Sexism and Misogyny?

Julia Gillard and the Australian Media

@DrJackHollandDrJackHolland.com

Overview

• Introduction• The Double Bind: Gender, Leadership and

the Media• Gender and Australian Political Culture • Methodology: Gender-Sensitive Discourse

Analysis• Sexism and Misogyny? Media Coverage in

October 2012• Introspection? Media Coverage in June

2013• Conclusion

Early examples

Later examples

Maley:• “Gillard's gender was difference enough for the

Australian electorate … her atheism, her unmarried status and her childlessness … she was simply not ‘relatable’ enough”.

Gillard:• Gender ‘issue’ was “the hardest to explain, to catch, to

quantify”. • …“heavens knows no one noticed I was a woman until I

raised it". • “Some in the media would not refer to me as prime

minister … They were deeply uncomfortable at dealing with a woman in a leadership position”.

Gender

• … not as something that an individual is but rather something they do.

• brought into existence through recurrent interactions with others; it is the management of activities and actions normatively conceptualised as appropriate for each sex category.

• a constructed idea and ideal, which emerges from social processes of interaction, and which in turn, helps to structure those interactions.

The Double Bind: Gender, Leadership and the Media

• The term ‘double bind’ highlights the tension in the position of ‘woman leader’. • It is a ‘tightrope of gender expectations’ (Johnson,

2010: 1).• Required to balance subservience and strength,

timidity and ambition, emotion and rationality etc amongst many other traditionally constructed gender binaries.

• Failing to get that balance right incurs electoral and political costs.

Double Bind: (Gender) Media(tor)

• As a gender mediator, the Australian media plays an important role in perpetuating the double bind, holding women politicians to account for both their role as a leader and their gender.

• Failing to ‘do gender’ appropriately, for women politicians, has implications on a magnitude comparable to failing to lead effectively (e.g. Mavin, Bryans and Cunningham 2010; Hall and Donoghue 2012). • Appearing too assertive readily framed as bitter,

quarrelsome and selfish (Schnurr 2008: 556).• Must project just enough power, strength and

ambition.

• “The stereotypes that are still in our culture … men do and women appear, and men act and women feel. So as a woman in a position of leadership who is called upon to act and do things it is hard to get the combination and the posture right of feeling as well. If you look like you’re feeling too much it will look like you aren’t competent to do the acting … to get the things done they want a leader to do. If you look like you are not feeling enough there is a ‘coldness’ to that because they expect a woman to feel emotions” (Gillard 2014b).

Gender and Australian Political Culture

• Is Australia unique? • Gendered narratives underpin the Australian nation

and its national identity, answering questions about what it means to be ‘an Australian’.

• These narratives shape the contours of the social, economic, and political landscape • An essentially gendered social terrain.

• Australian national Self built upon: • (1) exclusivist conception of ‘mateship’; • (2) foundational ANZAC myth; • (3) other male images such as the Larrikin, the Ocker,

and the Bushman.

Methodology: Gender-Sensitive Discourse Analysis

• Critical comparative analysis (diachronic and synchronic)• Five of Australia’s largest newspapers:

• The Australian, The Courier Mail, The Herald Sun, the Sydney Morning Herald, and The West Australian.

• Two hundred and sixty-six articles coded.• Keywords: Gillard, sexism, misogyny.• October 2012 and June 2013

• CDA: media reporting as ‘culturally embedded discourse’ (e.g. Holland 2013, Fairclough 1995) • Alive to patriarchal discourses and the power relations

they sustain • Nvivo, but manual and inductive coding

Sexism and Misogyny? October 2012

International coverage

• The UK’s The Spectator noted that there was ‘much to admire’ in Gillard’s speech (Massie 2012).

• In the US, Salon and Jezebel raved about the speech’s ‘badass’ lessons for US politicians (Morrissey 2012; Lennard 2012).

• International leaderscommented.

• Speech went viral on social media.

Domestic Australian coverage

• Coverage of the speech comprised three principal gendered framings: • strategic attack; • uncontrolled emotional outpouring; • and hypocrisy.

• gendered media framings: • limited the saliency of Gillard’s speech; • curtailed calls for wider introspection on Australian

political culture; • and further disassociated women from political

leadership.

(i) Strategic attack

• First, Australian newspapers repeatedly portrayed Gillard’s speech as an instrumental move, by a calculating politician, for political gain.• narrows the possible range of public responses to the

speech, by folding it within wider politicking. • Second, journalists frequently suggested (implicitly and

explicitly) that the speech was ‘an attack’, as opposed to (for instance) a defensive manoeuvre, a response, or an attempt to draw attention to an important issue. • presents Gillard as both ambitious and aggressive,

(re)producing the gender bind whereby women leaders are negatively associated with ‘masculine’ leadership qualities.

