights' as an affirmation of female autonomy and equality.
At a time when the 'stigmata of affectivity' (Thornton, quoted in Murphy, 1999: 413) is
said to have been transposed to the public sphere, leading to a blurring of the frontier that
separates public from private, the research project undertaken witnesses that the traditional
divide remains in place. Indeed, despite the 'nomadism' of contemporary theory, much of
which celebrates concepts such as 'hybridity, fluidity and transgression' (Murphy, 1999: 412),
the Habermasian public sphere, allegedly open to all, continues to ostracize certain voices
(Gould, quoted in Pajnic, 2006: 392). However, while Myra Macdonald argues that '…private
space is at once valued as a peaceful sanctuary, and yet devalued as that non-public space
which we worry about only when its aberrations filter through into the public arena' (1995:
48), I would suggest that both Público and Diário de Notícias devalue to a greater extent
issues related to radical feminism than they do those of the traditional private sphere.
Radical feminist themes, namely those related to sexuality, reproduction and the
gendered body, are nevertheless closely imbricated with those of the private sphere.
The radicality of this feminist current intends precisely to draw attention to the way
women's understanding of themselves has been constructed within a patriarchal frame of
reference (Thompson, 2001: 12). From this perspective, women are the only ones capable
of defining the specificity that characterizes their 'lived experience' of womanhood.
Bringing out certain issues linked to oppression in the private sphere, namely those of
sexual orientation, gender identity and reproduction, would presumably draw attention
to the patriarchal logic of the public sphere. Both Público and Diário de Notícias's
coverage of such issues sheds light on them as isolated 'rarities', the topicality of which
may, at times, drive them to the front pages of 'respectable' newspapers.
In effect, both Público and Diário de Notícias's editorial statutes contemplate the
rejection of interference in citizens' private sphere. The general public interest is not
regarded as overlapping with private matters, as if citizens' public personae constitute
manifestations of ideal standards suitable to particular situations (Goffman, 1962: 35,
44)—namely that of newspaper reading—which do not come under the aegis of the
private sphere. By fulfilling the expectations of the readers as idealized public personae,
both Público and Diário de Notícias convey a masculinized idea of 'imagined community'
Gendered Transformations
I would take issue with this affirmation, claiming instead that a process of 'inverse
colonialism' may be currently in place, with a significant proportion of space being
allocated to women in the public sphere. The problem, however, is that the same
proportion of space is not allocated to 'private' issues, as if woman must travesty herself
to a patriarchal conception of power and visibility so as to be heard.
In other words, woman's movement from 'object to subject', through the expression of
a 'liberated voice' (hooks, 1989: 9), takes place along masculine lines. While traditional
liberal feminist conceptions would centre on the analysis of women's visibility or lack of
visibility in the public sphere, drawing conclusions on the success of the battle for rights
from the degree of that very visibility, I would argue that the move 'from silence into
speech' is not affected by 'iron ladies', 'women warriors' or successful career women who
manage to catch the media's eye. Rather, this move is the result of a turning of media
attention to the private sphere in a non-sensationalist manner.
The problem, however, is that the very structure of the newspapers analysed
reinforces a masculine conception of what is deemed to be important for readers, with
clearly delineated 'political', 'economic', 'society' and 'sports' sections, as if the world we
live in corresponds to tidy, compartmentalized camps. Indeed, the internalization by
newspapers of the feminist dictum 'the personal is political' would be equivalent to a
Freudian 'return of the repressed' (1993: 141), whereby texts would perhaps cease to be
symptomatic of a need to express the forbidden idea that both men and women share
a private sphere, the relevance of which has been systematically downplayed due to its
habitual connotation with the feminine.
Tracing Gendered (In)Visibilities In the Portuguese Quality Press
3. The NVivo 6 qualitative research software program was used to obtain frequency rates
of categories that define liberal and radical feminisms in the newspaper texts analysed.
Althusser, L. & Balibar, E. Reading Capital, trans. Ben Brewster, London, New Left Books,
Anderson, B., Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism,
London, Verso, 1983.
Benhabib, S., 'In the Shadow of Artistotle and Hegel', in Situating the Self: Gender,
Community and Postmodernism in Contemporary Ethics, Cambridge, Polity Press,
1992, pp. 23–67.
Butler, J., Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity, London, Routledge,
Diário de Notícias, 'As noivas que querem mudar o Código Civil', 1 February 2006a, pp.
Gendered Transformations
Diário de Notícias, 'Pressão social afecta casais inférteis na cidade berço da Nação', 15
April 2006b, p. 20.
Fairclough, N., Analysing Discourse: Textual Analysis for Social Research, London,
Routledge, 2003.
Felski, R., Beyond Feminist Aesthetics: Feminist Literature and Social Change, Cambridge,
MA, Harvard University Press, 1989.
Fraser, N., 'Rethinking the Public Sphere: A Contribution to the Critique of Actually
Existing Democracy', Social Text, 25/26 (1990), pp. 56–80.
Goffman, E., The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, New York, Doubleday Anchor
Books, 1962.
Habermas, J., The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a
Category of Bourgeois Society, trans. Thomas Burger, Cambridge, MA, MIT Press,
hooks, b., Talking Back: Thinking Feminist, Thinking Black, Boston, MA, South End Press,
Macdonald, M., Representing Women: Myths of Femininity in the Popular Media, London,
Edward Arnold, 1995.
Mackenzie, S., 'Women in the City', in R. Peet et al. (eds) New Models in Geography.
Volume II: The Political Economy Perspective, London, Unwin Hyman, 1989, pp.
Tracing Gendered (In)Visibilities In the Portuguese Quality Press
McCombs, M.E. & Shaw, D.L., 'The Agenda-Setting Function of Mass Media', in O. Boyd-
Barrett & C. Newbold (eds) Approaches to Media: A Reader, London, Arnold, 1972,
pp. 153–163.
McLaughlin, L., 'Feminism, the Public Sphere, Media and Democracy', Media Culture
& Society, 15:4 (1993), pp. 599–620.
Meyers, M., 'News of Battering', Journal of Communication, 44:2 (1994), pp. 47–63.
Murphy, Th., 'Book Reviews', Social & Legal Studies, 8:3 (1999), pp. 411–413.
Pajnik, M., 'Feminist Reflections on Habermas's Communicative Action: The Need for an
Inclusive Political Theory', European Journal of Social Theory, 9:3 (2006), pp. 385–404.
Público, 'O Segredo de Brokeback Mountain lidera corrida aos Óscares', 1 February 2006a,
pp. 2–3.
Público, 'PS e PSD desvalorizam debate político sobre casamento entre pessoas do mesmo
sexo', 1 February 2006b, p. 12.
Público, 'Exames confirmam morte de Gisberta por afogamento', 10 March 2006d, p. 24.
Rose, G. 'Spatial Divisions and Other Spaces', in Feminism and Geography: The Limits of
Geographical Knowledge, Cambridge, Polity Press, 1993, pp. 113–136.
Saussure, F. de, Course in General Linguistics, trans. Roy Harris, Illinois, Open Court, 1916.
Thornton, M. (ed.), Public and Private: Feminist Legal Debates, Melbourne, Oxford
University Press, 1995.
Gendered Transformations
Tuchman, G., 'The Symbolic Annihilation of Women by the Mass Media', in O. Boyd-
Barrett et al. (eds) Approaches to Media, London, Arnold, 1995, pp. 406–410.
Van Dijk, T., 'Critical Discourse Analysis and Nominalization: Problem or Pseudo-
Problem?', Discourse & Society, 19:6 (2008), pp. 821–828.
Van Dijk, T., Discurso, Notícia e Ideologia: Estudos na Análise Crítica do Discurso, trans.
Z. Pinto-Coelho, Oporto, Campo das Letras, 2005.
Van Dijk, T., 'Ideology and Discourse Analysis', Journal of Political Ideologies, 11:2 (2006),
pp. 115–140.
Wodak, R. et al., 'Content Analysis', in Methods of Text and Discourse Analysis, London,
Sage, 2000, pp. 55–73.
Chapter Three:
Women's Time Has Come: An Archaeology of
French Female Presidential Candidates – From
Arlette Laguiller (1974) to Ségolène Royal (2007)
Marlène Coulomb-Gully
'Women's time has come.' This is how Ségolène Royal, on several occasions during the
presidential campaign of 2007, was presented and even justified her candidature, putting
the gender argument at the heart of her personal rhetoric.
As a candidate of the socialist party, one of the two main parties in France, Royal
belongs to a line of female politicians, a line of potential female presidents even, of which
she can be regarded as the front runner. It is this lineage of female candidates that we
propose to study. In doing so, our viewpoint will be a genealogical one, the intention
being to attempt a sort of archaeology (to use an expression dear to Michel Foucault) of
the prospective female president.
Saying: 'I'm [a woman] standing for president' constitutes a strong performative act,
both individually and collectively, which is an effective opposition to a tradition of male
hegemony and strong social norms regarding gender; a tradition which remains one of
Gendered Transformations
the last bastions in the world of politics. While there have always been women in power,
from Cleopatra to Catherine II of Russia or Elizabeth I of England and many others,
female heads of state who are democratically elected remain the exception. Indeed, in
France there have been none.
Nine women have been presidential candidates in France since 1965, when the
country's president was first elected through universal suffrage. The gesture made by
these pioneers is, above all, symbolic. Indeed, none of them, except for Ségolène Royal
in 2007, could have hoped to make it through to the second round.
The objective of this analysis is threefold. First of all, we will stress the methodological
perspective, and will then analyse a specific case, namely that of Arlette Laguiller in
1974. She was first woman to stand for the role of president of the Republic and is a kind
of template upon which we can consider all of the other female presidential candidates
who have followed in her footsteps. Finally, we will end with a comparison of Ségolène
Royal's campaign in 2007 to those that have gone before, and will attempt to see how
much things have changed for women in politics since 1974.
However, although it would be extremely interesting to understand and research
what may be common currency and what may be attributable to national specificities
(in terms of the rise in the power of female politicians, the identities deployed by them
and the reactions they cause), this is 'another story', albeit one which we hope will be
written soon.
Our approach is neither sociological nor based on political science, which in France are
the areas which seem to attract the most research on the issue of women in politics. Instead,
our outlook is communicational. It questions the construction of the image of self and the
notion of ethos serving as a point of anchorage. The Aristotelian concept was rediscovered
in the 1980s through discourse analysis and is defined as 'the image of self that the orator
produces in his speech—and not that of his real person' (Charaudeau and Maingueneau,
2002: 238). This is interesting because it bypasses the question of the real individual, instead
considering the speech produced as an object of interrogation in itself.
The ethos is rooted in 'stereotypes, an arsenal of collective representations which determine,
in part, the representation of self and its effectiveness in a given culture' (Charaudeau and
Maingueneau, 2002: 239). Contextualization by rooting in a given culture is a determining
factor, as is the reference to the notion of collective representations. Indeed, the stereotype
conditions the supposed effectiveness of the argumentative strategy. This second point is
all the more important because here we are analysing women's candidatures where the
mobilization of stereotypes in collective representations has always been particularly strong
(and, without a doubt, conditioned) in the strategies deployed by female politicians.
Women's Time Has Come: An Archaeology of French Female Presidential Candidates (1974–2007)
As Maingueneau points out: 'all speech comes from an enunciator incarnate', and this
incarnation covers 'not only the specifically vocal dimension but also all the physical and
psychological determinations attached by collective representations to the enunciator's
person' (Maingueneau, 1998: 79–80). The saying and the said, the verbal and the non-
verbal, the articulation of an active imagination in the midst of a given collectivity, these
are all the elements which should be analysed so as to define the models that these female
politicians put forward for collective deliberation.
We will, of course, question the place of the gender dimension constitution of
this ethos. How can the gender argument be mobilized? Is it explicit or implicit? Is it
articulated by the candidates themselves or by their entourages (journalists, rivals, etc.)?
Is it used positively or negatively (Bonnafous & Vassy, 2001; Bonnafous, 2003; Vassy,
2005)? Is it mobilized differently according to the period (a diachronic component)?
And, above all, is it mobilized differently by the right-wing (in this case, a minority: three
of nine) and the left-wing candidates?1 In other words, how may gender and class ethos
be articulated in the construction of these model female politicians?
The corpus of the analysis is twofold, and includes consideration of both television
programmes and newspapers. So far as the former are concerned, we will study the eight
o'clock news bulletins, which have the largest viewing figures, as well as a selection of
political and entertainment programmes broadcast during the election campaigns in
which the candidates appear.
The written press to be examined is as follows: Le Figaro, a daily paper on the right,
characterized by a conservative position in relation to women; Le Monde, a paper on the
centre-left, the 'yardstick'; and Libération, founded in the aftermath of May 1968 and
sensitive to women's fight for emancipation.
In this archaeology of the female politician, the study of Arlette Laguiller is vital.
First, in 1974, she was the first French woman to campaign for president and, secondly,
she has participated in every presidential election since then, the campaign of 2007
being the most recent. To French citizens and, according to public opinion, she is the
so-called candidate, with the woman and the role eventually merging into one. In
this paper, however, we will limit ourselves to a presentation of her first campaign in
Some reminders of the context of this election are worthwhile. It should have taken
place in 1975, but was brought forward a year following the untimely death of the serving
president at that time, Georges Pompidou. As a consequence, the campaign was very
short, lasting barely a few weeks, and was centred on the month of April. This presidential
election, like that of 1969, followed the huge anti-establishment movement of May 1968,
Gendered Transformations
which sent shockwaves through the upper echelons of French society. Arlette Laguiller
was representative of this movement because she was both a woman and a candidate
from the Lutte Ouvrière ('Worker's Struggle'), a small party on the extreme left.
Women's Time Has Come: An Archaeology of French Female Presidential Candidates (1974–2007)
But unlike decades which followed this first campaign, where the revendication of the
political status of women went hand in hand with the strategic mobilization of a set of
supposedly status-enhancing stereotypical qualities (such as a sense of responsibility, being
hard working, being down to earth and accurate, able to spot nuance, lacking personal
ambition, and having the ability to both see beyond the academic and take into account
human qualities) (Vassy, 2005; Bonnafous, 2003), the gender argument was not specified by
Arlette Laguiller. The simple openness of the statement somehow sufficed in itself and was
free from any characterization. Indeed, the very starkness of the statement—its brutality?—
is revealing of the radicality of the break with tradition occasioned by the candidate's gesture.
Is it really possible to imagine a male candidate standing up in front of the electors and
saying 'Well, yes, I am a man, and I'm venturing to stand for president…'?5 The irreversibilty
of the formula is revealing of the fundamental dissymmetry of the political space.
'…and I'm venturing to stand for president of this Republic of men', she continued. The
formula highlights the symbolic show of strength that a female candidate represented in
the deeply chauvinistic context of the 1970s. Let us remind ourselves that she was the only
woman to stand in 1974 (which would again be the case in 1988) against eleven men.6 The
gender argument doesn't suffer from a lack of characterization because it is a challenge
in itself. As a matter of fact, at the start of the official campaign, the président du conseil
constitutionnel, Roger Frey, declared that: 'The definitive list of candidates standing for
election as president of the Republic in alphabetical order has been established as follows:
Messrs. Jacques Chaban-Delmas, René Dumont, Valéry Giscard d'Estaing, Guy Héraut,
Alain Krivine, Arlette Laguiller, Jean-Marie Le Pen…'
In analysing Laguiller's other speeches, it is notable that the revendication of gender
went hand in hand with the denunciation of the situation experienced by other members
of the population: workers, young people and immigrants. These terms (women/
workers/ young people/immigrants) were almost always associated with each other and
are potentially interchangeable. Together these groups formed a real paradigm, a cohort
of people without rights and without voices, for whom Arlette Laguiller wanted to be the
Women thus fit into the notion of the dominated, their struggle being in common
with all of those who, according to the ideology of the far left, suffered under middle-
class, capitalist oppression.
According to Maingueneau's definition of ethos, we have seen that all speech originates
from an enunciator incarnate, with this incarnation covering 'not only the specifically
vocal dimension but also all the physical and psychological determinations attached
by collective representations to the enunciator's person' (Maingueneau, 1998: 79–80).
Gendered Transformations
Arlette Laguiller was the very incarnation of the protest against the dominant social
order, and the model of femininity that she represented was very much at odds with that
proposed by middle-class society in the 1970s.
The media of that time, both print and audiovisual, presented two types of women
during this very short campaign: the candidate, Arlette Laguiller, and the spouses of the
main male candidates. Thus, Mesdames Giscard d'Estaing, Mitterrand, Chaban Delmas,
Le Pen and Royer were all the subject of portraits. As a consequence, the specificity of
the stance of the revolutionary candidate appears all the more clearly when seen in the
light of these other women.
'For the general public, the first impression that Arlette Laguiller, 34 years old, makes is
of being a slender young woman with black hair cut very short.' This is how the candidate
was described in one of the first articles that the newspaper Le Monde devoted to her on
5 April 1974. Young, slight, her hair much shorter than many of her contemporaries at
that time (Alain Krivine, her opponent from the Ligue Communiste Révolutionnaire
and also running for president, had his hair much longer), almost always dressed in
trousers, a T-shirt, a pullover or a blouse, wearing a duffle coat, and without make-up or
jewellery, Laguiller offered an different incarnation, away from the models of femininity
valued in middle-class society and of which the spouses mentioned above are prime
examples. Other much valued attributes were long hair, if possible blond, which is a
traditional object of male fantasy, a dress which uncovers the legs, another privileged
area of male desire, make-up which adds its finishing touches to the body and jewellery
designed to show it off.
This neutralization of the outward signs of femininity, as they are defined by the
dominant code, gives the figure of Arlette Laguiller a kind of androgyny which is
accentuated by the recurrence of her declarations concerning her refusal to marry and
have children. Acknowledged in her biography (Laguiller, 1974), these statements were
taken up by all of the media. For example, in Le Figaro on 23 April, Sylvain Zegel wrote:
When she presents herself as a worker who has the time to be militant
because she doesn't have a husband or dependent child, she doesn't just
content herself with stating an opinion, she is thus expressing a choice
and we have to understand that it's because she has neither husband nor
child that she has the time to represent the workers.
Women's Time Has Come: An Archaeology of French Female Presidential Candidates (1974–2007)
Le Monde and Le Figaro both published portraits about Laguiller which were again
very telling of the character of the candidate, who was perceived as unconventional.
'Comrade Arlette' (La camarade Arlette) was the title of the article in Le Monde on 5
April, while 'A female Saint-Just' headed the piece in Le Figaro on the 23rd of that same
month. It is interesting to note that in French the term 'camarade' has the same form for
both the masculine and feminine genders, while Le Figaro compared her to Saint-Just, a
man, and the very epitome of the revolutionary hard-liner. The female political activist,
Olympe de Gouges, or the well-known revolutionary, Rosa Luxemburg, could have been
evoked in a similar vein, but it is a man who was chosen to serve as the model here.
The operation is all the more significant since another portrait, devoted to the male
candidate from the Revolutionary Communist League, Alain Krivine, went by the title
of 'the vestal Krivine' ('La vestale Krivine'). So, on the one hand, there is a feminization
of the intellectual from the far left (Jewish, too, and the historical identification of Jews
with women in stereotypical, disparaging forms is well known) and, on the other, the
masculinization of the female revolutionary socialist. This two-way mix-up is revealing of
the more or less conscious associations created by both the candidates' incarnations and the
denial of femininity which characterized the first woman to stand for the role of president of
France. The ethos of class further complicates matters, however, as we will see now.
To conclude with this first campaign, let us focus on the second and final article that
Le Figaro devoted to Laguiller. It is by Jean Fayard, dates from 22 April, and refers to the
televised official campaign programme on the 20th of that month:
I don't have anything against Miss Laguiller. She's actually rather pretty,
reasonably well dressed in green and black and I think she fulfils her post
as typist at the Crédit Lyonnais quite honourably. But when she seeks
to become President of the French Republic, when, mumbling her way
through a primary school text that she deciphers with great difficulty, she
claims to represent women, I can't prevent myself from thinking that at
least a million other women would be more capable, more gifted, more
astute and better made to set out ideas.
The violence of the charge is extreme, and it's no coincidence that these lines were found
in the columns of Le Figaro, a right-wing, conservative, daily newspaper. Arlette Laguiller,
a rank and file worker, as she liked to define herself, a representative of a party on the far
left and a woman to boot, was obviously the embodiment of the absolute counter-model
in the opinion of the journalist. Even if these words were just those of the author, it can be
Gendered Transformations
argued that there were many people who regarded Laguiller's candidature as scandalous.
Her ethos, which inextricably combined gender and class, did not coincide with that of a
potential president, at least in the imaginations of 1970s' citizens.
So, how can this ethos of a potential president be characterized? Simply, by a
requirement for collective representation which refers to the imaginary citizen. In a
presidential election in the system of representation which supposes to be a reflective
connection between the governed and the governing, the president of the Republic
is the operator who allows the passage from plural to singular and from diversity to
unicity by the production of a collective identity (Gaxie, 1993; Rosanvallon, 1998). This
identification is based on the objective relationship between opposing political powers,
and any candidate not nominated by a majority party has no chance of winning the
election. But such identification cannot be limited to this dimension alone, and the
incarnations of the candidates in their personal dimensions also influence the work of the
imagination. The candidate, Arlette Laguiller, departed in two ways from the standards
of this incarnation as progressively defined by a succession of presidential elections: by
her class ethos and by her gender ethos, the latter being the model of femininity put
forward by the candidate which is at odds with the dominant models in the institutional
sphere. Taking into account the status of women in 1970s' French society, this first female
candidature could only be doubly marginal.
Women's Time Has Come: An Archaeology of French Female Presidential Candidates (1974–2007)
Ségolène Royal is, without doubt, the first female French politician at a high level to
treat her gender as a political asset and embrace her status as a woman. Until now, female
ministers and major party figures have opted for the reverse strategy of refusing to draw
attention to their gender identity, clearly fearing that this would give their opponents
ammunition to use against them.11
Royal, on the other hand, embraces her status as a woman. As a mother of four children,
and given the government posts she has held12, she to some extent embodies the state of
motherhood. In 1992, just hours after the birth of her youngest daughter, Flora, she posed
for the cameras with her child in her arms, an image which has stayed in the minds of the
French people. And, during the presidential campaign, she announced at her manifesto
launch at Villepinte in Paris (11 February 2007): 'I want for all French children what I
wanted for my own children.' Moreover, on several occasions, she promised the French
people that she would 'look after [them] well', and noted that: 'France needs tenderness.
It is so deprived of it…what's important is the way we love one another, in spite of our
differences.' (Brest, 4 May 2007)
However, it wasn't the mother that the French saw during this campaign. The first thing
that strikes the observer is the profound metamorphosis that Royal's face has undergone.
Like François Mitterrand before her, she has had her upper canines filed down, and
the glasses she once wore have disappeared, bringing out her blue eyes. What is more,
Gendered Transformations
shorter hair, with a soft, blow-dried finish has replaced the hair bands and ponytails that
she used to prefer. In terms of her wardrobe, she opts for feminine elegance. Her clothes
are close-fitting, accentuating her slim figure; she rarely wears trousers, but she does like
bright colours, and her jewellery is discreet, but not absent (small earrings, light bracelets
and necklaces, thus accentuating the delicacy of her wrists and neck). Glossy magazines
put her on their covers, and everyone has gushed about her good looks. Indeed, let us
not forget that she was ranked sixth in a June 2006 poll conducted by the French edition
of the men's magazine, FHM, just behind Angelina Jolie and ahead of sex symbols such
as Pamela Anderson and Monica Belluci!
As a mother and a pretty woman, Ségolène Royal offers an unprecedented model of the
female politician which is poles apart from that embodied by the first female presidential
candidate, Arlette Laguiller. If Royal has incurred the wrath of a number of feminists,
who censured what they considered to be a dual concession to patriarchal dogma, one
can nevertheless consider that her nomination as the candidate of one of the two major
French political parties allows us to measure the long apprenticeship of women and the
gradual percolation of ideas that have allowed them to progressively embody this ethos
of a potential president.13
Neither Ségolène Royal nor, a fortiori, Arlette Laguiller, were elected president of the
Republic. It would be absurd to claim that their failure—particularly Royal's—was due
to the mere fact that they were women. Yet, the violence of the misogynous reaction
during the last campaign proved that the mobilization of both the gender argument
and the model of political incarnation constructed by Royal were an obstacle for many
citizens. This hurdle was, without a doubt, also (initially) symbolic. Indeed, while
women are recognized as competent, they still have difficulty in gaining acceptance
as 'representatives'. Although women have long been working as experts in political
cabinets or even as secretaries of state or ministers appointed by the president, they
have more difficulty in getting elected by their fellow citizens (Sineau, 2001; 2008). This
is akin to the analysis by Geneviève Fraisse, for whom the feminine is perceived (and
has been constructed as such for centuries) as specific and, at the same time, blocking
access to representation, the latter being founded on the theoretical imperative of a
universality. On the other hand, the masculine has been worked on to be perceived as
neutral and, consequently, in line with the requirements of collective representation
(Fraisse, 1995).
The challenge that female politicians must embrace lies in finding modes of
representation which, without denying their gender ethos, make it compatible with the
requirements of neutrality which are currently identified with the masculine alone. If
this strategy is successful, one may finally talk of a France Présidente.
Women's Time Has Come: An Archaeology of French Female Presidential Candidates (1974–2007)
1. This last question, though important when studying all of the French female candi-
dates, doesn't make sense in this specific study. Ségolène Royal and Arlette Laguiller
were both left-wing candidates (though the latter belonged to an extreme left party,
whereas the former represents the governmental socialist party).
2. For the campaign in 1974, each candidate had an allotted two hours of radio and two
hours of television broadcasts. On TV, these two hours were divided into slots of nine
and eighteen minutes which were broadcast on the first and second channels, the latter
being in colour. The candidate could appear alone, be interviewed by people of his/her
choice or could even be represented by someone else. Arlette Laguiller chose to appear
alone in all of the official campaign programmes.
5. It is interesting to note that, in the same period, the singer Michel Polnareff, in order
to refute accusations of homosexuality, declared 'I'm a man, in short, what could
be more natural?' ('Je suis un homme, je suis un homme, quoi de plus naturel en
somme?'), while he posed in drag with his buttocks exposed.
6. Other female candidates should have been present at these elections in 1974, as the jour-
nalist Claude Servan-Schreiber pointed out: 'Elections remain a man's business…Admit-
tedly, for the first time in an electoral campaign we have a female candidate, a marginal
nevertheless, Arlette Laguiller, just one against eleven. But there could have been two
female candidates. Five days before the closing date for registration of candidatures, the
League of Women's Rights had put forward one of its militants. But failure to collect the
necessary signatures through insufficient time meant that Huguette Leforestier had to
abandon the idea of standing. ' (In Le Monde on 25 April 1974).
7. In Moi, une Militante, an autobiography which came out in April 1974, the candidate
said that women are 'conditioned from their youngest age to play their role as women
destined for domestic chores and to be at the beck and call of husband and children,
in short, to play a role as slaves and the exploited' (Laguiller, 1974: 77).
8. 'For the general public, the first impression that Arlette Laguiller, who is 34 years
old, makes, is of being a slender young woman with black hair cut very short who
defined herself, in January 1973, as a militant without a husband or dependent chil-
Gendered Transformations
dren, and who can represent and fight besides those who seek to build a real socialist
society, a society in which police and struggle for profit will cease to exist.' (Le Monde
on 5 April 1974) One of the journalists present at the press conference asked her:
'Why aren't you married?' To which the candidate humorously replied: 'Perhaps it's
because nobody's thought about asking me. ' (The eight o'clock news bulletin (20h),
Channel 2, 19 April 1974)
9. Even if Ségolène Royal was nominated by bypassing the party executive; see, among
others, Bacqué & Chemin, 2007.
10. 'All of us are going to build this "France President", an adult France, a sovereign
France, a France where everything is possible.'
11. Two events sent out shock waves to female politicians: first, the shameful dismissal of
the first—and to date only—female French prime minister, Edith Cresson, primarily
on the grounds that she was a woman; secondly, in 1995, the no less shameful purging
of the female members of Alain Juppé's first government, who had been nicknamed
'les jupettes' in a supremely chauvinistic pun on the French word for skirt ('juppe').
Women have since learnt their lesson and are now wary of being seen as making an
issue of their gender.
12. She was, variously, a member of the president's advisory body, focusing on youth
and sport (1982–1984) and social affairs (1984–1988), deputy minister for schools
(1997–2002), and deputy minister for the family, childhood and the handicapped
13. For a detailed analysis of gender and politics during the 2007 French presidential
campaign, see Coulomb-Gully, 2009.
Bacqué, R. & Chemin, A., La femme fatale, Paris, Albin Michel, 2007.
Bonnafous, S., & Vassy, S., 'Réflexion sur une étude de la communication gouvernementale',
in Actes du 12ème Congrès de la SFSIC, Paris, SFSIC, 2001, pp. 205–211.
Bonnafous, S., 'Femmes politiques: Une question de genre?', in Réseaux n°120, Paris,
hermès-Sciences, 2003, pp. 121–145.
Women's Time Has Come: An Archaeology of French Female Presidential Candidates (1974–2007)
Coulomb-Gully, M., 'Beauty and the Beast', European Journal of Communication, 24:2
(2009), pp. 203–218.
Fraisse, G., Muse de la raison, Démocratie et exclusion des femmes en France, Paris,
Gallimard, 1995.
Sineau, M., Profession femme politique: Sexe et pouvoir sous la Vème République, Paris,
Presses de Sciences Po, 2001.
Sirdar-Iskandar Ch., 'Eh bien! Le russe lui a donné cent francs', in O. Ducrot (ed.) Les
mots du discours, Paris, Editions de Minuit, 1981, pp. 161–191.
Gendered Transformations
Chapter Four:
Gender Analysis of Mediated Politics In Germany
During the last few years, the political landscape has changed. The number of women
who have reached high-ranking positions as heads of government or have run for such
offices has increased. Indeed, in Germany, Angela Merkel became federal chancellor
in 2005, and in Finland, Tarja Halonen is actually the state president, as is Christina
Fernández de Kirchner in Argentina and Michelle Bachelet in Chile. Although
Ségolène Royal did not succeed during the French presidential election in 2007 (see the
chapter by Coulomb-Gully), her candidacy also highlights the advancement of female
politicians when it comes to senior roles. These developments suggest that the media
representation of high-ranking female politicians may now differ from in the past,
when Margaret Thatcher was the only woman in Europe to hold an important public
office. Several studies over the last twenty years have proved the marginalization and
trivialization of top-level female politicians in both the German media (Schmerl, 1989;
2002; Sterr, 1997; Pfannes, 2004; Gnaendiger, 2007) and internationally (Norris, 1997;
Sreberny & Van Zoonen, 2000; Pantti, 2007). It may, however, be the case that these
findings are no longer current, and further research is certainly needed to take into
account the changes that have taken place in society. This ongoing project examines
whether media representations have altered in quantitative and qualitative terms as a
result of the chancellorship of Angela Merkel, who is the first female chancellor of the
Gendered Transformations
Federal Republic of Germany. We will analyse the intensity of her media presence as
well as the coverage of her performance in foreign politics, a scene which has formerly
been dominated by male protagonists. In another research question, we ask if her
visibility, which is thought to be distinctive because of her status, also has a positive
effect on the portrayal of other senior female politicians in Germany. For these reasons,
the quantitative representation of these women is explored. Studies which concentrate
on the election campaign in 2005, when Angela Merkel competed against Gerhard
Schroeder, illustrate that the current chancellor faced no quantitative marginalization
despite her femininity (Holtz-Bacha & Koenig-Reiling, 2007; Holtz-Bacha, 2008). Yet, up
to now, we do not know how she has continued to be represented in either quantitative
or qualitative terms. Accordingly, it is for this reason that a qualitative analysis,
focusing on the modes of portraying Merkel, is also being undertaken. We seek out the
consequences which result from the plurality of themes and broadcasting contexts where
she appears. So far as other high-ranking female politicians are concerned, and because
we can only refer to a small number of qualitative findings, we will also examine these
women and their attributes in media texts. Consequently, we know little about past
modes of representation. This desideratum results from the fact that earlier research
analysed the subject in a quite constricted manner, with all of it focusing on quantitative
data from news broadcasts or newspapers. Ang and Hermes (1994) highlighted the
importance of the examination of 'gender representations' (Ang & Hermes, 1994) as an
aid to understanding how politicians who are women are portrayed. For example, the
coverage of female senators in the Berlin senate was reduced to private contexts and
was often scandalized, and these women were primarily reflected in a negative manner
(Schaeffer-Hegel, 1995). It is presumed that the media coverage of female politicians
in top-level positions is strongly shaped by inconsistencies, since two different social
roles need to be merged in the mediated representation: on the one hand, these women
are portrayed as the keepers of power and influence in professional contexts, while on
the other their social role is coded in terms of traditional femininity. As femininity and
power are socially constructed as opponents, a tension between these spheres might
occur when female politicians become media subjects. Accordingly, wider research,
which also emphasizes a qualitative approach, is necessary.
The first part of the chapter introduces the empirical concept of our research project.
We then focus on the quantitative representation of men and women in high-ranking
positions. Thereafter, as an example of our qualitative content and iconographic
analysis, in the third part of the chapter we will present some qualitative findings
relating to a particular media event: the opening of the Norwegian National Opera in
Oslo in April 2008, which Angela Merkel attended wearing a robe which accentuated
her décolleté.
Gender Analysis of Mediated Politics In Germany
Before we present the first set of our quantitative and qualitative results, we would like
to provide a brief insight into the basis data and methodological design of our work. The
ongoing project 'Women at the Top Represented by the Media'1 aims to contribute to
fulfilling research desiderata. It combines quantitative and qualitative content analyses, as
well as an iconographic analysis which investigates the textual and visual representation
of women and men in leading positions.2 Unique is the examination of the portrayal
of managers and scholars alongside that of female politicians. The study is important
because the relative representations of female managers and scholars in media content
have never been investigated before.
The sample examined comprises broadsheet newspapers and the tabloid press, political,
business and glossy magazines, weekly newspapers, and public and private broadcasts and
magazine television programmes. This material was examined over a period of six months
(from 1 April to 30 September) in 2008. The quantitative study contains a complete analysis
of all of the media content published in this period by 23 daily newspapers, magazines
and television broadcasts.3 Thereafter, both a qualitative and an iconographic analysis will
cover a selection of media output chosen from the overall sample. The quantitative data
was evaluated by descriptive statistics. The aim of the study is to compare the presence
of the three types of protagonists mentioned above, and to ask how men and women are
represented by the mass media. Furthermore, our aim was to examine the influence that
the representation of Angela Merkel, as the first female chancellor in Germany, has had
on the media's depiction of women in top-level positions.
