Feminist Media Studies

Gender and media studies has witnessed in recent years a resounding revival, as is testified
by number of published monographs and collections, articles, themed issues of international
journals, conferences that bring into focus the diverse features of the relationship between
gender and communication. The field has gone through an ebb and flow process over time,
since it began to take shape inside the academia in early seventies, under the determining influence
of the second-wave feminism, which had made the media a primary object of inquiry
and criticism. Actually feminism, its waves and shifts and multiple voices, is a major factor to
be considered –alongside equally shiftings conceptual frameworks and methodological tools
underpinning research and analysis, and the changing media contexts and contents– in order
to account for the constitution and development of the gender and media scholarship.
This paper is aimed at drawing an overview of such a history, through a narrative of change and
continuity that strives to render how the field has come to be configured and reconfigured over
time, and has readjusted its mode of engagement with the fundamental challenge of disclosing
and understanding the gendered and gendering dimensions of the media discourses and
practices. More focus will be put on the strands of the vibrant debate that enlivens the current
revival, much informed by competing ideas as regards gender and media in a postfeminist and
media-saturated cultural environment.
Keywords: gender, media, images of women, feminism, post-feminism

This book illuminates the rhetorical work performed by contemporary representations of a specific type of postfeminist hero who has garnered a lot of cultural capital: women who are smart, capable, physically agile and fit, and proficient with weaponry and technology. Employing critical/cultural and feminist approaches, Heather Hundley, Roberta Chevrette, and Hillary Jones engage with a range of theories including intersectionality, critical race theory, postmodernism, and posthumanism to examine a range of contemporary texts, including Kill Bill, Volumes I and II; The Hunger Games films; Wonder Woman; Atomic Blonde; Proud Mary; The Bionic Woman; Deus Ex; Dark Matter; and Caprica. Contributing to a robust existing conversation about postfeminist media as well as tracing how representation has changed in recent years, Hundley, Chevrette, and Jones contend that portrayals of dangerous dames offer limitations and opportunities for audiences. Specifically, should audiences read these characters as evidence of a postfeminist apocalypse, they may heed warnings of the limited interpretations offered. Yet as more women serve as role models and gain public attention, particularly regarding their assets and abilities, they provide important equipment for living for navigating around patriarchal constraints raised by postfeminism, neoliberalism, and humanism.

Available at:
-Peter Lang
https://www.peterlang.com/document/1057643
-Amazon
https://www.amazon.com/Dangerous-Dames-Representing-Female-Bodied-Postfeminist/dp/1433163012

This article presents a series of possible conceptual frames for engaging with what has come to be known as post-feminism. It understands post-feminism to refer to an active process by which feminist gains of the 1970s and 80s come to be undermined. It proposes that through an array of machinations, elements of contemporary popular culture are perniciously effective in regard to this undoing of feminism, while simultaneously appearing to be engaging in a well-informed and even well-intended response to feminism. It then proposes that this undoing which can be perceived in the broad cultural field is compounded by some dynamics in sociological theory (including the work of Giddens and Beck) which appear to be most relevant to aspects of gender and social change. Finally it suggests that by means of the tropes of freedom and choice which are now inextricably connected with the category of "young women," feminism is decisively aged and made to seem redundant. Feminism is cast into the shadows, where at best it can expect to have some afterlife, where it might be regarded ambivalently by those young women who must in more public venues stake a distance from it, for the sake of social and sexual recognition. I propose a complexification then of the backlash thesis which gained currency within forms of journalism associated with popular feminism (Susan Faludi 1992). The backlash for Faludi was a concerted, conservative response to the achievements of feminism. My argument is that post-feminism positively draws on and invokes feminism as that which can be taken into account, to suggest that equality is achieved, in order to install a whole repertoire of new meanings which emphasise that it is no longer needed, it is a spent force. This was most vivid in The Independent (UK) newspaper column Bridget Jones's Diary, then in the enormously successful book and film which followed. 1 For my purposes here, post-feminism permits the close examination of a number of intersecting but also conflicting currents. It allows us to examine shifts of direction in the feminist academy, while also taking into account the seeming repudiation of feminism within this very same academic context by those young women who are its unruly (student) subjects. Broadly I am arguing that for feminism to be "taken into account" it has to be understood as having already passed away. This is a movement detectable across popular culture, a site where "power … is remade at various junctures within everyday life, (constituting) our tenuous sense of common sense" (Judith Butler, Ernesto Laclau & Slavoj Zizek 2000, p. 14). Some fleeting comments in Judith Butler's short book Antigone's Claim (2000) suggests to me that post-feminism can be explored through what I would describe as a "double entanglement". This comprises the coexistence of neo-conservative values in relation to gender, sexuality and family life (for example, George Bush supporting the campaign to encourage chastity among young people, and

This article examines recent TV (True Blood, The Vampire Diaries) and cinematic stories (Twilight saga) from a feminist perspective. It focuses on the the gender relations and female agency embedded in these stories in order to determine if they conjure up any liberating potential for their audience.

