Seen and Not Heard: The Popular Appeal of Postfeminist Political Celebrity

Abstract

This chapter aims to contribute to the wider debate outlined in this book and conducted in the world beyond about the nature of contemporary feminism by looking at the politics of being a woman in electoral news coverage. Despite news coverage being an aspect of formal politics, the chapter focuses not on formal political actors (women politicians), but on political leaders’ spouses who despite having no role in the political process nevertheless received unprecedented levels of attention during the most recent UK election. The spouses of politicians have maintained some presence in political campaigns in British politics throughout the twentieth century and into the twenty-first. The 2010 UK general election was particularly interesting in this regard because it marked the first time when these unelected women received a higher proportion of electoral media coverage than women candidates (Harmer, forthcoming). Scholars have often attributed the attention paid to politicians’ spouses as a consequence of increased attention on the private lives and personalities of political leaders (Langer, 2011; Stanyer, 2013). Although the spouses of political leaders are not necessarily political actors in the traditional sense, this chapter will demonstrate that the newspaper coverage of the 2010 election served to cast them as political celebrities who were intended to appeal to women voters.

I am a feminist if … I believe that media coverage of politics should afford women more than a supporting role