In a next step, we will conduct interviews with journalists in order to understand the
modes of production of gendered texts. We are interested in professional routines and
behavioural patterns in which gendered manners of representation are created. In addition,
and in an attempt to gain insight into people's production of meaning, the reception of
young women and men will also be explored by using focus group interviews. Studying
the readers' perspectives is essential for acquiring an understanding of the social processes
(Klaus et al., 2006) which may contribute to the audiences' role models. We argue that
media professionals' perspectives and audiences' viewpoints are significant when it comes
to understanding the reasons for the emergence of gendered media representations.4
Findings from the quantitative content analysis will now be presented and discussed
in an initial consideration of the representation of women in top-level positions. The
analysis was guided by the following research questions:
Gendered Transformations
Representation in general: how many male and female high-ranking politicians, managers
and scholars do the German media cover?
Different media: in which way does the representation of women in leading positions
vary in different media genres?
Different professions: how is the relationship between male and female senior politicians,
managers and scholars characterized?
Politicians: has the representation of top-level female politicians changed over the years
since Germany has been governed by a female chancellor? Has the election of
Angela Merkel had any (positive) effects on the representation of high-ranking
female politicians?
In the quantitative analysis of six months of media content from newspapers, only
the business and political sections were coded, while the entire content was examined
in the case of the magazines and television broadcasts. All female and male politicians,
managers and scholars with five or more lines devoted to them in texts were counted and
differentiated by sex and professional status. In the television broadcasts and television
magazine programmes, the politicians, managers and researchers who appeared for
more than five seconds were selected (Table 1).
The number of coded individuals who fit into the coding categories is quite large,
and there is immediately a disparity between male and female protagonists. Altogether,
57,548 people were noted: 47,694 men and 9,854 women. The following table (2) sets out
the proportion of males and females and their numbers in absolute figures:
The first basic results reveal that women are still in a minority in terms of their
portrayal in the German media, with only 17 per cent of all representations. With 21
per cent of the coverage, the percentage of women in top-level positions referred to is
slightly higher. Nevertheless, in comparison to their male colleagues, female leaders are
under-represented. Women comprised about one-fifth of all of the individuals featured,
on both an average and a hierarchical level. This insight leads us to our first conclusion,
namely that women are still marginalized in terms of media representation.
When comparing the findings from different forms of media, a certain homogeneity
is noticeable; most of the representations of females are in the range of 17 to 20 per
cent, irrespective of the source of the data. As seen in Table 3, the media which focus
on providing information, like newspapers, political magazines and television news
broadcasts, all include women at this sort of level.4
However, there are also positive and negative exceptions to the homogeneous results.
The proportion of women featured in the business magazine, manager magazin, is, at 4
per cent, the lowest finding, followed by Capital and the television economics programme,
Gender Analysis of Mediated Politics In Germany
WISO (Table 3). The conclusion is clear: the economic sector is still a male-dominated
sphere, and this clearly socially constructed connotation leads to an exclusion of women
from the related media coverage.
In people and women's magazines, the visibility of female politicians, managers and
scientists is more distinctive. With 59 per cent of its coverage devoted to them, the women's
magazine Brigitte is at the top of all genres in terms of its portrayal of women. In addition, the
general publications, Bunte and SuperIllu, and the television news broadcasts distributed by
commercial stations, also feature an above average percentage of female protagonists (Table
3).5 These results suggest that the media which focus on providing information still tend to
marginalize women, while that which concentrates on entertainment, which usually relates
more to topics of human interest, has more space for their representation. This is another
Gendered Transformations
Table 3: Percentage and absolute figures of men and women in individual media
Gender Analysis of Mediated Politics In Germany
to their professional background (Table 4). In politics, women are represented noticeably
more often than they are in the fields of academia or economics.
The data shows that in comparison to men, the professions in which women receive the
most coverage are the fields of top-level politics (30 per cent), followed by that of senior
research (11 per cent). Only 4 per cent of managers in high-ranking positions referred to
were female.6 This under-representation of women in the media is often justified by their
factual under-representation in society. Yet, examination of the data relating to the three
professions under consideration herein, reveals that, once more, the media do not simply
reflect the status quo, but also construct a traditional world in which hierarchical gender
relationships are implied, particularly in certain professional contexts. Indeed, in the media
coverage of economics, women seem to be almost irrelevant. Reports about the economy
and major companies still ignore female managers and emphasize the male position.
Between 9 and 13 per cent of the top-level managers in German businesses are female,
but this is not reflected in the media (Bischoff, 2005: 35). In contrast, the field of politics
is characterized differently: according to the media coverage of this field, there is a certain
visibility of female politicians in this context. Although these women are slightly under-
represented in the media, as they are in the German government, with 38 per cent of all
cabinet members being female (BMBFSFJ, 2009), they are featured more according to their
social relevance than the women in the two other professional fields under examination.
Like in the economic sector, the situation concerning the representation of women in
academia in the media reveals that they are again marginalized. In universities and applied
research institutes, 17 and 8 per cent, respectively, of all leading positions are held by women
(GWK, 2009: 10). So, to summarize the findings made about the link between the numbers
of women in top-level positions referred to in the media and their professions, it becomes
clear that their marginalization in society, which certainly persists, is intensified in the
media. Nevertheless, there are enormous differences between these three fields, meaning
that the visibility of female leaders depends on the sector with which they are involved.
Economics in particular is still a man's world. Even though women with a high professional
status are media subjects more often than others of their sex because of their function, they
are referred to less than men in the same positions. Therefore, we have to conclude that
their points of view and social relevance are valued as being less significant, since we still
find modes and acts of disempowerment of females in the German media.
A major aim of our examination is to analyse the impact that a female chancellor
has had on the media representation of senior politicians. To do this, it is necessary to
compare the proportion of top-level female politicians featured in the German media
Gendered Transformations
Table 4: Proportion of women and men in top-level positions according to their profession
before Angela Merkel was elected chancellor to the situation more recently. A study by
Jutta Roeser (2006), undertaken in 2005 just before Merkel was elected, is an ideal starting
point. In that research, the proportion of female politicians referred to in the main news
section in eleven German daily newspapers over a three-month-period was analysed,
and at that time only 18 per cent of all of the politicians represented were female.
A comparison of the proportion of female politicians mentioned in the German media
in the years 2005 and 2008 reveals that the number of women represented in newspapers
has increased, but only by a small amount. Today, 20 per cent of all politicians featured
in German newspapers are female, while in 2005 this figure was 18 per cent, as referred
to above. But things have changed when it comes to women holding a high political
office: at 30 per cent, the proportion of top-level female politicians featured in the media
coverage is twelve points higher than when Gerhard Schroeder was the chancellor.
However, a look at the group of senior politicians featured in our sample who are
women reveals that in relation to her female political colleagues in other leading positions,
Angela Merkel dominates completely. In the four daily newspapers analysed, 55 per cent
of the coverage of all female high-ranking politicians is devoted to her (Table 5).
The contrast between the number of times that Merkel is mentioned in the four
newspapers studied compared to the overall group of top-level female politicians
emphasizes these findings. In the tageszeitung, the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung
and the Sueddeutsche Zeitung, she is referred to in half or more of all representations
about female political leaders (approximately 49 to 58 per cent). In the tabloid Bild,
this figure reaches 70 per cent because the journalistic 'strategy of personalization' is
used more often in this newspaper. The utilization of this approach seems to reflect a
Gender Analysis of Mediated Politics In Germany
concentration on featuring the woman holding the most important political office in
Germany. Meanwhile, female ministers only benefit a little from this personalized kind
of media coverage. These findings are supported by those of Christina Bauer (2008),
who found that during the election campaign in 2005, Merkel was practically the only
woman referred to in the television news; 95 per cent of the speeches by women that
were covered were by Merkel, while this figure was only 38 per cent for her opponent,
former chancellor Gerhard Schroeder. The journalistic 'strategy of gearing to the elite',
therefore, seems to be more prevalent in reporting about women than about men. While
national female ministers are outshined by chancellor Merkel, their male counterparts
gain much more attention than their female colleagues.
Even though Merkel as an individual is well represented in the newspapers, this does
not lead to there being a greater proportion of female politicians in leading positions in
general being featured (Table 6). There are also no remarkable differences between the
four newspapers, since the average proportion of top-level female politicians represented
in all of them is about one-third of all of the coded politicians.
Given that they follow journalistic strategies which lead to a focus on topics
characterized as 'human interest', the women's and people's magazines were expected
to feature a higher percentage of female politicians. The results, indeed, reveal that the
women's magazine Brigitte, with 58 per cent of representations, refers to female political
leaders most often. In Bunte, 41 per cent of all top-level politicians referred to are female,
while in Superlllu, a press magazine mainly distributed in Eastern Germany, this figure
Gendered Transformations
is 36 per cent. In Stern, however, and as in the overall sample, only one-third of all
political leaders featured are female. Nevertheless, in the popular media, the percentage
of representations of Merkel in particular is notably higher (Table 7).
In three of the four magazines studied, between 50 and 73 per cent of the coverage of
top-level female politicians is devoted to Merkel. Only in Brigitte is this figure lower, at
43 per cent.7
To summarize, the media representation of female politicians must be regarded as
Janus-faced. On the one hand, the coverage of those women in high political office in
the media has obviously intensified recently when compared to 2005, when Germany
Gender Analysis of Mediated Politics In Germany
was governed by a male chancellor. On the other hand, however, it is clear that the fields
of both economics and politics remain a man's world. We can, therefore, conclude that
Merkel's chancellorship does have positive effects on the representation of high-ranking
female politicians, since their coverage has almost doubled. Nevertheless, Merkel's
chancellorship has not lead to greater coverage of top-level female politicians in general,
and nor has it brought about a more distinctive plurality; the greater coverage of women
overall is merely down to her presence. German female ministers, who undoubtedly hold
influential positions, are not represented appropriately. In the case of female politicians
who do not hold a senior office, nothing has changed at all.
Overall, the quantitative results of six months of media coverage lead us to conclude
that—except for Chancellor Merkel—other female political leaders and ordinary female
politicians are still neglected and marginalized, because their proportion of media
coverage has remained almost the same as it was before Merkel was elected.8
To illustrate our qualitative media analysis, we have chosen a specific case study from
our research period. We employ a method which combines qualitative content analysis
with iconographic methods. In April 2008, the German chancellor, who usually wears quite
conservative clothes, provoked public attention by appearing in a décolleté dress. Numerous
European media outlets reported on this unusual outfit, which Merkel wore at the opening
of the National Opera in Oslo. We believe that the media discourse on 'Merkel's décolleté'
highlights the contradictory elements of power and gender in a specific way.
We have analysed the media coverage in selected newspapers and magazines—quality
press as well as tabloids and popular magazines9—between 13 and 21 April 2008. In all
of the media reports we found the same three photographic images: the arrival of Merkel
on the red carpet outside the opera; her shaking hands inside the opera house; and her
conversing with guests (cf. Luenenborg et al., 2009: 77–84).
Almost every report in the German press featured one of these motifs. In what follows,
we will explain how the voyeuristic gaze at the female body is visually constructed in this
highly sexualized, staged presentation. The images that served as a trigger for the extensive
coverage follow the common iconography of power concerning male and female political
representatives. The following discursive patterns become especially visible.
Gendered Transformations
magazine SuperIllu (17 April 2008: 86) saw 'Merkel on top of fashion'. The headline in
Bunte (17 April 2008: 30) read: 'What an appearance!' and talked about a 'statement
of fashionable self-confidence'. According to Bild (14 April 2008: 2), German citizens
favour a femininely dressed chancellor and not one who always wears trouser suits.
The weekly news magazine Focus (17 April 2008: 190) gave Merkel first prize for her
decision to wear this outfit, which is regarded as a nice variation on her usual business
suit silhouette. Even the trouser suit, a female adaption of the business suit, seemed to
be a deviation from the norm of femininity and confuses the heterosexual matrix. In
this line of argument, the outfit Merkel was wearing in Oslo is perceived and assessed as
being a calming stabilization of ideas of femininity and masculinity.
The media coverage evaluated Angela Merkel's outfit as something positive, and
didn't only refer to aesthetic considerations or body constructions. Here, we also find
a gendered debate on the professional status of the German chancellor. According to
another Bunte headline, Merkel reigns 'with a woman's weapons'.10 The magazine Focus
(17 April 2008: 190) turns her into the 'Queen Mum. An alma mater who not only tames
brawly politicians and saves Tibet, but who also wants to embosom the whole nation'.11
Stern (17 April 2008: 20) nominated the chancellor as 'Queen of Might' in another
headline, and in a double-side spread, the magazine presents an image of Merkel 'shaking
hands' with Sweden's Crown Princess Victoria in the lobby of the opera house. It was also
commented, in an annotation to the photograph, that Crown Prince Haakon, who is
also seen in this image, had his eyes fixed on the handshaking and must, therefore, be
considered a perfect gentleman. Thus, the coverage reproduces a heteronormative gaze
and interprets women's breasts as the primary attribute of womanliness and attractiveness.
It assumes that female breasts involuntarily cause heteronormative desire in the viewing
subject (intended as a male viewer). The missing glance of the Crown Prince as shown
on the photograph reintroduced the heteronormative gaze as a signifying practice on a
linguistic level.
In this case, the vivid example of 'Merkel's décolleté' shows clearly how this quality of
'to-be-looked-at-ness' (Mulvey, 1975: 11) and the voyeuristic gaze at the female body is
being created by and in the media, not only on a linguistic but on a visual level as well.
Another picture published in different newspapers and magazines shows the German
chancellor and her Norwegian colleague, Stoltenberg, talking (Figure 1). A large part
of the print media coverage, however, included a photo with only Angela Merkel in it
(Figure 2). Sometimes Merkel is even cropped in the layout (Figure 3). The situation of
political conversation becomes invisible on both of the final photographs shown here.
Merkel is quoted out of context, the picture is decontextualized and the low-cut neckline
stands in focus. In explicitly depicting femininity on the linguistic as well as on the visual
level, the coverage in the media referred to constructs a modern type of female politician
who does not question the heterosexual matrix.
Gender Analysis of Mediated Politics In Germany
Figures 1, 2 and 3: BamS 13 April 2008, Superillu 17April 2008, Bild 18 April 2008
Gendered Transformations
statement, i. e. in Bunte (17 April 2008: 30): 'The fact that her dress caused a furore
was not intended by the chancellor'.14 Furthermore, the media reporting called Merkel's
advisors to account for the clothing choice. According to means of negotiating power and
gender, the coverage stated that the German chancellor revealed a lack of expertise and
independence. Implicitly, the media coverage criticized any assumption of a compatibility
of femininity and political competence.
These two discourses on the intended or unintended quality of Merkel's performance
clearly illustrate the gendering of politics. It becomes obvious that the political sphere
is not a gender-neutral entity. Merkel's appearance is not being evaluated as politically
intentional, but as some kind of seemingly 'natural act' by a woman who dresses
fashionably. If a conscious staging on Merkel's part was insinuated, she appears to be
less powerfully taking her political agency into account. If the media coverage assumed
an intended performance, the female attributions would also expose political actors to
the suspicion of obscuring technical subjects. On a symbolic level, the political sphere is
being reconfirmed as male-dominated according to this media representation. Therefore,
the exclusion of women and femininities appears to be natural.
The findings from the quantitative analysis show that Merkel has a unique position
among the group of top-level female politicians. Because of her extraordinary status, she
is represented in the media far more often than other female political leaders or run of the
mill female politicians. In fact, the representation of these two groups has not increased
fundamentally since Merkel became federal chancellor. We can clearly assert then that in
the field of media coverage, chancellor Merkel outshines all other female politicians.
Because of Merkel's strong presence, it is even more interesting to analyse how senior female
politicians—and especially Merkel—are being depicted. The constellation of tension between
power and gender that exists for women as well as men becomes the focal point of a qualitative
content analysis. It combines an examination of linguistic and visual representations.
Furthermore, the case study reveals that even a high level of media coverage cannot
automatically be valued as a sign of proper representation, because the attribution of female
protagonists also plays an important role. The thin line of seeming gender equality, which
preserved Merkel from being trivialized in the news coverage during the election campaign
(Boomgaarden & Semetko 2007; Holtz-Bacha & Koch, 2008), quickly turns into sexualization
as soon as she leaves her usual gender-neutral appearance behind. We argue that the pictures
have to be regarded as performative acts of gendering and sexualization. By choosing the
moment the photographs were taken, their perspectives and details, the photographers and
picture editors at the various media outlets have represented Merkel in this highly sexualized
way. The widespread coverage provoked by her appearance is based on the difference between
Gender Analysis of Mediated Politics In Germany
the displayed femininity and the familiar. Two areas of conflict became clear in our analysis:
on the one hand, the outfit in Oslo stands in clear opposition to Merkel's hitherto staged
appearance, which was defined as being anti-fashionable and anti-feminine by the media; on
the other, she has diverged from the existing dress code for women in top-ranking political
positions. This code allows there to be a subtle emphasis on the female body, but it is not
expected to be explicit. This difference used to be the main reason for broad media resonance
and is being reconstructed consecutively in covering the issue. One can conclude that the
coexistence of power and femininity is still not accepted and causes irritation to the media.15
1. This is a joint project carried out by Margreth Luenenborg (Free University of Berlin)
and Jutta Roeser (Leuphana University Lueneburg). Our work is funded by the German
Ministry of Science and Research (BMBF) and by the European Social Fund (ESF).
2. Since top-level politicians, managers and scholars take centre stage in this study, the
meaning of the term 'leading position' in all of the three professional fields had to be
defined. Top-level politicians are heads of government, federal ministers and chairs
of a parliamentary party or group. Top-level managers are understood to be chief
executive officers, chairs of the board of management, members of the board of asso-
ciations, managing directors, managers and owners and managing directors of small-
and medium-sized businesses and family-owned businesses. And finally, the group
of highly qualified researchers includes professors and researchers with a leadership
function at universities and independent research institutions as well as other inter-
nationally renowned researchers and scholars.
4. Even in the tabloid Bild, which tends to personalize and relate to human interest top-
ics only, 18 per cent of women are represented. Two reasons related to the methodical
setting lead to this lower proportion: on the one hand, only politicians, managers and
Gendered Transformations
scholars were counted, but not all of the men and women appearing on the first two
pages. So, actors, singers or other celebrities are not included, and neither are the
wives of politicians or managers. On the other hand, only the political and business
sections were examined. Politicians, managers or scientists named in other sections
are not counted either.
5. In the print and television magazines, only a small number of cases were mentioned.
Therefore, the absolute figures are low.
6. Altogether, following the absolute figures, the politicians also form the largest group,
the managers are in the middle and the scholars are the smallest group: in the sample,
44,859 people are male or female politicians. The number of all male and female ma-
nagers and scholars counted is remarkably lower. Only 10,572 men and women are
managers, and 2,117 are scholars.
7. When comparing newspapers to magazines, it is important to point out that the abso-
lute figures of all of those counted differ greatly: in the newspapers, 20,160 people were
coded as top-level politicians, while in the magazines, only 1,169 female and male top-
level politicians were found.
9. The monthly magazines had not reported on the subject at that time. So, we exten-
ded our original sample by including the Sunday newspapers, Frankfurter Allgemeine
Sonntagszeitung and Bild am Sonntag, and the daily newspaper, Frankfurter Rund-
schau, which addressed the topic early on.
10. '[M]it den Waffen einer Frau' (Bunte, 17 April 2008: 7).
11. 'Koeniginmutter…Eine Alma Mater, die nicht nur zankende Politiker zaehmt und
Tibet rettet, sondern auch die ganze Nation an ihre Brust druecken will'.
12. The communications scientist Kathleen Hall Jamieson (1995) argues that double
binds make it difficult for women to achieve positions of power in our culture. Ja-
Gender Analysis of Mediated Politics In Germany
mieson identifies five double binds for women: Womb/Brain, Silence/Shame, Same-
ness/Difference, Femininity/Competence and Aging/Invisibility.
13. '[M]it ihren Bruesten lenkt Bundeskanzlerin Angela Merkel von den wesentlichen
Problemen eines politisch, wirtschaftlich wie sozial tief gespaltenen Deutschlands
ab. Sie hat damit ihren letzten Trumpf ausgespielt'.
14. 'Dass dieses Abendkleid fuer solche Furore gesorgt hat, lag nicht in der Absicht der
15. The medial constellation of tensions between the attribution of femininity on the one
hand and power through function on the other, described above, is also relevant for
young women's acquirement of these stories and images. The initial explorative inter-
views that were conducted have shown this (cf. Luenenborg et al., 2008: 76–77 and
90–97). More insight into this field will be gained by using the data collection method
of focus groups which is part of the ongoing project.
Ang, I. & Hermes, J., 'Gender and/in Media Consumption', in M.-L. Angerer & J. Dorer
(eds) Gender und Medien: Theoretische Ansaetze, empirische Befunde und Praxis der
Massenkommunikation. Ein Textbuch zur Einfuehrung, Wien, Braumueller, 1994,
pp. 114–133.
Bischoff, S., Wer fuehrt in (die) Zukunft?: Maenner und Frauen in Fuehrungspositionen
der Wirtschaft in Deutschland—die 4. Studie von der Deutschen Gesellschaft fuer
Personalfuehrung e.v., Bielefeld, Bertelsmann, 2005.
BMFSFJ, http://www.bmfsfj.de/bmfsfj/generator/BMFSFJ/Presse/pressemitteilungen,
did=106396.html. Retrieved 9 March 2009.
Boomgaarden, H.G. & Semetko, H.A., 'Duell Mann gegen Frau?! Geschlechterrollen
und Kanzlerkandidaten in der Wahlkampfberichterstattung', in F. Brettschneider,
Gendered Transformations
Focus, '1. Preis fuer 'das Dekolleté' von Angela Merkel', 17 April 2008, p. 190.
GWK, http://www.gwk-bonn.de/fileadmin/Papers/GWK-Heft-03-Chancengleichheit.
pdf. Retreived 9 March 2009.
Holtz-Bacha, C. & Koenig-Reiling, N. (eds), Warum nicht gleich? Wie die Medien mit
Frauen in der Politik umgehen, Wiesbaden, Verlag fuer Sozialwissenschaften, 2007.
Jamieson, K.H., Beyond the Double Bind: Women and Leadership, New York, Oxford
University Press, 1995.
Klaus, E., Roeser, J. & Wischermann, U., 'Frauen und Geschlechterforschung. Zum
Gesellschaftsbezug der Publizistik und Kommunikationswissenschaft', in C. Holtz-
Bacha, A. Kutsch & W. Langenbucher (eds) Publizistik Sonderhefte 5. Fünfzig Jahre
Publizistik, Wiesbaden, Verlag fuer Sozialwissenschaften, 2006, pp. 354–369.
Luenenborg, M., Roeser, J., Maier, T., Mueller, K. & Grittmann, E., 'Merkels Dekolleté als
Mediendiskurs. Eine Bild-, Text- und Rezeptionsanalyse zur Vergeschlechtlichung
Gender Analysis of Mediated Politics In Germany
Kanzlerin', in M. Luenenborg (ed.) Politik auf dem Boulevard? Die Neuordnung derGeschlechter
in der Politik der Mediengesellschaft, Bielefeld, transcript, 2009, pp. 73–102.
Mulvey, L., 'Visual pleasure and narrative cinema', Screen, 16:3 (1975), pp. 6–18.
Norris, P. (ed.), Women, Media, and Politics, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1997.
Pantti, M., 'Portraying politics: Gender, Medien und Politik', in C. Holtz-Bacha & N.
Koenig-Reiling (eds.) Warum nicht gleich? Wie die Medien mit Frauen in der Politik
umgehen, Wiesbaden, Verlag fuer Sozialwissenschaften, 2007, pp. 17–51.
Schaeffer-Hegel, B., Frauen mit Macht: Zum Wandel der politischen Kultur durch die
Praesenz von Frauen in Fuehrungspositionen, Pfaffenweiler, Centaurus-Verlag, 1995.
Schmerl, C., In die Presse geraten. Darstellung von Frauen in der Presse und Frauenarbeit
in den Medien, Koeln, Boehlau, 1989.
Sreberny, A. & Van Zoonen, L. (eds), Gender, Politics and Communication, Cresskill, NJ,
Hampton Press, 2000.
Sterr, L., Frauen und Maenner auf derTtitelseite. Strukturen und Muster der
Berichterstattung am Beispiel einer Tageszeitung, Pfaffenweiler, Centaurus, 1997.
SUPERillu, 'Merkel modisch auf dem Gipfel', 17 April 2008, pp. 86–87. die tageszeitung,
'Hurra, 2 Jahre Silas', 5 April 2008, p. 1.
Die Zeit, 'Wettbruesten. Was es mit Angela Merkels Dekolleté auf sich hat', 17 April 2008,
p. 12.
Gendered Transformations
Gendered Transformations
Chapter Five:
Hollywood, Resistance and Transgressive Queerness:
Re-reading Suddenly, Last Summer (1959), The Children's
Hour (1961) and Advise & Consent (1962)
Towards the end of William Wyler's The Children's Hour (1961), the character of Martha
(played by Shirley MacLaine) seems to be caught up in distress and self-loathing. She has
just come out of the closet as a lesbian to her friend Karen (Audrey Hepburn), using
words and sentences that imply a painfully negative self-image. She sobs and is looking
away from her confidente with whom she has fallen in love. Karen doesn't know what to
say, but a close-up allows the observer to read her expression as pitiful. After the dramatic
coming-out sequence, Martha flees to her room and eventually hangs herself. Although
The Children's Hour is often used as a key example of the stereotypical representation of
the pitiful and suicidal queer (see Russo, 1981; Barrios, 2003), the movie is one of the
first major Hollywood productions explicitly featuring a lesbian main character.
Queer characters had been removed from the big screen during the Production Code
era, as homosexuality was seen by the Production Code Administration (PCA, 1934–
1968) as a sexual perversion. Although The Children's Hour is often described as regressive
in its representation of homosexuality (see Russo, 1981), we argue that the film's text
allows itself to be read as an emancipatory statement, a reading that goes beyond the
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stereotypical surface and is based upon textual elements that defy the Production Code.
In this article we argue that Martha's outburst and suicide can be interpreted as a critique
of a hegemonic discourse on homosexuality. In the same period, other films featuring
gay characters also allow for a non-hegemonic reading. Drawing on poststructuralist
queer theory, which stresses a set of distinctive theories contesting essentialist notions
relating to gender, sexuality and identity (see Butler, 1990; De Lauretis, 1987; Sedgwick,
1985), this article concentrates upon the representations of gay characters in a set
of landmark Hollywood films dating from the end of the 1950s and the early 1960s.
Inspired by Alexander Doty's work on the subtle ways of expressing homosexuality
in film texts (Doty, 2000), we consider movies as spaces where queer resistance can
potentially take form, despite being filtered by institutional and other constraints. One
of these constraints is censorship, which in the case of Hollywood relates to the PCA's
prohibition of the depiction of sexual perversion. A few movies dared to undermine
this code, but Joseph L. Mankiewicz's Suddenly, Last Summer (1959), William Wyler's
The Children's Hour and Otto Preminger's Advise & Consent (1962) are often cited as
the films that challenged and softened the Code's prohibition on representing sexual
aberrations (Barrios, 2003). We will look at how the rejection of a hegemonic notion of
heteronormativity was, or is, inscribed in these film texts. After discussing this concept
of resistance and the importance of integrating queer theory into film studies, we will
elaborate on the role of queer resistance. We will then explore the implications of the
downfall of the Production Code at the end of the 1950s. Drawing upon a queer theory
perspective, we will finally analyse the three movies as potential spaces of resistance.
Queer theory has not only established its worth within gender research and
poststructural theories, but has also become a useful framework for film studies. Frederik
Dhaenens, Sofie Van Bauwel and Daniel Biltereyst (2008) mapped the concept of queer
theory, situating its roots in the late 1970s when the notion of homosexuality began to
be questioned, radically changing gay and lesbian studies (e.g. Creekmur & Doty, 1995).
At this time, homosexuality began to lose its essentialist and uniform connotation,
and homosexual desire came to be positioned in a social and historical context (for
an overview see Seidman, 1996). Gradually, class, race, ethnicity and nationality were
integrated into the debate about identity (Seidman, 1995: 116). Social constructivism
was the dominant approach or paradigm within which identity and sexual orientation
were discussed. It was stressed that socially recognized sexual orientations vary
culturally and historically, and that in cultures where the categories of heterosexuality
and homosexuality are acknowledged, sexual behaviour can move between categories or
incorporate both (McIntosh, 1997: 365–366). Queer theory also draws upon the work
Hollywood, Resistance and Transgressive Queerness
of the literary and film theorist Teresa de Lauretis (1987), who highlighted that early
feminist theory continued to think in terms construed by patriarchies, creating women
as a universal sex category (see Benhabib et al., 1995; De Vos & Van Bauwel, 2002).
Drawing on Foucault's technology of sex (1976), de Lauretis suggested that there is a
technology of gender that is the product of hegemony. Although the gathering of women
under the category 'woman' has its emancipatory purposes, such as the claiming of equal
rights, it constructs boundaries and consolidates the binary opposition between men
and women which upholds the promotion of exclusion and misrepresentation. Judith
Butler (1990), regarded as one of the major queer theorists, drew a comparison between
the categories 'woman' and 'gay', raising an issue that is of the utmost importance in
feminist and queer communities regarding the necessity of understanding how these
fixed categories are produced and reiterated in society. Queer theory and queer politics
react against these normalized hierarchies and identity politics, conducting research
outside the boundaries of predefined gay or lesbian communities (Seidman, 1995: 118–
126; Stein & Plummer, 1996: 134–135).
Queer theorists not only challenge the hetero/homo opposition, but notions of
heteronormativity as well. To this day, the dominant discourse in contemporary
society is that of heteronormativity, which is embedded in political, social and cultural
institutions. Jonathan Katz (1995) stressed the 'construction' of this discourse by
referring to the invention and emergence of heterosexuality in the twentieth century as
a fixed and normative sexuality. Queer theorists aim to resist heteronormative notions
by, for instance, 'queer reading' the texts produced by these institutions. For example, a
queer reading of popular culture products reverses the hegemonic meanings embedded
in these texts (Gross, 1998). Alexander Doty (2000: 2) emphasized that the practice of
queer reading is not so much about making a text queer, but rather about trying to study
how a text is—or might be—understood 'as queer'. Queer readings enable homosocial
and homosexual traces in major Hollywood film productions such as The Wizard of
Oz (Victor Fleming, 1939) to be revealed. Dhaenens et al. (2008) suggested that queer
scholars are not the only ones who are able to read against the grain. Inspired by Henry
Jenkins' (1992) groundbreaking work on the 'slash fiction' of Star Trek (1966–1969), they
referred to fan fiction produced by active audiences who imagined a romantic and sexual
relationship between the characters of Kirk and Spock, or to the internet as offering this
form of slash fiction through contemporary popular series such as Lost (2004).
Some film scholars have also referred to examples of contra-hegemonic readings, in
terms of sexuality, by historical audiences. Richard Barrios' (2003: 192) study on queer
representations in Hollywood up to the 1960s, for instance, revealed how particular
audiences in the 1940s were already openly 'queering' preferred readings. One of his
most convincing examples is that of the Paramount picture The Uninvited (Lewis Allen,
1944), which was seen by large groups of gay spectators, mostly women, and ultimately
became a lesbian cult movie. This ghost story, which is sometimes compared to
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Hitchcock's Rebecca (1940), was known for featuring a strong, gothic lesbian character,
Miss Holloway (White, 1999). While critics praised and audiences liked the movie, the
Legion of Decency, a collectivity of Catholic movements which act against films that
offend Christian morality and decorum, addressed the PCA regarding 'certain erotic
and esoteric elements in this picture' (quoted in Barrios, 2003: 191). But neither the
PCA nor the studios and producers were aware of (or willing to read) the queer subtext.
This example illustrates how audiences can read the text against the grain, thus queering
film content. In a way, Hollywood's tight internal censorship forced filmmakers to
think through the polysemic character of the movies, requiring them to get around
the PCA's definition of sexual perversion. It was during the downfall of the PCA, more
specifically the end of the 1950s and the beginning of the 1960s, that more explicit queer
representations found their way to the big screen.
Hollywood, Resistance and Transgressive Queerness
makes homosexual advances on his slave Anthony. The PCA had great difficulties with
this scene and demanded that 'the dialogue and action "indicating" that Crassus is a sex
pervert' should be cut.3
In the late 1950s, filmmakers began testing the limits of the Production Code
in a more offensive or manifest manner. A landmark movie on the level of queer
representation was the sophisticated sex farce Some Like It Hot (1959), where Billy
Wilder explicitly thematized transvestism, lesbianism, homosexuality, same-sex desire
and the performativity of gender roles. Wilder was a master at bypassing the Code, using
carnivalesque parody and suggestion as a lever for ensuring that the PCA would accept
the movie. Once the PCA had given Some Like It Hot a seal of approval, Shurlock had to
defend his decision. Upon its release, Bishop McNulty attacked the film in a letter to the
PCA, condemning its '"transvestism" and the consequent inferences to homosexuality
and lesbianism', arguing that 'this is the most flagrant violation of the spirit and the letter
of the Production Code' (Biltereyst, forthcoming). Shurlock's reaction to this complaint
was that it was a 'hilariously funny movie', and he referred to the fact that 'girls dressed as
men, and vice versa has been standard theatrical fare as far back as "as you like it"'.4
Another key picture, released in 1959, where homosexuality was explicitly thematized
and where it even functioned as a narrative motor, was Joseph Mankiewicz' Suddenly,
Last Summer. We will come back to this film later in this paper, but Suddenly, Last
Summer sharply illustrated how ingenious filmmakers, scriptwriters (Gore Vidal and
Mankiewicz) and producers (Sam Spiegel) could make the PCA accept a picture openly
dealing with homosexuality. Based on Tennessee Williams' original short play, the movie
tells the story of Sebastian, a gay man who ends up being killed due to his sexual desires.
The filmmakers decided not to focus upon Sebastian's troubled psychological state of
mind, but instead chose to tell the story from the perspective of Catherine, his niece,
who unknowingly accompanied him in his search for young boys. Inspired by the PCA's
objection that Sebastian's homosexuality could be 'inferred but not shown' (Russo, 1981:
116), Vidal and Mankiewicz decided not to show Sebastian at all. In the film, Sebastian
finally pays for his 'sins' with his life, while the movie is surrounded with horror-like
issues such as cannibalism, psychopathic sexual desire and madness.
