Xenas and Samurai Swords: News Framing of Female and Male Prime Ministers in Canada and New Zealand

News media called the two women competing for the post of Prime Minister in the 1999 New Zealand election “Xena warrior princesses” and described one of them as a “beautifully tempered samurai sword”. These metaphors placed the female leaders firmly in the electoral “battleground” while clearly marking them as female. Are female leaders feminsed or masculinised by media coverage of their electoral performances? Our paper analyses newspaper reportage of three national elections that featured competitive women leaders, two elections in New Zealand and one in Canada. We examine the gendered nature of descriptions and framing of the male and female leaders. Given the masculine nature of the state and international relations we anticipated the application of masculine descriptors and antagonistic tactics to male and female leaders alike. This expectation was borne out by our findings, and we argue that the norm of aggressively masterful and adversarial political leadership circulated through media coverage of these three elections, reinforcing the idea of political competition as a battle between heroic warriors.

Publisher: Paper presented at the annual meeting of the ISA's 49th ANNUAL CONVENTION, BRIDGING MULTIPLE DIVIDES, Hilton San Francisco, SAN FRANCISCO, CA, USA, Mar 26, 2008
Year of Publication: 2008