We analyse how memes construct networks of feminist critique and response, mobilising the derisive laughter that energises current feminisms. Using the 2012 case of the ‘Binders Full of Women’ meme, we argue that feminist memes create online spaces of consciousness raising and community building. The timeliness, humorous affect and media techné of meme propagators become significant infrastructures for feminist critique, what we term ‘doing feminism in the network’. If the Internet is particularly good at facilitating the diffusion of feminist jokes, as others argue, we illustrate how the networking and distribution capacities of social media platforms such as Tumblr, Facebook and the online shopping site Amazon.com also cultivate new modes of feminist cultural critique and models of political agency for practising feminism through meme production and propagation.

Australian media depictions of young women are currently influenced by what Angela McRobbie calls "postfeminism"--that women are content, and that feminism is finished. Yet media representations of young women are also inherently patriarchal, influenced by moral panic around the "crisis" of femininity. Historically, self-publishing in general, and zine-making in particular, have been strategies for marginalized groups to create media that gives voice to their experiencesthere is a history of zines by people of colour, queer people, and wom*n and grrrls (these categories are not discrete). Despite research suggesting that the materiality of zines is no longer important, or that zine discourse has now moved into digital culture, this is not entirely the case: though the internet has come to play a role in the distribution of zines and zine culture, there remains something indispensable about the materiality of zines. Materiality enables the 'underground' nature of zine culture-the difficulty of finding zine-makers or distributors, and the limited print runs of most grrrl zines; this 'undergroundness' also creates barriers to entry within feminist zine culture. These barriers, however, allow feminist zines to develop autonomous narratives-content might be intimate, confessional (an author might disclose sexual assault), angry and combative ("Death to rape apologists!" or similar). The materiality of grrrl zines allows authors to create autonomous, safe spaces, in which hegemonic media discourse around girls and women can be subverted, dissented, and destroyed. This project emerges from a community archive project to assemble a library of feminist and grrrl zines.

This newsletter illustrates the commitment to engaged scholarship of the highest quality that is emblematic of the faculty and students in the Department of Criminology, Law and Society. My thanks to Jason Gravel for initiating this publication, in conjunction with the student Strategic Communication Committee and congratulations on a wonderful first issue.

La imagen videográfica como herramienta se incorpora a las artes a finales de los 60 en el contexto del happening y la performance. Es en este momento cuando se despliegan las teorías fílmicas de análisis feminista cuya influencia servirá para configurar un "video feminista" casi desde los comienzos en contraposición a las normas del cine o la televisión. Nos estamos refiriendo a nuevas estrategias de concepción, rodaje, edición y exhibición que huían de la normatividad cinematrográfica para mostrar la identidad de los géneros. El video  se interesará por procesos físicos y psíquicos, se utilizará para grabar acciones y en un ejercicio de autocontemplación y/o contacto con el público espectador, prevalecerá un componente autoreferencial.

Child beauty pageants in popular culture depict the competing discourses of girlhood and motherhood that arise in the post-feminist context. These pageants portray hyperbolic femininity as a meritocratic practice of gendered discipline and consumption that yields material rewards, conflating girl power with subscription to the current social fetishisation of girl power. Moreover, this representation of girlhood highlights the irrelevance of older generations, in a way that speaks to the post-feminist—and third wave—repudiation of second wave feminism. Specifically, I analyse the TLC reality television show Toddlers and Tiaras as a text that represents the mother–daughter dyad so as to make mothers obsolete and a hindrance to the potential of their dynamic and empowered daughters. This allows post-feminist girlhood to triumph as the most relevant and desirable model for young women, while scapegoating monstrous moms for the problematic, exploitative aspects of the show. When such mother–daughter relations are highlighted, diametrically opposed and negatively portrayed, they recall the symbolic logic of contemporary feminist movements and their rejection of the experiences and knowledge of older generations of feminists. I argue that destroying the rich historical legacy of feminism further distances post-feminist subjects from the potential of future political coalitions.

