Discourse, Politics and Women as Global Leaders focuses on the discourse practices of women in global political leadership. It provides a series of discursive studies of women in positions of political leadership. ‘Political leadership’ is defined as achieving a senior position within a political organization and will often indicate a senior role in government or opposition. The volume draws on a diverse collection of studies from across the globe, reflecting a variety of cultures and distinct polities. The primary aim is to consider in what way(s) discursive practice underpins, reflects, or is appropriated in terms of women’s political success and achievements within politics. The chapters employ differing theoretical approaches all bound by the discursive insights they provide, and in terms of their contribution to understanding the role of language and discourse in the construction of gendered identities within political contexts.

Investigates the underrepresentation of women in politics, by examining how language use constructs and maintains gender inequalities in political institutions.

Transnational Feminist Rhetorics and Gendered Leadership in Global Politics examines the rhetoric surrounding women who hold or have held the highest office of a nation-state. Heads of state, such as Golda Meir, Margaret Thatcher, Benazir Bhutto, Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, and Michelle Bachelet, have navigated their ascent to executive government in vastly different ways while contending with gendered expectations of leadership, especially since most of them are the first woman to occupy their country’s highest governmental position. This book analyzes how these women rhetorically perform their positions of power—discursively, visually, and physically—in a traditionally male leadership role. Specifically, this project examines how certain rhetorical acts open up and close down the potential to confront the gendered expectations surrounding political leadership. When people analyze, campaign for, or critique a “female prime minister” or a “woman president,” they are not just talking about one woman but also referencing a collective neoliberal logic that interrupts and reaffirms the belief that the nation-state is an eternal, inevitable structure. Diverse political figures, such as Angela Merkel, Julia Gillard, and Indira Gandhi, are continually put in conversation with one another, through popular media representations, academic scholarship, and political analyses. This book examines the effect of such comparisons and connections, ultimately arguing that many of these gestures reduce or over-simplify women’s contributions to world politics. In order to show this effect, this book manifests the transnational connections found in autobiographies, organizations, political commentaries, biographical films, and other sources that focus on women who have been heads of state.

Since well before ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment in 1920 secured their right to vote, women in Oklahoma have sought to change and uplift their communities through political activism. This Land Is Herland brings together the stories of thirteen women activists and explores their varied experiences from the territorial period to the present. Organized chronologically, the essays discuss Progressive reformer Kate Barnard, educator and civil rights leader Clara Luper, and Comanche leader and activist LaDonna Harris, as well as lesser-known individuals such as Cherokee historian and educator Rachel Caroline Eaton, entrepreneur and NAACP organizer California M. Taylor, and Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) champion Wanda Jo Peltier Stapleton. Edited by Sarah Eppler Janda and Patricia Loughlin, the collection connects Oklahoma women’s individual and collective endeavors to the larger themes of intersectionality, suffrage, politics, motherhood, and civil rights in the American West and the United States. The historians explore how race, ethnicity, social class, gender, and political power shaped—and were shaped by—these women’s efforts to improve their local, state, and national communities. Underscoring the diversity of women’s experiences, the editors and contributors provide fresh and engaging perspectives on the western roots of gendered activism in Oklahoma. This volume expands and enhances our understanding of the complexities of western women’s history.

As an installment of Routledge’s Broadcast Education Association (BEA) Electronic Media Research Series, Political Communication, Culture, and Society focuses on the expansive concept of political communication and illuminates the processes, contents, and effects related to myriad forms and vehicles of political communication. Whether involving traditional print or broadcast media, social media platforms, or face-to-face discussions, political communication today has shaped how we perceive others and understand the world around us, including our place in it, and ultimately, how we engage with others as social, cultural, and political beings. Hailing from multiple locations and drawing on a multitude of theories as well as quantitative and qualitative methodologies, the volume’s contributors examine how communication intersects with politics in a broad swath of contexts, ranging from climate change to migration to the notion of political correctness. Collectively they ask and answer questions about how today’s richly textured media ecology shapes our political world and how political messages can fuel – and ameliorate – the issues that deeply cleave societies around the globe. Relevant to scholars and students of journalism, media studies, and communication sciences, this volume will help interested readers better understand today’s increasingly complex sociocultural world through the lens of political communication.