Some Like It Hot was a comedy, of course, and Suddenly, Last Summer turned out to
be a rather grotesque horror picture, but both films were clearly indicative of a gradual
change in the PCA's policy regarding the queer imagery that was accepted within certain
generic and moral boundaries. Responding to a continuing effort by filmmakers and
companies to deal with issues of non-heterosexual relationships and queerness in a
more adult and serious manner, the PCA clearly adopted a more tolerant approach. A
landmark in this regard is the Administration's decision to weaken its position on the
representation of homosexuality. In October 1961, the PCA amended the Code in order
to permit movies to display 'sex aberration', so long as it was treated with care. In a public
announcement, the PCA declared that 'in keeping with the culture, the mores and values
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of our time, homosexuality and other sexual aberrations may now be treated with care,
discretion and restraint' (Russo, 1981: 121–122).
Two crucial movies in this transgression or slowly changing representation of
queerness in Hollywood cinema were The Children's Hour, directed by William Wyler,
and Otto Preminger's Advise & Consent, both released in 1961. The first film was
about two female teachers (Audrey Hepburn and Shirley MacLaine) who are accused
of lesbianism, thereby risking their jobs and their friendship, and was based on a
controversial stage play written by Lillian Hellman.6 Wyler had already shown interest in
the play in 1936, and started to adapt it into a screenplay. Because of the Production Code,
he changed Hellman's plot into a heterosexual love affair, playing upon the accusations
of a relationship between Martha and Karen's fiancé. As well as removing the suicide,
the producers also decided to turn the title into the less controversial These Three (1936).
These and other changes underlined the PCA's ultimate power, but even though the play's
sharp edges were removed for the screen adaptation, some critics and scholars praised
These Three for containing traces or retaining 'possibilities of secret homoeroticism'
(Barrios, 2003: 183). More than twenty years later, United Artists and Wyler were ready
to tackle Hellman's play less obliquely. At a time when the PCA's amendment had not
yet been accepted and the performance of lesbianism was still forbidden, it came as no
surprise that PCA boss Geoffrey Shurlock first wrote to Wyler that 'inasmuch as the
story deals with a false charge of homosexuality between two female leads, we could not
approve it under the present code regulations' (quoted in Gardner, 1987: 192). United
Artists, though, which was preparing more pictures with risqué stories and images of
homosexuality, immediately reacted by contacting Eric Johnson, head of the Motion
Picture Association of America under which the PCA operated. The company threatened
to release the picture without PCA approval, but also underlined that there would be no
suggestion or clear acts of homosexuality on screen. Finally, by October 1961, the PCA
gave the movie the green light, ultimately leading to The Children's Hour's reputation as
the film that triggered the amendment.
Another United Artists' movie that dealt with homosexuality overtly was Otto
Preminger's Advise & Consent. Preminger had been one of the prime Hollywood
filmmakers who had defied the Production Code with a series of controversial films
such as The Moon Is Blue (1953, for reasons of sexuality), The Man with The Golden Arm
(1955, openly dealing with drug use) or Anatomy of a Murder (1959, portrayal of rape,
nakedness, violence). With Advise & Consent, which was based on the Pulitzer Prize
winning novel by Allen Drury (published in 1959), Preminger added a new controversial
picture to the list with which he would challenge the PCA. The production of Advise
& Consent, which openly dealt with homosexuality in Washington DC's high political
circles, was accompanied by a publicity campaign about breaking the code. Released
only three months after The Children's Hour, the film also contained a suicide caused
by a false accusation of homosexuality (a politician is blackmailed by an opponent on
Hollywood, Resistance and Transgressive Queerness
the basis of a supposed homosexual encounter in his past). The picture also notably
contained the portrayal of a gay bar, including the whole (until then unknown or never
shown) atmosphere of a hidden subculture (Russo, 1981: 141). Although the film had
received an official seal after the new code amendment, as well as a sufficient amount of
publicity and critical attention, Advise & Consent turned out to be quite disappointing
at the box office (Barrios, 2003: 314). Whether this was related to the representation of
queers is not relevant to this article, but by 1962 Hollywood pictures dealing with matters
of homosexuality, lesbianism or any other portrayal of non-heterosexuality still seemed
to be confined within the boundaries of genre (an aura of horror, comedy, etc.) and
morality (punishment, negative tone). However, given the slow change in the production
codes in terms of representing queerness, one might question whether these pictures
had to be read so negatively.
Transitional queer movies such as Suddenly, Last Summer, The Children's Hour and
Advise & Consent have often been regarded as representing homosexuals as pitiful and
self-loathing. Yet, following the work conducted by scholars such as Doty (2000) on
more subtle, complex and 'non-straight' readings of texts, we would like to analyse the
three films in a more positive, destabilizing sense. More specifically, we would like to
illustrate how these pictures can be seen as spaces of queer resistance in which queer
characters are portrayed in an emancipatory light.
It should be acknowledged that these films all feature gay characters whose bodies
are used as discursive articulations which deconstruct dominant notions of queerness.
Yet, they differ from one another in the actual materialization of these bodies. Suddenly,
Last Summer, for instance, does not even feature a 'living' queer character, as Sebastian
is already dead at the beginning of the movie. He is only present through the stories of
his family and once as a vague character in a visualization of his niece's memory. And
even in this memory he is not granted a face and nor is he included in the end credits.
Sebastian is merely a queer phantom, whose representation depends on his family's
remembrances and his personal belongings. Advise & Consent and The Children's Hour
on the other hand do credit actors who portray queer characters. Indeed, both queers are
the main characters and are represented by well-known performers (Shirley MacLaine
as Martha in The Children's Hour, and Don Murray as Brigham in Advise & Consent).
These films not only granted queers a face, but let queer roles be performed by good
looking young actors. In a similar way, Martha is neither predator nor butch, whereas
Brigham does not correspond to the stereotypically effeminate pansy. In contrast,
Suddenly, Last Summer's Sebastian could be interpreted as a more clichéd dandy. In a
way he lives up to a stereotypical image of the queer that is not being countered as he
Gendered Transformations
remains faceless, whereas Martha and Brigham are more non-stereotypical 'everyday'
characters who function as a negation of dominant stereotypes. Martha is introduced
as a caring and devoted teacher, who runs a private school with her best friend Karen
(Audrey Hepburn). The opening sequences show the women to be very much alike. Both
are feminine yet do not appear to be passive. Furthermore, they run a successful private
school on their own.
Similarly, Brigham is portrayed as a masculine, ambitious and self-assured senator
who (to an even greater extent than the character of Martha) is portrayed as a rather
powerful member of a heteronormative society. Brigham is a happily married man and
father, living in an expensive house in suburbia. Sebastian, in contrast, is quickly set
outside the borders of heteronormativity. His mother talks about him in terms of being
'different', and even though she utters it with pride, he is constructed as the 'Other' from
the beginning of the movie. We also come to learn that Sebastian used to live in the
garçonnière in the back garden of his mother's mansion, where he could meet his friends
in private. He is also portrayed as a poet who did not need to work for a living. These
elements are used to reiterate the idea of Sebastian as an outsider.
Whereas Martha is handed the responsibility of teaching children and Brigham is
chosen by the state to function as its representative in the Senate, Sebastian does not
'participate' in society. By rendering him physically almost invisible throughout the film,
the erasure is nearly complete. As such, whereas Sebastian is kept in the margins, it
seems that The Children's Hour and Advise & Consent feature 'queer' characters who
are fully integrated in society and, on a more cinematographic level, in the film. In this
respect we should point to the fact that the sexual identity of the three queer characters
is initially constructed as asexual or heterosexual, perhaps as a postponement of their
queer desire.
Each film actually chooses to use a clear and straightforward love plot on queer desire
that structures the narrative. The Children's Hour introduces the story by focusing on the
reaction of society towards homosexuality prior to Martha coming out. The film starts
with one of the pupils spreading a rumour about her teachers being lovers. It then depicts
the misery brought to the women as a result, with consequences such as mockery, the
loss of a lawsuit and the retreat of the children from the school. The rumour even affects
Karen's fiancé, who is fired from his job as a doctor as a result of his connection to the
two women. It is remarkable that those who resent the queers seem to have never met
them. Accordingly, they are resenting the unknown. And even though it is never stated as
such, those who represent society in the film tend to assume despicable perversion when
thinking of the women as lesbians. In the coming out scene at the end of the movie, it is
revealed that the 'everyday' character Martha is indeed harbouring homosexual feelings
for Karen. But society does not seem to need a queer truth, since it trusts one girl's
statement to reinforce its opinions based on hegemonic notions of queerness. The latter
clearly appears in scenes where the mothers send their husbands to school to fetch the
Hollywood, Resistance and Transgressive Queerness
children in order to avoid physical contact with the women, while the husbands avoid
eye contact with them. The avoidance of any 'physical' confrontation with queerness can
be read as necessary so as to avoid dissonance in their opinions inspired by hegemonic
notions concerning homosexuality. Martha even mocks the stereotypical imagery when
she says to the staring grocery boy: 'I've got eight fingers, you see. And two heads, I'm a
freak!' Yet, the film itself does not avoid the queer and relocates it onto one of its main
characters. Before Martha comes out of the closet, the picture depicted the inordinate
societal consequences of being thought of as gay. However, by queering Martha, the
audience becomes involved, since the queer is no longer constructed as the invisible
Other but as a subject.
Advise & Consent similarly constructs the queer as a subject in order to defy society.
But whereas (the thought of) being gay was more central to the plot of The Children's
Hour, Advise & Consent primarily focuses on a scandal concerning a man named
Leffingwell who is nominated by the president as secretary of state. Brigham is a senator
belonging to the Presidential Party who is selected as chairman of a subcommittee that
has to decide whether to oppose or support the nomination. When the controversial
nominee is accused of being a communist, the chairman delays making the decision.
This forces the pro-Leffingwell senator, Van Acker, to anonymously blackmail Brigham
about something that happened in the latter's past, which will gradually be revealed as an
affair he had with another man in Hawaii. Again, queer identity is stalled. But whereas
The Children's Hour more directly discussed the position of society towards queers, this
film mimics society's point of view by not daring to speak its name. The gay secret is only
uncovered by small plot elements such as Brigham asking his secretary for the address of
a man named Ray Shaf with whom he was stationed in Hawaii. Another scene in which
the queer secret is unveiled takes place in New York City where we are introduced to
Ray, portrayed as a queer man in a gay bar, who seems to have been close to Brigham.
A further scene of this kind occurs when Brigham's wife receives a photograph of her
husband and another man, presumably Ray, accompanied by a good-bye letter from
Brigham to his male lover. Even though Brigham is not physically present in the scene,
this confession functions as a coming out.
Similar to The Children's Hour, Preminger's picture focuses on the relationship between
queers and society. Aside from the fact that the gay affair comes across as being worth
a blackmail operation, it was also considered by the character of Senator Van Acker as
one man's 'Achilles heel'. As such, the deviancy surrounding the New York City gay scene
in the film can be read as part of a dominant discourse that looks upon queers as the
weak spot of society, directing them to the margins. At this point, the film has created
Brigham as a subject, and he internalizes society's fear due to his inability to tune his
queerness in with his other identity traits, including high social status. The character's
inability to transgress the dominant notion of incompatible identity traits eventually
leads to suicide. Accordingly, both films represent a homophobic society that opposes
Gendered Transformations
queerness on the one hand, but clearly feature queer subjects who are part of that society
on the other. Using this more complex, even dialectical position on rejecting but also
performing queerness, these films clearly criticize a society where notions of identity
are, or seem to be, stable. Consequently, the movies also denounce ideas that equate
queerness with deviancy from what is considered to be normal behaviour.
Suddenly, Last Summer, in contrast, lacks such a queer subject. Here, the gay character
has died before the film even begins. Still, the movie succeeds in incorporating queerness
as a core plot element. The question here is whether an absent queer character can evoke
a similar societal critique. We have already argued that Sebastian is only described by his
family, and the audience therefore depends on their testimonies to get to know him. The
movie's plot is completely focused on Catherine (Elizabeth Taylor), the sick niece of Violet
Venable (Katharine Hepburn). The film further introduces a doctor named Cukrowicz
(Montgomery Clift), who is invited by Violet to talk about her niece. Even though the
first dialogues construct Sebastian as different, the film does not use queerness as a plot
element and thereby 'delays' the explanation of otherness. Moreover, the film never
constitutes queerness and instead uses metaphors and queered accessories to construct
Sebastian as a gay character, namely in the following scene where the mother and the
doctor find themselves in the garçonnière. As well as their conversation, the camera
focuses on the decoration of the main room where they are talking. Mankiewicz shows
a picture of a naked black man, posters and drawings of other nudes, as well as a statue
of a male torso and a huge painting of Saint Sebastian. Whereas the film lacks a physical
queer character, the gay iconography on display seems to replace the 'missing' queer
body. It also allows us to read these artefacts as expressions of queer desire. Even though
the queer body is missing, the queer desire that comes from the body is still on display.
The movie even starts by showing the objects of affection in his private room, which are
affirmed as such in Catherine's confessions. Halfway through the film she happens to
remark that Sebastian was 'fed up with the dark ones, famished for the light ones', which
could imply a changing taste for men. His homosexual longing is also illustrated when
Catherine reveals to the doctor that she and Violet were procuring men for Sebastian
on their holidays, but she says it implicitly: 'We were decoys. He used us as bait. We
procured for him.'
The societal critique of the film is embedded in the impossibility of expressing this
desire. This becomes poignant in the final sequence in which Catherine retells what
happened during the holiday when Sebastian was murdered. Although this sequence
has been much analysed in terms of cinematography, editing and with regard to its
portrayal of cannibalism (for instance, Ohi, 1999), it is also a pivotal moment in the queer
representation of Sebastian. A visualization of Catherine's memories is simultaneously
encompassed in the shot that frames her in a close-up. It is in her traces of memories
that the audience 'sees' Sebastian, albeit with an invisible face. Whereas they emphasize
his physical body, these scenes also function as a dialogue between his desiring body
Hollywood, Resistance and Transgressive Queerness
and the frustration that this desire cannot be materialized. We are faced with an isolated
man who needs women to 'procure' men for him on the beach and who is faced with
unrequited love as the men are only physically interested in Catherine, as illustrated by
the shots of them gazing at her wet bathing suit. Sebastian eventually uses his wealth to
keep the men interested in him, but this already unsatisfying situation culminates in the
cannibalistic scene in which he is colonized by troupes of men who, craving his wealth,
eventually devour him.
Not only does Suddenly, Last Summer end with the death of Sebastian, Advise &
Consent and The Children's Hour also perform the suicide of their queer characters. Vito
Russo (1981) has analysed these self-destructions, constructing them as essential to the
films' depiction of homosexuality as evil. Although Russo's reading is evident on the
basis of the rudimentary plots, it should also be acknowledged that the reasons for self-
destruction are constructed as being located outside the 'queer'. Death can be read as the
most absolute act of queer resistance against a system in which the non-normative is not
even able to 'breathe'.
Ellen: 'If they are threatening you through me, it can only mean one
thing; it's about a woman, isn't it?'
(Advise & Consent, 1962)
During the late 1950s and the beginning of the 1960s, mainstream cinema defied the
PCA as more and more films were being distributed that transgressed the boundaries of
the Code. Suddenly, Last Summer, The Children's Hour and Advise & Consent were among
the first to openly portray queer characters and thematize their desires, which had long
been regarded by the PCA as sexual perversion. Although by 1961 the PCA had attenuated
its position on this point, leading to the emergence of more adult-orientated movies
performing queerness, the depiction of homosexuals still continued to be quite negative
and punitive. Despite this situation, as we have tried to indicate, films such as Suddenly,
Last Summer, The Children's Hour and Advise & Consent contained images or traces of
resistance against a heteronormative society. Drawing upon queer theory and using textual
analysis, we have tried to examine queerness in terms of exposing a societal critique. Here,
we first referred to the structure of these films, where the queer plot element was used to
elaborate on the issue of how society deals with this issue. Secondly, we indicated how
each film used its queer characters to oppose stereotypical imagery concerning the queer
body. The queer subjects presented were also used to contradict dominant discourses
on homosexuality, while the idea of a queer phantom was utilized to underscore the
impossibility of an exclusively heterosexual society. The three movies do not openly justify
Gendered Transformations
the queers' deaths, nor do they argue that queer subjectivity should be equated with self-
loathing or self-pity. On the contrary, the movies show the ultimate consequences of being
part of a homophobic society. Moreover, even though these films depict a society that tries
to exclude queerness, the role of the queer phantom in Suddenly, Last Summer illustrates
the impossibility of erasing the queer, as the dead character and his queer desire are similar
to ghosts which are continuously present throughout the picture.
1. See letter by Geoffrey Shurlock to first name Warner, 22 March 1955, PCA file on
Rebel without a Cause, Margaret Herrick Library, PCA collection, Los Angeles.
2. See letter by Geoffrey Shurlock to first name Vogel, 23 September 1958, PCA file on
North by Northwest, Margaret Herrick Library, PCA collection, Los Angeles.
4. See letter by Geoffrey Shurlock to Rev. first name Little, 18 March 1959, PCA file on
North by Northwest, Margaret Herrick Library, PCA collection, Los Angeles.
6. The play premiered in 1934 and ran for two years on Broadway and elsewhere.
Benhabib, S., Butler, J., Cornell, D. & Fraser, N. (eds), Feminist Contentions: A Philosophical
Exchange, New York, Routledge, 1995.
Butler, J., Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity, London, Routledge,
Hollywood, Resistance and Transgressive Queerness
Creekmur, C.K. & Doty, A. (eds), Out in Culture, Durham, NJ, Duke University Press,
De Vos, P. & Van Bauwel, S., 'Essentialisme en politieke identiteit: De impasse van een
feministische probleemstelling', in A. Van den Brande (ed.) Identiteiten. Functies
en dysfuncties, Gent, Academia Press, 2002, pp. 83–106.
Dhaenens, F., Van Bauwel, S. & Biltereyst, D., 'Slashing the fiction of queer theory:
Slash fiction, queer reading, and transgressing the boundaries of screen studies,
representations, and audiences', Journal of Communication Inquiry, 32:4 (2008),
pp. 335–347.
Doherty, T., Pre-code Hollywood: Sex, Immorality, and Insurrection in American Cinema,
1930–1934, New York, Columbia University Press, 1999.
Foucault, M., Histoire de la sexualité, vol. 1: La volonté de savoir, Paris, Gallimard, 1976.
Gardner, G., The Censorship Papers. Movie Censorship Letters from the Hays Office, 1934–
1968, New York, Dodd, Mead & Company, 1987.
Gross, L., 'Minorities, majorities and the media', in T. Liebes and J. Curran (eds) Media,
Ritual and Identity, London: Routledge, 1998, pp. 87–102.
Katz, J.N., The Invention of Heterosexuality, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1995.
Lugowski, D., 'Queering the (new) deal: Lesbian and gay representation and the
depression-era cultural politics of Hollywood's Production Code', Cinema Journal,
38:2 (1999), pp. 3–35.
Ohi, K., 'Devouring creation: Cannibalism, sodomy, and the scene of analysis in
Suddenly, Last Summer', Cinema Journal, 38:3 (1999), pp. 27–49.
Gendered Transformations
Russo, V., The Celluloid Closet, New York, Harper & Row Publishers Inc., 1981.
Schumach, M., The Face on the Cutting Room Floor: The Story of Movie and Television
Censorship, New York, William Morrow, 1964.
Sedgwick, E., Between Men, New York, Columbia University Press, 1985.
Seidman, S., 'Deconstructing queer theory or the under-theorization of the social and
the ethical', in L. Nicholson & S. Seidman (eds) Social Postmodernism, Cambridge,
Cambridge University Press, 1995, pp. 116–141.
Stein, A., & Plummer, K., '"I Can't Even Think Straight": "Queer" Theory and the Missing
Sexual Revolution', in S. Seidman (ed.) Queer Theory. Sociology, Cambridge,
Blackwell, 1996, pp. 129–144.
Warner, M., The Trouble with Normal, Cambridge, Harvard University Press, 1999.
White, P., Uninvited: Classical Hollywood Cinema and Lesbian Representability, Indiana,
Indiana University Press, 1999.
Chapter Six:
Political Blogging: At a Crossroads of Gender
and Culture Online
With the increase in the popularity of the internet and its impact on social development,
research into the changes it has brought about is becoming more important. Indeed,
the internet generates such a wide variety of new phenomena of both a social and
psychological nature, such as virtual personas, virtual communities, virtual offices,
e-societies and e-governments, that studies of its influence is some of the most crucial
work taking place today.
The term 'cyber-politics' was recently coined by a number of academics and
politicians (among them Kevin A. Hughes, John E. Hill, Tom Price, Ed Schwartz and W.
Van DeDunk), and is being widely employed across the world to analyse internet use
in terms of political activity (Perlmutter, 2008; Rozel & Semiatin, 2008). The concept
embraces all forms of social software, including journalism, fundraising, blogging,
volunteer recruitment, voting, campaigning and organization building. The net is
becoming a more prominent venue for the airing of any political issue and agenda, and
with each election the use of the internet reveals itself as an increasingly important way
for key political actors (candidates, opinion leaders, political influentials and office-
holders) to communicate with constituents, citizenry and the public at large (Political
Influentials, 2004).
Gendered Transformations
Political blogging
A great variety of web genres are used for political communication on the internet,
including emails, discussion groups, webpages, blogs and online news groups. All contain
cutting-edge opportunities provided by web 2.0 technologies. While analysing perspectives
and issues of online media research, it is notable that blogs have received far less scholarly
attention than other forms of computer-mediated communication (CMC) (e.g. personal
websites). This lack of interest is even more pressing with regard to the non-English
speaking internet (Goroshko & Zhigalina, 2009; Khitrov, 2005; Kluver et al., 2007). Of
all of the genres used in cyber-politics, blogs in particular are a cheap and convenient
tool via which opinion leaders can disseminate and update useful information, while
simultaneously and quickly providing expertise, networking and material incentives to
consolidate a constituency and complete a political campaign (Tremayne, 2007).
Barbovschi (2008: 2) argues that a working definition of the political weblog might
include the unedited voices of political actors, specialist/conventional journalists (i.e.
individuals with journalistic credentials and an affiliation to a traditional media outlet),
opinion leaders, politicians, politically informed non-journalists (i.e. non-journalist
individuals who blog extensively on various political topics) and popular bloggers.
One could argue that opinion leaders, informal leaders or influentials have much more
impact than official political functionaries when it comes to disseminating information,
arguments and a particular mentality (vox populi) on the internet. The opinion leader
is an individual who acts as an intermediary, agent or active media user who interprets
the meaning of media messages or content for lower-end consumers thereof (readers of
blogs who constitute their target audience, e.g. friends' lists). Usually, the opinion leader
is held in high esteem by those who accept his or her points of view and, accordingly,
he or she has more authority and influence than politicians in a network society. The
ability of an actor—be it a company, individual, government or other organization—to
participate in the network is determined by the degree to which he or she can contribute
to its goals. Moreover, this new environment requires skilled, flexible actors for any form
of social communication, including cyber-politics (Castells, 2000: 12).
Political Blogging: At a Crossroads of Gender and Culture Online
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This makes it indispensable for online campaigning and personal image
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communication that does not rely on the official (sometimes politically biased)
mass media.
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i.e. to make people aware of impending congressional votes and to encourage
them to call or email their representatives.
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image-promotion or for consolidation of political efforts, but they are also a
helpful tool for professional communication of any kind, especially in terms of
constituency consolidation and the organization of voluntary-based activities
by ordinary citizens (Tremayne, 2007).
Gendered Transformations
Gendered blogging
The research conducted by Calvert and Huffaker (2005) examines online identity and
language use among male and female teenagers who created and maintained weblogs.
Online identity and language use are investigated in terms of the disclosure of personal
information, sexual identity, emotive features and semantic themes. The study reveals
that both groups presented themselves similarly in their blogs, often revealing personal
information such as their real names, ages and locations. It was also found that males,
more than females, used emoticons, employed an active and resolute style of language
and were also more likely to present themselves as gay. These data contrast with other
results where the intensive use of emoticons is fixed as a female computer-mediated
communication (CMC) characteristic (Witmer & Katzman, 1997; Wolejszo, 2003).
In Huffaker's MA thesis (2004), bloggers' identities were studied in terms of the
disclosure of personal information, online name choice, avatar selection and emotive
features, common blog topics, blog characteristics, blog abandonment rates and frequency
of use. Language use was also explored with regard to word counts and semantic themes.
The data obtained again show that teenagers reveal a considerable amount of personal
information in their blogs, including their name, age and location, as well as contact
details in the form of an email address, an instant messenger moniker or a link to a
personal homepage. The content of the blogs typically reflected what is expected to have
an impact on a teenager's life, such as school, intimate relationships, sexual identity and
even music. Contrary to the author's prediction, the results revealed that there are more
gender similarities than differences in blog use. However, some gender variations were
noted in terms of emotive features, sexual identity, language use and components of
personal information. Males average more emoticons in their posts than females, and
they also reveal their sexuality more often, commonly expressing their sexual identity
or 'coming out'. Moreover, males disclose their location more often than females, while
women present a link to a personal website more frequently. Finally, males use more
active and resolute language in their blogs than females do (Huffaker, 2004: ii–iii).
Nowson's attention also turned to gendered blogging, where quantitative methods
are exploited to research gender differences in language use. The data demonstrate that
women are found to write more in their blogs than men. More generally, and using the
British National Corpus, it is also revealed that women are more contextual, except in
the least contextual of genres (academic writing) where there is no difference between
the sexes. 'The study concludes by confirming that both gender and personality are
projected by language in blogs; furthermore, approaches which take the context of
language features into account can be used to detect more variation than those which do
not.' (Nowson, 2006: iii)
The Perseus Survey of 4.12 million hosted weblogs testifies that most of them are
seldom seen and are quickly abandoned; men 'skip' blogs more often than women, while
Political Blogging: At a Crossroads of Gender and Culture Online
women create them much more frequently than men (The Blogging Iceberg, 2004: 5).
Pedersen and Macafee (2007) asked whether blogging in the United Kingdom, which
started later than in the United States, reproduces the gender differences in blogging
behaviour and the gender inequalities in recognition that have been observed in research
based largely on US bloggers. They studied 48 female and 48 male British bloggers
in terms of their blogging practices and attitudes. Their work revealed that blogging
is mainly a leisure practice for both men and women, and both sexes experience the
same range of satisfaction from the activity. Simultaneously, more women use blogging
as an outlet for creative work, whether as a hobby or a livelihood. The results obtained
completely confirm the hypothesis that the gender differences found in earlier, mainly
US, studies are replicated in the British context. According to Pedersen and Macafee:
the evidence found supports several of the reasons that have been advanced
in the past for the lower profile of women bloggers: more personal content
and orientation towards the social aspects of blogging, as opposed to a
male emphasis on information; lesser technical sophistication; and a
greater preference for anonymity. (2007: 1)
An analysis by Schler et al. (2005) of a corpus of 10,000 blogs, covering nearly 300
million words, revealed significant differences in writing style and content between
male and female bloggers, as well as among authors of different ages. Such differences
can be utilized to determine an unknown author's age and gender on the basis of a
blog's vocabulary. The sample of bloggers was formed taking into account a variety of
demographic features. The study reveals that teenage bloggers are predominantly female,
while older exponents are almost always male. Moreover, within each age group, male
and female bloggers write about different things and use different blogging styles: male
bloggers of all ages write more about politics, technology and money than their female
counterparts. In their turn, female bloggers gossip about their personal lives, and use a
much more personal writing style than men do. The authors conclude that 'for bloggers
of each gender, a clear pattern of differences in content and style over age is apparent'
(Schler et al., 2005: 5).
The authors also argue that in spite of gender, 'writing style grows increasingly
"male" with age: pronouns and assent/negation become scarcer, while prepositions and
determiners become more frequent' (Schler, 2005: 7). Additionally, they consider that
blog words present a definite hallmark of youth, while hyperlink usage increases with age.
Content also evolves with age in ways that could have been anticipated (Schler, 2005).
These data run contrary to Herring and Paolillo's (2006) results, where no correlation
was found between bloggers' gender, content and writing style.
Gendered Transformations
As for gendered political blogging, the examination conducted by Harp and Tremayne
(2006) testifies that only 10 per cent of the top bloggers are female. A discourse analysis
of bloggers' explanations of gender disparity revealed three dominant reasons for this:
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Authors have exploited network and feminist theory to interpret these findings and offer
recommendations for increasing the representation of female voices in the world of internet
political blogging (Barabási, 2002; Barabási & Albert, 1999; Watts, 2003; Kramarae 1998).
The theoretical analysis of work in the fields of internet studies, CMC and internet
linguistics reveals that this topic has been successfully studied when it comes to the
English-speaking internet, but is still under-researched in a non-English-speaking context
(i.e. the Russian-speaking internet, coined in this work as the Slavic web) or from a
comparative perspective. CMC and internet research findings also reveal that the internet
is not a culturally neutral medium: there are a great number of differences in information
presentation, interaction and design, etc. that are conditioned by culture and language
(Danet & Herring, 2007; Herring, 2007; 2008b). It is for this reason that cross-cultural,
comparative research is proposed to investigate the peculiarities of political blogging on
the net. It is necessary to add that almost no work in this area within the Slavic context
has been conducted (Goroshko, 2008). Thus, comparative research may not only advance
the Western paradigm of the developments in cyber-politics in terms of cutting-edge
opportunities in online campaigning, but might simultaneously provide the foundation
upon which to advance this discipline beyond an English-speaking knowledge area.
There is much debate in both gender studies and the social sciences in general about
the nature and perception of gender. One of the latest approaches in this area is based on
the notion of intersectionality. This supposes that gender lies at the crossroads of social
Political Blogging: At a Crossroads of Gender and Culture Online
factors such as power, class, race and nationhood. Gender is thus presented as being the
result of convention and strongly conditioned by these factors (Cranny-Francis et al.,
2003). These views on gender have influenced the most recent ideas regarding gendered
virtual and cultural political communication, as well as identity issues (Goroshko, 2006;
2008; Goroshko & Zhigalina, 2009).
Research design
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t ĕWF&OHMJTITQFBLJOHGFNBMFCMPHT 64BOE6,PQJOJPOMFBEFST
This study uses the quantitative content analysis webstyle method to review blogs
located on the political internet. Webstyle is a content analysis tool that is often used
to examine website content in political campaigning (Banwart, 2008; Herring 2008a).
The approach is a direct adaptation of the videostyle methodology, which consists of
Gendered Transformations
The study of political blogging reveals that male political blogs dominate; just as in real
life, there is a prevalence of male-dominated political discourse both on the Russian- and
English-speaking internet (Goroshko, 2006; 2008). Content analysis of blog rubric titles
reveals that 70 per cent of male and female titles are identical. However, there is a wider
diversity thereof in the English political blogosphere (see blogs by Iain Dale, Virginia
Foxx or Arnold Schwarzenegger) than in the Russian domain. It is interesting that the
English sample blogs contain rubrics which present their owners in different social and
political roles which clearly indicate their party identity. This is almost completely absent
on the Slavic net. Furthermore, English blogs maintain such rubrics as multimedia,
interact and donate (Arnold Schwarzenegger or Rick Perry blogs) as a way of attempting
to elicit concrete actions from visitors.
The study of thematic feelings and imagery on the websites examined herein shows that
male political blogs use more self- and member-centred approaches to the information
posted online. This situation is especially pronounced in the English-speaking
blogosphere. Male political blogs also seem to be more conceptual, entailing a clearer
Political Blogging: At a Crossroads of Gender and Culture Online
and more efficient formulation of mission statements and objectives, the principles of
social activity, as well as comments about and analysis of everyday political and public
events. However, when compared to female blogs, they are seen as being more boring
and excessively politicized. The information on male pages recalls the motto, 'It is more
important to present yourself instead of lending an ear to somebody.' Men underscore the
distance between the elected official and the visitor. This pattern is particularly evident in
their biographies and descriptions of activities.
Our analysis also revealed tendencies to focus on the accomplishments and professional
success of members in very reserved and formalized ways. Also common is the selection
of photographs (which occupy a large amount of space) where the figure of the male
blog owner is set against images of the national landscape or the ordinary electorate.
Sometimes, other VIPs surround this figure. Our data completely confirm the results
obtained by Jarvis & Wilkerson (2005: 10). These authors explored the World Wide
Web homepages of members of the US House of Representatives from 1996 and 2001,
examining content, structure and congressional photographs. Testifying that: 'in 1996,
almost all of the photos were suit-and-tie headshots in front of U.S. flags or the Capitol,
a trend still evident in 90% of the sites five years later' (ibid.), they argue that emphasis
on the congress member in the biography and images contributes to member-centered
sites, and that office-holders pay less attention to the visitor than in other related forms
of communication. This choice thus, allegedly, emphasizes the trappings of the office,
signifying the position of the representative rather than his or her relationship with
constituents (ibid.).
Male bloggers also exercise more symbolic capital in their blogging practices, which
becomes apparent in the blogs of key political office-holders and speakers (Medvedev,
Obama and Pelosi). There is a list of instructions on Dmitrij Medvedev's blog about how
to blog properly. The list of friends also serves as an original moderator, allowing or not
allowing comments on the post.
The most popular and visited blogs are the property of high-office holders and
celebrities. Those by Obama, Pelosi, Schwarzenegger and Medvedev have the highest
Page Ranks, equating to six or seven. (Page Rank is a link analysis algorithm used by
the Google internet search engine. It assigns a numerical weighting from zero to ten for
each webpage on the internet, with the purpose of 'measuring' its relative importance. In
other words, this Page Rank denotes a site's importance in the eyes of Google.)
The research conducted indicates that English-speaking political bloggers (opinion
leaders) are more open to the public than their Russian counterparts. The information
provided in such blogs is also much more personal and open to ordinary citizens. As
for gender-balanced personal information, only Arnold Schwarzenegger's blog contains
details 'About Arnold' and 'About Maria'. In turn, the information about Maria (first
lady of California) is more diverse and voluminous than that concerning her husband,
containing sections such as WE Serve, WE Empower, WE Inspire and WE Include.
Gendered Transformations
As for graphical objects, there are more photos and images in the English-speaking
blogs. There is no gender difference in the use of graphics containing complicated web
designs, logos, etc. Only party cues are registered in this research, and this feature is
also more pronounced in English-speaking male blogs, being attributable to a member-
centred strategy for presenting political information online, which has also been noted
in previous studies (Jarvis & Wilkerson, 2005; Goroshko, 2008).
Moreover, English-speaking blogs can be viewed as an integrated part of the virtual
political office and not as a separate diary on the net. For example, Dmitrij Medvedev's
blog has no links to either his personal homepage (if it exists at all) or official Kremlin
portals. In contrast, male English-speaking bloggers demonstrate a deep immersion in
virtual surroundings. The Barack Obama blog demonstrates this perfectly.
