title: Updating Hegemonic Femininity: A Feminist Critical and Poststructuralist Discourse Analysis of the British Broadsheet Press
Creators: name: Montiel McCann, Camila
Publisher: name: University of Liverpool Repository
Year: 2023

description: Although research on hegemonic femininity has certainly increased since Connell’s (1987, p.302) argument that women lack the social power to have hierarchical relationships among themselves, such research has yet to comprehensively model this hierarchy and explain how it is institutionalised. Moreover, how hegemonic femininity is updated in order to appeal to a society that is increasingly conscious of calls for women’s equality has yet to be explored. This thesis aims to fill these gaps in the literature by providing a coherent and comprehensive model for hegemonic femininity. Moreover, applying postfeminist theory, I explain how hegemonic femininity can be updated for contemporary society by appropriating aspects of an individualised feminism in order to give the impression of gender equality, whilst maintaining patriarchy. This model is applied to investigate how representations of hegemonic femininity may be used to further certain political agendas – specifically, that of the far-right. In the UK today, the Conservative government has been moving increasingly to the right, producing ever stricter law and order policies and targeting immigrants, refugees and other already marginalised communities, such as the transgender community. Using populist tactics, the Conservatives make increasing attacks on these communities in order to justify their unjust policies, but they also increasingly make claims to feminism. This apparent paradox between far-right, conservative politics and feminism, which has typically been associated with progressive politics, can be explained through an understanding of how neoliberal capitalist culture has appropriated and transformed feminism for its own ends. By studying representations of both hegemonic and marginalised femininities in the UK’s broadsheet newspapers, this thesis exposes the subtle and unsubtle ways that hierarchal femininities can be manipulated by news media in order to maintain hegemony. Studying a dataset of 1,263 broadsheet news articles, that has been quantified to track topical and gendered discursive patterns, I identify three key topics and social actors that have dominated the British news cycle’s representations of femininity from 2020-2021. These are the leadership of Scottish First Minister, Nicola Sturgeon; the Sarah Everard case; and the moral panic over transgender femininity. Applying a hybrid feminist critical and feminist poststructuralist discourse analytic approach, news articles on these topics from across the broadsheet press were qualitatively analysed. I find that hegemonic femininity is updated in the reporting on these topics by both the conservative and progressive newspapers. By appropriating a neoliberal and capitalist (post)feminism, issues of gender inequality in the UK are hidden in the broadsheets in favour of the individualisation of women’s experiences, which enables the maintenance of the capitalist hierarchies that are crucial to the power of the British press itself.