This article analyzes how news photographs and textual accounts of the 1964 Kitty Genovese murder and its 38 witnesses formulated the problem of crime in the city as one of failed witnessing in urban conditions. It analyzes the press images of Austin Street in Kew Gardens and a police portrait of the victim as facialized surfaces that journalists and editors used to interpret
the failure of witnesses who were said to have watched or heard Winston Moseley’s assaults on Genovese. In years since, the number of witnesses has been called into question, as has the
claim that Genovese’s neighbors did not call the police or offer direct assistance. In reviewing a case made famous through the construction of its 38 witnesses, the author shows how crime
scene photography and victim portraiture played their part in conjuring the witnesses and their presumed inaction. Through these representations, this famous story of failed witnessing created an urban physiognomy of the Genovese murder whose truths lie not in the veracity of the witnesses themselves but in the ability of news and police photography to spectate the crime
scene and murder victim for readers.

We analyse the media representations of women at the Spanish-Moroccan border. We will compare those of cinematographic works that have given them a central role in the story and that operate via minority circuits, with the more habitual ones that have more of an impact on the social imaginary resulting from more widespread media. In contrast to the high number of women confined at this border and the seriousness of the specific problems affecting them, their representations are rare. When they do appear, the representations of both types clash. The more widespread ones, through the use of gender determinants, end up reifying them in the imaginary in subordinate positions which facilitate their incorporation into work networks for the first world (such as care work). Furthermore, the cinematographic works analysed provide more complex representations of these women. For example, they consider alternative discourses that are critical of the capitalist use of their bodies in the workforce.
DISPONIBLE SOLO EN EL SITIO Y PAGANDO. LO SIENTO
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/14680777.2020.1804974?scroll=top&needAccess=true

This paper highlights a fresh approach in the Mid-Seventies to the historiographical discussion of the female condition and women’s role in the ancient, and more specifically Roman World, thanks to works like Sarah B. Pomeroy’s "Goddesses, whores, wives, and slaves "(1975). Beyond its place in that decade’s feminist debate in the USA, this book’s many faceted and pragmatic nature has contributed a more articulated view of Roman women’s image. It left its mark not only on later historiography, sparking new discussions among Roman history specialists, but also well beyond, as the numerous videos and films on Roman women available on the Internet attest. These latter display the creativity and skill of their authors, of various ages and levels of knowledge and technical expertise. While being informed, the viewer is catapulted into women’s daily life in ancient Rome as they deal with the typical problems ascribed to women in every epoch. In this perspective, such efforts can be seen as an excellent example of applied Public History, whose usefulness in increasing gender studies relating to Roman history is well worth evaluation.

ינואר 2000. אירוע זה, שבו הורשעו שבעה בני נוער מרמת השרון בתקיפות מיניות של תלמידה, זכה לבולטות ניכרת בסדר היום הציבורי בישראל. הסיקור העיתונאי של האירוע נבחן באמצעות ניתוח תוכן של כל הפריטים ("אייטמים" בלשון העיתונאית) המילוליים והחזותיים שעסקו בו במהלך שנה — מרגע פרסום דבר התרחשותו של האונס עד הכרעת הדין בו (בסך הכול 270 פריטים בשלושת העיתונים). המחקר מעלה כי בגופי הפריטים (ה"אותיות הקטנות") הציגו כל העיתונים קשת רחבה של פרשנויות אפשריות של האירוע. בקשת זו הבליט כל עיתון רכיב שונה: "ידיעות אחרונות" התמקד בתיאור פרטני וסנסציוני של האונס עצמו; "הארץ" התמקד בהיבטים של חוק וסדר ובסיקור ממסדי של פעילות המערכת המשפטית; "מעריב" התמקד בהקשרים החברתיים, בעיקר המעמדיים והעדתיים, שבהם התרחש האונס. מגמה משולשת זו ניתנת לתיאור סכמטי, המראה שהביטוי "משפט אונס רמת השרון" פוצל לשלושה רכיבים: "ידיעות אחרונות" עסק באונס, "הארץ" במשפט ו"מעריב" ברמת השרון, כמייצגת חתך ישראלי-חברתי נתון. עוד מעלה המחקר, כי על אף המסגור השונה התאפיין הסיקור בכל העיתונים בהדרה של פרשנויות עכשוויות לתופעת התקיפות המיניות וקשריה למבנה המגדרי של החברה. כחלק ממגמה זו, הסיקור בכל אמצעי התקשורת הציג הבנה הגמונית מסורתית של תופעת התקיפות המיניות, מגמות משותפות של מיצוב השחקנים באירוע במונחי קרבן, אחריות ואשמה, וחוסר חיבור בין האירוע לבין המבנה הפטריארכלי של החברה הישראלית.
The article presents an analysis of the coverage of a high profile rape case in the daily Israeli press from December 1998 to January 2000. In the case of "The Ramat HaSharon Rape", seven high school teenagers from Ramat HaSharon, an upper middle class Israeli town, were convicted of sexual assaults on a fellow student. All verbal and visual items on the subject which were published in the three major Israeli newspapers within a year — from the moment the rape was published until the sentence was passed (all in all 270 items) — were analyzed. The research revealed that the three newspapers presented a wide array of frames and interpretations in the "fine print". From this array, each newspaper highlighted a different component: Yedioth Aharonoth focused on a sensational and elaborate description of the rape itself; Ha'aretz focused on law and order and offered coverage of the legal system's actions; and Ma'ariv focused on social issues, mainly the social classes and ethnic origins of the individuals linked to the rape. The three interpretive frames schematically divided the phrase "Ramat HaSharon Rape Trial" into three: Yedioth Aharonoth dealt with the rape, Ha'aretz with the trial, and Ma'ariv with Ramat HaSharon, as typifying a certain sector of Israeli society. The research also reveals that despite the diversified framing by the three newspapers, the coverage was marked by the exclusion of contemporary interpretations of the phenomenon of sexual violence and its relation to gender. The coverage in all three newspapers was typified by a traditional hegemonic understanding of sexual assaults. The newspapers shared the same trends by situating the actors of the event in terms of victims, responsibility and blame, and by not relating this event to the patriarchal structure of Israeli society.