The differences between two political blogospheres—English and Russian—can
also be seen. On the whole, the structural analysis of English blogs reveals that their
rubrics typically include the following items: News, Biography, Photo Gallery, Speeches,
Political Blogging: At a Crossroads of Gender and Culture Online
My Position, Elections, Hot Topics, More about Me, etc. Indeed, the number of rubrics
frequently exceeds twenty. Russian blogs, on the other hand, only maintain the rubrics
suggested by the blogging software utilized, and their number is kept to a minimum.
English blogs also include more rubrics concerning legislation, state and political
concerns, as well as constituent services. However, the information content analysis of
these English blogs reveals that the site audience is required to understand the inner
workings of Congress.
Russian blogs contain more issues (posts) and comments and there are fewer links
to external internet resources. These results stand in sharp contrast to the Russian
political net, and might be explained by the influence of the national political culture
or the peculiarities of local cyber-politics. Nevertheless, the Russian blogosphere looks
increasingly user-friendly, but further research is required to clarify this point.
Figure 2: Barack Obama's blog start page with Obama Everywhere section
Gendered Transformations
It is common for English political sites, in contrast to the Slavic internet, to contain
a blog kids' page, with entertaining and educational information for children and their
parents. By placing this rubric on the website, the blog owner is obviously emphasizing
values such as family, home and children, thereby providing a positive image of him/
herself as a respectable member of a particular community. This rubric also helps to attract
a much more age-differentiated audience, which includes children and teenagers.
In Slavic blogs this information is almost completely lacking. It is also surprising
that in contrast to the Slavic political blogosphere, the English version displays great
sensitivity to different age groups and their problems. The Arnold Schwarzenegger or
John Boozman blogs are the best examples of sites which contain information about
how to care for generations from young to old, with such rubrics as: Budget, Jobs and the
Economy, Education, Energy and the Environment, Health, Military and Veterans, Public
Safety, Water Management and Levees (Arnold Schwarzenegger's blog) or 3rd District
Issues, Agriculture, Education Reform, Faith-Based Organizations, Health Care, Homeland
Security, Illegal Drugs, International Relations, Iraq, Job Creation, Medicare, Prescription
Drugs, Protecting the Ozarks, Retirement Security, Second Amendment, Tax Relief, Trade,
Transportation, Values Legislation, Veterans' Affairs, War on Terror, Water Quality (John
Boozman's blog), etc. There is effectively only a cultural and not a gender gap in this area:
Slavic blogs do not contain any socially orientated information at all.
Another unexpected revelation was that only Slavic politicians (Russian female)
allow the use of four-letter, swear words in their blogs (see, for example, Darja Mitina's
blog start-up page). In the English-speaking political environment, it is considered
inappropriate to use such language within any sort of civilized discourse, including the
political internet.
As for links, the qualitative research shows that English-speaking blogs are well
integrated into the internal (virtual political office [portal] of their owners) and external
net. There is a vast amount of links to press releases, constituent services, state problems
and concerns and legislation issues, etc. The primary goal is to provide direction to the
required resources, not to interpret or clarify them. Accordingly, the data posted on the
internet are usually lacking in interpretation, background description, bloggers' editorial
input or legislator commentary. This research goes a long way towards confirming the
study by Jarvis and Wilkerson, which argues that all information located on political
congressional homepages 'is not anchored by an authorial voice…the information
presented is more meaningful for visitors who already have a thorough understanding
of current events, the duties of federal government, and the organisation of the House of
Representatives' (Jarvis & Wilkerson, 2005: 12).
The Slavic political net is more arranged and accessible to fresh netizens (newbies) as
well as inexperienced users; it looks more interpretative and user-friendly, as mentioned
earlier. This might be partly explained by the low level of IT development in this language
segment on the net.
Political Blogging: At a Crossroads of Gender and Culture Online
The English-speaking blogosphere has more visual information and the Russian one
contains more verbal texts. The study also reveals that both male and female English-
speaking blogs are more colourful, with diverse imagery, than their Slavic counterparts.
Almost every site has many images of local geography, slides of the representative's state
and of sightseeing in the United States in general. On these sites, cutting-edge multimedia
opportunities (web 2.0 services) are realized to a great extent, a situation that is probably
explained by the leading positions of the United States and the United Kingdom in the
IT and internet sectors. Additionally, technological factors have a huge impact both on
the format of information located on the internet, as well as on the use of multimedia in
blogs. The blogging services used (like LiveJournal.com and Blogsport.com) also greatly
influence the types of information presented on the net (e.g. rubrics for friends and
communities are only provided by LiveJournal Services).
On the Ukrainian blogosphere it is possible to trace the impact of the e-media corporate
culture that provides hosting facilities to bloggers (compare Mustafa Nayem, Oksana
Bilozir or Inna Bogoslovskaya's blogs, which are hosted by Ukrainskaja Pravda Online).
As regards colour design, Slavic sites are more laconic and reserved. Male sites tend
to be presented in blue and grey shades, while the English blog palette includes colours
like pink, grey, yellow and blue. Pink as a background colour is only used by Sandra
Gidley (MP for Romsey since 2000) confirming the well-known stereotype that pink is
a representation of femininity in culture and society. By contrast, the blue hues of Iain
Dale's blog represent the same stereotype in inverse form.
The analysis of site owners' photographs reveals both cultural and gender peculiarities
in this type of imagery. The attributes of national and state identification are very prevalent
on the North American political internet, and provide a consistent background for the
site owners' images.
The Ukrainian, Bielorussian or Russian politweb almost completely lacks this dimension.
As regards photos, almost all of the American male images are suit-and-tie headshots
in front of US flags or the Capitol. One might consider that this tendency highlights a
distance from the audience rather than a connection. Slavic photos are less official, and
the female images are not as static and reserved. They are vivid, more colourful and strive
to bring about the immersion of virtual visitors into the virtual site environment. These
female pictures appear to disclose the inner personal lives of blog owners so as to eliminate
the social barriers between the latter and the blogs' virtual audience. Again, culture either
emphasizes or blurs gender meanings, exploiting virtual reality quickly and effectively.
This study has a number of limitations, the main one being the size of the sample.
Future research into gender influences on blogging practices may wish to adopt a
Gendered Transformations
This research did not find any serious gender differences concerning the number
of links and their usage, unlike previous studies (Miller & Mather, 1998; Goroshko,
2006). External links (outside the body of the blog, indicating other internet resources)
dominate internal ones in practically all of the blogs in our sample. All of the blogs
studied are updated on a permanent and regular basis (this was traced by using press
releases or news rubrics with an indication of the exact date and time). Only two (current
and former) female US secretaries of state have abandoned their blogs.
Our main results indicate that culture and technologies have a far greater impact
on political blogging than the gender of blog owners. The comparison between two
blogospheres shows clearly that culture and IT may increase, strengthen or neutralize
and diminish gender performances on the internet. Gender in itself presents a rather
fluid social construct, appearing in one situation and almost disappearing in other
circumstances. This confirms the famous notion of the nomad used by Rosi Braidotti
to explore the fluidity of gender (Braidotti, 1994). The nomadic subject, says Braidotti,
is fiction which enables one to think about and beyond well-known categories such as
Political Blogging: At a Crossroads of Gender and Culture Online
class, race, ethnicity, gender, age and so on, without being confined or limited by them.
It enables one to think of the individual subject in relation to many of these categories at
once, even where they sometimes contradict each other. Braidotti argues for 'blurring
boundaries without burning bridges' (ibid.: 4).
And, in an afterword, it should be noted that the question 'How best to facilitate
political blogging?' remains unanswered. The findings of this research reveal some weak
points in political blog functioning, and the challenge that thus arises concerns the best
way to address these.
As a way of dealing with the problems highlighted, male bloggers should think more
about narrowing the distance between their public personae and the online audience,
providing more opportunities for direct communication with ordinary internet users.
English IT blog software designers and bloggers should, in turn, consider how to develop
more user-friendly virtual surroundings, not only for themselves, but also for ordinary
people without special training in political office functioning. The Russian political
blogosphere needs to become more professional and socially and age-sensitive to the
everyday problems that ordinary people experience, and should also learn how to exploit
more of the cutting-edge media opportunities provided by the net so as to increase blog
interactivity and accessibility.
Many CMC researchers testify that the majority of site visitors mention the convenience
of the internet, the ability to search for new sources, the capacity to be able to 'obtain
information from the Net not available elsewhere' and the opportunity to voice opinion
online thanks to the 'multimedia capabilities of the Net' as factors in their decision to use
it (Foot & Schneider, 2002: 2).
However, the cyber-politics perspective is in the hands of all of the political
stakeholders who are working to develop new ways of reinvigorating social capital by
exploring the new opportunities for the superhighway environment that the internet
presents. 'Whether or not the promise of this new medium is fulfilled depends on access
to the medium beyond the upscale citizens who predominantly use it' (Kern, 1997:
1248), although, of course, many problems remain unresolved in this area and future
tendencies are not easily predicted.
Barabási, A.-L., Linked: The New Science of Networks, Cambridge, Perseus Publishing,
Barabási, A.-L. & Albert, R., 'Emergence of scaling in random networks', Science,
286:5439 (1999), pp. 509–512.
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Castells, M., The Rise of the Network Society, 2nd edn, Oxford, Blackwell Publishing, 2000.
Cranny-Francis, A., Warning, W., Stavropoulos, P. & Kirkby, J., Gender Studies: Terms and
Debates, New York, Macmillan Palgrave, 2003.
Foot, K.A. and Schneider, S.M. (2002). 'Online Action in Campaign 2000: An Exploratory
Analysis of the U.S. Political Web Sphere', Journal of Broadcasting and Electronic
Media, 46:2 (2002), pp. 222-244.
Goffman, E., The presentation of self in everyday life, New York, Doubleday, 1959.
Goroshko, O., 'Virtual political office where culture and gender meet', The Handbook of
Research on Virtual Workplaces and the New Nature of Business Practices, Hersey/
London, Idea Group Inc., 2008, pp. 636–662.
Goroshko, O. & Zhigalina, O., 'Political communication on the RuNet – Blogs by leaders
of opinion', Russian Cyberspace, 1:1 (2009), pp. 81–100, http://www.russian-
Cyberspace.com/issue1/goroshko_and_zhigalina.php?lng=English. Retrieved 2
June 2009.
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Harp, D.M. & Tremayne, M., 'The gendered blogosphere: Examining inequality using
network and feminist theory', Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly, 83:2
(2006), pp. 247–264.
Herring, S.C., 'Web content analysis: Expanding the paradigm', in J. Hunsinger, M. Allen &
L. Klastrup (eds) The International Handbook of Internet Research, Springer Verlag,
http://ella.slis.indiana.edu/~herring/webca.2008.pdf. Retrieved 13 April 2009
Herring, S.C., 'Language and the internet', in W. Donsbach (ed.) International Encyclopedia
of Communication, Oxford, Blackwell Publishers, pp. 2640–2645, http://ella.slis.
indiana.edu/~herring/lg.inet.pdf. Retrieved 22 May 2009.
Herring, S.C., Paolillo, J., Ramos-Vielba, I., Kouper, I., Wright, E., Stoerger, S., Scheidt,
L.A. & Clark, B., 'Language networks on LiveJournal', in Proceedings of the Forty
Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences (HICSS-40), Los Alamitos, CA,
IEEE Press, 2007, http://www.blogninja.com/hicss07.pdf. Retrieved 22 May 2009.
Herring, S.C. & Paolillo, J.C., 'Gender and genre variation in weblogs', Journal of
Sociolinguistics, 10:4 (2006), pp. 439–459.
Herring, S.C., Scheidt, L.A., Kouper, I. & Wright, E., 'Longitudinal content analysis of
weblogs: 2003–2004', in M. Tremayne (ed.) Blogging, Citizenship, and the Future
of Media, London: Routledge, 2006, http://ella.slis.indiana.edu/~herring/
tremayne.pdf. Retrieved 30 March 2009.
Huffaker, D.A. & Calvert, S.L., 'Gender, identity, and language use in teenage blogs',
Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, 10:2 (2005), http://jcmc.indiana.
edu/vol10/issue2/huffaker.html. Retrieved 22 May 2009.
Huffaker, D., Gender Similarities and Differences in Online Identity and Language
Use among Teenage Bloggers (Master's Thesis), Washington, DC, Georgetown
University, 2004.
Jarvis, S.E. & Wilkerson, K., 'Congress on the Internet: Messages on the homepages of the
U.S. House of Representatives', Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, 10:2
(2005), http://jcmc.indiana.edu/vol10/issue2/jarvis.html. Retrieved 4 June 2009.
Kern, M., 'Social capital and citizen interpretation of political ads, news, and web site
information in the 1996 presidential election', The American Behavioral Scientist,
40:8 (1997), pp. 1238–1249.
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Kluver, R., Foot, K., Jankowski, N. & Schneider, S., The Internet and National Elections:
A Comparative Study of Web Campaigning, Routledge Research in Political
Communication, New York, Routledge, 2007.
Kramarae, C., 'Feminist fictions of future technology', in S.G. Jones (ed.) Cybersociety
2.0 Revisiting Computer-Mediated Communication and Community, New York and
London, Sage, 1998, pp. 100–128.
Miller, H. & Mather, R., 'The presentation of self in WWW home pages', in Proceedings of
the IRISS'98 Conference, Bristol, UK, 1998, http://ess.ntu.ac.uk/miller/cyberpsych/
millmath.htm. Retrieved 22 August 2005.
Nowson, S., The Language of Weblogs: A Study of Genre and Individual Differences
(Doctoral Thesis), University of Edinburgh, 2006.
Papacharissi, Z., 'Campaigning online: The American Presidency meets the Internet',
paper given at the Association of Internet Researchers 5.0 annual conference,
Brighton, England, 2004.
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Democracy & the Internet, George Washington University, 2004.
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Gendered Transformations
Political Blogging: At a Crossroads of Gender and Culture Online
Gendered Transformations
Chapter Seven:
XXY: Representing Intersex
Gendered Transformations
Gender norms exist within a binary system where two sexes are symbolically connected
to two genders and two sexualities (one of them stigmatized). This binarism has served
the purpose of constructing opposing definitions of what being male and female and
masculine and feminine means, and is based on an 'unquestionable biological and
objective reality'—sex—which sustains and intersects a social construction—gender—
that is closely related to it. But, as Fausto-Sterling remarks, neither sex nor nature are 'real',
and nor are gender and culture constructed: 'our very real, scientific understandings of
hormones, brain development, and sexual behaviour are, nevertheless, constructed in
and bear the marks of specific historical and social contexts' (2000: 29).
Vázquez & Moreno (1997), Herdt (1993), Trumbach (1993), Laqueur (1994) and
Weeks (1989), among others, show how specific historical and social contexts produce
social conceptions of sex, gender, body and sexuality. In the Western tradition, there have
historically existed (and sometimes coexisted) at least three models of representation of
sex: a unisex model that was predominant among the Greeks and Renaissance physicians;
XXY: Representing Intersex
a hegemonic model of three sexes (men, women and hermaphrodites, all capable of
sexual interaction with each other) that existed until the beginning of the eighteenth
century (Trumbach, 1993: 112); and a binary system that begins to be shaped during
the eighteenth century and becomes hegemonic in the 1800s. With regard to gender,
for Trumbach 'the paradigm of two genders founded on two biological sexes began to
predominate in Western culture only in the early eighteenth century' when a transition
occurred from a 'two genders—three sexes' system (feminine/masculine, male/female,
hermaphrodite) to a 'four genders—two sexes system' (men, women, sodomites and
sapphists—male/female), where two of the genders were legitimized and the other two
were stigmatized (1993: 111):
In the case of sexual ambiguity, parents or godparents decided which sex and gender
the newborn was assigned, a decision that was not based on any positivist knowledge. If
physical transformations of the subject's body took place during adolescence, it was only
at the time of marriage that the affected individual chose which sex and gender he or she
wanted to be. Changes in behaviour, implying a change in the decision, were condemned
under civil and canon law (Vázquez & Moreno, 1997).
Until the change in paradigms that started to occur in the eighteenth century, the
term 'hermaphrodite', apart from naming a third sex, was interchangeably used to refer
to homosexual men (particularly passive males, as it was thought that they had become
women) and extremely active women. Those who transgressed the sex and gender roles,
and whose behaviour combined what was socially considered to be masculine and
feminine, were reclassified as 'hermaphrodites'. For example, in 1731, Pulteney's use of
the term clearly refers to an effeminate male who desires sex with other men and has no
reference to the biological condition of his body (Trumbach, 1993: 111). Therefore, at
some stage in Western history, the term was used to refer to sex duplicity as well as to
gender and sex roles.
In the eighteenth century, the idea that a person cannot simultaneously be a man
and a woman becomes progressively dominant, and the third sex is questioned.
Parsons' (1741) echoing of the Enlightenment view that there are only two anatomies
on the basis of which two genders are founded pointed towards the idea of a 'true'
sex (Trumbach, 1993: 117). By the dawn of the twentieth century, physicians are
recognized as the chief regulators of sexual intermediacy (Fausto-Sterling, 2000: 41),
replacing lawyers and judges who, until the early nineteenth century, had been the
Gendered Transformations
But complete maleness and complete femaleness represent the extreme ends of a
spectrum of possible bodies. That these ends are the most common has lent credence
to the idea that they are not only natural (that is, produced by nature), but normal (that
XXY: Representing Intersex
is, they represent both a statistical and social ideal). Knowledge of biological variation,
however, allows us 'to conceptualise the less frequent middle spaces as natural although
statistically more unusual' (author's emphasis) (Fausto-Sterling, 2000: 76).
In fact, intersex is more common than Down's syndrome, but is much more taboo
and much more misunderstood (Harper, 2007: 25). One out of every 100 children are
born with bodies which differ from what is considered to be a 'standard' male or female
(Fausto-Sterling, 2000) and, according to Diamond, one of 2,000 are born with clearly
ambiguous genitals, corresponding to 2 to 3 per cent of the population (Cucchiari,
1981: 33). In the United States, between 100 and 200 children undergo surgery to carry
out sexual reassignation every year (Harper, 2007), and approximately one in 1,700
newborns have karyotypes other than XX (female) or XY (male) (Blackless in Harper,
2007). Fausto-Sterling (2000: 51) believes that the current incidence of intersex in 1.7 per
cent of all births will increase due to in vitro fertilization and environmental pollutants.
Moreover, this author also suggests that twelve people in every million exhibit 'true
hermaphroditism': gonadal intersex is a more common index of 'true hermaphroditism'
than mythological 'genital duplicity', as only 25 per cent of intersexuals are born with
genital ambiguity (Briffa in Harper, 2007: 69).
Around sixty to seventy per cent of 'true hermaphrodites' are genetic females with
an XX karyotype. Occasionally, an additional Y chromosome is present (XXY) or a
chromosomal mosaic occurs. Hormonal influences and/or imbalances in the internal
reproductive apparatus are also indexical of intersex. In summary, intersex is a condition
of the whole person, not just the genitalia (Briffa in Harper, 2007: 69).
Domurat Dreger (1999) traces the evolution of intersex and defines three different 'ages'
in its management: the age of gonads (1896), the age of surgery (1950s) and the age of
consent (1990s). In 1896, Blacker and Lawrence established that the anatomical nature of
the gonads alone (ovarian or testicular) determines a subject's 'true' sex independently
of other anatomical parts.5 Consequently, the only 'true hermaphrodite' was that subject
whose gonads—upon microscopic verification, generally conducted on corpses—were
confirmed to contain both ovarian and testicular tissue.6 By 1915, increasingly advanced
technologies allowed the discovery of 'true live hermaphrodites'. Despite sex having
been established as being 'determined by the obvious predominance of characteristics,
especially the secondary, and not by the non-functional sex-glands alone, for this is
neither scientific nor just' (Bell, quoted in Domurat Dreger, 1999: 10), only two 'true'
sexes were still considered to exist.
'Normalizing' genital surgery in intersexed infants with ambiguous genitalia has
been practised since the 1950s (Harper, 2007: 17), giving birth to the age of surgery.
Gendered Transformations
Exemplifying the idea that there must be a 'true' sex in each body, surgical proceedings
posit that bodies, as the 'locus' of sex and gender identity, must have a socially acceptable
Although the symbolic association between sex and gender is deeply internalized in
Western thought, in 1972 the sexologists John Money and Anke Ehrhardt popularized
the idea that sex and gender are separate categories. Sex, they argued, refers to physical
attributes and is anatomically and physiologically determined. Gender was considered
to be a psychological transformation of the self (the internal conviction that one is either
male or female (gender identity)) and the behavioural expressions of that conviction.
According to Money, all children are psychosexually neutral at birth and, therefore, can
be virtually turned into either gender as long as the sexual anatomy is made to appear as
reasonably believable for that reassigned gender. For Money, echoing Freud, the presence
or absence of the penis is the critical anatomical factor (Kipnis and Diamond, 1999: 176)
with which to determine gender and sex in intersexed newborns. In general, protocols
establish that genetic females should always be raised as females, preserving reproductive
potential, regardless of how severely the patients are virilised. But in genetic males, the
gender of assignment is based predominantly on the size of the phallus (Fausto-Sterling,
2000: 57). It is considered that in newborns an 'acceptable' clitoris measures up to 1
cm and an 'acceptable' penis 2-2.5 cm. If the clitoris is longer or the penis is smaller,
newborns' sex is reassigned and their penis/clitoris is adapted to the standard size.
Therefore, 'the worries in male gender choice are more social than medical' (Fausto-
Sterling, 2000: 57- 58). This reduction of the complexity of the self to the appearance of
one's genital anatomy is highlighted and denounced by Harper (2007).
In contrast with Money's ideas, the endocrinologist Milton Diamond believes that
there exists a hormonal basis of gender identity, an internal truth and necessity that no
amount of socialisation can reverse. Considering the theory of psychosexual neutrality at
birth untenable, since children are not infinitely malleable in terms of gender formation,
Diamond has been battling with Money for several years (Kipnis and Diamond, 1999).
Money and Diamond's views highlight the complexities in the sex/gender system and
in sex and gender identity determination. They both defend surgical sex reassignment,
but whereas Money's emphasis lies on anatomy, Diamond's is on hormones.
In summary, medical protocols on the classification of non-standard sexual
anatomies are not clearly established. In some cases, external genitalia determine sex
identity. In others, as the International Olympic Committee's tests indicate, genetic
sex is determinant.7 In the very recent, highly controversial, case of the South African
athlete Caster Semenya, the only information published up to the time that this article
was written8 revolved around the fact that she has testicles and produces high levels of
testosterone, characteristics that lead the Daily Telegraph to award her 'hermaphrodite'
XXY: Representing Intersex
In our work, we find that doctors' opinions about what should count
as 'intersex' vary substantially. Some think you have to have 'ambiguous
genitalia' to count as intersex, even if your inside is mostly of one sex
and your outside is mostly of another. Some think your brain has to be
exposed to an unusual mix of hormones prenatally to count as intersex,
so that even if you're born with atypical genitalia, you're not intersex
unless your brain experienced atypical development. And some think
you have to have both ovarian and testicular tissue to count as intersex.
(Intersex Society of North America, 2009)
So, nature does not always decide where the category of 'male' ends and the category
of 'intersex' begins, or where the category of 'intersex' ends and the category of 'female'
starts. Sex and gender assignment is sometimes a process that requires active and precise
medical decisions and interventions.
For the last twenty years, broadly speaking, the older technocentric treatment has
evolved into a newer, ethically informed, patient-centred approach (Domurat Dreger,
1999), thus giving birth to the age of consent. Critical voices against surgical proceedings
are progressively being heard (e.g. Chase & Fausto-Sterling) and many reference books
on intersex have been published (Domurat Dreger, 1999; Fausto-Sterling, 2000; Kessler,
1998 and others). Publications divulging many cases of unsuccessful sex reassignments—
such as the paradigmatic case of two male twins, one of them reassigned as a woman
who ended up committing suicide (see Kipnis and Diamond, 1999; Butler, 2004)—have
drawn attention to the dangers of taking decisions on behalf of patients.
Intersex is progressively being de-pathologized and made visible. The Intersex Society
of North America (ISNA), founded in 1993, has been a cornerstone of this process.
XXY:10 Sex and truth, gender, medical protocols and social pressure
As we have seen, intersexed bodies threaten chaos, disrupt order and trouble our cultural
'norms'. Intersex is a hidden and taboo medical category without social correspondence in
our culture. But intersexuals exist despite surgery, shame and silence (Harper, 2007: 13).
Gendered Transformations
We can infer from the title of the Argentinian film XXY that Alex is a XXY baby.
By parental decision, Alex is not surgically reassigned at birth. Her mother (Suli), who
wished to have many daughters, decides to raise her as a girl, thus reinforcing the idea of
the necessity for a gender to inform the growing up process (gender of raising), although
this decision is never made explicit, nor is it explained or indeed justified in the film. The
secrecy and shame that surround these cases lead the family to seek exile in an isolated
environment where, apparently, life goes by calmly until Alex is fifteen.
Ramiro, Erika and their son are invited by Suli to spend a few days with them. She
wants Ramiro to have a look at Alex, although we still do not know 'what is wrong' with
her. We are only allowed a glimpse of Ramiro in his car examining Alex's photos and a
book called 'Origins of Sex', written by Alex's father, Kraken, a biologist (min. 3.55').
The medicalization of sex and the protocols of transformation of non-standard bodies
are presented in the film through the character of the plastic surgeon (Ramiro), whose
stance is shared by his wife (Erika) and by Alex's mother. Their intention is to finally
make Alex's body socially acceptable, forcing it to conform to her 'true' identity.
Alex's body is subtly presented as thin and flat and ambiguous, and is never shown
completely naked. The film is dominated by bluish colours which evoke softness and
calmness and, at the same time, can convey masculinity.
Alex is fifteen and has never had sex: her first conversation with Alvaro is about
masturbation. She is disoriented and fragile, her room is full of homeopathic remedies
('for people afraid to be hurt') and at the beginning of the film, instead of taking a pill (a
corticoid, 'so I don't grow a beard'), she places it on her breast. We know then that there
is something wrong and medicine is intervening: 'She's not taking them', her mother tells
her father. Later, we learn that Alex is a hermaphrodite with a penis and a vagina, evoking
mythological tales and fear of the unknown, but also inspiring attraction (Alvaro) and
confusion (Alex and her relatives).
Disorientation, crisis and fear are represented in Alex's drawings, found by Alvaro
in her room, as well as in two terms that are widely used in the film—'enemies' and
'endangered species'—clearly referring to social pressure. Alex's father works with turtles,
an 'endangered species', but this term is used to metaphorically allude to hermaphrodites,
endangered to the extent that surgical proceedings try to erase their existence as such.
'Enemies', as in a battlefield, is the term used to refer both to those who must not know
about her 'secret' and to the war that intersexed people wage against the standard
conceptions of sex, gender and body. The battlefield comes to life when physical violence
is introduced in the film: Alex punches her friend Vando (the only friend who knows
about her 'secret') and, as a result, gets 'excluded' from a sociability sphere by being
expelled from school.
The relationship between hermaphroditism and monstrosity is treated in a very subtle
way through secrecy, exile, social stigma and the apparent need for active intervention:
only Alvaro seems to dare to address her directly over the issue. Alvaro is attracted to
XXY: Representing Intersex
Alex but, feeling something strange in her, declares: 'You're different, you're not normal.
Why do people stare at you?'
The evocation of images, the escape to Uruguay and the punching of Vando allow us
to empathize with Alex's turmoil, although we still do not know much about it. But soon
Alex has sexual intercourse with Alvaro and seems to penetrate him, her father seeing
it from a hidden corner. A storm follows. When her father tells his wife, he admits: 'We
knew this would happen. She'll never be a woman even if a surgeon cuts her off.' This
is the first clear reference to surgical sex reassignment. And Kraken's position seems to
parallel that of Diamond, as he defends the idea that there appears to be an unavoidable
'inner truth' in Alex. Despite surgical interventions, she will never be what she is not.
This 'inner truth' is unveiled by Alex's sexual role as inserter (regardless of the gender
according to which she was raised) along with her decision not to take the pills she uses
to stop virilization. These two scenes are the most explicit gendered scenes in the film
and can be related to the Money/Diamond controversy mentioned above.
The tensions revolving around the convenience of surgical intervention arise as her
mother insists that Alex be operated on (so as to convert her into a 'standard' woman),
while her father opposes this move. At this stage, Kraken looks for informed counselling
and visits a petrol station to talk to an employee. The employee happens to be a female-
to-male intersexual, whose case had been published in a newspaper. Upon being asked
by Kraken whether he had always known that he was not a woman, his answer is very
direct: 'At sixteen I started taking testosterone, at seventeen I was operated [on]. I've had
five operations. That is not normalization. That is castration.' This positions the film in
the defence of arguments against surgical reassignment and close to the assumptions of
the age of consent that Domurat Dreger (1999) describes.
After their sexual interaction, interrupted by Alex's father, Alex avoids Alvaro, but
when they finally meet again, the dialogue is explicit:
Nearly an hour after the beginning of the film, this is the first scene to indicate exactly
what 'the secrecy' is about, and the reference to monstrosity is central to the definition
of the situation. Hermaphroditism and its intelligibility in our cultural context are here
placed centre-stage. But that is not all; secrets are hard to keep.
When walking on the beach, three boys approach Alex and she is sexually attacked: it
is when they realize she has a penis that we confirm our suspicion: 'She's got both, she's
got everything, I want to see if it gets hard', they shout (min. 60.01').
Gendered Transformations
These two scenes—Alex penetrating Alvaro and the rape on the beach by three local
youths—disclose the secret through dramatization and violence. However, the scenes
differ from each other to the extent that self-definition—'I am both'—in the scene with
Alvaro (Alex in an active role) is turned into insult and stigma—'she has both'—in the
scene on the beach (Alex in a passive role). Genitalia are presented as the defining criteria
for the subject's individual and social definitions; that is, as key elements for identity
construction. In the film, this oversimplification is associated with violence.
Appearing on the beach during the assault, Alex's friend Vando helps her, and both
cry. Later, Alex's father faces the aggressors and for the first time talks about Alex
as a man, while shouting: 'Stay away from my son!' He also strikes the surgeon when
he tries to stop him from hitting the aggressors, and exclaims: 'You're like them!' The
surgeon has become an 'enemy', one of those who do not understand, who do not accept
difference, who do not respect non-standard bodies. The transformation of Alex's sex
and gender is starting to be assumed by her father.
In the following scene, Erika informs Alex's mother of the necessity to operate on
Alex, as the family cannot keep her in hiding forever. Suli answers: 'Hide her? Why?
Do you think she's a freak?' It is then, at the very end of the film, that we learn that
they considered operating on Alex when she was two days old—the sooner the better,
protocols establish—but at the time she had seemed 'perfect' to Kraken's eyes.
After the attack, two male friends and one female pal accompany Alex. They are on
the beach, and Alex and Vando pee standing up. Her process of 'male-ing' seems to be
ongoing and profound.
Kraken tells her that he will look after her until she chooses who she wants to be,
either man or woman, but she answers: 'And if there is nothing to choose?' He replies
that 'everybody will find out', but she does not seem to mind: 'Let them.' Both characters
represent attempts to negotiate tensions between consent and choice over the social need
for a single sex and gender.
Ramiro, Erika and their son Alvaro are ready to leave. Alvaro and Alex admit that they
have fallen for each other (despite Alvaro fearing himself to be 'a fag', as does his father),
but Alex waves goodbye with these words: 'What do you regret most, not seeing me any
more or not to have seen it? Do you want to see it?' Alvaro cries and leaves for the car.
While Alex and her father are walking together, she takes her father's arm and puts
it around her shoulders. Despite this emotional ending, consisting of an expression
of a parental support that has never floundered amidst doubts and difficulties, Alex's
sentiment that he/she is a monster, a freak for exhibition, does not abandon us, leaving
us with a sense of the extraordinary. Parental and cultural shame, guilt and panic are
present: 'the secrecy and stigma surrounding intersex perpetuates the perception of
monstrosity, indicating to intersexed people that their "defect" is so monstrous it should
be erased' (Harper, 2007: 2).
XXY: Representing Intersex
We do not know much about Alex: she has been raised a girl, and there is something
'special' about her. Her body is flat and thin, as yet bearing no sexual mark. It is through
sexual activity that we learn that despite being a girl, she can penetrate a man. She
has 'never done it', as she tells Alvaro the first time they meet, and when she has the
opportunity, her choice is to penetrate violently rather than to be penetrated. This fact
leads her father to believe she 'is' a man: from an active sexual role as inserter, gender
and sex are inferred. Genitalia and sexual role are shown here as key features for identity
construction. In terms of the latter, this reminds us of those systems in which the former
was the determinant of the reclassification of the person according to 'hermaphrodite'
status (prior to the eighteenth century); that is, when gender and sex roles were prioritized
over sex in social classifications.
In a cultural context, where the system of sex/gender/sexuality is conceived as
unidirectional and binary (men-masculine-heterosexual equated with an 'active' role;
women-feminine-heterosexual equated with a 'passive' role), sexual activity in a girl like
Alex is a double transgression: she is active with a man and she is active as a man. But
homosexuality is never mentioned in the film in relation to Alex because at this stage
she is still conceived as a girl; it is after the sexual act that her role is interpreted as the
definitive sign that she is a man. In Alvaro's case, the result is different; his role as the one
who is penetrated is considered to be the evidence that he is what his father feared, 'a fag'.
Both Alex and Alvaro discover something relevant about themselves through sexuality:
a sex act that apparently takes place between boy and girl ends up revealing that the girl
has a penis and the boy is a homosexual. That act is central to the film and to the plot.
We have seen how, historically, hermaphrodites were tolerated if they chose one gender
and did not change the roles assigned to it. In the film, however, and although it is through
violence, Alex assumes both active and passive roles. The fact that the first act with Alvaro
is violent but consented to differentiates it from her rape on the beach. In any case, it is
again through sexual activity that we learn about the specificity of her 'identity'.
Apart from the centrality of sexuality for identity construction, pro- and anti-surgery
positions are very well defined in the film. Within both positions, the underlying belief
that there is only one true sex with corresponding anatomy (female for Alex's mother,
male for Alex's father) is only questioned by the intersexed characters themselves,
namely Alex, who is willing to refrain from choosing, and the female-to-male intersexual
who refers to castration. They introduce a deep and subtle questioning of binarism,
underscoring the need for the person's consent.
'Why do I have to choose?' asks Alex. She does not fear exclusion as a result of her
decision to refrain from choice because intersex is not broached as extraordinary in
itself, but in the reaction it provokes. The presence of two intersexed characters helps
us understand that this is not such a 'strange' phenomenon. However, we do not know
Gendered Transformations
where Alex's decisions regarding the refusal to opt for sex reassignment will take her. The
film is open-ended because its primary focus lies in the presentation of intersex along
with social reactions and protocols. Both social pressure and peer support are apparent:
once Alex's close friends know about the issue, they give her their backing. Surprise,
incredulity and mystery give way to comprehension, respect and help, and the result is a
sense of 'normalcy' achieved through the visibility of difference.
