Abstract
This article engages with news coverage of the sexual assault scandal
involving elite politician Dominique Strauss-Kahn and hotel cleaner
Nafissatou Diallo to explore what their media treatment reveals about
current relations of gender and power in the public sphere. Several key
questions inform the analysis. What happens when a low status
complainant speaks to power? What strategies of denigration take place to
challenge her credibility? And how (in what terms) do the media make
sense of the encounter between the two parties? Feminist media analyses
of sex crime in the news have shown how misogynist attitudes underlie the
depiction of women who speak out. This analysis reveals how the rules of
media engagement are stacked against the speaking subject because she
is both female and poor. It finds that economic inequalities, as well as
those of gender and race, are dramatically inscribed in the mythic
narratives of news. The overall conclusion is that the public sphere and its
dynamics of denigration and disrespect towards women who complain are
problematically organised along fault-lines embedded in the gendered
socio-economics of the public and private/domestic realms.
© 2018, SAGE Publications. The attached document is an author produced version of a paper which has been accepted for publication in the European Journal of Cultural Studies, uploaded in accordance with the publisher’s self-archiving policy. Some minor differences between this version and the final published version may remain. Once published, we suggest you refer to the final published version should you wish to cite from it.
involving elite politician Dominique Strauss-Kahn and hotel cleaner
Nafissatou Diallo to explore what their media treatment reveals about
current relations of gender and power in the public sphere. Several key
questions inform the analysis. What happens when a low status
complainant speaks to power? What strategies of denigration take place to
challenge her credibility? And how (in what terms) do the media make
sense of the encounter between the two parties? Feminist media analyses
of sex crime in the news have shown how misogynist attitudes underlie the
depiction of women who speak out. This analysis reveals how the rules of
media engagement are stacked against the speaking subject because she
is both female and poor. It finds that economic inequalities, as well as
those of gender and race, are dramatically inscribed in the mythic
narratives of news. The overall conclusion is that the public sphere and its
dynamics of denigration and disrespect towards women who complain are
problematically organised along fault-lines embedded in the gendered
socio-economics of the public and private/domestic realms.
© 2018, SAGE Publications. The attached document is an author produced version of a paper which has been accepted for publication in the European Journal of Cultural Studies, uploaded in accordance with the publisher’s self-archiving policy. Some minor differences between this version and the final published version may remain. Once published, we suggest you refer to the final published version should you wish to cite from it.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Journal | European Journal of Cultural Studies |
| Publication status | Accepted/In press - 1 Oct 2018 |
Keywords
- inequality
- economics
- voice
- public sphere
- subaltern
- sexual assault
- news media
- gender