This study used frame analysis to explore gendered frames and archetypes in the news coverage of two mass shootings, in which both suspects were White, middle-class university professors: Amy Bishop at the University of Alabama and George Zinkhan at the University of Georgia. Three people were killed in each of the shootings, but the amount of coverage on Bishop exceeded by about four times the amount of news about Zinkhan—a difference whose magnitude can hardly be explained
only by the circumstances of the shootings. Although the female professor committed murder in a professional setting, due to dissatisfaction with a career outcome, the coverage focused on her personal life and alleged psychological instability, in line with the archetype of the “Female Monster.” By contrast, the coverage of Zinkhan’s crime, committed in highly personal circumstances—the murder of his wife and two men at a picnic—fit a patriarchal, Othello-like archetype of a man embroiled in a crime of passion, and focused mostly on his successful career, lacking an investigation of past abusive behavior that may have preceded the murder. The news coverage serves to exemplify the societal discourse on women and men who kill.

This essay traces the theorization of interwar animation through period analogies with painting and dance, paying special attention to the valorization of concepts such as dematerialization and embodiment, which metaphors of visual music and physical kinesthesis were used to promote. Beginning in 1919, and exemplified by her feature-length film Die Abenteuer des Prinzen Achmed (1926), Lotte Reiniger directed numerous silhouette films animated in an ornate style that embraced decorative materiality. This aesthetic set her in uneasy relation to the avant-garde, whose strenuous attempts to distance abstraction from ornament took the form of absolute film, and were screened together at the Absolute film Matinee of 1925. However, their claims for aesthetic integrity were staked on territory these artists largely had in common. By adopting a feminist approach that examines networks of collaboration, publication, and artistic production in Weimar Berlin, this essay reveals Reiniger as an early proponent of haptic cinema in interwar Europe and one of animation's earliest and most perceptive theorists.

This chapter considers the rapid rise in media visibility of the Tasmanian comedian Hannah Gadsby since 2017 through an analysis of her stand-up show Nanette, which was filmed in 2018 as an original Netflix stand-up com­ edy special, and the wider cultural commentary around her. It argues that Gadsby’s globalised success must be understood in relation to the spread of a broader affective mood in celebrity culture in the wake of the #MeToo move­ ment – one that is characterised by the increased registering and visibility of women’s anger. To this end, it explores both the possibilities and limitations of ‘celebritised anger’ in a transnational media culture that appears to be increasingly attuned to identity politics – or what has been called the ‘woke­ ness industrial complex’. I argue that the imperfect political conditions occa­ sioned by capitalist media culture can only allow for a ‘messy anger’ that does not fully meet the requirements for an effective feminist anger, but that this messy anger has some value nonetheless. I consider how Gadsby’s own articulation of her ambivalent relationship to anger can help us to under­ stand the deep forms of ‘affective injustice’ (Srinivasan 2018) that structure and underpin contemporary media culture. I also explore the ways in which Gadsby is routinely figured as hailing from a deeply conservative small-town in Tasmania, Australia’s most southern state, and the subtle ways in which this might work to contain some of the more radical possibilities of rage.

