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Drawing on content analyses of 175 newspaper articles about repealing the ban on American women serving on the front lines of combat, this paper explores how news media portrayed military women. Historically, media depicted women in war as damsels in distress, yet after a decade of women's service in blurred front lines, media had ample opportunities to frame women differently. The news media have a powerful role in reinforcing or challenging hegemonic masculinity when presenting women as warriors. Using an intersectional lens, this paper finds that news media portray women as legitimate warriors; however, media do not discuss military women's race, ethnicity, sexuality, or family roles, rendering women as one-dimensional. Implications of one-dimensional representations of military women make diversity indiscernible and reinforces the double-bind, which upholds hegemonic masculinity and limits women's career potential both within the military and the labor force, more broadly. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines how transgender identity is represented across articles from three British national newspapers: The Guardian, The Times and The Telegraph. Transgender identity has become a highly contentious issue in areas of western culture, especially Britain, and even within feminism itself, with heightened visibility leading to a backlash against the rights of trans people to protection, and even recognition, in law. However, the influence of the broadsheets, Britain's so-called "quality" newspapers, in shaping the debate over transgender rights is under-researched. Using feminist critical discourse analysis (Michelle), I assess how the above newspapers position transgender subjects to alternatively legitimize or "other" transgender identity. Despite polarisation on issues of trans rights between newspapers, this paper finds that both "pro-trans" and "anti-trans" articles appropriate a feminist lexicon to define womanhood and gender in ways that justify their stance and foster division within wider society. I conclude that (white, cisheteronormative) feminism has become a vehicle for mainstream news media to further political agendas that can be crudely cast as either "progressive" or "conservative". [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In Australia, the rise of the #MeToo movement coincided with a major public reckoning with sexual and family violence, through two royal commissions. Across #MeToo and the royal commissions, a common picture emerged whereby the mutually reinforcing role of institutions such as the media and law was considered central to the production of problems such as sexual assault. Drawing on insights from feminist science and technology studies on the constitution of realities, this paper examines how the role of institutions has been constructed in public debate since, through an analysis of Australian newspaper accounts of #MeToo from 2017–2020. Some accounts materialise #MeToo problems as the product of mutually reinforcing institutional dynamics. More commonly, these problems are constituted as the product of "institutional exceptionalism": rare features of particular institutions, not commonly replicated. We consider the implications of these media constructions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The women's pages of a newspaper have often been dismissed as fluff, playing at most a subsidiary role, while the real news of a paper is in the malestream pages: the domestic news or leader pages. Yet historically, these pages are often key in constructing women, and men, politically, socially and economically; in terms of generating revenue within the paper; and in terms of how the paper constructs itself in relation to its readers. Further, they have been important in bringing women into newsrooms, and allowing them to construct themselves as journalists with specialist expertise and independence from the male editorial hierarchy. In Malaysia, however, the women's pages of the Malay-language press played a key role in the 1996 campaign for a Domestic Violence Act. Informed both by feminist critical discourse analysis and oral histories with female journalists working at the time, this article sheds light on the gendered nature of Malaysian newsrooms, with implications for how feminist media activists can negotiate feminist coverage, even in an environment hostile to feminism. There are further implications for the importance of understanding processes of both negotiation within newsrooms and identity formation as journalists, both of which impact upon the news produced. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]