`Cherie: Lawyer, Wife, Mum': Contradictory Patterns of Representation in Media Reports of Cherie Booth/Blair

Abstract

This article examines the complex and contradictory patterns of representation used by the media in reports of Cherie Booth/Blair, wife of current British Prime Minister, Tony Blair. As a subject of media attention, she is particularly interesting for she acts as a focus for a range of identities that juxtapose stereotypes of women related to their roles in both the domestic and public domains (a celebrity wife, a successful barrister and an icon for `working mothers'). The data sample considered here consists of 130 British press reports which are analysed using lexicogrammatical tools from critical linguistics, specifically concentrating on naming practices and transitivity choices. This is complemented by a corpus-based approach which traces collocational patterns, especially those related to the phrase `working mother'. Both the naming patterns used and the contrast between the personalized profile of Booth and the collectivized stereotype of the `working mother' are understood as examples of `textual heterogeneity' and so evidence of social change. Moreover, these representations are also seen as operating within that social change to both reflect and potentially reinforce the gendered inequality presupposed by the ideological model of separate spheres.