This short essay considers how, in conditions of widespread lockdown during the coronavirus pandemic, domestic space has become hyper-visible. It argues that, in the mediated aesthetics of the crisis, we have seen a resurgence of mystificatory images of the heteronormative private household through celebrity culture. It considers how the injunction to 'stay the fuck at home' may work to conceal pervasive forms of gendered violence within domestic space, as well as reaffirming the private, capitalist home as a place of safety and stability. Drawing on the work of family abolitionist feminism, the essay argues that we might turn the hyper-visibility of the private heteronormative home against itself, by exposing its inbuilt dangers, inequalities, and cruelties-and by imagining how much better home could be.

About the book
Offering critical response to a range of popular debates on children's sexual cultures, this ground-breaking volume challenges preconceived and accepted theories regarding children, sexuality and sexualisation. The contributions to this collection offer compelling accounts from a range of disciplinary fields and transnational contexts to present original empirical research findings, which offer
new ways to make sense of children's sexual cultures across complex political, social and cultural terrains. Organised into five sections, this book addresses the history of young
sexualities research and theory across disciplinary boundaries; pre-teen sexualities and a rethinking of sexual agency and innocence; how space, place and history shape young queer
sexualities; the representation of young sexualities in the popular cultural imaginary; and the role of new media and digital technology in the formation of children and young
people's sexual cultures.

Questo intervento intende esplorare e problematizzare la rappresentazione delle donne in quanto icone, muse o soggetti passivi, e come esse diventino ricettacolo di proiezioni sociali. Quali strumenti estetici e politici le donne hanno impiegato per riappropriarsi della propria soggettività e autonomia in una cultura visuale patriarcale ed eteronormativa? Attraverso un’analisi critica queer-femminista – e percorrendo le definizioni di sesso, genere e sessualità – questa lectio prende come punto di partenza esempi tratti dai media mainstream per poi allargarsi verso problematiche che riguardano la rappresentazione dei corpi in ambito artistico.

[EN]
'Body, Femininity and Objectification: Queer-Feminist Perspectives'
This presentation explores and problematises how women are usually portrayed as either icons, muses or passive subjects, either way becoming receptacles of social projections. What aesthetic and political tools have women employed to re-frame their own subjectivity and autonomy within a heteronormative and patriarchal visual culture? Through a feminist and queer critical analysis, this lecture will take as its starting point examples drawn from mainstream media, to move towards issues that relate to the representation of bodies in the arts.

-- text available only in Italian --

In this chapter Taylor examines Amy Poehler and Lena Dunham, celebrities who represent the mid-point between women who are famous because of their feminism and those who later chose to add feminism to their ‘brand’. For these two celebrities, feminism has always been central to their creative practice, and is thereby integral to their renown; it also clearly underpins their books, Yes Please and Not That Kind of Girl respectively. In each case, their comic blockbuster memoirs have worked to sustain their feminist celebrity in important ways but, as Taylor comprehensively demonstrates, these bestselling texts represent only one part of the equation. Accordingly, engaging with Amy Poehler’s Smart Girls website and Lena Dunham’s Lenny e-newsletter, Taylor argues that, in addition to literary works, celebrities are increasingly deploying new media to shape public conversations around feminism.

This article explores how the gendered and racialized representation of muteness is politicized within the current cultural imaginary. It undertakes a media-historical reading of the mute woman as a cultural figure and asks how through this character certain independent films seek to establish cinema as a counterpublic space. Followed by selected readings of a group of films with mute female protagonists, the article embeds the discursive operations of muteness in a broader discussion of identity politics, voice, communication, and silent protest. These discussions are relevant for mediations on mute femininity because they become frameworks within which her muteness serves as a problematic political allegory announcing a lack of participation.