This de-pathologization of intersex and normalization that the film seems to invoke
is counterbalanced by some 'dramatic effects': only 25 per cent of intersexuals are born
with genital ambiguity, but Alex seems to have 'both', something which is extremely rare,
but is connected to popular and mythological images of hermaphrodites. Moreover,
both of the organs, vagina and penis, are functional, as we learn from the two sex acts
performed. Violence in those acts constitutes a dramatic element. In more general
terms, the violence in the film is both implicit and explicit: the former in the terms
used ('enemies', 'normal'), and the latter in the scenes of sex with Alvaro and the rape.
Suspense, uncertainty and doubt are also used as dramatic elements. Terms like 'intersex',
'hermaphrodite' or 'surgery' are never explicit, despite cutting across the entire film's
production. Alex itself is a name that can be used for boys and girls, in line with doctors'
recommendations to resort to 'neutral' names in intersex cases.
Biology—as a reference to naturalized and essential identities—and medicalization
are ubiquitous themes, not only due to Alex's transformations (as a result of puberty and
assumption of her specificity), but also because of the characters' professions (Kraken
and Ramiro).
Alex is a clear example of a non-standard body, non-standard sex and non-standard
gender. In her story, we can clearly trace the tensions and conflicts over the historical
need for the definition of a true sex, gender and body that was strengthened at the end of
the nineteenth century by the modern state's disciplinary methods with which to control
individuals and personal truths, the latter implying duplicity and the conscience that
duplicity can exist in this particular case.
However, as already mentioned, the search and need for only one sex is paradoxical,
as medical protocols are not definitive on the matter: the relation of sex to gender and
of either one to anatomy, as exemplified by the Diamond/Money controversy, is not yet
resolved. And it remains unsolved in the film: based on the same 'reality' (Alex's body),
her mother sees a girl and her father a man. In this context, Alex poses the most relevant
of questions, that of personal choice.
Although intersexed people generally identify themselves as men or women, Alex's
potential desire to exercise the right to choose and change the gender according to which
she was raised would not only question binarism, but also any permanence within the
assigned gender. Her refusal to choose to change goes a step further, as permanence in one's
gender was the condition for tolerance of hermaphrodites when the three sexes model was
hegemonic, as previously explained.
XXY: Representing Intersex
The concept of a sexless utopia where gender is acted out rather than
fixed (Butler, 1990) and is therefore always a work-in-progress (Kessler,
1998) and where the simple dichotomies of sex and gender, and the
essentialisms of biological determinism, are destabilized within a biology
increasingly understood as medically invented (Domurat Dreger,
1998a), remains peripheral to mainstream thought. Separation of sex
from gender, so that, for example, a female (sex term) can operate as
a boy or man (gender terms), and a male (sex term) can operate as a
girl or woman (gender term) continues to present a cultural challenge in
actuality (Diamond and Beh 2006).'
The film is deeply revealing and elicits conflicting feelings of exclusion, shame and
courage. It escapes 'raw' exhibitionism (an easy resource) by very subtly treating delicate
and profound issues. Only at the end do we learn that Alex was to have been operated
on shortly after birth. Only at the end can the spectators establish connections between
scenes and understand that medical protocols on intersex are based on surgical sex
reassignation. Only at the end are all elements (surgery, gender, sex) fully comprehended
and, only then, do we understand what 'abjection' means: 'it is thus not lack of cleanliness
or health that causes abjection but what disturbs identity, system, order. What does not
respect borders, positions, rules.' (Kristeva, 1982: 4).
Bodies which do not respect borders, positions and rules are bound to be reconstructed
and redefined in order to make them intelligible. As a necessary condition for identity,
sexed and gendered bodies become a place for control, oppression and resistance. This
film faces and questions this reality.
Gendered Transformations
2. Harper's book (2007) references eight media productions on intersex in Britain from
1996 to date (TV dramas, documentaries, film epigraph).
4. Foucault defines the politics of truth as politics that refer to those relationships of po-
wer that circumscribe in advance what will and will not count as truth, which order
the world in certain regular and regulatable ways, and which we come to accept as the
given field of knowledge (in Butler, 2004: 58).
5. As two French experts observed, 'the possession of a (single) sex (as male or female)
is a necessity of our social order, for hermaphrodites as well as for normal subjects'
(Domurat Dreger, 1999: 9).
6. A 'true hermaphrodite' is typically defined as having both ovarian and testicular tis-
sue, either presented separately as one testis and one ovary; or mixed as an ovary and
an ovotestis; two ovotestes; a testis and an ovotestis; or one single ovotestis.
8. October 2009.
9. See http://www.elpais.com/articulo/deportes/pudor/Semenya/
elpepudep/20090910elpepudep_12/Tes (28 Spt 2009) and http://www.marca.
com/2009/09/11/atletismo/1252661927.html. Retrieved 28 September 2009.
Bolin, A., 'Traversing gender: Cultural context and gender practices', in S.P. Ramet (ed.)
Gender Reversals and Gender Cultures, London, Routledge, 1996, pp. 22–51.
XXY: Representing Intersex
Butler, J., Bodies that Matter. On the Discursive Limits of 'Sex', New York, Routledge, 1993.
Cucchiari, S., 'The gender revolution and the transition from bisexual horde to
patrilocal band: The origins of gender hierarchy', in S. Ortner and H. Whitehead
(eds) Sexual Meanings. The Cultural Construction of Gender and Sexuality,
Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1981, pp. 31–79.
Diamond, M., 'Management of intersexuality: Guidelines for dealing with persons with
ambiguous genitalia', Archives of Pediatrics and Adolescent Medicine, 151 (1997),
pp. 1046–1050.
Diamond, M. & Sigmundson, H.K., 'Sex reassignment at birth: Long term review and
clinical implications', Archives of Pediatrics and Adolescent Medicine, 151 (1997),
pp. 298–304.
Domurat Dreger, A.D., 'Ambiguous sex or ambivalent medicine?.', The Hastings Center
Report, 28:3 (1998), pp. 24–35 (see www.isna.org).
Domurat Dreger, A.D., Hermaphrodites and the Medical Invention of Sex, Cambridge,
MA, Harvard University Press, 1998.
Domurat Dreger, A.D., Intersex in the Age of Ethics, Maryland, MD, University Publishing
Group, 1999.
Enguix, B., 'La construcción del sexo', in Actas del IX Congreso de Antropología de la
Federación de Asociaciones de Antropología del Estado Español, Barcelona, Institut
Català d'Antropologia, 2002 (CD).
Fausto-Sterling, A. et al., 'How sexually dimorphic are we? Review and synthesis',
American Journal of Human Biology, 12 (2000), pp. 151–156.
Fausto-Sterling, A., Sexing the Body. Gender Politics and the Construction of Sexuality,
New York, Basic Books, 2000.
Gendered Transformations
Halberstam, J., 'The transgender gaze in Boys Don't Cry', in N. Mirzoeff (ed.) The Visual
Culture Reader, London, Routledge, 1998, pp. 669–676.
Herdt, G., Third Sex, Third Gender. Beyond Sexual Dimorphism in Culture and History,
New York, Zone Books, 1993.
Kessler, S.J., Lessons from the Intersexed, London, Rutgers University Press, 1998.
Kipnis, K. & Diamond, M., 'Pediatric ethics and the surgical assignment of sex', in A.D.
Domurat Dreger, Intersex in the Age of Ethics, Maryland, MD, University Publishing
Group, 1999, pp. 173–195.
Kristeva, J., Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, New York, Columbia University
Press, 1982.
Laqueur, T., La construcción del sexo. Cuerpo y género desde los griegos hasta Freud,
Madrid, Cátedra, 1994.
XXY: Representing Intersex
Nanda, S., 'Hijras: An alternative sex and gender role in India', in G. Herdt (ed.) Third
Sex, Third Gender, New York, Zone Books, 1993, pp. 373–418.
Ramet, S.P. (ed.), Gender Reversals and Gender Cultures, London, Routledge, 1996.
Rubin, G., 'The traffic in women: Notes on the political economy of sex', in R. Reiter (ed.)
Toward an Anthropology of Women, New York, Monthly Review Press, 1975.
Stolcke, V., 'Is sex to gender as race is to ethnicity?', in T. del Valle (ed.) Gendered
Anthropology, London, Routledge, 1993, pp. 17–37.
Trumbach, R., 'London's Sapphists: From three sexes to four genders in the making of
modern culture', in G. Herdt (ed.) Third Sex, Third Gender, New York, Zone Books,
1993, pp. 111–136.
Weeks, J., Sex, Politics and Society: The Regulation of Sexuality since 1800, New York,
Longman, 1989.
Vázquez, F. & Moreno, A., Sexo y razón. Una genealogía de la moral sexual en España,
Madrid, Akal, 1997.
Zhang, L., 'One game, different players: The coverage of 2008 Olympics by three
Chinese newspapers', in Proceedings of the ICA Conference, Chicago, International
Communication Association, May 2009.
Gendered Transformations
Chapter Eight:
Disciplining Fantasy Bodies In Second Life
If you join the popular virtual world Second Life (SL), you may find yourself—as we
did—in a place that is both familiar and surreal. That we live in a world where a sexualized
appearance still matters is old news. That you can buy a 'skin' with genitalia remains (at
least for now) bizarre. In SL, this surrealism becomes not only possible but suggested
through a complex web of technical constraints and social dynamics as the means for
an authentic life, freed from the restrictions of physical corporeality. Constructed as 'a
real world, only better' (Ondrejka, 2004), where better stands for an 'almost unlimited
freedom' to create and appropriate virtual bodies (SL Frequently Asked Questions), SL
promises self-fulfillment through personal agency. Yet, what exactly does it mean to be a
creative agent shaping your (virtual) body in this environment?
Here, we propose a reading of the creation and maintenance of our virtual bodies as
a process of self-discipline as well as creativity. While virtual environments may provide
self-fulfillment for some, this does not necessarily mean that they are spaces of freedom.
We argue that SL rests upon and reinforces an essentializing vision of gender as a male/
female dichotomy, informed by both patriarchal and postfeminist neo-liberal discourses.
It is within this vision of gender that we can exercise our agency for moments of personal
gratification, perceived empowerment and resistance.
Gendered Transformations
Disciplining Fantasy Bodies In Second Life
become enrolled in existing power arrangements. In his later work, Foucault had become
more interested in the recuperation of desire and pleasure through our bodies, as a means of
escaping this oppression. Somewhat enigmatically, he advices us to create the self—and by
implication, the body—as a 'work of art', refusing to buy into the dominant discourses and
instead reshaping them into something of our own making (Foucault, 1984; 1988).
Here, we draw together these concepts: the technologies of the self, discipline and
self-surveillance, and the opportunity for creativity and resistance in our engagement
with our own experiences in SL. What is, we ask, the role of wider discourses about
gender and beauty as we immerse and embody ourselves in a virtual world? And what
is the role of these discourses in the technical design of the world itself? How do acts of
disciplining your virtual body to become a member of that virtual world interplay with
the moments of creativity, personal gratification, play and resistance to the normativity
of the world? In exploring these questions, we focus on three inter-related moments that
framed our experience of SL: the creation of our avatars, their subsequent modification
to 'fit' in with the world we began to know and our own perceptions of the other avatars
we encountered.
Creation of avatars
Gendered Transformations
After selecting names for our avatars, we were prompted to 'choose one of the many
different styles we have created for you. And remember, there are [an] almost unlimited
number of choices of how you can look after you enter Second Life' (SL Select an Avatar).
In spite of this expectation of (almost) endless possibilities, we were in fact required to
choose between a rather predictable male/female pair.4 The initial avatar selection page
depicted two figures in silhouette, with options for default avatars likewise presented in
two columns. The presentation and construction of 'male' and 'female' avatars followed
a normative gender discourse. The 'female' physiognomy was marked by prominent eyes
with long eye-lashes and red-coloured lips, while the silhouette had a smaller waist to
hip ratio, thin arms and long hair. The 'male' form was generally marked by the absence
of the 'female' features, with the occasional facial hair add-on; the silhouette was also
bigger and taller, with broad shoulders, well-shaped arms and short hair.
We put our avatars together by selecting from the pre-determined options provided by
the SL platform. In this process, we certainly possessed some agency in our choices; for
instance, Delia, who wanted to experiment with gender swapping in this environment, chose
a 'male' avatar. By successfully representing our digital bodies, we established ourselves
as skilled social actors, able to navigate through the various models provided—we were
participating in the social dimension of the environment. Our recognition of the options
provided by SL as specifically 'male' and 'female' derived from our own understanding
of 'real life' (RL) gender discourses investing specific physical parts as hypersexualized
gender markers. The avatars were not textually labeled; we read and interpreted these cues.
Our RL experiences as heterosexual women, expected to fulfill certain ideals of feminine
beauty in a Western cultural environment, framed this interpretation, and we drew upon
this knowledge in order to make sense of the milieu we were entering and negotiating.5
Our response to the experience of avatar creation in SL was two-fold: on the one hand,
the pre-determined options and our familiarity with the forms presented to us made
creation easy. Bringing our nascent avatars into being might be read as a technology of
our virtual selves in the most obvious, formative way. However, as Foucault notes, 'The
self is not clothing, tools, or possessions. It is to be found in the principle which uses
these tools, a principle not of the body but of the soul' (Foucault, 1988: 25). At this point,
our actions upon and with our avatars had produced, for us, a feeling of a lack of control.
We had joined SL to play with gender representation and we were disappointed by the
predictability of the options. It also reminded us of our imagined audiences. While Delia
was concerned with being cool and fashionable, Georgia created an avatar with a plain
appearance. This too was a deliberate choice, an act of resistance against the perceived
hegemony of a particular vision of beautiful, gendered bodies in SL. Throughout, we
could not unhinge ourselves from the belief that physical appearance would be important,
that it would count in the social landscape we were entering, that it might frame our
interactions with other 'people' in SL, that our self-presentations would be interpreted by
these people and that it was up to us to control these responses as much as we could.
Disciplining Fantasy Bodies In Second Life
Modification of avatars
Our preoccupation with the appearance of our avatars did not stop with their creation.
As we began to suspect, even in our first days in SL, understanding that your appearance
tells other people who you are applies equally to a virtual presence.6 Particularly in a
world like SL, your visual appearance says a lot about you (Boellstorff, 2008; Castronova,
2004; Webb, 2001) although not necessarily in terms of representing your RL looks, but
rather in terms of your competence in the environment:
The girls are dancing [in a SL night club], with lascivious moves, scantily
dressed. I feel I'm under-dressed for this place…I tried to change my
outfit but I'm not happy with the options embedded in the system…As I
tried to improve my clothes, I realized that I cannot really do that without
technical skill. (Delia, 16 January 2008)
For both of us, modification of our avatars followed observations of our sense of their
inadequacy. We compared ourselves, not only to the other avatars we saw, but with
the images advertising avatar body-parts and clothing for sale which were prevalent
throughout the environment. These images were almost exclusively of Barbie-and-Ken-
like bodies: large breasts and tiny waists, broad shoulders and muscular physiques. The
relentless parade not only provided powerful visual cues for our interpretation of the
milieu (Dumitrica & Gaden, 2009) but also gave us clear and familiar standards against
which to measure our own digital bodies. In this setting, 'commitment' represents more
than a determination to participate; it also stands for a knowledge of both the mores
of social interaction and the technical infrastructure of the platform. As we gained
experience in SL, we increasingly re-constituted our avatars in relation to what we
observed and experienced, becoming aware that a sloppy example signalled a lack of
skill and experience of the game: when 'you look like a newbie, you look like you do not
have the skill, there's nothing special about you' (Delia's diary, 16 January).
In SL, there are three main ways of modifying avatars. First, and most easily accessible,
was the standard avatar modification editor provided by the platform. This allowed us to
change our facial features, hair and body-shape, and also afforded us a basic repertoire of
clothing and gestures (neatly divided into 'male' and 'female'). Secondly, we could learn
Gendered Transformations
how to make our own 'skins' and clothing using yet another graphic editor tool provided
by the platform. However, it transpired that in spite of our being somewhat experienced
with such tools, the SL version proved difficult to master. Using it required not only a
more advanced level of technical skill, but also the willingness and resources to invest
our time and energy into learning how to make realistic body parts or clothes. Finally,
we could buy anything that pertained to our virtual physical appearance, or occasionally
get it for free from various shops. Shopping is big business in SL7 and buying such virtual
enhancements requires financial investment on the part of the user.8 Interestingly, this is
also the route often recommended in literature produced by enthusiastic residents of SL:
if I were you, I'd come up with the $10 or $20 it costs to buy a skin
and shape designed by a talented SL artist…the constraints of current
SL rendering possibilities…along with the huge number of interacting
variations, not to mention possible limitations to your talent as a sculptor
and make-up artist, make it quite time consuming to create your ideal
look. (Mansfield, 2007: 55)
Disciplining Fantasy Bodies In Second Life
And although these strategies could give us a sense of gratification and comfort, while we
were active agents this didn't make us powerful vis-à-vis the structure. We were becoming
proficient in the gender discourse embedded in SL, but we could not affect it.
From the beginning of our journeys, we were 'looking' at other avatars through
gendered lenses, unconsciously referring to them as 'she' or 'he', and becoming fixated on
particular characteristics (those body parts and behaviours) as defining their gender:
I found this female avatar…She has really big breasts, couldn't help noticing
them, with the cleavage showing over her top. (Delia, 26 November 2007)
The first things I saw were these two girls on the floor…Why do they
have these long, slim legs?…Is this because what we all sell is appearance,
sexualized appearance? (Delia, 2 January 2008)
I glance over the posters on the walls. It's all about boobs and butts, about
big eyelashes and round eyes, and, of course, Angelina Jolie's lips…so
much sex-market around here. (Delia, 16 January 2008)
Gendered Transformations
This visual bombardment served to reinforce in powerful terms (Dumitrica & Gaden,
2009) the norms of appearance in the SL environment. Re-reading our journals, we
considered how the ubiquity of naked, sexualized bodies and body parts produced
different reactions in us. On the one hand we wanted to fit in, and felt out of place.
On the other, the appearance of other avatars and the prevalence of what we read as
highly sexual imagery produced, especially in Georgia, the desire to protect her avatar
(and herself) against unwanted sexual attention (whether this was a reality or not). In
response, she modified how her avatar looked according to her own understanding of
what kind of appearance might protect her in this way.
We soon noticed that the presentation of these virtual bodies was also characterized
by an effort towards achieving a 'realistic' effect. In fact, this was often what largely
distinguished a 'nice' avatar from a 'sloppy' one—again betraying the skill or material
resources of the typist. As noted before, our rudimentary experiments with editing tools
and freebie finds at the shopping malls in SL did not seem to compare favourably with
the appearances of those we observed: our garb was poorly rendered, lacking detail,
realism and animation. The 'realistic' faces and bodies we saw reminded us of airbrushed
magazine images: flawless, without the imperfections and impurities which characterize
human skin.
It was largely the perception of avatars (our own included) and the presence of avatar-
related advertisements that became a 'mirror of the self ' (Foucault, 1988: 25) through
which we constructed our understanding of the culture of gendered bodies in SL and
our positions therein. In this way, we interpreted what it meant to create and possess a
successful body, trying to fit in while feeling uncomfortable with the norms of the milieu
which seemed underpinned by discourses bringing together the hypersexualized body,
its commodification and the importance of a successful body 'beautiful'. Whether we
reproduced the seemingly dominant vision or resisted it, we had to adopt its perspective
in order to make sense of the other avatars and, thus, the social landscape in SL.
We began by asking what it means to be a creative agent intervening upon your body in
a virtual environment such as SL, and how this connects to a (possibly) new understanding
of gender. We would like to propose here that this creative agency cannot be divorced
from a process of self-disciplining our bodies as we bring each (available) part in line with
or against the normative gender discourses of the SL platform. In our experience, this
normative gender discourse is intrinsically connected to the prevailing vision of gender
within our RL social context, since designers often choose (whether consciously or not) to
play upon stereotypes to make their products appealing (Zdenek, 1999) and we, as users,
draw upon the conventions and understandings of our RL experiences.
Disciplining Fantasy Bodies In Second Life
As we have described, from the outset and throughout our journeys in SL, we acted
upon our virtual bodies in various ways. And while we also work on our RL selves, in
a virtual environment such as SL the promise is for a far wider scope of control and
agency in this process. In the construction and maintenance of our virtual bodies we
were, with every keystroke and mouse-click, bringing our virtual selves into being and
negotiating these new bodies in this new environment. And, yet, although we could see
possibilities for creativity, our observations and experiences suggested that the platform
itself was built on a particular understanding of gender as an essentialized male/ female
binary, paying obvious attention to particular body parts deemed, particularly in our
own cultural context, to be markers of sexualized, desirable and fit gendered bodies.13 In
his discussion of technologies of the self (and in those of the others who contributed to
the Vermont seminar of the same name), Foucault makes it clear that those employed
by individuals are inextricable from their historical and cultural contexts. While the
ancients, for instance, were concerned with private reflection—often through various
forms of writing (letters and diaries for example)—the early Christians took a more
public and corporeal approach whereby penitence 'must be visibly represented and
accompanied by others who recognize the ritual…What was private for the Stoics was
public for the Christians' (Foucault, 1988: 40). Our experiences in SL were likewise
situated: closely related to neo-liberal postfeminist discourses in contemporary Western
society, discourses which celebrate the same public production and consumption of the
sexualized body as a mark of emancipation, symbolizing a choice for women to claim an
empowered sexuality, and as a freedom from feminist recrimination (McRobbie, 2007).
In this environment the onus is upon individuals to seize the opportunity to create
themselves in the form of their own desire, to achieve goals and realize dreams, and to
be successful. In RL, this individual responsibility rests upon an economic environment
where 'the individual…has become his/her own branded commodity' (Ouellette & Hay,
2008: 105). Here, looking 'good' is part and parcel of a self-presentation which stands to
determine personal as well as professional achievement and (by association) happiness,
while consumption becomes associated with a sense of personal gratification and
pleasure (Ouellette & Hay, 2008; Roberts, 2007). Through self-inspection, critique and
extensive consumer activity we can produce a body worthy of admiration and respect,
allegedly bringing to light our 'true' or 'authentic' self.
SL is presented as an environment where these possibilities are even more
democratically available and where individual creativity reigns. Indeed, an environment
like SL is particularly interesting because it presents opportunities for self-modification
that are unavailable or perhaps simply more difficult in RL. As one of the numerous
fashion orientated SL bloggers writes: 'in SL, unlike in RL, we can wear whatever we
want, whenever we want, and we can change our look completely in a matter of seconds'
(SL Fashion Addict, 30 November 2007). In SL, a typist can play with the appearance of
their avatar, adding tattoos, changing hair colour, switching gender or race. However, as
Gendered Transformations
In this way, our experience and analysis suggest that the technologies we employ in the
care and understanding of our gendered selves are engaged in a complex relationship
with processes of discipline. SL was introduced to us as a place of opportunity and
Disciplining Fantasy Bodies In Second Life
Indeed, as we worked on our virtual bodies, this work remained rooted within both
the gender discourses of the environment and our offline contexts (which, for us, were
inextricable), discourses that we were ultimately unable to affect but would always
respond to even in our efforts at resistance.
1. For a more detailed description of method, see Dumitrica and Gaden (2009).
2. Second Life webpages have changed from that time. The process may no longer be
identical to what we are describing here.
4. In this paper, we will focus exclusively on humanoid avatars. Despite having both met
several non-humanoid versions and reading about the existence of 'furry places'—
places where non-humanoid avatars hang out—we did not see too many of them in
our SL journeys.
5. It is important to point out that the creation of avatars is not, in itself, prescribing any
role for either male or female avatars. It merely embeds those features of male/femalie
bodies traditionally associated with normative gender discourses and a patriarchal
power arrangement: muscular male bodies and smaller female ones.
6. For various discussions on the relationship between appearance and gender issues,
see Keränen (2000), Finkelstein (2007).
Gendered Transformations
7. The market of avatar bodies in virtual worlds has real monetary value in RL and is con-
stantly growing. To give a sense of the magnitude of the SL market, the amount of USD
exchanged in transactions over a month (January 2008) throughout the SL platform was
around 2.2 million, while in-world sales in the same period amounted to $744,564 (SL
Blog, Key Economic Metrics).
8. Beyond simply having money available to buy the currency used in this world,
the user must own—and disclose—a credit card. We often forget that the avail-
ability of these cards is restricted to the industrialized world and the economic
9. Pretty in Pink (1986) is a movie about American teenagers. The lead character, Andie
(played by Molly Ringwald), makes many of her own clothes and does not fit in with
the affluent kids at her high school.
10. In SL, various scripts are available to animate your avatar. For instance, in many lo-
cations, when you want to make your avatar sit down, you have a choice between a
'male' or a 'female' sitting pose. In other cases, scripts are used to animate the avatar's
body parts, hair or clothes.
11. An interesting personal account about the economy of SL is provided by Ludlow and
Wallace (2007).
12. In the first part of our journey, we tried to visit those places deemed 'popular' by the
SL platform. The platform offers a map which shows popular locations, where popu-
larity is defined by the number of avatars present there.
13. We should emphasize that we do not argue that SL is all about sex, nor that SL users
are in the world for sexual purposes only. While everyone may come to SL with par-
ticular interests, and while there's an activity for everyone (from sex places to playing
games or visiting virtual museums), our argument refers to the normative discourse
of gendered bodies that frames the virtual existence in SL.
Disciplining Fantasy Bodies In Second Life
Berger, A.A., Video Games: A Popular Culture Phenomenon, New Brunswick, Transaction
Publishers, 2002.
Boellstorff, D., Coming of Age in Second Life, New Jersey, Princeton University Press,
Cassell, J. & Jenkins, H. (eds), From Barbie to Mortal Kombat: Gender and Computer
Games, Cambridge, MIT Press, 1999.
Castronova, E., 'The price of bodies: A hedonistic pricing model of avatar attributes in a
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Gendered Transformations
Gendered Transformations
Chapter Nine:
Reality TV's Contribution To the Gender
Differentiation of Moral-Emotional Repertories
Tonny Krijnen
In its early days—the 1990s—reality TV evoked a great deal of debate (a case in point
are programmes such as Big Brother and Temptation Island). Since then, the genre has
widened and the term reality TV also incorporates factual programmes which 'give an
unmediated account of events, often associated with the use of video and surveillance-
imaging technologies' (Dovey, 2008: 136). Only the more extreme shows continue to
be a topic of both academic and public deliberation. The arguments in the latter arena
seem quite unambiguous: reality TV is accused of too much emotional display. Series
and producers are said to be exploiting participants' genuinely held feelings in order to
gain a few points in the ratings over their competitors. Additionally, or rather because
of this 'emotion overload', reality TV is also regarded as one of the culprits to blame
for society's moral decay. The genre's viewers are accused of gloating and experiencing
schadefreude over the pain, humiliation and sadness of those taking part, which is
interpreted as a sign of the devaluation of morality. Even though some academic studies
of ethical issues focus on the richness of the genre and contradict these arguments (cf.
Hawkins, 2001; Hill, 2005), reality TV as a questionable presence in society is more often
acknowledged than denied. Two very important assumptions underlie these persistent
arguments concerning the genre's suspicious content. First, and it may be superfluous
to say so, the assumed relationship between the content and reception of reality TV is
Gendered Transformations
unsophisticated: the content is thought to have a direct effect on the moral capacities of
its viewers. Secondly, a false opposition between morality and emotions is constructed:
when the content is emotional, it seems impossible for it to have a positive impact on its
audiences' morality. In this chapter I take issue with both of these assumptions.
The starting point of my argument is that the content of reality TV is not necessarily
bad or immoral. On the contrary, it can be seen as offering narratives for its viewers
to engage with and employ to construct their own moral-emotional repertories (cf.
Krijnen & Tan, 2009). Furthermore, I will demonstrate how the imagination of emotions
and morality in these shows, and the relationship between the two, is strongly gender-
differentiated, shedding light on gender differences in moral-emotional repertories.
The primary research question is: how is the relationship between emotions and morality
imagined in the (Dutch) reality shows, The Golden Cage and Farmer Wants a Wife, and
are these imaginations gender-differentiated?
To answer this question, the content of the two reality shows referred to above—
which present the extreme ends of the reality-TV spectrum—is analysed. The Golden
Cage has been the centre of heated debate on a national and international level (Van de
Velde, 2006; Wade, 2007). The programme is the primordial Big Brother, and situates ten
participants (both men and women) in a luxurious villa. The last one standing wins the
villa and 1 million Euros. The main difference to Big Brother is that the audience does not
vote and the participants have to eliminate each other. Elimination in this case means
that someone must voluntarily decide to leave. Because of this last feature, the show is
often rejected for its immoral content as it is said to cause bullying and other malicious
behaviour. The Dutch version of Farmer Wants a Wife, however, has been hailed by
critics and audiences alike and is celebrated as an authentic, high-quality programme.
The focus lies with single people (men) who look after a farm while looking for a partner,
with the ultimate goal being to find love. After introducing themselves on TV, interested
women can send a letter. The later episodes revolve around the farmers having to choose
between the possible candidates. Starting with an initial ten, the farmers engage in
different activities with the participants to decide which women they want to leave and
which they want to stay, leading up to the final choice of one of them.
The programmes are different but also contain the traditional features of a reality
show; they both provide factual entertainment, there is a psychological twist (in The
Golden Cage participants have to eliminate each other, in Farmer Wants a Wife the farmer
gets to choose the partner) and there is almost continuous video surveillance (Dovey,
2008). Therefore, analysing and comparing the two provides an excellent opportunity
to investigate the gendered imagination of moral-emotional repertories in the broad
spectrum of reality television. To do so, however, it is necessary to carefully examine the
assumptions underlying the evaluations of the genre.
Reality TV's Contribution To the Gendered Differentiation of Moral-Emotional Repertories
Disentangling assumptions
The debates on the relationship between television and morality are flawed in two
ways, namely by the presupposition of both an unsophisticated understanding of the
link between television content and the reception thereof, as well as a false opposition
between emotion and morality.
The relationship between content and its reception seems to be poorly understood
in the public debates on morality and television. While in academia the concept of the
'hypodermic needle theory' is outdated (cf. McQuail, 2005), in the public arena the media
are often understood as having direct effects in terms of either 'copy-cat behaviour' or
a decline in moral values. In this chapter, reality TV's audience(s) are understood as
heterogeneous and dynamic. Viewers actively engage with the moral and emotional
content of the reality programmes they watch, employing their insights to construct
moral-emotional repertories. Reality TV is understood as a narrative that offers its
viewers an opportunity to reflect on moral decisions and choices and experience the
consequences in terms of emotions without actually feeling them in real life (Rorty, 1989;
Nussbaum, 2001). This enables the viewers to develop a moral-emotional repertory, a
stock of beliefs and values that are primary to moral deliberations and choices in real
life. The major difference as regards hypodermic needle theory is that the viewer does
not passively incorporate ideas into his or her moral emotional repertories, but instead
reflects on TV content with different results (as has been frequently shown by many
scholars such as Ang (1985) and Liebes & Katz (1990)).
In accordance with the perspective on the active audience, the content of the TV
narrative is pivotal for these experiments by the viewers. The observer can only try out
moral situations and emotions that are imagined in the narrative (Nussbaum 2001).
Therefore, it is important to study the content of reality TV on a moral and emotional
level. Of course, individuals employ other narratives beyond televised ones, such as those
deriving from family, friends, education and so on. Television, however, is one of today's
most important suppliers (Allen, 1992; Gerbner, 1998).
In Nussbaum's (2001) and Rorty's (1989) formulation, the concepts of morality and
emotion are laced together. When reflecting on moral issues the viewer takes into
account the emotions experienced by all of the people involved. This junction alludes
to the second misconception touched upon in the introduction: the false opposition
between morality and emotion. Although this opposition seems to be natural, it is
essentially constructed. Woven into the fabric of Western societies is what we might call
the minimum conception of morality: 'the effort to guide one's conduct by reason—that
is, to do what there are the best reasons for doing—while giving equal weight to the
interests of each individual who will be affected by what one does' (Rachels, 2003: 14).
Moral decisions are based on reason: there is one best way of acting and everybody's
interests should be weighed equally.
Gendered Transformations
The rational basis of morality, namely judiciously deciding which moral law applies, is
the main focus of criticism. Nussbaum (2001) is one of the most important, contemporary
critics in the field. According to her explanation of the intelligence of emotions, there are
several reasons why feelings are strongly connected to rational moral thoughts. Emotions
are not just about things, but are elicited by an object or situation that is of explicit value to
a particular individual. This value is understood as the result of a complex set of (moral)
beliefs about the object or circumstance. In other words, the emotion is often connected
to a moral judgement. In this context, Nussbaum (2001) emphasizes the particularity of
these beliefs and emotions and adopts a social-constructionist view. When employing
her conception of morality, moral thought is understood as a process in which one
imaginatively deliberates about the best reasons for conduct, while simultaneously taking
into account all consequences and the feelings of all involved (including oneself).
Moral-emotional repertories are carefully constructed throughout life, and are
therefore shaped by an individual's history and the social norms of the society he or
she resides in. These repertories should be understood as they are situated. In terms
of social norms, Nussbaum (2001) looks at different causes for variations in emotional
repertories; physical conditions, religious beliefs, social practices and language are all
reasons why variances are found between societies. However, she does emphasize that
individual histories are just as important.
In line with academic work on emotions and morality, Nussbaum (2001) emphasizes
gender-differentiated moral-emotional repertories, and integrates two disciplines through
the connection of emotions to morality: psychology and moral philosophy. A lot of
research on gender-differentiation in emotions has been conducted (Timmers, Fischer &
Manstead, 2003; Fischer, Mosquera, Van Vianen, & Manstead, 2004; Jansz, 2000). Here,
though, a distinction should be made between emotional experience and emotional
expression. Psychologists such as Frijda (2007) and Oatley, Keltner & Jenkins (2006) have
argued that emotional experience might be similar for each individual, but the expression
of emotions can differ due to expectations of social consequences, norms and motives, all
of which are gender-differentiated (Timmers et al., 2003; Fischer et al., 2004). Research
on the expression of emotion reveals three ways in which this is gender-differentiated.
