Double discrimination of elderly women in the media

The topic of this article is the phenomenon of double, namely cross or additive discrimination against senior women in the media sphere. Many studies and articles are devoted to ageism, discrimination against the elderly and gender inequality as discrimination against women. Rarely and hardly ever in Serbia, research is focused on the topic of gender differences that determine the quality of life in old age. While some believe that gender inequality and stereotypes end with age, which is in itself a basis for discrimination, and that gender differences are equalized, others believe that gender differences are particularly pronounced in old age, especially when considering marginalized elderly populations such as elderly people belonging to the Roma nationality, people with disabilities, LGBT people and HIV-positive people. This article is a comprehensive literature review article. The authors applied theoretical and interpretative methods of research, discursive and critical thematic analysis. The interpretative method is based on the meanings and representation of different aspects of the issue. The main finding of this article is the existence and prevalence of a gap and contradiction between the reality of longer and better quality of life and outdated media representation of old age, especially of elderly women.

The media presentation of the migration crisis: An analysis of the discourse on the Croatian women politicians

This article analyses links between the archetypal myths in Croatian news stories and images of woman politicians transferring through the media to the public. A total of 73 articles have been empirically analysed using content analysis to identify master myths according to Jack Lule’s classification in Croatian news articles about the migration crisis 2015. The analysis covers the period from 31 July 2015 to 8 November 2015. The articles have been selected by searching web extension of the newspapers Jutarnji list, Večernji list and 24sata from 31 July 2015 to 8 November 2015. The data has been selected, coded and analysed per chosen woman politicians, Kolinda Grabar-Kitarović, Vesna Pusić, Mirela Holy, Ruža Tomašić and Milanka Opačić. The results show that the dominant myth in all analysed statements is the myth of a good mother. In doing so, the use of lexemes indicates a stereotyped and idealized social role of a woman who cares for and protects ‘her family’. Two framing perspectives are evident: one is a patriarchal, protective and defensive attitude towards migrants, while the other is humanitarian, based on a positive attitude towards migrants. The article’s value is that it provides a perspective on mythological narration within media texts, whereby the mythological narration could be used as a tool for stereotypical and ideological construction on politician’s images in the media.

Gendering journalistic voices for gendered political violence? Agential representations of Palestinian female suicide bombers in UK broadcast news media

In the late twentieth century, the rise of the female suicide bomber phenomenon was prevalent in Chechnya, Lebanon and Sri Lanka. Arguably, in terms of academic engagement and visibility within the wider public consciousness, the first wave of Palestinian female suicide bombers during the second intifada (2000–05) encapsulates particular notoriety in relation to the perceived deviance of Palestinian female participation in political violence. Key to this construction is the role of news media as an agent of power. This article examines coverage of Palestinian female suicide bombers during the second intifada period within the scarcely examined medium of British terrestrial broadcast news media. This article determines the impact of individual journalists' gender in producing forms of discourse that delegitimize political agency. In particular, it shall establish if female journalistic voices are complicit in communicating intersectional gendered and Orientalist frameworks.

Sport media and the cultural circulation of race/ethnicity: Moving from content analyses to production studies

The racial/ethnic diversity that can be seen in televised football, together with its wide audience, makes it an interesting place to study meanings given to race/ethnicity. Previous research on the content of these discourses has found that televised football in different countries reproduces a variety of racial/ethnic stereotypes. These discourses arguably help to perpetuate and ‘naturalize’ racial/ethnic inequities. In order to better illuminate how sport media serves as a site where discourses surrounding race/ethnicity are (re)constructed, a fruitful yet understated direction of future research would be to look at the production process of such discourses. Although the theoretical value of production studies has been noted in previous work, there is at this time a shortage of empirical production studies in sport media. The present article describes some of the main findings of previous research on the representation of race/ethnicity in televised football (a dominant subject of research in this area) and audience reception research. Furthermore, the article focuses on main findings from production studies in sport media, supplementing a focus on race/ethnicity with describing production studies on gender – as most production studies have mainly focused on gender and provide relevant insights for the study of race/ethnicity. We conclude with some future research avenues highlighting the importance of exploring production processes in relation to meanings given to race/ethnicity in sport media.

