Feminism in the Papers

Abstract

This paper argues that existing accounts of the “post-feminist” gender regime place excessive emphasis on modes of repudiation of feminism, at the expense of analysing possibilities for the affirmation of feminism in the mainstream media. I argue that this oversight may be rectified by an assessment of the ways in which feminism is affirmed, contested and spoken about in the pages of the quality press. Consequently, the bulk of the paper consists of an analysis of articles specifically about feminism and gender in two British quality newspapers with divergent political orientations. These are The Guardian, which is left-leaning and broadly pro-feminist, and The Times, which is more conservative and ambivalent towards feminism. In so doing, the paper introduces the notion of feminist “domestication” as central to constructions of feminism in The Guardian, and to a lesser extent in The Times. Domestication refers to the explicit or implicit affirmation of a safe, unthreatening form of feminism via a disavowal of a more radical feminist position. Strategies of domestication thus constitute an acceptable space for feminism to reside, whilst at the same time curtailing its more radical political dimensions. Introducing the notion of “domestication” gives us a better understanding of the conditions under which feminism can be affirmed within mainstream public discourse.