”Un-retiring a grandma” : Gender and Age in News Media Representation During the 2015 Spanish Municipal Elections
Year: 2018
Type: article
Abstract: This master’s thesis sought to fill in two gaps: the lack of studies of gendered media representation of women politicians in Spain, and the way older women politicians are represented in the media. The 2015 Spanish municipal elections provided the perfect ground to study these two phenomena, as Manuela Carmena, who was 71 years old at the time, was elected mayor of Madrid, the capital of Spain. This paper dealt with a corpus of 183 newspaper articles in total, belonging to the two most read newspapers in Spain, El País and El Mundo, which mentioned Manuela Carmena in some capacity. Through a mixed methodology consisting of Qualitative Content Analysis and Critical Discourse Analysis, the articles were analysed through a feminist prism. Manuela Carmena’s mediated representation was shown to draw heavily from gendered tropes usually ascribed to women politicians, and a discourse of grandmotherhood underlined the way her image was constructed. However, there were some instances where Carmena was represented with more typically masculine traits, such as power or assertiveness, signifying perhaps a small improvement in the representation of women politicians.
Source: Työväentutkimus Vuosikirja
Author: Esther Veas Perez de Tudela
Language: English
Subfield: Gender Studies
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W3009608248