Browsing by Subject "Female politicians"
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Item Nagging mothers and monstrous teachers : female politicians in political cartoons : a comparative analysis between Mexico and the U.S.(2013-12) Reyes García, Zazil Elena; Cloud, Dana L.This dissertation begins with the observation that discursive and visual representations of women in politics have direct consequences on the actual participation of women in politics (Beail & Goren, 2009; Bimey, 2010). For this reason I analyze current visual representations of female politicians in editorial cartoons. This work focuses on political cartoons because these artifacts provide information about cultural assumptions regarding gender roles and can bring insight about the cultural barriers that women still face when they become political actors. For this project I asked the following questions: How are female politicians represented visually? And how does the existing visual rhetoric enable, debilitate or restrain their political participation? This is also a comparative study of political cartoons that portray women in Mexico and the United States. To answer these questions, I analyze cartoons within a feminist framework, using literature on patriarchy, postfeminism, and the notion of the double binds faced by women in power. To examine portrayals of female politicians I developed a methodological approach that consists in identifying cartoons that rely on gender in order to construct their political commentary. Gendered cartoons are then classified using archetypes —specifically the Great Mother archetype— and stereotypes. For the analysis, I connect Kenneth Burke’s notion of perspective by incongruity with the feminist framework I previously constructed. The cartoons analyzed in this project comprise one decade, from 2002 to 2012, and four newspapers: La Jornada and Reforma (from Mexico), and The New York Times and The Washington Post (from the U.S.). I conclude that the argument that a patriarchal system no longer exists is not valid when we analyze cartoons that clearly resent women’s participation in the public political sphere. In these gendered cartoons women continue to be the symbol of the private sphere of the home. Their presence in the political space is portrayed as incongruous and cartoonists seek to restore the patriarchal order by visually taking women back to their traditional domestic space, depicting them as housewives and mothers. In these instances cartoons become powerful tools for reinforcing the traditional hierarchy of the private and public spheres.Item Political contradictions : discussions of virtue in American life(2010-05) LaVally, Rebecca; Hart, Roderick P.; Jarvis, Sharon E.; McCombs, Maxwell; Sparrow, Bartholomew H.; Stroud, Natalie J.This dissertation asserts that American political culture faces a crisis of virtue and explores the role of citizens, journalists and politicians in fostering it. The historic election of Barack Obama on a platform of hope and change in 2008 suggests that Americans yearn for an infusion of virtue into political life. I assert, however, that we have lacked a lexicon of political virtue, or any systematic understanding of which virtues we value and which matter most to us. Nor have we understood whether groups who constitute key elements of our democracy—citizens, journalists, politicians, men and women, Democrats and Republicans—value virtues in politics similarly or differently. Without a working knowledge of the anatomy of virtue in the body politic, what is to prevent us from having to change again? By charting the virtue systems of these key groups, I have made explicit what is implicit to reveal that political virtue is more valued—and more present—than Americans likely realize. This exploration, I believe, contributes to the scholarship of political communication by enabling a fuller and more useful understanding of American political culture—and of the contradictions, curiosities, and surprises that enrich it.Item Toward a theory on gender and emotional management in electoral politics : a comparative study of media discourses in Chile and the United States(2011-05) Bachmann Cáceres, Ingrid; Harp, Dustin, 1968-; Coleman, Renita; Jarvis, Sharon; Poindexter, Paula M.; Stroud, Natalie J.The role of a political leader often is associated with the emotional attributes of a man, and there is empirical evidence that media coverage reinforces culture-specific emotion display rules for politicians. Feminist communication scholarship also has shown the gendered assumptions manifest in mediated discourses. This dissertation explores the relationship between gender, culture and candidates’ emotionality by examining and comparing news media coverage of the emotional management of Chile’s Michelle Bachelet and the United States’ Hillary Clinton, two female candidates with a viable bid for the presidency in their respective countries. Using a discourse analysis of 1,676 items from national newspapers, news magazines and television newscasts, this study found that cultural differences influence the discursive constructions of these women candidates’ emotionality. In the case of Bachelet, she was deemed as a soft, empathic and ultimately “feminine” candidate who needed to toughen up to convey authority and convince voters that she had the skills, in addition to the charm, to lead a country. In the case of Clinton, she was described mainly as a cold and unsympathetic contender, an unwomanly woman with too much ambition to be likable, and who was portrayed either as fake or frail when being more emotionally open. These mediated discourses suggest the media favored determined understandings for a woman’s place and role, reinforcing socially-shared and culturally-bound meanings about gendered identities. Informed by a feminist theoretical framework, the discussion addresses how these mediated discourses on Bachelet and Clinton illustrate the power of culturally-sanctioned sexism in Chile and the United States to make of gender a restrictive force that keeps women out of the realms of politics and policy.