From gendering to intersectional labelling. Russian and Swedish political journalists’ perspective on discriminating and promoting mechanisms in the media content.
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Abstract
This paper suggests to study the phenomena of gendering in political journalism from intersectionality perspective (Davis, 2008; McCall, 2005) in order to understand gendering in the framework of other discriminatory and promoting mechanisms in political news. Gendering is understood as the perceived imprint of gender on the media portrayal of politics and politicians, as well as the processes whereby gendered media representations materialize (Voronova, 2014). The paper is based on forty semi-structured interviews with political journalists working for the quality press in Russia and Sweden. The choice of the countries is driven by the wish to explore the difficulties and similarities of the journalists’ conceptualizations of gendering and other discriminatory and promoting mechanisms in two very different political and cultural contexts. The paper shows that the journalists in both countries highlight the importance of not only gender mainstreaming, but diversity in the content as a democratic value, where gender stands in the same row with other difference-making categories (such as ethnicity, sexuality etc.). The paper highlights the difficulties and contradictions the Russian and Swedish political journalists face trying to achieve their diversity ideal. The paper suggests a definition of intersectional labelling in political journalism, and proposes that it is an ambiguous process, which can be either discriminatory or promoting, depending on its manifestations. Moreover, its application is contextual, and is related to the journalists’ vision of ethics, commercial benefits of the media organization, and press freedom.Keywords
gender, intersectionality, journalism culture, matrix of domination, political journalism.Downloads
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