‘Iron Maidens’ vs. the ‘Witless Pet’: Typecasting the Woman Politician in Editorial Cartoons and Memes
‘Iron Maidens’ vs. the ‘Witless Pet’: Typecasting the Woman Politician in Editorial Cartoons and Memes

Summary/Abstract: Woven into the fabric of our everyday life, different forms of media insinuate messages that restore traditional hierarchies of male-female relationships and signal the incongruity between ‘woman’ and the man-dominated public sphere. Among these, editorial cartoons and internet memes (their more recent offspring) play their part in naturalising the patriarchal order when representing women politicians, reiterating thus societal norms and cultural assumptions that confine woman to the domestic space (albeit through verbal-visual forms of humour, mockery or caricature). Combining insights from semiotics with Kanter’s theory of the “role traps” (1993) devised for women in leading positions, the paper will address instances of gender stereotyping and typecasting in editorial cartoons and internet memes which mediate representations of female political leaders (from Hillary Clinton and Theresa May to Viorica Dăncilă, Romania’s first woman prime minister) both as records of public controversies that affect a community at a given time, as well as clues to the discourses which normalise a gendered-biased “homo politicus”.

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