Gendering in Political Journalism in the Framework of Other “ing-s”: Russian and Swedish Journalists about Gender, Ethnicity and Sexual Identity as Politicians’ Characteristics and Political Categories

This paper explores gendering in political journalism – the perceived imprint of gender on the media portrayal of politics and politicians, as well as the processes whereby gendered media representations materialize. Gendering here is understood as an ambiguous process, which can be either discriminatory or promoting, depending on its manifestations (e.g. gender stereotypes or counter-stereotypes, gender-spotlighting or gender-aware story). Moreover, this paper suggests to study this phenomena from intersectionality perspective (Davis 2008, McCall 2005) in order to understand gendering in the framework of other discriminatory and promoting mechanisms in political news. 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 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 in general 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. As such, the paper discusses the reasons for the “double othering” of foreign women politicians in the Russian press and the ridiculing of Russian male politicians in the Swedish press, the attempts of the Russian journalists to remain gender-neutral in the current homophobic context and their Swedish colleagues’ striving for keeping gender as an issue on the media agenda when it is being replaced from the political agenda by the discussions of race and ethnicity issues.