• Martial language: • Charles Waterstreet (2012) describes how Gillard

‘with her head glowing red, full of fire and ire, her big guns blazing’ fired ‘every bullet … into the head and heart of Abbott’. Her final lines, he insisted, ‘delivered the fatal one-two punches to the hapless jaw of Abbott’.

• a ‘gender-based declaration of war’ (Oakes 2012). • A ‘broadside’ (Herald Sun 2012).

• ‘trying to exploit the gender gap’ ... ‘a deliberate, tested strategy’

• playing the ‘gender card’ or ‘misogynist card’

(ii) Uncontrolled emotional outpouring• Framed as a ‘tirade of rare vintage’ – a ‘rant … long in the

fermenting’ – the speech was reduced to the moment the prime minister ‘snapped’, rather than a defiant stance against sexism • ‘explosive’ (Maiden 2012), ‘raw emotion’ (Legge 2012).• She was ‘clearly fed up’ (McCullough in McCullough et al 2012).• It had ‘been building for many, many, many years’; it was a ‘dam

waiting to burst’ (Johnston in McCullough et al 2012). • ‘she almost quivered with rage’ (Oakes 2013). • the transformation of ‘Robotic Julia’ into ‘Furious Julia, whose

“tone is vicious” as she unleashes a ‘spritz of acid rain’ (Sheehan 2012a).

• Gillard’s “I had a scream”’ speech (Megalogenis 2012). • a “thunder clap of lady-rage” (Maley 2012)!• “Abbott's face was a study in male helplessness… confronted

with female unreasonableness” (Campbell 2012).

(iii) Hypocrisy

• ‘[S]he displayed double standards in strongly accusing the Opposition Leader of sexism while defending the Speaker's own vile misogyny … Any gains the Prime Minister made from the strength of her rhetoric were eroded by the weakness of her principles’ (Fagan 2012).

• The result, it was suggested, was that it came ‘across as hypocritical and contrived, a cynical attempt to deflect attention from the Opposition's attacks on her Government's failings’ (Devine 2012).

Introspection? June 2013

Rudd challenges and replaces Gillardin a drawn out leadership spill

Hypocritical strategic attack

• Continuity:• “the gender war … foisted on Australia” by Gillard and

her “feminist hit squad”• “[By playing the gender card] Gillard wasn't so much

preaching to the converted but preaching to the shrill lunatic fringe; feminazis devoid of logic … No doubt Gillard was trying to recapture the magic of the much YouTubed misogyny speech that resonated deeply with the Twitter faithful but left some of us wondering why the most powerful woman in the country was playing the victim … If there is one thing the electorate hates more than unhinged feminists, it's hypocrisy” (Panahi 2012).

Introspection

• “the land that political correctness forgot” • “naked, visceral hatred” demonstrates the “extent to which sexism is

tolerated” (Syvret 2013)• debate has “degenerated into the trivial, the personal and the

downright derogatory” (Courier Mail 2013)• “disgraceful sexist attacks on the Prime Minister” (Maiden 2013a).

Gillard was “subjected to more naked hatred and personal abuse than any leader who has gone before her” … “the demeaning and very personal abuse levelled at the leader of what is a middle-ranked power and the 13th largest economy in the world is quite disturbing” (Courier Mail 2013).

• “Gender discrimination is still rife in Australian society”, “sexist male dinosaurs” … “made a mockery of claims sexism no longer exists in Australian politics”

Change and continuity

• ‘media texts constitute a sensitive barometer of sociocultural change’ … ‘messy contradictions’ of change

• Change, as reflected in the newly adopted introspective tone, was significant rather than constituting a critical juncture in gender reporting and relations; it was incorporated within an overarching patriarchal discourse, not symptomatic of its end

• Gillard no longer represented a challenge to entrenched gender stereotypes. • She had become victim, rather than victor, • and she was returning to the domestic rather than public sphere.

• Together, these changes made Gillard a more accessible subject for reporting; one who did not challenge dominant discourses to the same extent as a reigning woman leader.

Conclusion

• Events had revealed the “brutal edge of sexism” (Needham and Power 2013) and “the dark seam of misogyny and sexism that appears to run through our culture” (Caro 2013).

• Jacqueline Maley (2013), in the Sydney Morning Herald, asked, “she held us up to the mirror – do you like what you saw?” She lamented that “As one senior Labor Party figure put it this week: "The model for leadership was created by white guys in the 1950s." It hasn't changed much since then” (ibid.).

• It is imperative the Australian media reflect in, as well as on, the mirror Gillard held up to all Australians. Only then might more substantial transition occur, and a ‘fair go’ be given to future leaders who happen to be women, rather than see them continue to be held to account against the impossible expectation of performing the category of ‘woman leader’.