First, differences are often found in what is called the display of powerful and powerless
emotions. The former, such as anger and contempt, serve to demonstrate assertiveness
and power, while the latter, such as sadness, fear, guilt and shame, reveal vulnerability and
internal blame. Men tend to express powerful emotions more often than women. Secondly,
differences in the expression of pro-social emotions, such as joy and empathy, are also
found. These emotions serve to establish and groom affective ties. Women tend to express
these feelings more often than men do. Thirdly, the amount of emotional expression is also
gender-differentiated. In general, women show their emotions more often than men (Fischer
et al., 2004; Jansz, 2000). These research results offer a perspective that is quite similar to
Nussbaum's argument on gender differentiation in moral-emotional repertories.
Reality TV's Contribution To the Gendered Differentiation of Moral-Emotional Repertories
Gendered Transformations
Further analysis was based on a grounded theory approach, and contained three
phases: open coding, axial coding and selective coding (Strauss and Corbin 1998). In
the first phase, open coding, all moral statements and moral and emotional expressions
were coded. In the second stage, axial coding, patterns of relationships between moral
expressions, emotional expressions and gender were outlined. Nussbaum's (2001)
notion of the relationship between emotions and moral evaluation—emotions often
communicate a deeply felt (moral) belief—was taken as a starting point. Similarities
and differences between possible groups of statements or emotional expressions were
noted. The final phase, selective coding, was aimed at the formulation of overarching
Before presenting the results, a cautionary note is in order. Emotion theory easily
runs the risk of the essentialist determination of gender differences by suggesting that
all women express emotions and moral issues in the same way, as do men. I have dealt
empirically with this danger by investigating gender differences in their context, thus
allowing for diversity within both groups. The results of the analysis give us a general
idea of how gender differentiation in moral-emotional repertories is constructed in
reality television shows.
The analysis of the episodes of The Golden Cage and Farmer Wants a Wife reveals a
wide variety of feelings. In addition to Ekman's (1999) basic emotions (anger, disgust,
fear, happiness, sadness, surprise, amusement, contempt, contentment, embarrassment,
excitement, guilt, pride in achievement, relief, satisfaction, sensory pleasure, shame) more
complex feelings were also displayed. There was, for example, not only a display of anger,
but also frustration and irritation. Differences were found between the programmes in
the kinds of emotions expressed. Powerful feelings were mostly observed (82 per cent) in
The Golden Cage, while the largest element of powerless (79 per cent) and pro-social (71
per cent) emotions were on show in Farmer Wants a Wife. Striking as these differences
may seem, the way in which the display of the various emotions is gender-differentiated
in both programmes is surprisingly similar.
Of all the emotional expressions, 65 per cent were displayed by women and 35 per
cent by men. The patterns of gender differentiation in the release of powerful, powerless
and pro-social expressions were as expected. Of the total amount of pro-social emotions,
64 per cent were displayed by women and 36 per cent by men. Furthermore, women
displayed 74 per cent of powerless emotions, while only 26 per cent were shown by men.
And finally, the expression of powerful feelings was displayed by men and women 58 per
cent and 42 per cent of the time, respectively. These results are in accordance with the
observations of Fischer et al. (2004) and Timmers et al. (2003).
Reality TV's Contribution To the Gendered Differentiation of Moral-Emotional Repertories
Emotional expression
Brian: 'I never spoke about your mother. What did you wanna do,
you little turd?'
Huub: 'Little turd?'
Brian: 'You tiny, little turd. That's what you are, you can't do fuck
against me.'
Huub: 'You need Jaap and Amanda.'
Brian: 'Oh you are such a sissy, you're peeing your pants right now.'
(The Golden Cage, 26 March 2006)
Gendered Transformations
while Natasia's young son was also visiting. The dog was running around and Natasia
was worried her son would be harmed by it. She is angry with Nena for not keeping her
dog with her:
Natasia: [raising her voice] 'Listen, you keep him with you. If he bites,
we have a problem. No, no…it doesn't matter how often I need
to say this, keep him with you…you need to be careful.' (The
Golden Cage, 4 October 2006)
Instead of using swear words, Natasia threatens Nena only verbally (If he bites, we have
a problem) and only raises her voice. Other female participants in the reality shows
expressed their anger in similar ways.
Powerless emotions were also gender-differentiated in terms of their display. For
example, the powerless feeling of nervousness was revealed by the female participants
as rather positive excitement. For example, in Farmer Wants a Wife, there were a lot of
nerves on show during the episodes in which the three women chosen by the farmer
have a sleep-over at the farm. On these days, the farmer and the women get to know
each other better, but the farmer also gets to choose which woman he wants to spend a
weekend abroad with. At Martijn's farm, there are two women left. One of them is asked
how she feels:
Although Bibi feels nervous about the situation and the possible feelings that Martijn
has for her, she is also very positive: she smiles and her eyes twinkle. Martijn, on the
other hand, is also nervous but expresses this in a much more negative way. When the
presenter, Yvon, asks him how he feels about the decisive moment (during which he has
to announce his final decision) Martijn shows his nervousness in a pessimistic manner:
Reality TV's Contribution To the Gendered Differentiation of Moral-Emotional Repertories
Martijn is not smiling at all. His voice is trembling and he slumps in his chair. This
difference in emotional expression is often explained by the kind of situation in which
the emotion is elicited. In the above situation Bibi is nervous, but hopeful: she might be
selected. Martijn, however, has to make the decision and, therefore, also has to disappoint
While powerful emotions seem to be gender-differentiated in their expression, the
expression of powerless feelings seems to be more context than gender-related. However,
this context, namely that which elicits the emotion, is gender-differentiated in both reality
shows and indicates a more complex pattern of emotional expression and morality.
Gerrit prolongs the moment of suspense because he wants to take revenge on all of the
three women who stayed for the sleep-over and put him into a difficult position. During
this scene Gerrit is smiling and is obviously enjoying his retaliation. Male participants
seem to express powerful emotions mainly to exercise power in competition or situations
that make them uncomfortable.
The expressions of powerful emotions by the female participants contrast with those
of their male counterparts. The female contestants who express powerful feelings always
do so in the context of setting limits and trying to maintain their (personal) boundaries.
Gendered Transformations
An example, following on from the one referred to in the previous section (Natasia being
angry with Nena), concerns Lieke. Lieke, who is one of the housekeepers in The Golden
Cage, is engaged in a romantic relationship with Huub (later she will enter the show as
a formal participant). Huub is not very faithful, and when Lieke questions him about
this he explains that his behaviour is 'game strategy'. Huub says he has to pretend to like
Amanda (Brian's girlfriend) so as to tease Brian. Lieke becomes angry with him, not
because he is unfaithful, but because he is dishonest with her:
Lieke: 'Yes, you can play your game…but this [meaning their relationship]
is NOT a game.'
Huub: 'No, this is not a game…'
Lieke: 'You should not play me around anymore.'
(The Golden Cage, 30 March 2007)
Lieke uses her expression of anger instrumentally to set personal boundaries: if Huub
wants to maintain their relationship, he has to be honest with her. Expressions of anger
and other powerful emotions by the female participants thus usually serve to set or
maintain personal boundaries.
The context for the expression of powerless emotions is also gender-differentiated. The
male participants in both series generally displayed powerless feelings in relation to goals
in the programme or sometimes in life. The Golden Cage contestant Jaap, for example,
is a student in real life. Upon his entrance in the game show, his university informs him
that he cannot remain a student (due to his absence from lectures and exams). When
Jaap receives the official letter stating this fact, he shows anguish and sadness:
Jaap: 'I just think this really sucks. I have a lot of bad luck. Of course
I am also responsible, I know…But when you just look at the
facts of my life, it's just simple bad luck.' (The Golden Cage,
2 April 2007)
Reality TV's Contribution To the Gendered Differentiation of Moral-Emotional Repertories
of this; it is caused by her dependence on Martijn's decision. This dependency can also
come across as an expression of sadness ensuing from missing someone outside the
programme. This is how Natasia explains her feelings:
In The Golden Cage, this situation occurred quite regularly. Due to the set-up and the
duration of the show, participants more often expressed the feeling that they were
missing someone from outside the series. Nevertheless, it is striking that none of the
male contestants were shown displaying powerless emotions in this situation. These
contextual features of gender differentiations in expressing feelings are related to the moral
circumstances and decisions the participants have to deal with in both programmes.
In both shows the male participants express more powerful emotions and explain
these in terms of their orientation in respect of end goals. Both programmes showed
the male contestants as being extremely focused on the project at hand: winning the
competition (The Golden Cage) or finding a partner (Farmer Wants a Wife). This single-
minded focus created the opportunity for the men to ground their (im)moral decisions
in rational thought about the project. This enabled them to feel positive about their own
negative behaviour. Huub's actions are an example. In his rivalry with Brian he decides to
manipulate the feelings of Amanda, Brian's girlfriend. He does this deliberately: 'And then
I just became really angry, smashing the doors and [saying]: you just go to this stupid ass
Brian! And this morning, I just really touched her feelings. So yeah, I'm playing an ugly
game.' (The Golden Cage, 30 March 2007)
That morning, Huub had tried to convince Amanda of her boyfriend Brian's inability
to truly care for her. He added that he was only telling her this because he [Huub] did
care. This conversation takes place while Amanda is lying in a dentist's chair with a metal
device in her mouth, making it impossible for her to speak. Although as a viewer we
might judge Huub's actions as immoral, because he is unnecessarily hurting Amanda's
feelings and using her instrumentally to achieve his goal (the elimination of Brian), Huub
views his own behaviour as a strategic tool in the game and, therefore, does not believe
Gendered Transformations
that it is immoral at all. According to Huub, Amanda and the other participants are very
much aware of being part of the game. He not only explains his actions as strategic, he
also enjoys himself tremendously. In a similar vein, the farmers in Farmer Wants a Wife
explain their decisions in terms of their goal: finding a partner. Illustrative is Gerrit's
conversation with Inge, the woman of his choice. In the chat, Gerrit admits he has kissed
Eva, one of the other women who stayed during the sleep-over. He regrets doing this, not
because he hurt Eva (he gave her false hope that she would be selected), but because of
the fear of not achieving his objective:
Gerrit frames his confession in terms of his emotions, fear of losing Inge, while glossing
over his egotistical motivation to kiss Eva. This relation of emotions and moral decisions
to goals was illustrative of the behaviour and actions of the male participants. Therefore,
I would like to suggest that men's emotions, as shown on these programmes, might be
described as goal-orientated, since they are closely related to projects and aims.
The female participants, in contrast, were shown to express emotions as related to the
situation at hand. Instead of being focused on winning the competition or getting the
farmer to fall in love with them, the women seemed to concentrate more on 'the here
and the now'. In other words, female participants seemed more focused on 'surviving the
programme' and the situations that they were manoeuvred into. Related to this, they are
much more often depicted as feeling negative about negative actions. For example, in
Farmer Wants a Wife, things go wrong when Eva is supposed to make dinner and Inge
goes grocery shopping:
Obviously, the women are in competition because they would both like to be selected by
Gerrit as the woman of his choice. Their argument, however, is based on disappointment
Reality TV's Contribution To the Gendered Differentiation of Moral-Emotional Repertories
and unfamiliarity with the situation. Both feel bad about their fight, and their faces
show worry and anxiety. Additionally, the female participants were sometimes shown
to make moral decisions while expressing negative emotions. A very clear example is set
by Trudy. Trudy and Anneke are two women at the sleep-over at Hans's farm. Hans is
having trouble making a decision. Trudy has observed Anneke and has noticed that she
has developed a serious crush on Hans. Since she is not sure about her own feelings, she
decides to talk to Hans and convinces him to choose Anneke. Later on, she explains her
decision in front of the camera. She cries while doing this:
Trudy: 'The day before yesterday, I put Hans through his paces, how
he felt about Anneke. Because I had already noticed that Anneke
was developing something. But he didn't want to say anything…
Yesterday afternoon, he had a really hard time. And we were alone
for a moment and then I said: Hans, why don't you listen to
your heart?…And then I told him: I am not allowed to tell you,
but that [indicating Anneke] is the woman who fell for you.
She is in love with you. Accept it. I'll survive.' (Farmer Wants a
Wife, 5 November 2006)
Even though Trudy is not sure about how she feels (she might have developed similar
feelings to Anneke), she sacrifices her opportunity to find a partner in order to give two
other people a chance of love. This action might be judged as morally positive, despite
Trudy's obvious feelings of sadness. This embeddedness of feelings and moral decisions
in concrete situations was illustrative of the female participants in both shows. I would
like to suggest that women's emotions, as shown in the two programmes, can be called
'concrete emotions'.
Although The Golden Cage and Farmer Wants a Wife might be regarded as two
completely different reality shows, the gender differentiation in the emotional expressions
therein is surprisingly similar. Returning to our main question: how is the relationship
between emotions and morality imagined in the (Dutch) reality shows The Golden Cage and
Farmer Wants a Wife, and are these imaginations gender-differentiated?, the conclusion
can be drawn that reality TV offers a gender-differentiated perspective on moral-
emotional repertories. These results provide a starting point when it comes to reaching
an understanding of how TV contributes, reflects and sustains gender differentiation in
emotional expression. Male participants are shown as ultimately being focused on their
goals, while the women are revealed to be focused on the 'here and now'. This difference
Gendered Transformations
in focus is closely connected to their moral behaviour. While male contestants argue for
their moral decisions in terms of the goals they have, their female counterparts do so
by taking the social consequences thereof into account. The differences in the display of
emotions are, therefore, easily understood in terms of their context. When your action
is related to a certain goal and you are successful, the emotions are positive. When your
action is tied in with the situation, that is, the 'here and now', as well as the relationship
with others, feelings are closely connected to the specificity of the circumstance (you are
either chosen as the partner or not).
Furthermore, our results also shed light on the complex intertwining of emotions
and morality. If moral decisions are, indeed, strongly related to emotions, and if
people differ as to when and how they experience feelings (goal-related or concrete),
we may have gained insight into the difficult issue of why some people make immoral
decisions. However, this study does not deliver any information about how emotions are
experienced. Therefore, the intertwining of emotions and morality should be developed
further in other research.
Ang, I., Watching Dallas: Soap Opera and the Melodramatic Imagination, London,
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Dovey, J., 'Reality TV', in G. Creeber (ed.) The Television Genre Book, 2nd edn, London,
Palgrave MacMillan, 2008, pp. 134–145.
Ekman, P., 'Basic emotions', in T. Dalgleish & T. Power (eds) The Handbook of Cognition
and Emotion, Sussex, John Wiley & Sons, Ltd, 1999, pp. 45–60.
Fischer, A.H., Mosquera, P.M., Van Vianen, A.E.M. & Manstead, A.S.R., 'Gender and
culture differences in emotions', Emotion, 4:4 (2004), pp. 87–94.
Frijda, N., The Laws of Emotion, Mahwah, NJ, Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc., 2007.
Gerbner, G., 'The stories we tell and the stories we sell', Journal of International
Communication, 5:1&2 (1998), pp. 75–82.
Reality TV's Contribution To the Gendered Differentiation of Moral-Emotional Repertories
Hawkins, G., 'Ethics of television', International Journal of Cultural Studies, 4:4 (2001),
pp. 412–426.
Hill, A., Reality TV: Audiences and Popular Factual Television, London & New York,
Routledge, 2005.
Jansz, J., 'Masculine identity and restrictive emotionality', in A.H. Fischer (ed.) Gender
and Emotion: Social Psychological Perspectives, Cambridge, Cambridge University
Press, 2000, pp. 166–186.
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Oxford University Press, 1990.
McQuail, D., McQuail's Mass communication theory, 5th edn, London, Sage Publications,
Oatley, K., Keltner, D. & Jenkins, J.M., Understanding Emotions, 2nd edn, Malden/Oxford/
Victoria, Blackwell Publishing, 2006.
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Companies, Inc., 2003.
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about men's and women's emotional behavior', Cognition and Emotion, 17:1 (2003),
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Gendered Transformations
Velde, F., van de, 'PvdA: Gedragscode tegen vernederende tv', Elsevier, 2006, http://
Retrieved 3 April 2008.
Chapter Ten:
Casualizing Sexuality In Teen Series.
A Study of The Gendered Sexual Discourses In the
Popular American Teen Series, One Tree Hill
and Gossip Girl
'Teens can learn about sex from the mass media. They've grown up as
neighbours to the residents of Melrose Place on television, watching
preening fictional characters swap sexual partners as casually as baseball
cards.' (Sutton, Brown, Wilson & Klein, 2002: 26)
Time and again, the mass media, and especially television and the internet, are held
responsible for all kinds of social ills and negative behaviour involving children and
teenagers (Gerbner & Gross, 1976; Morgan, 2007). Parents, politicians and academics
are most concerned about young people since, at the age of eighteen, they spend more
time in front of the television and at the computer than they do on any other daily activity
(Ralph, Brown & Lees, 1999: 105; Weimann, 2000). Indeed, we could say that media are
predominant in the everyday lives of teenagers (Osgerby, 2004: 6). These concerns about
the possible effects and impact of media content are not new; anxieties have been around
since the media's heyday, and we see the same tendencies reoccurring whenever a new
form is developed. A similar fear has been expressed in the past about earlier types of
media, such as films and comic books (Critcher, 2006), but the potential effects of new
Gendered Transformations
mediums, like the internet and game consoles, are being studied as well in this respect
(Mazzarella, 2007). According to several authors (Morgan, 2007; Signorielli, 2007;
Bindig, 2008), television is still the primary storyteller, both in national and international
terms, which is why it has quite possibly become one of the most common learning
environments across the globe. The world of television shows us the workings of daily life
and how society is organized and presented, primarily in the form of highly consistent
and repetitive entertainment (Mirzoeff, 1998: 1, 6; Morgan, 2007). Buckingham (2003:
3–5) argues that despite not offering a translucent window to the world, the media shape
a view of reality and give us tools to interpret our relationships and define our identities.
Unlike cultivation theorists,1 we do not think that young viewers adopt the reality
represented on screen as their own, but instead believe that the role is more nuanced and
complex, in what resembles the cultural studies' point of view. The media are not the only
distributors of meaning; peers, parents and schools are other socialization agents in the
lives of teenagers that we have to consider. Moreover, viewers are not passive victims of
media content and are regarded as being media literate. It is, however, necessary to study
the substance of contemporary media programmes directed at teenagers, since we live in
a mediated reality. We agree with Bindig (2008: 5) that 'while it would be ridiculous to
think that viewers imitate exactly what is portrayed in the media that surround them, it
would be similarly naive to believe that the messages of the media are meaningless'. We
can, therefore, say that youth media provides a site for teen identity construction (Bindig,
2008: 14) and the evaluation of teen television content is, therefore, absolutely crucial.
Gender and other ideological themes such as class and sexuality are intertwined and
cannot be fully separated (Bindig, 2008: 21), which is why we will analyse the gender
representations of a group of teenagers in the popular North American teen series One Tree
Hill and Gossip Girl, with a specific emphasis on the relationship with sexuality. However, we
first need to be acquainted with the meaning of our key concepts, gender and representation,
as well as with an overview of the studies focusing on the portrayal of teens.
Although people often assume that we are born as male or female, an individual has
to learn his or her gender identity and how to be a man or a woman. We follow a non-
essentialist approach to gender and believe that it is through civilization and socialization
that a human being is constructed as feminine or masculine (Lorber, 1997: 35; Gunter,
1995: 2). Gender is created and recreated out of human interactions and social lives, and
is the texture and order of that social life (West & Zimmerman, 1987). Gender is thus
socially constructed and cannot be equated with biological and physiological differences.
A specific set of roles, created by cultural traditions, moral codes, the economy and politics
(Jacobson, 2005: 6), is attached to gender identity. Those roles are not stable but differ
Casualizing Sexuality In Teen Series
across time and space (Nayak & Kehily, 2008: 175). Adolescents develop their personal
sexual behaviour according to the gendered scripts that society advocates. However,
we do not perform gender so freely. School, parents, peers and the mass media are the
agencies and tools that help us, and more specifically young people, to integrate into a
gendered world. Gender is, therefore, both ascribed and achieved (West & Zimmerman,
1987). Moreover, ranked according to prestige and power in most societies, it is therefore
unequal. Men are attributed greater worth and importance than women of the same
race and class, even if their activities are similar or alike (e.g. the glass ceiling). Not only
is this stratification reflected and constructed by the media (Lorber, 1997: 40–43), but
they 'also contribute to the construction of hegemonic definitions that often appear to be
self-evident…Generally, stereotyping in the media context follows patterns of power by
diminishing those with little power and influence' (Jacobson, 2005: 5).
When assumptions are made about a person only on the basis of gender, we speak of
gender stereotyping. Female stereotypes follow themes such as appearance, sexuality,
relationships and traditional gender roles like housekeeping. The stereotyping of
masculinity, on the other hand, is organized around coolness, aggression and violence
(Jacobson, 2005: 6; 25–26).
In his work Media Power and Class Power (1986), Stuart Hall describes the ubiquitous
visual culture as the 'machinery of representation'. Representation can be defined as a
production of meaning through language; it connects meaning and language to culture.
To make sense of these representations, we have to share the same conceptual maps and
speak the same language (Hall, 2003: 15–31).
Although images can closely resemble the object to which they refer, they still exist in signs
that carry meanings, thus requiring interpretation (Hall, 2003: 18). Media do not reflect
or present reality; they instead interpret and represent a possible take thereon. Media
representations of youth, then, are not a straightforward reflection of young people's
culture and lifestyles either. 'Instead, they offer a particular interpretation of youth,
constructing images of young people that are infused by a wealth of social meanings'
(Osgerby, 2004: 60). The (content of) representations (is) are important since the media
Gendered Transformations
Casualizing Sexuality In Teen Series
little or no explicit sexual representations visible in teen series, but sexual innuendo
or talking about sexual relationships is presented more than ever before, as is implied
sexual behaviour between characters. Where, in the 1990s, series like Dawson's Creek
focused on the romantic and affective aspects of a relationship (Bindig, 2008), we note
that the sexual aspect thereof has become one of the core subjects of recent teen series.
Sexual relationships are often just for fun (no serious commitment), which makes us
wonder whether we perhaps do need to reconsider sexual licence as part of youth-as-fun
instead of youth-as-trouble (Hebdige, 1979).
Scholars tend to focus on children, while teenagers have received little attention in
the past. For general findings about the portrayal of teenage girls and boys, we refer to
Katherine Heintz-Knowles (1995; 2000) and others. It should be noted that most studies
use quantitative content analysis instead of the qualitative approach we have utilized
in our research. Young people in prime-time programmes are often portrayed in roles
where they are coping with problems related to romance, friendship, popularity and
family issues. Many of these difficulties were resolved without help from adults (Aubrun
& Grady, 2000: 8). Heintz-Knowles (1995) argues that teenagers in entertainment
television are not motivated or driven by school-related issues, but rather by peer
relationships, sport and hobbies, family, and romance. In TV series, young people who
are sexually active rarely take any precautions to protect themselves against pregnancy
or sexually transmitted diseases. More importantly, these characters seldom experience
negative consequences as a result of their sexual actions (Aubrey, 2004), and having sex
is suggested as normative if you are in a committed relationship (Gunter, 1995: 5).
Upon taking a closer look at the results concerning female teen characters in fiction,
we notice contradictory findings, both confirming and breaking gender stereotypes.
Plots involving teenage girls are centred on dating and shopping (Signorielli, 2007:
174–175) and contain many stereotypical messages about relationships, careers and
appearance. Female characters are often devalued as sexual objects (Bindig, 2008: 26)
and are depicted as bad when they express their sexual desires openly. Remarkably, girls
in teen programmes initiate sexual dialogue more than they initiate sex, but when they
do the latter they experience more negative consequences than men do (Aubrey, 2004:
510). Boys, however, get more positive media messages about how to be a man, though
stereotypes are found as well. On the one hand, male characters often have athletic,
muscular bodies, which are highlighted by the clothes they wear, while on the other, their
physical appearance is, in contrast to female characters, seldom the subject of discussion.
Male characters are shown for their abilities and talents, not because of their looks.
A particularly worrying aspect in the portrayals has emerged in the context of images
of sexual behaviour and sex (Gunter, 1995; Kellner, 1995), because both sex and sexuality
are depicted in a clichéd and stereotypical way. A boy has sex with as many women as he
can because a 'real man' never says no when the opportunity for sex arises (Brown, Steele
& Walsh-Childers, 2002: 3; Signorielli, 2007: 174–175). This sexual double standard
Gendered Transformations
results in men's sexuality being encouraged and rewarded and male characters are
portrayed as active choosers ('predators'). This is in contrast to passivity, restriction and
compliance for female sexuality (Aubrey, 2004: 506). 'The stereotypical media concept
of sexuality is built around the female as the object of desire and the male as active
chooser of object.' (Jacobson, 2005: 14) According to Schor (2004, quoted in Bindig,
2008: 16) 'teen media depict a manipulated and gratuitous sexuality, based on unrealistic
body images, constraining gender stereotypes and, all too frequently, the degradation
of women'. Studies focusing on gender representations in, for example, music videos
confirm the presence of the same stereotypes that appear in other forms of popular
media for both men and women (Kaplan, 1997). Those portrayals may function as role
models for young people and contribute to their gender-role socialization and identity
construction (Gunter, 1995: 4). As Jacobson (2005: 27–29) concluded, masculinity is
depicted as superior to femininity, even in teen television series.
Textual analyses are usually interpretative and thus qualitative, and attempt to
understand latent meanings of a text. This type of analysis is successfully transferred
and incorporated into the area of film studies (Larsen, 2002: 117–120). The current
type of film analysis is mostly based on narration, because of the narrative format of
the studied programmes, and consists of an exploration of the levels of content and
representational strategies used in the audiovisual text. Cinematographic elements have,
however, been studied as well. We explored the representations of teen sexuality, with a
specific emphasis on gender, by means of a qualitative textual film analysis (Bordwell &
Thompson, 1993). Because of the importance of plot development and the evolution of
characters in the series researched, we want to stress the importance of the use of our
sample. This approximately eighteen hours of television fiction included sixteen One
Tree Hill episodes (the first, eighth, sixteenth and final episodes of every season that had
been released on DVD before June 2008) and eleven episodes of Gossip Girl (the first,
fourth, eighth, twelfth, sixteenth and final episode of seasons one and two2).
One Tree Hill (OTH) first aired in the United States on 23 September 2003, and
the seventh season is currently showing in North America on the free CW Television
Network. The series has been nominated for a Teen Choice3 award 23 times, and the
fact that it has won twice4 reflects its importance in popular teen media. The series
focuses on the lives of some teenagers in Tree Hill, a small but eventful city in North
Carolina. The storyline is developed around the high school basketball team and the
different relationships, be they friendship, romantic or of a sexual nature, between the
male protagonists, Lucas and Nathan, and their female (girl)friends, Peyton, Brooke and
Haley. Gossip Girl (GG) was first shown on the same CW Television Network, on 19
Casualizing Sexuality In Teen Series
September 2007 and the third season is currently being aired. The series has won eleven
awards from sixteen nominations,5 including the Teen Choice Awards for best breakout
show and best television drama in 2008, which stresses the popularity of the series with
teenagers. The programme tells the story of several teenagers (and their families), some
of whom live on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, while others travel by train instead
of being escorted in a limousine from Brooklyn to New York City. These teenagers are
about to make the most vital decision in their young lives—which university to attend—
while they also experiment with love, sex and drugs. Gossip Girl refers to the female
voice-over who spreads gossip and rumours about the main female characters, Blair and
Serena, and their male opponents, Chuck, Nate and Dan.
Gendered Transformations
physical power when he forces himself on Jenny. She voices her objections, but Chuck
does not listen. In the end, she is saved by her brother (active heroic male versus passive
female victim). Remarkably, the male characters in Gossip Girl are objectified as well,
although in a more subtle and less explicit manner. Some teenage girls use these young
men to make another jealous. Georgina, for instance, tries to sleep with Dan—Serena's
boyfriend—because the two females are stuck in a fight and a competition over who can
hurt each other the most. Sometimes, two teenagers use each other for their own reasons:
Jenny is dating the rich but gay Asher to climb the social ladder. Asher, on the other hand,
is using Jenny as well, to cover up his sexual orientation.
Casualizing Sexuality In Teen Series
force teenagers to reflect upon who they are and who they want to be. Love is not always
represented as negative; on the contrary, it is idealized in certain situations and portrayed
as being able to survive and challenge anything. Dan addresses his relationship with
Serena as the single greatest moment in his life, and he would do it all over again, even
though they have broken up (GG). Sex is a normal step in a romantic relationship, which
is taken rapidly and sometimes even hastily without talking it through with the respective
partner. There are, however, two important exceptions in our sample of One Tree Hill
episodes. First, Haley is afraid to have sex for the first time and decides to wait until she is
married. Her partner, Nathan, has a hard time accepting this and visits porn sites to cope
with his sexual feelings towards his girlfriend. Later, though, he admits that he wants to
wait too and help her survive her fears. The second example is the 'Clean Teens', a group
of teenagers (mostly girls) who are against sex before marriage. These youngsters are,
however, mocked and looked upon as if they are freaks; the group is condemned to die out
silently. The connection between sexuality and teenagers' groping boundaries, values and
norms is drawn here. They are searching for their own sexual identity and relationships
in a process that will allow them to define themselves and who or how they want to be. In
Gossip Girl we found that having sex with your partner gives you a better social standing,
but lying about it is unforgivable and results in a reduction of status (e.g. Jenny).
Gendered Transformations
boys in a boat, telling Peyton that men are so easy (OTH). Even Dan (GG) addresses
something similar when he tells Blair, who wants to seduce Chuck to win a bet, that:
'Chuck is still a man. Be present everywhere, it will drive him crazy.' This kind of sexual
talk or sexual innuendo between characters is recurrent in both series; in the One Tree
Hill research sample, this innuendo only appears between female characters, while in
Gossip Girl we notice the same tendency, although we also found that Chuck has some
sexually coloured conversations with Blair. We see the sexual innuendo between female
teenagers as an emancipatory gender script in which teenage girls are depicted as active
sexual creatures, instead of passive and compliant. Another positive and emancipatory
gender script can be found in the sequence in which a female teenager (GG) conveys her
impression of masturbation, a unique situation in the research sample from both series.
Casualizing Sexuality In Teen Series
(paid) sex with several older women simultaneously (GG). This last example of the use
of prostitutes and a threesome can be seen as both an incorporation of porn culture into
the daily lives of youngsters as well as another attempt to 'casualise' (paid for) sex.
The analysis of sexual scripts in relation to gender in the series One Tree Hill and
Gossip Girl revealed several stereotypical gender scripts, although more positive and
emancipatory discourses regarding both female and male characters are found as
well. Our data confirm previous research results, but put some of them in a different
perspective. In general we can say that Gossip Girl contains more diverse, sexually
gendered representations than One Tree Hill, even though paradoxical messages are to
be found in both series.
Female characters are often devalued as sexual objects in both programmes, confirming
the results of previous studies (Jacobson, 2005; Nayak & Kehily, 2008; Bindig, 2008). This
devaluation and objectification becomes visible in several different ways. Women use
their bodies to intimidate a man to get something done. Specific female body parts like
breasts and thighs are highlighted by (subtle) screenshots, and girls appear as the real
trophy that men compete for during a game. Female characters often objectify their own
sexuality and see it as a prize a man can claim, or as a way to thank a man for his efforts.
In Gossip Girl, female characters are even mentioned as part of a consumption culture
and as goods that you pay for. Remarkable is the fact that in the same series, males are
used and objectified by women, although in less explicit and more subtle ways.
The sexual double standard is recognised in both shows, where male teenagers who
sleep around are depicted as cool and girls who do the same are portrayed as slutty (cf.
Aubrey, 2004). Male sexuality is represented as insatiable; a real man never says no when
the opportunity to have (casual) sex is offered. There are, however, a few counterexamples
of men refusing such an offer and placing high value on sexual interaction.
Both the male and female teenagers in our sample have several romantic (and sexual)
relationships during the seasons we researched, and having a partner is regarded as
an important contribution to the development of identity. Teenagers sometimes lose
themselves due to love relationships, although love is not always represented as negative.
On the contrary, it is idealized by both boys and girls, and we find the same tendency
when it comes to sexual behaviour. Having sex is addressed as the single greatest moment
in someone's life, although it is mentioned once that it risks destroying a relationship
(friendship, sexual).
Sex is often insinuated and neither the use of condoms nor sexually transmitted diseases
is ever mentioned in our research sample, in keeping with the results of Aubrey (2004).
The only negative consequence that is connected to sex is a possible teen pregnancy; the
Gendered Transformations
emotional impact is, for the most part, non-existent in both series.
Although sex is idealized, we also found that it is often minimized. This finding is
supported by the regularly recurring examples of casual, non-committed sex, where
teenagers in the series do it just for fun. Hebdige (1979) regarded teens' sexual licence as
troubling, but we think that this should be reconsidered. Twenty-first century teenagers
and (casual) sex are woven together in contemporary teen fiction, and sex has become
part of the 'having fun' culture among this group. However, the absence of any references
to condoms in (casual) sexual relationships, as well as the lack of discussion of sexual
intercourse or the emotional consequences of sex can be regarded as problematic since
media shape our view of reality and offer us tools to interpret our (sexual) relationships
and define our identities. We have to be careful, however, not to exaggerate the role
of television, for it is not the only distributer of media, and there are other socializing
influences and agents in the lives of adolescents which also have to be taken into account
(Cope-Farrar & Kunkel, 2002: 75). Moreover, young viewers are not passive victims of
media content and are media literate.
No overt portrayals of sexual intercourse are seen in the series; passionate kissing
and embracing were the most common acts, confirming the results of Cope-Farrar and
Kunkel (2002) and Jacobson (2005). In the cases in which sexual behaviour was registered
in either show, female characters took decisions on the matter in what we consider to be
a positive and emancipatory gender script. The 'problem' of objectification of the female
body and sexuality, though, places this script in a more negative light.
Girls often engage in sexually suggestive talk and this strengthens the impression that
the represented female teenagers are very sexually active. This impression of sexually
active (male and female) teenagers only increases when we take all of the examples of
casual, non-committed sex into account. In examples of paid for sex and threesomes, we
found several illustrations of stereotypical representations of male teenage fantasies and
references towards the incorporation of porn culture into the daily lives of teenagers. We
can, therefore, conclude that whereas teen fiction in the nineties (Bindig, 2008) focused
on the romantic and affective aspects of a relationship, One Tree Hill and Gossip Girl are
built around sexual relationships between the main characters. We can even say that in
the teen series we researched, sexuality is being 'casualized'.
Further work focusing on non-heterosexual relationships is necessary, as is an
exploration of the differences between representations in United States and non-US teen
series, possibly using methodologies such as audience reception research. Meanwhile,
we plead for more diverse representations of both male and female teenagers and hope
that, in time, writers and producers will present young viewers with less stereotypical
images, and will incorporate positive and more realistic examples of teen life in the series
that teenagers watch. Or, in the words of Douglas (1994: 294), 'Media still are our worst
enemy and our best ally in our ongoing struggle for equality, respect and love.'