In feminist and other critical media studies, scholars have long been interested in the role that media imagery plays in deeming some bodies desirable, acceptable, or 'normal', others threatening, shameful, or excessive. Most bodies we see in the media are slim or normatively sized. Many classic studies on how gendered body norms and beauty ideals take shape and transform in and through the media have focused on just that, what we mostly see: normabiding, idealized, dieting, or eating disordered bodies (e.g. Bordo, 1993; Wolf, 1991). However, the categories of 'normal' or 'desirable' are at least as much produced through what constitutes their outside, what is understood as 'excessive', 'too much', or 'over'-all things that fat is claimed to be. When we examine images of fatness and fat people in the media, we are therefore not only analyzing fat but also the very boundaries of corporeality and 'normalcy' overall. Thus media images of fat unavoidably entangle with the production of gender, sexuality, class, race, and ability, while they also deserve to be a research focus in their own right. Fat bodies are relatively invisible in the body-scape of popular culture (e.g. Kent, 2001; LeBesco, 2004). When fat bodies do appear, they tend to appear in rather specific contexts: in particular genres and modalities (Kyrölä, 2014). Why does fatness appear so often in comedy, reality television and so-called 'trash TV' (Raisborough, 2014), but much more rarely in televisual or cinematic drama? What characterizes news publicity around fatness, and what is fat's appeal in pornography? Even though the cultural limitation of fat bodies to certain genres rather than others is a testament to how fat people are still not seen capable of representing the whole spectrum of humanity, these genres are not without subversive potential to challenge, or even unravel, body normativities. 2 In scholarship about fat in the media, fat bodies' relationship to 'normalcy' has been a fraught one. On one hand, scholars and activists have called for a broader range of roles and characteristics for fat actors, so that they would not have to be limited to being defined first and foremost through their fatness, or to the roles of, for example, funny sidekicks or emotionally damaged binge-eaters (Jester, 2009; LeBesco, 2004). A call for 'normalcy' in fat representation in the media is, at the same time, a call for fat people to be seen as fully human, good as well as bad, complicated as well as superficial, sympathetic as well as annoying, exciting as well as boring (Cooper, 1996; Mosher, 2001.) On the other hand, fat studies scholars have also seen subversive, revolutionary potential in the excess and indeed the abjection that fat has come to signify in western culture (Braziel, 2001; Kent, 2001; Kyrölä, 2014; LeBesco, 2004). Why aim for normalcy, when the whole category of the 'normal' is already so oppressive? A better strategy might be to refuse and dismiss the notion of 'normalcy' altogether and embrace the excess and danger to bodily boundaries that fat has come to stand for, similarly as queer theory aims to do with the concept 'queer' (LeBesco, 2004, p. 5; Kent, 2001, pp. 136-137). Media images furthermore participate in producing understandings of what counts as 'normal' or fat overall, how we are expected to feel about such definitions, and how other categories of difference, such as gender and race, intersect with fat. In contemporary Hollywood, actors are considered 'fat' at much lower sizes than in the surrounding world, and such standards easily seep into everyday lives. Sensationalistic celebrity journalism observes actors' bodies in minute detail, and weight-gain as well as weight-loss are targets of keen and fully normalized speculation. Actors' weight fluctuations for roles are praised as signs of dedication, but otherwise strictly condemned. For example, American actress Reneé Zellweger as Bridget Jones (Bridget Jones's Diary, 2001; and Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason, 2004) may have looked simply average-sized in the role, but her 'incredible' weight gain was still highlighted, as well as her difficulties losing the weight. Many celebrities, such as Oprah Winfrey, Britney Spears, and Monica Lewinsky, have also fluctuated in weight repeatedly, and have thus come to embody the fraught relationships between weight, wealth, race, sexuality and gender in the public eye (Farrell 2014, pp. 121-127). Given the key role of media in defining and redefining fat, it is not surprising that many fat studies writers have addressed the media at least in passing. Academic writing on fat bodies in the media has become a rich field during the 2000s and 2010s, addressing images of

Drawing upon the example of Australia’s first female Prime Minister, Julia Gillard, and her de facto partner, Tim Mathieson, this chapter considers the ways in which concerns around the ‘legitimacy’ of this relationship worked in tandem with other deeply embedded discourses about the ‘illegitimacy’ of her leadership within the Australian political and media spheres to call into question her credibility as prime minister. If successful leadership is presumed to require a successful relationship (as in a state sanctioned, heteronormative one), what happens when the celebrity political couple is not so easily assimilated into these loaded gendered narratives? Although much has been written about how, as PM, Gillard was subject to intense misogyny from other politicians, journalists and even ‘ordinary’ citizens via social media, this chapter seeks to interrogate what her representation reveals about the operations of contemporary celebrity culture as well as the ongoing privileging of marriage.