‘Iron Maidens’ vs. the ‘Witless Pet’: Typecasting the Woman Politician in Editorial Cartoons and Memes

Abstract

Woven into the fabric of our everyday life, different forms of media insinuate messages
that restore traditional hierarchies of male-female relationships and signal the
incongruity between ‘woman’ and the man-dominated public sphere. Among these,
editorial cartoons and internet memes (their more recent offspring) play their part in
naturalising the patriarchal order when representing women politicians, reiterating
thus societal norms and cultural assumptions that confine woman to the domestic space
(albeit through verbal-visual forms of humour, mockery or caricature). Combining
insights from semiotics with Kanter’s theory of the “role traps” (1993) devised for
women in leading positions, the paper will address instances of gender stereotyping
and typecasting in editorial cartoons and internet memes which mediate
representations of female political leaders (from Hillary Clinton and Theresa May to
Viorica Dăncilă, Romania’s first woman prime minister) both as records of public
controversies that affect a community at a given time, as well as clues to the discourses
which normalise a gendered-biased “homo politicus”.