Casualizing Sexuality In Teen Series
1. The cultivation hypothesis of Gerbner (1973) holds that 'television, among modern
media, has acquired such a central place in daily life that it dominates our "symbolic
environment", substituting its (distorted) message about reality for personal experi-
ence and other means of knowing about the world…Viewing television gradually
leads to the adoption of beliefs about the nature of the social world which conform
[to] the stereotyped, distorted and very selective view of reality as portrayed in a sys-
tematic way in television fiction and news' (McQuail, 2005: 497).
2. The last episode of the second season had not, however, been aired when this paper was
3. The Teen Choice Award is annually presented by FOX and honours the year's big-
gest achievements in music and television (and other disciplines), as voted on by
teens aged thirteen to nineteen. In 2009, the Teen Choice Award had over 83 million
votes. (http://teenchoiceawards.com/index.php and http://www.imdb.com/Sections/
4. http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0368530/awards
5. http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0397442/awards
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in S.R. Mazzarella (ed.) 20 Questions about Youth and the Media, New York, Peter
Lang, 2007, pp. 167–178.
Silverman, L.T., Sprafkin, J.N. & Rubinstein, E.A., 'Physical contact and sexual behavior
on prime-time TV', Journal of Communication, 29:1 (1979), pp. 33–43.
Sutton, M.J., Brown, J.D., Wilson, K.M. & Klein, J.D., 'Shaking the tree of knowledge for
forbidden fruit: Where adolescents learn about sexuality and contraception', in
J.D. Brown, J.R. Steele & K. Walsh-Childers (eds) Sexual Teens, Sexual Media:
Investigating Media's Influence on Adolescent Sexuality, New York, Lawrence
Erlbaum Associates, 2002, pp. 25–55.
Casualizing Sexuality In Teen Series
Ward, L.M., Gorvine, B. & Cytron, A., 'Would that really happen? Adolescents' perceptions
of sexual relationships according to prime-time television', in J.D. Brown, J.R.
Steele & K. Walsh-Childers (eds) Sexual Teens, Sexual Media: Investigating Media's
Influence on Adolescent Sexuality, New York, Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 2002,
pp. 95–123.
Wartella. E., 'Where have we been and where are we going?', in S.R. Mazzarella (ed.) 20
Questions about Youth and the Media, New York, Peter Lang, 2007, pp. 1–12.
West, C. & Zimmerman, D., 'Doing gender', Gender & Society, 1 (1987), pp. 125–151.
Gendered Transformations
Chapter Eleven:
Media Constructions of Gender In ICT Work
The ICT sector is the icon of the knowledge economy, and researchers have long
discussed whether it offers women better opportunities or produces the same old
inequalities as its traditional counterpart. Those arguing the first point of view claim
that the organizations in this sector are less hierarchical, women are paid comparatively
well, they are offered autonomous and creative work, and the relational skills that they
are assumed to have are of key interest to ICT companies. Arguments in favour of the
second position, however, maintain that the sector demands total commitment to work
and long working hours, expectations that are not easily combined with responsibility for
a family. The ICT sector has likewise been framed and presented in quite contradictory
terms by the media, ranging from euphoric and utopian visions at the one extreme, to an
apocalyptic and dystopian scene at the other (Moore, Griffiths & Richardson, 2005: 4).
This paper reports on a study of how work in the ICT sector is presented in Swedish
newspapers, paying particular attention to articles giving information that is allegedly
based on research.1
Gendered Transformations
technology, and give rise to our beliefs and comprehension of what it is like to be a
woman working in the industry.
Newspapers and television are not, therefore, merely mediating the state of affairs in
a given reality that is 'out there', but they actually 'do' a lot more; they produce a social
reality such as gender relationships. Like all of us, these forms of media participate in
the everyday business of doing gender. The contributions of newspaper and television
journalists, however, are more widely disseminated than those of most others, and their
representation of gender thus has an impact on a wider public.2
In order to find out what kind of information is provided about the ICT industry, this
project has involved a systematic analysis of the contents of Swedish newspaper articles
about the sector and women between 1994 and 2004.
Media Constructions of Gender In ICT Work
Figure 1: Articles discussing 'wom*' and 'IT' in DN, SvD, AB and CS between
1994 and 2004
The distribution of articles is similar in the four newspapers. The number of those on
'wom* and IT' increased during the second half of the 1990s, reached a peak in 2000 and
then dropped to a lower level by 2004. In CS, this reduction is less spectacular than in the
other publications, while in AB it is especially striking. The limited number of articles
over the first few years was expected, as the concept of IT became prevalent in Sweden
only in the mid-1990s, gradually replacing that of the computer (in Swedish, 'dator').
But how are we to interpret the dramatic drop in DN, SvD and AB? The answer lies with
the dot.com crisis, which coincided with this period. Our data suggest that the sector's
economic decline then became the focus of media attention, and did so at the expense of
questions about gender relations.
A study of IT policies in the Nordic countries reveals that equal opportunity issues
were customary in policy texts during the years of IT expansion, but were omitted from
later policy documents (Mörtberg & Due, 2004). These researchers suggest that equal
opportunity matters are emphasized only in times of prosperity (ibid.: 14). Our diagram
confirms their findings; the newspapers' interest in gender relations in the ICT sector
seems to be sensitive to economic fluctuations.
Gendered Transformations
Article content
After deciding whether the articles were relevant to our study or not, we summarized
their contents using a modified version of Kenneth Burke's 'dramatistic pentad' (Burke,
The pentad provides a method for the analysis and critique of texts, and offers a
systematic way of analysing situations, statements and courses of events that are narrated
in newspaper articles for example. It comprises the elements of: act, scene, agent, agency
and purpose. According to Burke,
[A]ny complete statement about motives will offer some kind of answers
to these five questions: what was done (act), when or where was it done
(scene), who did it (agent), how he did it (agency), and why (purpose).
(Burke, 1962: xv)
The questions to be answered in the pentad are thus similar to those a news reporter
would ask: Who? What? When? Where? Why? As we are more interested in the outcome
of the act than in the speaker/writer's stated or implied goal, we made a modification by
substituting the purpose aspect with an outcome element.
We have identified accounts of wom* and IT in the articles. In applying the pentad to
these, we have read the text very closely, avoiding as much as possible the inclusion of
our own ideas, conclusions and interpretations at this stage of the analysis.
The result, in the form of short statements summarizing the articles' contents,
provides an overview of what is said with reference to wom* and IT. This is a
shorthand account of how the newspaper articles talk about gender relations in the
ICT sector.
In every article we identified one or several statements or claims, in total 3,026, and
distinguished them in terms of the elements: scene, actor, act, agency and outcome. Not
all of the statements comprise all of these elements. The contents of some fit well in the
form of the pentad and are nicely captured in one statement. Other article texts need
more than one to be reasonably summarized and make sense. Although it is important
not to over-emphasize the meaning of the number of statements, they do indicate
roughly which sources are given a voice on different issues and how these issues are
Media Constructions of Gender In ICT Work
Whereas many articles make use of more than one source or voice, there is generally
only one behind each statement. The ICT sector came out as the basis for every third
statement in all four newspapers. In this context, female managers are the most frequent
sources, voicing more than 17 per cent of the statements. Female professionals and male
managers appear less often, each accounting for 5 per cent of the statements. The low
representation of professional women is remarkable.
The research/study category, i.e. studies, researchers, research, authors or books,
is the source for 17 per cent of the statements. In SvD, research/studies are used as
sources more than in the other newspapers, whereas in AB such sources appear more
Sometimes the article contains enough information to allow us to find the study
or report referred to therein, although occasionally this kind of data is lacking. The
research/study sources have been categorized according to the chance of identifying
them. Moreover, when it comes to the possibility of identifying sources, SvD and AB
stand out. More than the other newspapers, SvD provides enough information about
the research/study sources to make identification thereof possible, whereas AB seldomly
includes such data.
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Media Constructions of Gender In ICT Work
At this point it is important to remember that there may be, and indeed probably
are, more articles dealing with those themes which use research/studies as a
source, but did not match our search criteria and are, therefore, not included in the
A comparison of women's salaries in the US IT sector with those of other fields reveals
that 'women in IT earn 60 per cent more than women in other occupations' (CS, 10
November 2000).
The wider the frames of reference, the more favourable the salaries for women in IT
appear to be. An article in SvD brings an international perspective to gendered wage
Gendered Transformations
discrimination in Sweden (SvD, 24 January 2001). The article is based on data from an
International Labour Organization publication (ILO).
In the IT world, women are often given lower positions, while men get the
higher and better-paid ones. According to the report, the Scandinavian
countries and the US are the exceptions. Particularly in Scandinavia,
where internet use is high, the gap between the sexes concerning wages
and level of responsibility is almost non-existent according to the ILO.
In a global perspective, therefore, gender wage differences in the Nordic countries appear
to be 'almost non-existent'.
CS is the newspaper which delivers the greatest amount of news with some kind of
positive content about salaries and gender in the IT sector. In the other three publications,
statements about gender discrimination predominate, thus causing a quite generalized
and depressing view of the salaries paid to women in the IT industry. The overall message
is that both female professionals and managers in this sector are badly paid.
Research-based statements on management (see Table 1) were found in 96 articles (17
in DN, 24 in SvD, 11 in AB and 44 in CS). Information about the percentages of women
working as managing directors and board members in ICT companies quoted on the
exchange play a major role as a point of departure for the articles. Three studies are the
main sources of these numbers. The first is a mapping study conducted by one of the
newspapers, DN, in the autumn of 1999, which covered 22 ICT companies quoted on
the exchange. It was followed by another mapping study, covering the same companies,
conducted by the Equal Opportunities Ombudsman (JämO, 2000), as a direct response
to the DN study. An official government report, Jämit, then took a closer look at the same
issue and published an initial document in June 2000.
These investigations highlighted that the numbers of women who are managing
directors or board members in ICT companies were disturbingly low. The fact that the
figures predominantly concerned only 22 ICT firms and just a few roles within them
was not always clear, and on the whole these articles give the impression that women
are extremely scarce in all positions in the ICT sector. However, at the time when these
studies reached the headlines, some 23 per cent of computing professionals in privately
owned companies were women (SCB, 2009). In connection with this, Dataföreningen, an
association for employees in the ICT sector, published its own report, with the explicit
purpose of countering the picture of the industry as a female trap (Dataföreningen, 2000).
Unlike the data on salaries, the low numbers of women in management are generally
commented on by other sources, mainly belonging to the ICT sector, and it is obvious
that these prefer different explanations. One common understanding is that these low
Media Constructions of Gender In ICT Work
numbers are a result of the recruitment base; there just aren't enough women who have
the technological knowledge and education for these kinds of assignments. According
to a leading article in SvD:
A female managing director of an IT company comments: 'Today, very few women have
sufficient experience to sit on the board of a public limited company' (CS, 16 November
This recruitment-base explanation is the one favoured by male managers in the
sector, and to a large extent by their female counterparts as well. However, these men
also introduce gender differences as a justification. Women are generally assumed to be
less likely than men to take risks, instead preferring security. A managing director of an
IT company states: 'In reality, when we recruit new employees fewer women respond
to our ads. If I were to generalise, women are less inclined to take risks.' (AB, 24 June
Power relationships as a category of explanation include male networking, the
connection between masculinity and leadership, and patriarchal structures. The power
relationship explanation is put forth primarily by researchers, but also by some female
managers. An IT manager who is also a woman declares: 'There are only a few women IT
executives for the same reason there are so few women in high-level positions everywhere.
We get to a certain level, but no further.' (CS, 17 November 1999)
Charlotte Holgersson, a gender researcher, explains why she does not believe that this
lack of women is a question of education and childcare.
If you want women in leading positions, you can find them. There is no
shortage of women who can run an organization. The problem is the
gender order in society that defines men as the norm and women as
deviating. The prevailing power structure discriminates against women,
she says. (CS, 8 March 2004)
These explanatory categories are not exclusive. Nevertheless, they point in different
directions when it comes to possible solutions to the problem. The 'recruitment-base'
and 'gender-differentiating' approaches both draw attention away from organizational
structures and the business of companies, while the power relationship argument makes
them part of the problem. As a law on quotas was being discussed at the time, these
arguments must also be read as contributions to that debate. While such legislation
Gendered Transformations
Working conditions
Data on salaries in the ICT sector are published yearly by Statistics Sweden as well as
by trade unions to which IT professionals are affiliated. Facts about women and men as
board members and managing directors are available from corporations' annual reports
and can be easily put together for anyone who is interested. Data on other aspects of work
and working conditions, such as working hours, content of work, working environment
and demands, are less accessible. In order to explore these issues, studies that are designed
to address them need to be conducted.
We found research-based statements on working conditions (apart from the salary and
management themes) in only 27 articles (two in DN; five in SvD; seven in AB; thirteen
in CS). In these pieces, negative assessments are twice as common as positive ones. AB
contains more articles with negative accounts than the other newspapers.
Stress is the predominant problem featured in twelve of these articles, all of which
convey negative assessments. In an SvD piece (28 May 2000), two researchers identify
people who inhabit the 'new economy', stating:
The media tell us about young men working with IT or 'e' around the
clock, with unkempt hair, offices and clothes inspired by the 60s. They
make more money than they can spend, though they are unlettered.
The researchers are referring to media portrayals of those populating the 'new economy'.
The better part of the article deals with management thereof, with the following being
stated in passing: 'The staff is worn out and will hardly fit into the sector after thirty.'
Here too, the media seem to be the source; in any case, the article does not refer to any
Media Constructions of Gender In ICT Work
As many of the statements seemed vague or confusing, and since part of the research
referred to in the articles was unknown to us, we decided to take a closer look at the
reports which supposedly support the statements made. In four cases we were unable
to find the research alluded to because the articles provided no information at all about
it, and we therefore did not know where to start looking. In ten cases we found the
research referred to, but were able to establish that it was of little or no relevance in the
context, either because the ICT sector had not specifically been the object of a study, or
it was vaguely referring to stories told about the industry. More disturbing is that in six
cases we have reason to believe that no report could be found, even though either the
researcher or journalist gives the impression that a study had been conducted.
After ruling out the four 'impossible-to-find' studies, the ten irrelevant and the six
seemingly non-existent references, only seven of the studies referred to remained.
Although we have not managed to lay our hands on two of them, we have reason to
believe that they exist(ed), and it would have been possible for us to find them at the time
the newspaper article was published. Three of them discuss positive aspects of working
conditions, while four emphasize problems. One of the reports we managed to trace
deals with stress (CS, 21 March 2001):
The article refers to a survey of 265 women, all members of the network World Women
in Technology in the United States (Gewirtz & Lindsay, 2000). Compared to some of
the statements on stress found in the articles which refer to studies of little relevance or
those that we believe are non-existent, the understanding of the situation quoted above
is more nuanced.
Accordingly, of the twelve references to research on stress in the IT sector, only one
turned out to be reliable. There, therefore, seems to be little research evidence to support
the notion that jobs in the ICT industry are particularly stressful, although almost half
of the statements on working conditions suggest otherwise.
Of the remaining six research-based articles, three report on positive aspects of work
satisfaction among IT professionals, the remarkably high percentage of permanent
employment contracts in the sector and the development opportunities for women in
the industry. Two of the negative articles deal with difficulties concerning work–life
balance, while the third refers to a study reporting that nude pictures can be found in
every fifth IT company.
Gendered Transformations
The examination of the articles consequently leaves us with only a few reasonably
reliable studies on working conditions in the sector. On the whole, the newspapers
provided their readers with very little research-based data on gender and working
conditions in the industry during the period studied.
Concluding discussion
This article improves our knowledge of how gender relations and working conditions
in the ICT sector are covered by Swedish newspapers and, consequently, how these
issues are constructed by the media. The contents of four Swedish newspapers—Dagens
Nyheter, Svenska Dagbladet, Aftonbladet and Computer Sweden—between 1994 and 2004
were analysed. The analysis reveals that a rather small proportion (17 per cent) of the
newspapers' statements on the sector is based on research/studies. Svenska Dagbladet,
a conservative morning paper, is the one which used research/studies as its sources the
most, whereas Aftonbladet, a social democratic evening tabloid, seldomly does. Among
the allegedly research-based accounts or statements, we found that those referring directly
to the ICT sector discussed issues of salaries, management or working conditions.
Management is by far the most common theme, and was discussed in 96 articles.
Salaries, on the other hand, were the concern of 37 articles, while other aspects of
working conditions were broached by only 27 pieces.
Statistical sources clearly dominate in the articles discussing management and salaries,
whereas only one piece discussing working conditions refers to statistics as a source.
Statistics Sweden and the trade unions in the IT sector are the main producers of the
data about salaries presented in the newspapers under study. For the most part, women's
salaries are compared to those of their male counterparts in the IT sector, resulting in a
general message that both female professionals and managers in the industry are poorly
paid. However, when women's salaries in this sector are compared to other occupational
groups, their level of pay stands out as being exceptionally high. Computer Sweden, a
newspaper covering ICT-related issues, stands out as the publication delivering the
greatest number of positive statements on salaries and gender in the IT arena.
The lack of women in managerial positions was highlighted at the turn of the century by
three mapping studies. Although the numbers of women working as managing directors
or board members in the ICT sector were no smaller than in many other industries, it
was the state of affairs in this sector that received a lot of attention and was targeted.
Numerical quantities are what most of the articles (80 per cent) on the managerial
theme focus on, despite often complementing these numbers with comments that offer
explanations of the situation or how to change it. In all four newspapers, the majority
of the articles on management portray the lack of women as a problem; however, this
tendency is less visible in Svenska Dagbladet than in the other publications. Computer
Media Constructions of Gender In ICT Work
Sweden is the newspaper which is keenest to report research that opposes traditional
gender patterns in management.
While secondary statistics are available for the articles dealing with salary and
management issues, this is rarely the case when it comes to other aspects of working
conditions, where other kinds of studies based on primary data are referred to. At first
sight, when reading the articles, there seemed to be strong evidence that stress is a
serious problem for employees in the IT sector. However, a closer look at the studies
allegedly supporting these claims reveals that in only one of twelve articles is the research
in question reliable; that is, traceable, relevant and actually in existence. Likewise, of the
total of 27 articles on working conditions that claimed to be research-based, only seven
turned out to be based on reliable research sources. Among the few articles dealing with
working conditions, apart from salaries and management issues, negative assessments
clearly dominate all four newspapers. However, Computer Sweden also reports a fairly
high number of positive assessments.
This overview of how newspapers report the state of affairs in the ICT sector and how
research/studies are used in these articles raises some important questions: why is the
impact of secondary quantitative data so much stronger than other kinds of research
data? Why do newspaper articles sometimes fall back on results from studies that lack
reliability or cannot—for one reason or another—be found? Why are the contents of
articles in Computer Sweden more balanced than in the other newspapers when it comes
to positive and negative assessments?
Quantitative data produced by public authorities are easily accessible and obviously
favoured as sources in the articles. As a result, the figures concerning women and men's
salaries, as well as the absence of women in the top positions in ICT companies, are
given a great deal of space at the cost of dealing with other aspects of working conditions.
Numbers on salaries seem to have newsworthiness per se, whereas data on women in
managerial roles are often commented on by other sources. Quantitative data is more
easily utilized in articles, whereas the qualitative form is less available and requires more
journalistic processing. Together, availability and time aspects make a difference to costs.
Today's commercial pressures on newspapers mean that costs are part of journalists'
working conditions. As Nick Davies (2008) points out, newspaper stories need to be
cheap and quick to cover. Furthermore, the data need to be safe, that is, reliable to publish,
which means that official sources are clearly favoured (ibid., 114; 118). The quantitative
data used in articles on salaries and the numbers of women in managerial positions
clearly meet these criteria.
Paradoxically, the importance of making a story reliable by using (seemingly)
trustworthy sources may also partly explain why newspaper articles all too often refer to
studies that either lack reliability or relevance, or whose existence is dubious. While the
journalists' desire to base an article on research makes sense, some researchers' readiness
to comment on the state of affairs in the ICT sector, even when lacking expertise in the
Gendered Transformations
Media Constructions of Gender In ICT Work
1. The research project Gender Relations and Working Conditions in the ICT Sector is
financed by the Swedish Council for Working Life and Social Research.
2. Kerstin Engström (2008) looks into how different newspapers, genres and editorial
sections reproduce, or contribute to change, existing gendered discourses. Unlike our
study, her analysis does not focus on the ICT sector.
3. The Presstext database comprises all articles published in DN since 1994, the Medie-
arkivet database comprises articles from SvD and AB, also since 1994, and the Affärs-
data database contains all articles published in CS since 1992.
Burke, K., A Grammar of Motives, Berkeley, CA, University of California Press, 1969
Computer Sweden, 'Trögt för kvinnliga IT-proffs att göra karriär', 14 July 1996, http://
www.computersweden.se. Retrieved 10 May 2005.
Gendered Transformations
Computer Sweden, 'Var fjärde IT-konsult letar efter nytt jobb', 21 March 2001, http://
ww.ad.se. Retrieved 6 April 2010.
Davies, N., Flat Earth News, London, Chatto & Windus, 2008.
DTI, Women in the IT industry: How to Retain Women in the IT Industry, 2005, http://
www.dti.gov.uk/files/file9335.pdf. Retrieved 2 June 2007.
Gewirtz, M.L. & Lindsey, A., Women in the New Economy, GLS Consulting, Inc., 2000,
http://www.glsconsulting.com/womensurvey/womensurvey1.htm. Retrieved 11
November 2008.
Hammersley, M., Media Bias in Reporting Social Research, Oxon, Routledge, 2006.
Media Constructions of Gender In ICT Work
Mörtberg, C. & Due, B., 'Med IT och kön som prisma i studier av nordiska IT-policies',
in C. Mörtberg & B. Due (eds) Informationsteknologi och kön som prisma i analyser
av nordiska IT-policies, NIKK Småskrifter no. 9, Olso, NIKK, 2004, pp. 9–21.
Moore, K., Griffiths, M. & Richardson, H., Gendered Futures? Women, the ICT Workplace
and Stories of the Future, paper presented at Gender, Work & Organization
conference in Keele, June 2005.
SCB (Statistics Sweden), Employees at National Level by Occupation, Sector, Age and Sex,
Stockholm, SCB, 2009.
Gendered Transformations
Chapter Twelve:
Looking for Gender Equality In Journalism1
In Finland, like in other Nordic countries, gender equality has been a part of official
policy since the 1970s. Yet, in spite of this, labour market segregation has changed
very little in recent decades (cf. MSAH, 2008). The journalistic profession has been an
exception for more than twenty years because of its gender balance; in Finland there
have been almost equal numbers of female and male journalists ever since the late 1980s.
The amount of women in lower and mid-level managerial posts among editorial staff has
also increased. Indeed, according to the membership register of the Journalists' Union
in Finland, about half of editorial chiefs are women. However, this picture is not quite
There are no general Finnish statistics which specify gender differences between the
different forms of media and the different managerial posts. However, it seems to be
almost impossible for women to make it to the very top, to the position of editor-in-
chief; female journalists do indeed encounter the glass ceiling, especially in newspapers.
There are 31 daily newspapers in Finland, but only two of them have senior or executive
editors-in-chief who are women. The gender balance in the profession is thus only an
illusion, and is marked by both vertical and horizontal segregation (Van Zoonen, 1994:
50–51). The former refers to the fact that women are under-represented in managerial
positions. This is, of course, not only a Finnish phenomenon, as female journalists all
Gendered Transformations
over the world have to deal with this problem (De Bruin & Ross, 2004; Fröhlich & Lafky,
2008; Morna, 2007; Vochocová, 2008).
Horizontal segregation is evident when one considers gender balance in terms of
specialization within the different journalistic activities (cf. Djerf-Pierre & Löfgren-
Nilsson, 2004). According to many studies (Savolainen & Zilliacus-Tikkanen, 1992;
Zilliacus-Tikkanen, 2008; Steiner, 1998; Van Zoonen, 1998; Mc Kay, 2000; Chambers,
Steiner & Fleming, 2004), there are differences between women and men so far as both
their experiences and editorial work are concerned. Horizontal segregation works in
two ways in the field. On the one hand, career obstacles seem to diminish because female
journalists are particularly needed today to head editorial offices for content reasons.
On the other, media groups are demanding female editors-in-chief at the very least for
reasons of image and competitive advantage. However, the increase in the number of
women in senior positions does not necessarily lead to the dismantling of gendered
journalism cultures, to use Margareta Melin's (2008) terminology. Therefore, it is both
necessary and challenging to analyse the preconditions and factors under which, for
example, the conceptions of journalism, leadership and cultural expectations change
and begin to promote gender equality (cf. Djerf-Pierre, 2007).
Looking for Gender Equality In Journalism
Although the myth of female leadership described above might even, in the long
run, help change the journalistic organization, it is nevertheless based on the natural
and static differences between the female and male genders (Billing & Alvesson, 2000:
147–149). Therefore, an alternative third research path leads us to pose the following
questions: why do we need the idea of difference? Should we not question all norms,
ideals and practices that thrive on the idea of gender difference? In these circumstances,
no cultural practice related to gender differentiation would constitute an ideal and a
norm-like starting point. The aim would be to create completely new kinds of institutions
and practices that are in no way founded on gendered essentialisms.
This chapter pays attention to recognizing the factors that prevent women from
reaching the same positions as men. It reflects female managers' career development
in media groups, as well as the overt and covert obstacles to women's professional
advancement in order to consider how their careers are connected to journalism as an
institution and culture.
Studies on gendered journalism have thrown light on the complexity of careers (De
Bruin & Ross, 2004). Inspired by social identity theory, Marjan de Bruin (2004: 2–6)
highlights a difference between three categories: gender, professional and organizational
identities. According to De Bruin, organizational identity exists in a collectively
constructed and continuously renegotiated understanding among the members of an
organization. In contrast to this, professional identity does not stem from a particular
media group but from the journalistic community and its understanding of professional
roles, functions and values. Gender identity is not understood as a static feminine-
masculine polarity, but rather as a category including multiple identities under continuous
construction and renegotiation.
Despite departing from a somewhat different starting point from De Bruin, we do
not completely disagree with her. It is useful to combine the different perspectives on
studying gendered career development in journalism. For example, both women's careers
and leadership have been researched from a number of different perspectives (Lift &
Ward, 2001; Indvik, 2004: 276), but these rarely intersect in the same empirical study.
Our approach to gendered career development arises from the following three positions:
the organizational, journalistic and individual. Each of these is also considered on the
cultural, structural, operational or action levels (see Table 1). Here the analysis follows
Julia Evetts' (2000) dimensions of explanations about women's professional careers and
promotion in organizations and professions. Our multidimensional conceptualization
makes it possible to recognize the ways in which media organizations, journalism and
individuals act as a part of gendered social and cultural practices.
Gendered Transformations
In our study, gendered careers thus consist of a complex set of actions such as, for
example, ranking candidates in media groups, or the personal tactics and social conventions
that individual journalists absorb as 'females' and 'males'. A part of these processes are the
cultural ideals of good journalism and powerful leadership that are realized in the everyday
lives of media organizations. These ideals are usually taken for granted and structure daily
routines, conventions and traditions. Joan Acker (1998: 197) states that there is a gender
substructure in the organization which operates to help reproduce gender divisions and
inequalities even against the best intentions of some of the women and men working
therein. These substructures are always gendered insofar as society is organized into two
genders. However, according to Judith Butler (1990: 24), gender is not a noun but a doing:
we do our gender in our everyday lives by using certain gestures, manners and language,
all of which build us socially and culturally as women and men.
We assume that the multidimensional approach helps us, as media scholars, to
highlight the social nature of individual subjectivity; that is to say, to see how society
and its power relationships are overlapped in all of the gendered conventions and tactics
which female or male journalists adopt when, for example, they try to specialize in
certain areas, consider their personal career options and carry out their daily duties.
The multidimensional approach also helps us to recognize how individual tactics are not
restricted but are instead conditioned by a variety of organizational attributes, namely by
the way of thinking about both ideal leadership and gender roles.
Contradictory experiences
The aim of our study is to examine and clarify the careers of female and male
editors-in-chief in Finland and especially the overt and covert obstacles to the career
advancement of women in media organizations and in terms of journalistic practices.
The concrete research questions are: what kinds of differences are there in the careers of
female and male editorial chiefs? Do the cultures and structures of media organizations
and journalism explain these differences? What kinds of individual strategies and tactics
do journalists themselves choose?
Looking for Gender Equality In Journalism
The study's data are contained in the thematic interviews of 21 female and 22 male
editorial chiefs of newspapers and media companies. The interviewees were drawn from
the highest management levels, and were working as senior editors-in-chief, editors-in-
chief, managing editors and news editors. The interviews involved eleven daily newspapers,
four television news and current affairs departments and six magazines, two of which were
women's magazines and four were general interest and family publications. This report does
not name the media that have participated in the research, because in a small country like
Finland journalists know each other quite well and revealing the names would endanger
anonymity. In addition, announcing the names of the media would be ethically questionable
due to the fact that the interviewees—being only two from each media organization—do
not represent the entire media company or its journalistic staff.
Among the interviewees, 22 work in newspapers, twelve in magazines and nine in
television. The data does not consist of representatives of both sexes from every media form,
because some of those included only have either female or male chiefs. In one case, both
respondents were male because a female chief refused to be interviewed. The majority of the
participants had families: 32 had a spouse and children, one was a single parent, ten were
childless and, of these, eight live as part of a couple. Ten were under 40 years old, 27 ranged
from 40 to 55 years of age and six were over 55. The interviewees' educational backgrounds
varied, and the respondents ranged from being high school leavers to postgraduates.
The data was collected by semi-structured thematic interviews. The focus was on the
interviewees' career stories. Participants were asked to talk about both their working
and personal lives. Only at the end was there a general discussion on the theme of why
women and men do not have equal opportunities for career advancement in journalism.
The analysis undertaken included a critical close reading of the interviews and an
examination of the similarities and differences between the narratives from a gender
perspective (Torkkola & Ruoho, 2009).
Divided careers
A comparison between the basic facts provided by the interviewees illustrates how
careers are divided between male and female journalists. There are clear differences
between the careers of female and male editorial chiefs, with the latter having had a
faster and more varied career development than their female colleagues. Because of the
data volume, this study has no statistical significance, but it does suggest that male and
female journalists have had different opportunities when it comes to progressing their
The comparison of female and male careers reveals that the progression of the latter
has been more rapid (Table 2). Nearly half of the male interviewees were appointed to
their first chief post during the first five years of work, while only two female respondents
Gendered Transformations
had been working as chiefs in the initial stages of their careers. One of them worked as
an editor-in-chief at a very small local paper. Thereafter, she was employed for several
years as a journalist and a press officer before her second appointment to a chief post.
The other woman was first appointed as a producer of a free sheet. She then proceeded
to continue her career as a sub-editor at a family
The comparison between careers indicates that male journalists are recruited from
outside an organization more frequently than their female counterparts. Half of the men
who had been appointed to a chief post had no previous work experience in the same
media or media company that now employed them (Table 3).
Table 3: Work experience in the same media before the first appointment to
a chief position
Looking for Gender Equality In Journalism
Gendered Transformations
Networking is an elementary part of the recruitment process. It is very common for the
person who is recruited to be appointed to the post without an open announcement.
Moreover, when a vacancy is formally announced, networking and headhunting is a
typical way of finding decent candidates. An interviewee with a successful career said
that he has never sent his application anywhere because he has always been invited to his
next post. The networks used in recruitment are gendered, which explains why women
are not headhunted as often as men. An interviewee thinks about the importance of
networks in the recruitment process. Most often headhunting is only targeted at male-
dominated networks.
There is a great deal of tacit knowledge in the recruitment process that directs not only
the actions of the recruiters, but also those of the people being recruited. A female chief
answers the question why she did not apply to the editor-in-chief 's position.
I didn't apply for it. I sensed that they were not looking for me; my type
was not looked for. The senior editors-in-chief in this paper have been
quite some men, sort of provincial figureheads and they've had great
influence. In my mind, the senior editor-in-chief doesn't need to have
such great influence. It could be a good journalist, sufficiently good to
become the senior editor-in-chief. (Woman, 52 years, interview 6)
The interviewees connect leadership to masculinity in many ways. One of the oldest
male respondents displays an openly chauvinistic standpoint and maintains that women
do not apply for managerial positions because their interests are orientated to the home
and family. In his view, there is a natural division of labour according to which 'men do
the work outdoors and women indoors'. Although such blatant chauvinism does not
seem to be particularly common today, it is still very familiar to the older generation of
female journalists. An interviewee recounts an episode from the 1980s:
my editor said—I had been in the political news department for a couple
of years then, I was maybe 26 or 27 years old—listen N.N., you do good
stories and good work but always remember that you are only a woman.
(Woman, 52 years, interview 15)
Looking for Gender Equality In Journalism
Maybe in the end it is in that I have a rather good sense of humour and
make jokes like any man, that in that sense I am not too sensitive. I haven't
felt that I would have it more difficult because I am a woman. (Woman,
39 years, interview 22)
The women's stories about leadership are contradictory. On the one hand they deny
the relevance of gender. On the other, they think that women are appointed to chief
positions partly because they are naturally conceived as having the attributes that make
them different leaders who are in demand in a context of changing organizations and
increased competition in the media market. The same contradiction arises when the
interviewees speak about journalism and journalistic cultures and practices.
Through the journalistic perspective, we focused on the gender logic that shapes the
daily routines and working practices of editorial offices. Gendered attitudes to journalism
arise from the dichotomy between the masculine and the feminine: while the masculine
is connected to rationality, objectivity and the public sphere, the feminine, for its part,
is associated with emotion, subjectivity and privacy. Opinions on gender relevance are
extremely contradictory among the interviewees. Some editorial chiefs are aware of the
gender logic that directs the working routines in editorial offices. The relevance of gendered
practices is seen in daily editorial meetings where the topics of stories are fixed.
The old-fashioned way was to give women the stories on handicrafts and
child care and all such things, and it was thought that that was all women
could do. Then came this journalism where women can do things if they
really try. We did write stories for ten years from all over the place. Now
gender isn't necessarily paid so much attention. Rarely do we come across
an attitude of the kind—oh yeah, we have a woman here. But if you think
that women and men are on a par, they are not…gender does have an
effect. It's not as great an effect as people think, but it isn't a small effect
either. (Woman, 52 years, interview 15)
On the contrary, some interviewees do not think that journalistic work has gender
relevance, arguing instead that personal attributes and personal lives are of greater
Gendered Transformations
The competition in the media market may offer better opportunities for female
journalists, because there are expectations that they have the competence to do
journalism that could potentially attract more female audiences. But being a female
journalist does not automatically imply a different journalistic style. On the contrary,
some interviewees claim that women can be more traditional 'hard news' writers than
their male colleagues.