‘He needs pulling down a peg or two’: Assessing online fan responses to racialized discourse in sports broadcasting

Although overt expressions of racism are increasingly rare within the sport media, implicit and conscious/unconscious racial bias, on the other hand, is a common feature within contemporary sports reporting. A comprehensive body of research has illustrated that Black athletes are more likely to be praised for their supposed innate biological superiority while White athletes are more likely to be credited for their work ethic and intelligence. In addition, Black, Asian and minoritized ethnic athletes, such as Lewis Hamilton and Raheem Sterling, have often been criticized for being too ‘flashy’ by some sections of the UK press, which conjures up images of undeserved riches. These representations are symptomatic of a wider culture in which minoritized communities are ‘othered’. This article, then, focuses on one example of racial bias from BBC Radio Derby’s Sports Scene podcast from February 2020. Former professional footballer turned pundit, Craig Ramage, suggested that ‘all the young Black lads’ needed ‘pulling down a peg or two’ and needed to work harder. This work empirically investigated three online post titles across Facebook, Instagram and a forum to critically examine how contemporary football audiences reacted to such comments. The analysis illustrated that online participants were: (1) divided over whether Ramage’s comments were racist or not, (2) unsure of who was to blame, (3) unsure of who the victim was. The article concludes by outlining preventative measures to avoid such reoccurrences and emphasizes the importance of educational training around equality and diversity within the sport media.

Women and peace-building in Northern Ireland’s print news media

This research sits at the nexus of women, peace-building and the news media in order to decipher how the representations of women and peace-building in post-conflict Northern Ireland affect women’s social situation in divided societies recovering from violent ethnonational conflict. Women are habitually associated with non-political community-level reconciliation through an assumed innate and feminine propensity to peace. This is amplified through gendered news media portrayals which serve to reinforce patriarchal social knowledge, and in turn, this disenfranchises women by foregrounding their femaleness rather than political expertise; and damages peace by marginalizing a significant demographic of the population and intensifying social inequality, which is the foundation for conflict.

Ageing like a supermodel: Negotiating body in the celebrity ‘self-life writing’

In the modelling profession, ageing is a multi-challenging process. By analysing the auto/biography Becoming by Cindy Crawford and Katherine O´Leary, the ageing issues prove to be particularly stimulating. Crawford views her private and professional, internal and external self through a temporal perspective. The special focus of the analysis is a relationship to the body exposed to multiple views. In this context, the auto/biographical text becomes a relevant and stimulating document for questioning (self)presentations of ageing female celebrities, analysing the production of new cultural notions of appropriate ageing and transformations of beauty ideology that creates new (unrealistic) standards, norms and expectations.

Gifts of welcome: Precarity, intimacy and the gift in Die Farbe des Ozeans (Peren, 2011) and Welcome (Lioret, 2009)

This article examines the role of Europe as gift in Lioret's Welcome (2009) and Peren's Die Farbe des Ozeans (2011) by focusing on gestures of welcome extended by white European characters to undocumented migrants. In both films, these gestures include gifts, in the form of money, shelter or skills taught, that play an important narrative role, but subordinate refugee characters' lives and stories to the emotional needs of white European 'givers'. In this way gifts of welcome become violent acts that reinforce European assumptions about European political and epistemological superiority, and paper over the existence of colonial and racist violence that continues to produce precarious lives.

Crossing the European boundary: The conjoined figures of colonizer and migrant in Zama (Martel, 2017) and The Other Side of Hope (Kaurismäki, 2017)

Caught between the seemingly contradictory imageries of particularity and universality, 'European identity' could in fact be presumed but as a shorthand for ontological anxiety. The ('euro-') centric ontology that it denotes is marked by an ongoing ambivalence that both recoils from and accepts the superfluousness of boundaries. The obverse of this ambivalent concern with boundaries, we suggest, are the narrative efforts to consign it to the singular agency of the 'impossible' boundary crossing. Cinematographically speaking, the otherwise mute ontological anxiety is contained in the precariousness of the figures of colonizer and migrant. The way a 'European' cinema relates to these figures becomes all the more significant where 'Europe' denotes a challenging relationship, and not a 'thing'. It is in view of the ways in which they respond to this challenge that we examine Zama (Martel, 2017) and The Other Side of Hope (Kaurismäki, 2017). The focus, in other words, is on what nevertheless escapes their efforts: while Zama's out-of-place 'colonizer' obscures the inherent placelessness of colonial agency, Hope's symbiotic relationship between the self and the other withholds the reversibility of the 'self/other' dualism. In the instrumental visibility of their singular figures, we hope to show, both films contribute to the incidental visibility of the 'European' claim to transcend its own dualisms. The figures of colonizer and migrant are in fact the relatively visible symptoms of a cinematic labour whose ambivalences remain otherwise invisible.