The Unsettling of Women Prime Ministers

Abstract

Women politicians have long experienced gendered and often sexist portrayals within the mainstream media that reproduce and reinforce the heteronormative gender binary. Though the media overwhelmingly support binary notions of gender, the way in which they portray women politicians, intentionally or not, also has the potential to unsettle notions of sex/gender. Political cartoons have been widely and historically used by newspapers to communicate certain messages to the reader, drawing from cultural norms and stereotypes, often in ways that would be regarded as unacceptable if written in the text of the article. However, little research has examined gender stereotypes in political cartoons of women political leaders and those that do largely focus on the “feminine”. This paper will address that gap by analyzing how “masculine” stereotypes are used in political cartoons of four women Prime Ministers from English speaking Westminster Democracies: Julia Gillard (Australia), Margaret Thatcher (UK), Jenny Shipley (NZ) and Helen Clark (NZ). Drawing from Judith Butler’s idea of gender performativity and utilizing a feminist semiotic methodological analysis of selected political cartoons, I explore how masculine stereotypes are used to ridicule these leaders for their supposed gender subversion while also inadvertently unsettling the gender binary. Show more