'Hard news' refers to the hierarchy of the journalistic genre. In traditional news,
journalistic hard news is ranked at the top. A journalist who wishes to advance in his or
her career in mainstream journalism has to prove his or her capability in the traditional
core areas such as politics, sport or economics.3 For female journalists this is perhaps
more demanding because such topics are conventionally considered a natural part of
masculine competence. Thus, female journalists have to prove their ability to go beyond
the female boundaries that stop them from being taken seriously as professionals. In
the current study, this phenomenon becomes most visible in the stories that focus on
individual choices at work and in the home.
Looking for Gender Equality In Journalism
I have seen close up how demanding that job is (the senior editor-in-
chief 's job). My situation is that I have three under age children and there
is a lot more going on in life than work so at the moment I wouldn't
even want such a committed post as that of the senior editor-in-chiefs.
(Woman, 40 years, interview 8)
According to traditional gender stereotypes, female journalists are expected to have good
social skills and not a lot of interest in actively promoting their careers. This may be an
obstacle to a career, because a woman is then not considered as a potential candidate
for a job that a senior colleague could facilitate. An interviewee speaks about 'the crown
prince syndrome' and asks why there are always so many opportunities for an 'angry
young man' but few for an 'angry young woman'. Another participant compares gendered
career expectations in this way: 'Women's ambition—well they laugh out loud at that—
but not at men's ambition; it is regarded a virtue.' (Woman, 52 years, interview 15)
The 'crown prince syndrome' refers to both the masculinity of leadership and of
journalism that female journalists have to adapt to before they can progress in their
careers. In editorial offices, women seek acceptance by acting like one of the boys. An
interviewee describes the socialization process in this way:
Gendered Transformations
Responsibility for the family is often seen as the reason why women do not apply
for chief positions. But family responsibilities do not explain why women's careers
do not progress as well as men's. Career advancement depends on the cultures and
structures of the media organization and its ability to take into account different family
circumstances. An interviewee from a magazine says that children have been no obstacle
to her career.
I have three children and I have really worked the whole time, really a
lot. Well, I have never not applied to a job or not gone to work because I
have children. But, of course, you have to think about whether you can
be the senior editor-in-chief when your youngest is… (Woman, 47 years,
interview 24)
According to this study there is no clear evidence that some forms of media would be
more women-friendly than others. Yet it seems that in magazine journalism, women
would have more opportunities to advance their careers than in the traditional news
arena. In this study, there are some female interviewees who had moved from a newspaper
to a magazine as a result of believing that they had no other way to progress.
The oldest interviewees had started work as journalists in the 1960s and the youngest in
the 1990s. It seems that there are differences not only between the genders but also across
the generations. This difference between generations is mostly visible when it comes to
family issues. The oldest male journalists consider the family and children as women's
business; however, men in their forties speak a lot about their family duties as well.
In the interviews with editors, four different kinds of characteristics emerge which can
be crystallized into four career types. These are caricatures and the careers of any single
editor, managing editor or other editorial journalist cannot be explained by just one of
them. Instead, single careers intersect with a number of different types. Both gender and
generational differences are evident in the differences between these types. They reveal
not only individual choices but also the cultural conditions and preconditions in media
companies and editorial offices that create the space for individual action.
Looking for Gender Equality In Journalism
In this chapter we have analysed the structural, cultural and individual issues that explain
the career differences of female and male journalists. The results obtained confirm those
of previous research on the topic (Savolainen & Zilliacus-Tikkanen, 1992; Van Zoonen,
1994: 49–60; De Bruin, 2000; De Bruin & Ross, 2004; Chambers et al., 2004; Robinson,
2005; Fröhlich, 2007: 161–177; Melin, 2008; Fröhlich & Lafky, 2008; Zilliacus-Tikkanen,
2008). In this study we attempted to outline the complexity that is constructed when media
Gendered Transformations
organizations, journalism and individuals, both men and women, meet. We compared the
careers of 43 interviewed editorial journalists through three perspectives: the organizational,
the journalistic and the individual. From the organizational perspective, the ideals of
leadership and recruitment processes open up differing positions that require women and
men to realize their careers in different ways. In the context of the Finnish debate, the
lack of women at the top of organizations has been justified by their lack of willingness to
seek managerial jobs. According to our research, however, this lack of willingness does not
merely relate to individual choices, but to the fact that the structures and cultures of the
organization construct leadership on the basis of a masculine ideal. It seems that in Finland
there are increasing opportunities for female senior editors, because they are thought to
improve the competitive advantage of media companies. But if women are continually
offered leadership positions where they are thought to correct and complement masculine
leadership, then the gendering ideal of journalistic leadership will remain as it is.
Gender-based specialization can be seen in journalistic culture and in the practical
routines which offer men and women different chances of acquiring qualifications. The
inequality of opportunities for gaining these qualifications and career progression is
revealed in Finland by the fact that although since the 1980s there have been as many
female as male journalists, women have not been recruited to senior leadership positions.
On the one hand men are thought to do better in the traditional core areas of news
journalism, where such male attributes as rationality and objectivity are emphasized.
In the competition for the same occupational positions, female journalists have to
demonstrate a particular competence, especially in the areas of journalism which have a
masculine label. On the other hand, in Finland, where women are a considerable media
audience, there is a demand for both female journalists and editorial chiefs. Women are
believed to produce journalistic content that is thought to be feminine, and helps the
media to succeed in the increasing competition for audiences.
The cultures and structures can be seen in individual action. Individual actors adapt
to the status quo in one way or another. They can try to adjust to the culture of the
editorial office by acting like 'one of the boys' or they can move to more woman-friendly
media companies. The fact that women do not seek senior editorial posts has often been
justified by their greater family responsibilities. According to this research, the situation
would seem to be changing because young male journalists also emphasize combining
family and work demands with gender equality. Although men's attitudes towards and
actions in the family are changing, the current research suggests that these do not,
however, alter gendered practices in the organization or the culture of journalism, nor
do they automatically encourage men to reflect critically on masculinity as a culturally
produced gendered discourse.
The three perspectives used in this research dismantle the view that the structures and
cultures of journalism only offer women a narrow victim role. Individual action is not
merely seen as a result of subjective positions or choices but as an interaction between
Looking for Gender Equality In Journalism
individuals, structures and cultures. Thus, the gendering of journalism is not tied to
the gender division of journalists or the masculine practices of journalism, but to the
whole socio-historical locus of journalism. In other words, by increasing the numbers of
female editorial chiefs in media organizations, or by changing the routines of journalistic
practice, it is possible to promote gender equality. However, this does not necessarily
change the nature of journalism as a gendered institution.
1. This article is part of the project Equality, Journalism and Career Development among
Finnish Women Journalists (2007–2009) financed by Helsingin Sanomat Foundation.
2. Although the majority of Finnish journalists are members of the Union, top edito-
rial chiefs—the people who can alone decide on the hiring and firing of personnel or
represent the employer in collective bargaining—are barred from membership. There
may also be other kinds of errors in the register, due to it being based on members'
own declarations (SJL, 2008; Zilliacus-Tikkanen, 2008).
3. There are different ways to define soft and hard news and there is no self-evident defini-
tion of which topics belong to soft news and which to hard news. According to Monica
Djerf-Pierre and Monica Löfgren Nilsson, the different definitions derive from a different
logic: those of importance and taste or pleasure. The first logic is rooted in the view that
women and men have different beliefs about what the important and therefore newswor-
thy public issues are. Hard news includes issues related to the male-dominated spheres
such as politics, the economy and business. Soft news includes issues related to such social
spheres as health care and child care, traditionally understood to belong to the female-
dominated sphere. The second logic springs from the view that women and men are in-
terested in and derive pleasure from different subjects and topics. Sports, pornography,
science and crime are believed to be topics for men, and personal relationships, human
interest, fashion and home-making for women (Djerf-Pierre & Löfgren-Nilsson, 2004:
82–83). Furthermore, the distinction between hard and soft news could be based on the
way the news is told. Hard news focuses on telling information and soft news on creating
good stories (Zelicer, 2004: 132–135).
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Work and Organization, 5:4 (1998), pp. 195–206.
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Billing Y. and Alvesson. M., 'Questioning the notion of feminine leadership: A critical
perspective on the gender labelling of leadership', Gender, Work and Organization,
7: 3 (2000), pp. 144–157.
Bruin, M. de & Ross, K. (eds), Gender and Newsroom Cultures: Identities at Work,
Cresskill, NJ, Hampton Press, 2004.
Bruin, M. de & Ross, K., 'Introduction: Beyond the body count', in M. de Bruin & K. Ross
(eds) Gender and Newsroom Cultures: Identities at Work, Cresskill, NJ, Hampton
Press, 2004, pp. vii–xiv.
Butler, J., Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity, London, Routledge,
Chambers, D., Steiner, L. & Fleming, C., Women and Journalism, London, Routledge,
Djerf-Pierre, M., 'The gender of journalism: The structure and logic of the field in the
twentieth century', Nordicom Review, 28: Jubilee Issue (2007), pp. 81–104.
Evetts, J., 'Analysing change in women's careers: Culture, structure, and action imensions',
Gender, Work and Organization, 7:1 (2000), pp. 57–67.
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in Mass Communication, 3rd edition, London, Sage, 2007, pp. 161–176.
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Fröhlich, R. & Lafky, S., 'Introduction: Gender, culture and news work in the Western world',
in R. Fröhlich, R. & S. Lafky (eds) Women Journalists in the Western World: Equal
Opportunities and What Surveys Tell Us, London, Hampton Press, 2008, pp. 1–9.
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of women´s understanding of promotion and senior management positions',
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pp. 187–206.
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Newsrooms, Johannesburg, SANEF, 2007.
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in Britain and Sweden, Göteborg, JMG, Department of Journalism and Mass
Communication, University of Göteborg, 2008.
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Finland, Helsinki, Ministry of Social Affairs and Health (MSAH), 2008 English
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(eds) News, Gender and Power, London, Routledge, 1998, pp. 145–159.
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fortress', Media Studies, 3:3 (2008), pp. 231–256.
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culture', in R. Fröhlich, R. & S. Lafky (eds) Women Journalists in the Western World:
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The relationship between gender and media has received scholarly attention from the
1970s onwards. The emergence of feminist media studies and the link to emancipatory
and women's movements (Krolokke & Sorensen, 2005) has constructed a specific
relationship between academia and gender issues. Feminist or wider research on gender
and the media is intertwined with societal and political realms. Notions of diversity and
equality are at the core of these two worlds and function as a bridge between them,
contributing to the establishment of a relationship of co-existence which is, nevertheless,
not always the essence of scholarly work on gender and communication. As Byerly and
Ross (2006: 3) argue, this particular inclusivity is reflected by 'the women-and-media
relationship [which] begins to reveal the process of struggle that women have engaged in
for use of media to gain a public voice, presence, and influence'. This perspective, which
has roots outside academia and stresses the inequality of the gendered power struggle,
lies at the core of such research.
Although until the 1990s feminist research was primarily focused on 'women',
contemporary preoccupations are now increasingly centred on 'gender', in particular
on the latter's intersections with a host of societal and political issues which contribute
to the production and reproduction of gendered discourses in daily life. Moreover,
the field can, and in our opinion should, open itself up to inquiries into gender from a
posttructural perspective, influenced by 'queer' theory, where the emphasis is placed on
the construction of masculinity and femininity. As Gauntlett (2002: 9) has pointed out,
'the ideas of "masculinity" and "femininity" have been pulled through the social changes
of the past decades in quite different ways'. Such constructs are in flux and hybrid,
resulting not only in new articulations but also in revisions and entry into hegemonic
spaces. Notions of gender are now applied in research on the levels of production, text
Gendered Transformations
and audiences, and are using paradigmatic perspectives ranging from political economy
to deconstructive explorations of poststructuralism. Contemporary transformations
in society and politics illustrate the workings of a gendered machinery where notions
of femininity and masculinity are altered. Such transformations are particularly visible
in communication and media institutions, which provide a crucial research space for
'doing' and 'undoing' gender.
In the introduction, Liesbet Van Zoonen describes the contents and approach of
Gendered Transformations as the re-establishment of a research agenda on gender and
media as 'normal science'—a forward to the past. Consisting of a selection of articles
originally presented at the 2008 ECREA conference in Barcelona, this anthology is
intentionally eclectic in scope, encompassing a wide range of topics which reflect
the entwining of media and gender in the context of discussions on identity politics,
definitions of public/private spheres, visual culture, cyber culture and access to media
professions. It aims to bring together scholars who, despite coming from a variety of
disciplinary backgrounds, share a common research focus. Gendered Transformations
provides an overview of cutting-edge perspectives on the intersections between gender
and media, while simultaneously exploring the wider implications and interdisciplinary
nature of this academic field.
By drawing attention to a plurality of intertwining approaches to this theme, the book
situates itself 'between camps' (Gilroy, 2000), exploring perspectives that range from the
essentialist—which presuppose a pervasive commonality inherent in women—to the anti-
essentialist—which problematize and aim to deconstruct the commonality of a sexualized
essence (see Benhabib, 1992). The discourse of sex thus opens itself up to a discourse
on gender, the constitution of which is performatively enacted in daily life, namely in
communication and the media. On the one hand, the essentialist discourse of sex is a
valuable political asset in that it permits one to fight back against 'sexism' (Spivak, quoted
in Harasym, 1990: 12). On the other, by seeking recourse in transformative projects that
rely on the concrete classification—and representation—of a cohesive identity, the anti-
essentialist discourse on gender is no less valuable in that it fragments the subject so as
to open the latter up to the non-identical, namely conflictual intersections such as class,
ethnicity and race. Both essentialist and anti-essentialist perspectives ultimately—and
perhaps paradoxically—point to a political dimension: if essentialist approaches may be
strategically helpful in drawing attention to the historically rooted dimensions of sexual
discrimination in the materiality of bodies, anti-essentialist approaches pave the way for
a postmodern politics that seeks to remain open to the 'permanently contingent' (Butler,
1995: 41), thereby preserving the plurality and diversity distinctive of gender expressions.
The link between gender and media translates, in this anthology, into the dimensions
of representational politics, embodied performativity and social constructions of reality.
The first section, titled 'Gendered Politics', discusses the representation of women in the
public sphere, exploring the extent to which the latter is permeable to issues allegedly
pertaining to the private realm. The focus on the political representation of women is
clearly essentialist in that it presupposes that women as a collective identity—strategic
or otherwise—have a set of legal rights to recognition in the public sphere. The level of
autonomy and equality—liberal democratic values so highly prized in Western society—
enjoyed by women in any society can be gauged, according to this perspective, by the
extent to which they are effectively recognized in the public sphere. Karen Ross, for
instance, argues for a cultural and political change in the way women are represented by
news discourse, pointing to the fact that the current increase in the number of female
journalists does not necessarily mean that women are depicted more fairly in the news.
Claudia Alvares, in turn, analyses the link between academic feminist discourse and the
journalistic representation of 'feminine issues' in two Portuguese 'quality' newspapers,
querying the degree to which the general public interest is effectively regarded as
overlapping with private matters. Women's entrance into the realm of politics, one of the
remaining 'bastions' of male hegemony, is explored by Marlène Coulomb-Gully in terms
of identity construction, reactions to the latter, and contextual specificities. Margreth
Luenenborg, Jutta Roeser, Tanja Maier and Kathrin Mueller also focus on the increasing
visibility of female politicians, examining the changes both in the media representation
of such women as well as in the way they are perceived by media consumers.
The second section, titled 'Embodied Performativities', is concerned with the gendered
body that is produced and enacted in a variety of media texts. The opposition of
complementary terms—masculine and feminine—occurs within a grid of institutionalized
heterosexuality and heteronormativity that limits the gendered possibilities within a
rigidified binary system of gendered polarities. By drawing attention to the fact that a solid
definition of gendered identity can only be defined oppositionally against the characteristics
one lacks, a non-essentialist focus on gender attempts to deconstruct the rigid dichotomy
between male and female, drawing attention to the fluidity of these categories. Frederik
Dhaenens, Daniel Biltereyst and Sofie Van Bauwel argue for the integration of queer
theory into historical film research into gay and lesbian representations, focusing on the
challenge presented to the Motion Picture Production Code by three popular films of the
late 1950s and early 1960s which engaged with the themes of homosexuality and queer
identity. Begonya Enguix-Grau examines film approaches to intersexuality, claiming that
these are rare precisely because intersexuality evades the mappings of our representational
frameworks, which are usually based on the existence of two sexes and a gender dichotomy.
The normalization of the male/female dichotomy, respectively connoting oppressive/
submissive modes of conduct, in the infrastructure of popular virtual world platforms
is explored by Delia Dumitrica and Georgia Gaden, a process that risks conditioning
consumers' 'options and choices' as well as their perception of gender. Olena Goroshko
and Olena Zhigalina also concentrate on the virtual world, focusing on the fluidity and
instability of gender as a category that is almost rendered invisible in the construction of
an online political identity in the blogosphere.
Gendered Transformations
The third section, 'Gendered Socializations', offers insight into the dynamics involved in
shaping gendered ideologies in daily life, namely the manner through which stereotypes
connoted with sex-based essentialisms are reproduced and reinforced by the media.
Topics of concern are the media professional in context, as well as the gendered discourses
visible in media content that mould socially conditioned views of the world. Tonny
Krijnen focuses on the gendered manifestations of emotion and morality in reality TV,
inquiring into the degree to which the stereotypical views according to which emotions
are inherently feminine and morality intrinsically masculine intertwine in such shows.
The role played by the media as an instrument of socialization is analysed by Elke Van
Damme, who concentrates on how the discourses of popular series are used by teenagers
to define their own gendered identities, especially in the articulation of sexuality. Martha
Blomqvist and Kristina Eriksson explore the construction of gender in the ICT sector by
Swedish newspapers, drawing attention to the fact that the media's strategy of making
women more absent than they in fact are only serves to perpetuate the status quo in
gender relations. Examining the gendered inequalities in the Finnish media sector,
Sinikka Torkkola and Iiris Ruoho claim that this industry is torn between the acceptance
of journalistic practice as being gender neutral on the one hand, and the concrete creation
of gendered divisions of labour that ensue from genre stereotypes on the other.
The sections 'Gendered Politics', 'Embodied Performativities' and 'Gendered
Socializations' each address specific concerns relating to the intertwining of gender and
media. However, the neutral and transparent status that the media claim is an accurate
presenter of a 'true picture of reality' (Van Zoonen, 2007: 152) provides a common link
between those three sections: representational politics seeks to challenge inequalities in
the way women are represented in the public sphere; the focus on the enactment of the
gendered body through media texts aims to open up the heterosexual binary matrix to
other possibilities; and the exploration of sex-based essentialisms that are visible in the
media emphasizes the extent to which ideologies condition our daily life. Accordingly,
we can affirm that at the heart of this book lies a concern with the media as agents of both
public knowledge, contributing to citizen-formation, as well as of entertainment, namely
industrialized popular culture (Corner, 1991: 268; Livingstone & Lunt, 1994: 179). The
links between public knowledge and entertainment, that is, between cognitive and
emotional domains, is visible in the manner through which the media are regarded as
aiding the promotion of normative social consensus and, ultimately, in the construction
of hegemonic morality.
However, this is not to deny the capacity of audiences to autonomously interpret
media messages according to a variety of socio-cultural contexts in which they are
received. What is in fact sustained is that the poststructuralist emphasis on gender as an
ambiguous and unstable category may not necessarily imply a rejection of politics, but
rather a redefinition of the terms in which the latter have traditionally operated (Van
Zoonen, 2007: 154). As such, a new, more democratic political potential ensues from the
emphasis on the polysemic nature of media texts, as well as on the promotion of audiences'
interpretative abilities. The struggle for women's rights and equal representation by the
media and within the media industry can thus be complemented by a further political
dimension that is linked to that of audience research.
The essays collated in Gendered Transformations provide a valuable contribution to the
area, due precisely to the interdisciplinary scope of the volume, coupled with its objective of
deconstructing existing theories and methodologies, pointing out, in the process, novel ways
of combining the latter. In effect, this anthology opens up the field of gender by analysing
traditional perspectives thereon in light of recent advances in the field of media theory and
methodology. The title, Gendered Transformations, points to the alterations that such new
and fruitful combinations of theories and methodologies may lead to, transcending the
restrictive compartmentalizations of pre-established disciplinary discourse. We hope that
the critical reflection presented here on the intersections of gender and media may indicate
novel ways of deconstructing traditional views of areas that are irreducible to disciplinary
camps due to their permanent engagement with the field of possible experience in 'actuality'.
In our view, the deconstruction of delimited 'camps' can deliver new insights into the reason
why gender continues to be a topic that is well positioned on the research priority list,
particularly due to its multiple imbrications with media analyses.
Benhabib, S., Situating the Self: Gender, Community and Postmodernism in Contemporary
Ethics, London, Routledge, 1992.
Byerly, C.M. & Ross, K., Women and Media: A Critical Introduction, London, Blackwell,
Corner, J., 'Meaning, genre and context: The problematics of "Public Knowledge" in the
new audience studies', in J. Curran & M. Gurevitch (eds) Mass Media and Society,
London, Edward Arnold, 1991, pp. 267–306.
Gauntlett, D., Media, Gender and Identity. An Introduction, London, Routledge, 2002.
Gilroy, P., Between Camps: Nations, Cultures and the Allure of Race, London, Penguin
Press, 2000.
Gendered Transformations
Harasym, S., 'Criticism, feminism and the institution', in G.Ch. Spivak (ed.) The
Postcolonial Critic: Interviews, Strategies, Dialogues, London, Routledge, 1990, pp.
Krolokke, C. & Sorensen, A., Gender Communication Theories and Analyses: From Silence
to Performance, London, Sage, 2005.
Livingstone, S. & Lunt, P., 'Studio discussions, social spaces and postmodernity', in Talk
on Television: Audience Participation and Public Debate, London, Routledge, 1994,
pp. 162–180.
Van Zoonen, L., 'Conclusion', in Feminist Media Studies, London, Sage, 2007, pp. 148–
abnormal, 34, 35, 135 Beauvoir, Simone, 36
abortion, 39 beliefs, 46, 95, 125, 136, 153, 154, 156,
abuse, 29 170, 179, 186, 204, 209, 217
active/passive, 19, 29, 33, 45, 81, 86, 94, Benhabib, Seyla, 26, 27, 81, 222
96, 117, 122, 124, 125, 139, billboards, 139
153, 168, 171, 172, 173, 174,
176, 178, 198, 213, 215 biology, 115-119, 122, 126, 127, 128
activism, 2 boundary, 3, 12, 26, 81, 83, 85, 89, 107,
159, 160, 175, 212
adolescency, 29, 117, 169, 178
bourgeois, 38, 47
advertising, 2, 3, 13, 95, 100, 139, 140
Braidotti, Rosi, 106, 107
aestethics, 68, 135
broadcasting, 2, 3, 9, 45, 53, 58, 59, 60,
agency, 33, 70, 133, 134, 136, 140, 141, 188 61, 62, 72
agenda-setting, 11, 25, 26, 27 Broadway,90
Althusser, Louis, 28 Brokeback Mountain, 32, 35
ambition, 47, 198, 213 Bruin, Marjan de, 10, 18, 204, 205, 209, 215
androgyny, 48 Buckingham, David, 168, 170
Ang, Ien, 3, 58, 153 butch, 85
asexual, 86 Butler, Judith 37, 80, 81, 116, 121, 127,
audience(s), 3, 10, 17, 59, 81, 82, 87, 88, 128, 206, 222
94, 95, 103-105, 107, 136,
152, 153, 155, 170, 174, 178,
authenticity, 2, 67, 133, 141, 152 carnivalesque, 83
autonomy, 25, 36, 37, 39, 185, 223, 224 celibrity, 1, 2, 9, 14, 15, 36, 72, 101
censorship, 29, 80, 82
Gendered Transformations
Fischer, Agneta, 154, 156, 157 heterosexuality, 35, 37, 39, 68, 80, 81, 83-
Foucault, Michel, 43, 81, 118, 128, 134- 86, 89, 116, 118, 125, 136,
136, 138, 140-142 178, 223, 224
framing, 10-11, 18, 19, 25, 26, 29, 35, 36, Hollywood, 1, 2, 5, 79, 82, 84, 85
37, 88, 116, 118, 135, 136, homoeroticism, 84
138, 144, 162, 185, 191, 209, homophobia, 87, 90
213, 223
homosexuality, 29, 31, 32, 35, 36, 39, 53,
Fraser, Nancy, 26 79-89, 115, 117, 125, 223
Freud, Sigmund, 38, 118, 120 homosocial, 81
Friedan, Betty, 2 hooks, bell, 27, 38
hypersexualization, 136, 138, 139, 140, 142
gaze, 67, 68, 135 I
genitals, 34, 35, 115, 118-121, 124-126, identification, 49, 50, 52, 100, 105, 118,
133 126, 128
genre, 60, 61, 85, 94, 96, 151, 152, 155, identity, 2, 5, 26, 27, 37, 44, 46, 50, 51, 80,
199, 212, 224 81, 86, 87, 88, 96, 99, 100,
Gerbner, George, 153, 167, 179 106, 120, 121, 122, 124-127,
Gilligan, Carol, 153 128, 168, 170, 172, 174, 175,
177, 178, 205, 209, 222-223
glossy, 2, 52, 59
ideology, 11, 26, 28, 47, 168, 224
Goffman, Erving, 37, 100
internet, 1-5, 81, 93, 94, 98-107, 134, 143,
167, 190, 192
Habermas, Jurgen, 26, 27, 37 J
Hall, Stuart, 169 Jenkins, Henry, 81, 135, 154
Hebdige, Dick, 170, 171, 174, 178 journal, 4
hegemony, 10, 11, 18, 27, 43, 80, 81, 86,
87, 117, 118, 126, 136, 138,
Hepburn, Audrey, 79, 84, 86, 88 Katz, Elihu, 153
hermaphroditism, 115-128 Kellner, Douglas, 143, 171
Hermes, Joke, 3, 58 Kidman, Nicole, 1, 2, 5
heteronormativity, 68, 80, 81, 82, 86, 89, Kristeva, Julia, 127
135, 223
Gendered Transformations
language, 50, 96, 98, 104, 154, 155, 169, 206 narrativity, 3, 83, 86, 152, 153, 155, 172,
Lauretis, Teresa de, 80, 81 174, 175, 188, 207
lesbian, 29, 32, 33, 35, 79, 86, 223 nature, 48, 53, 70, 115, 116, 118, 119, 121,
153, 179, 204-206, 209-212,
Liebes, Tamar, 153 217
lifestyle, 12, 169 newspaper, 2, 3, 9-19, 25-38, 45, 48, 49,
literature, 27, 81 57-72, 123, 185-198, 203-
217, 223, 224
M newsroom, 10, 15, 16, 18
magazine, 2, 3, 52, 59, 72, 140, 207, 208, newsworker, 11, 18
214, 215 newsworthy, 11, 197, 217
management, 39, 71, 190, 192-197, 204, normalization, 4, 81, 119, 123, 126, 223
207, 213, 215 normativity, 140, 143, 144, 171, 224
marriage, 29, 33, 35, 117, 175 Nussbaum, Martha, 153-156
masculinity, 26, 27, 32, 37-39, 49, 52, 68,
86, 116, 117, 122, 125, 139,
211-213, 216, 217, 221-224, Obama, Barrack, 101-103
maternity, 29, 32, 34, 35, 36 objectification, 4, 169, 171-173, 173-175,
McQuail, Denis, 153, 179 177, 178
McRobbie, Angela, 4, 141 oppression, 26, 37, 47, 127, 135
mediation, 2, 5, 57, 58, 94, 143, 151, 168, 186 otherness, 88
Merkel, Angela, 57-71
military, 104 P
misogyny, 52 panopticon, 134, 142
monstrosity, 116, 118, 122, 123, 124 parenting, 104, 116-118, 122, 124, 167-
169, 207
morality, 33-34, 82, 83, 85, 151-164, 168,
224 passivity, 19, 33, 86, 117, 124, 125, 153,
168, 172, 173, 174, 176, 178
motherhood, 36, 51
patriarchy, 11, 25, 26, 36, 38, 52, 81, 133,
movie, 79-90, 116, 144 139, 143, 193, 209
multimedia, 2, 5, 100, 105, 107 performativity, 5, 37, 43, 50, 69, 70, 83,
Mulvey, Laura, 168, 173 84, 106, 222-224
music, 96, 172, 179 perversion, 4, 79, 80, 82, 86, 89
phallus, 120 S
photo, 13, 67-70, 87, 100-102, 105, 122 scandal, 9, 50, 58, 87
pleasure, 135, 141, 143, 156, 173, 217 Second Life, 133-144
politicize, 26, 101 semiotic, 3
polysemy, 82, 225 sex roles, 2, 117, 125
pornography, 1, 139, 175, 177, 178, 217 sex-market, 139
post-feminism, 4, 133, 141 sexualization, 1, 2, 4, 67, 69, 70, 133, 136-
postmodern, 25, 222 141, 222
post-structuralism, 80, 222 sexuality, 36, 37, 79-90, 96, 115-128, 141,
167-179, 223, 224
power, 32, 38, 39, 44, 50, 58, 67, 70-73,
84, 99, 128, 134, 135, 142, shame, 54, 73, 116, 118, 121, 122, 124,
143, 154, 156, 16, 169, 174, 127, 154, 156, 176
193, 194, 206, 221 signification, 68, 101, 116, 118
press, 1, 5, 9-19, 25-39, 45, 48, 54, 57-73, Signorielli, Nancy, 168, 171
104, 106, 198, 208 situatedness, 2, 4, 5, 141, 154, 170
soap opera, 170
Q socialization, 5, 138, 168, 170, 172, 178,
queer, 79-90, 221, 223 213, 224
socio-cultural, 28, 127, 224
R spectacle, 3, 35
race, 26, 80, 99, 107, 141, 169 sports, 12, 38, 54, 105, 128, 171, 212, 213, 217
reality TV, 151-164 stereotype, 2, 3, 44, 47, 49, 79, 80, 85-87,
reception, 59, 71, 151, 153, 178 89, 105, 140, 169-172, 176-
179, 213, 224
reporter, 12, 188
stigma, 116-118, 122, 124
representation, 3, 9, 12, 25-39, 44-54, 57-
72, 79-90, 98, 105, 115-127, subculture, 85
136, 137, 141, 168-178, 186, subject, 18, 25, 33, 35, 36, 38, 48, 58, 63,
189, 222-225 68, 87-90, 106, 107, 117,
resistance, 79-90, 127, 133, 135, 136, 138, 118, 119, 124, 128, 171, 222
143 subordination, 10, 198
Rorty, Richard, 153 surveillance, 134, 135, 151, 152
Royal, Ségolène, 36, 43-54 symbols, 19, 26, 27, 34, 44, 46, 52, 70,
Rubinstein, Renate, 174 101, 115, 116, 120, 141,
170, 179
Gendered Transformations
taboo, 116, 119, 121 violence, 1, 11, 49, 52, 84, 122, 124, 126,
technocentric, 121 169, 170
technology, 4, 94, 97, 105, 106, 119, 151,
techonology (Foucault), 81, 134-136, Wartella, Ellen, 170
141-142 web, 93-107
television, 3, 5, 45, 46, 53, 59-62, 72, 151-
164, 167-179, 185, 186, 207
Thatcher, Margreth, 57
Zoonen, Liesbet Van, 1-5, 18, 57, 203,
transsexuality, 29-33, 35, 36, 115 204, 215, 222, 224
transvestism, 29, 33, 83, 115
Notes on Contributors
The Editors
Claudia Alvares (email@example.com) is associate professor in culture and
communication at Lusofona University, Lisbon, Portugal, where she directs the centre
in applied communication, culture and information technologies (CICANT) as well as
a masters programme in journalism, politics and contemporary history. She obtained a
PhD from Goldsmith's College, University of London, in June 2001, under the British
Council Chevening Scholarship and the Portuguese Government/European Union
Praxis XXI Joint Scholarship. Chair of the ECREA gender and communication section,
Alvares is principal investigator of four research projects, funded by the European
Union, focusing on the relationship between gender and media. She is, moreover, one of
the partners of the UNESCO chair on gender equality and women's empowerment that
has recently been established at the University of Cyprus.
Among her main publications are Humanism after Colonialism (2006), Representing
Culture: Essays on Identity, Visuality and Technology (2008) and Perspectivas
Interdisciplinares da Comunicação (2008). Alvares is currently working on a book
resulting from one of her European Union-funded research projects.
Gendered Transformations
The Authors
Daniel Biltereyst (firstname.lastname@example.com) is a professor in film, television,
and cultural studies at the department of communication studies, Ghent University,
Belgium, where he leads CIMS—centre for cinema and media studies. His research
and publications are on film and screen culture as sites of controversy and censorship,
situated within public spheres.
Notes On Contributors
Gendered Transformations
Notes On Contributors
Gendered Transformations
Notes On Contributors
program for research about the anti-Islam film Fitna and the video respons on YouTube.
This topic is embedded in her wider interest in the many and diverse articulations of
media and citizenship, in particular the increasing connections between political
communication and popular culture. Her exposition of these connections in her latest
book Entertaining the citizen: when politics and popular culture converge (Rowman and
Littlefield, 2005) received positive reviews in leading international academic journals,
and is considered an important innovation in political research. She is furthermore
internationally known for her work on gender and media (Feminist Media Studies, Sage,
1994), which has been translated into Chinese, French, Portuguese, Serbian and Italian.
Gendered Transformations
* @
Comprising the most current scholarship from leading experts in the fields of
gender and media studies, Gendered Transformations offers readers a new
foundation from which to reexamine traditional perspectives on gender and
media. Organized into sections concerning representational politics, embodied
performance, and social constructions of reality, these essays explore a wide
variety of concerns from a similarly wide variety of perspectives. As Liesbet
van Zoonen states in the introduction to this volume: 'In the current cultural
condition of multimediality and intertextuality it makes more sense,[…]
[to] see how particular media and media combinations are articulated
with [particular issues] in situated diachronic and synchronic contexts.' A
thought-provoking contribution to a number of disparate fields, Gendered
Transformations offers a rare interdisciplinary approach to gender that
reflects the most recent developments in media theory and methodology.
Tonny Krijnen is Assistant Professor in the Media and Communication Department of the
Erasmus University Rotterdam, Netherlands. Claudia Alvares is Associate Professor in
Culture and Communication at Lusofona University, Portugal. Sofie Van Bauwel is Assistant
Professor in the Department of Communication Studies at the University of Ghent, Belgium.
. ,-&-)& *%(++%