Shortlisted for BAAL (British Association for Applied Linguistics) Book Prize 2022 The Routledge Handbook of Language, Gender, and Sexuality provides an accessible and authoritative overview of this dynamic and growing area of research. Covering cutting-edge debates in eight parts, it is designed as a series of mini edited collections, enabling the reader, and particularly the novice reader, to discover new ways of approaching language, gender, and sexuality. With a distinctive focus both on methodologies and theoretical frameworks, the Handbook includes 40 state-of-the art chapters from international authorities. Each chapter provides a concise and critical discussion of a methodological approach, an empirical study to model the approach, a discussion of real-world applications, and further reading. Each section also contains a chapter by leading scholars in that area, positioning, through their own work and chapters in their part, current state-of-the-art and future directions. This volume is key reading for all engaged in the study and research of language, gender, and sexuality within English language, sociolinguistics, discourse studies, applied linguistics, and gender studies.

Indispensable for the student or researcher studying women's history, this book draws upon a wide array of cultural settings and time periods in which women displayed agency by carrying out their daily economic, familial, artistic, and religious obligations. Since record keeping began, history has been written by a relatively few elite men. Insights into women's history are left to be gleaned by scholars who undertake careful readings of ancient literature, examine archaeological artifacts, and study popular culture, such as folktales, musical traditions, and art. For some historical periods and geographic regions, this is the only way to develop some sense of what daily life might have been like for women in a particular time and place. This reference explores the daily life of women across civilizations. The work is organized in sections on different civilizations from around the world, arranged chronologically. Within each society, the encyclopedia highlights the roles of women within five broad thematic categories: the arts, economics and work, family and community life, recreation and social customs, and religious life. Included are numerous sidebars containing additional information, document excerpts, images, and suggestions for further reading.

This accessible introductory textbook looks at the modern relationship between politicians, the press and the public through the language they employ, with extensive coverage of key topics including: ‘spin’, ‘spin control’ and ‘image’ politics models of persuasion: authority, contrast, association pseudo-logical and ‘post-truth’ arguments political interviewing: difficult questions, difficult answers metaphors and metonymy rhetorical figures humour, irony and satire Extracts from speeches, soundbites, newspapers and blogs, interviews, press conferences, election slogans, social media and satires are used to provide the reader with the tools to discover the beliefs, character and hidden strategies of the would-be persuader, as well as the counter-strategies of their targets. This book demonstrates how the study of language use can help us appreciate, exploit and protect ourselves from the art of persuasion. With a wide variety of practical examples on both recent issues and historically significant ones, every topic is complemented with guiding tasks, queries and exercises with keys and commentaries at the end of each unit. This is the ideal textbook for all introductory courses on language and politics, media language, rhetoric and persuasion, discourse studies and related areas.

While the image or construct of the “good mother” has been the focus of many research projects, the “bad mother,” as a discursive construct, and also mothers who do “bad” things as complicated, agentic social actors, have been quite neglected, despite the prevalence of the image of the bad mother across late modern societies. The few researchers who address this powerful social image point out that bad mothers are culturally identified by what they do, yet they are also socially recognized by who they are. Mothers become potentially bad when they behave or express opinions that diverge from, or challenge, social or gender norms, or when they deviate from mainstream, white, middle class, heterosexual, nondisabled normativity. When suspected of being bad mothers, women are surveilled, and may be disciplined, punished or otherwise excluded, by various official agents (i.e. legal, medical and welfare institutions), as well as by their relatives, friends and communities. Too often, women are judged and punished without clear evidence that they are neglecting or abusing their children. Frequently they are blamed for the marginal sociocultural context in which they are mothering. This anthology presents empirical, theoretical and creative works that address the construct of the bad mother and the lived realities of mothers labeled as bad. Throughout the volume, the editors consider voices and acts of resistance to bad mother constructions, demonstrating that mothers, across time and across domains, have individually and collectively taken a stand against this destructive label.

This collection examines the ways in which women have used political rhetoric and political discourse to provide leadership, or assert their right to leadership, at the national level. While over the years women have broken through traditional roles, they are still underrepresented in political leadership. In this text, scholars consider the various factors that continue to restrict political leadership opportunities for women as well as some of the ways in which individual women have strategically sought to enact political power and leadership for themselves. The contributors analyze various case studies of leadership positions at the national level, looking at women who have run, been nominated to run, or appointed to national positions. The interdisciplinary approach lends itself to: rhetoric; political rhetoric; political discourse; leadership studies; women’s studies; gender issues; satire; pop culture.