ECREA16-Abstract

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Friday, November 11

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GEC03

Gendered Identities, Politics and the Professional Sphere

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Twitter and the Gendered Election: Women, Men and Tweets in the 2015 UK General Election

K. Ross

, T. Burger

, C. Carter

Northumbria University, Media and Communication Design, Newcastle, United Kingdom

Cardiff, JOMEC, Cardiff, United Kingdom

Increasing numbers of British MPs haveTwitter accounts (currently around two-thirds of sitting MPs) although the extent to which they are active onTwitter

varies enormously. We report preliminary findings from research focused on 40 MPs’Twitter behaviour during the 2015 election campaign. We monitored

the tweets from the most prolific women and men politicians on Twitter to explore how their sex might influence the content or tone of their tweets and

the extent to which their messages were RT’d, favorited and attracted comments. Over the survey period, we captured 40,000 tweets and from that corpus,

derived a sub-sample of 1200 tweets which we coded against a set of variables. Initial findings suggest that women were slightly more likely to engage in

two-way communication with followers and the overall tone of women’s tweets was more positive than men’s. Women were significantly more likely than

men to send ‘thank you’messages to colleagues, constituents, party supporters and campaign team members. Men on the other hand were twice as likely

to send tweets which criticised others. These findings suggest that messaging on Twitter exhibits similar kinds of gender-based differences in style, tone

and content to those which have been observed in offline forms of communication. An important additional variable which was revealed as an important

influence on content, was political Party and findings show that political affiliation and whether and MP was in Government or oppositionmade a difference

in terms of tweet volume and content. Overall, public response in terms of either endorsement or challenge was relatively low and few tweets received high

volumes of RTs or faves, regardless of the sex of their authors.

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The Celebrity-Scientist: Genre, Gender, Genius

H. Ganetz

Stockholm University, Dept. of Ethnology- History of Religions and Gender Studies, Stockholm, Sweden

This paper discusses representations of science and scientists in a televised Nobel Banquet on Swedish public-service television, SVT. The televised Nobel

Banquet is a genre hybrid that consists of two genres, namely, science communication and award show. Drawing on cultural, media, and gender studies,

the paper examines the mediated and gendered persona of the scientist in the televised Nobel Banquet via contextualised textual analysis. The main

questions of this paper are as follows: In what ways do the media, the genre and the idea of geniality affect the representation of the scientist? The paper

suggests that the increasing ‘celebrification’ of scientists is characteristic of the past several decades, and that, among other factors, this has been due to

the entry of aspects of entertainment into banquet broadcasts. Through such processes, the“celebrity-scientist”has emerged within the high-status sphere

of science. However, a very specific type of celebrity is represented in the Nobel context: the celebrity-scientist is commonly a white man of high education

whose fame has been reached through hard work in competition with others of the same kind. This representation of a scientist and its associated quality

of genius will here be examined from a gender perspective.

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Patriarchy and Women in Arab Culture

I. Alwahaibi

Sultan Qaboos University, business communication, muscat, Oman

It is often assumed that in highly gender differentiated societies, women suffer much more inequality compared to men in work contexts than in societies

where that differentiation is less marked. These assumptions are based on the idea that patriarchy or associated structures are inevitably oppressive. In this

paper, we argue that social structures are immanent only within specific situated interactions and that these apparently constraining structures ( Patriarchy)

can be used as discursive resources to obtain power in the interaction.We argue that social structures, like patriarchy, don't exist in any objective sense, rath‑

er participants may show a sensitivity to them either through their identity work or through the particular things they say in the course of an interaction.

We look at this issue in the context of a formal meeting between library staff in a university in Oman. This meeting, which lasted for 56 minutes, was held

in September 2008 in the meeting room in the information center and was videotaped. In this meeting the information centre employees again reported

this problem to their manager and urged him to send a formal proposal to the dean’s office of the need to open a new department called the “text book

distribution department”, to be staffed by specialist employees whose main job duties would be to perform the textbook distribution tasks. Present at this

meeting were the manager of the information centre, two employees from the information technology division and six from the library and textbook divi‑

sion. Only two of the participants were female. The employees at the information center had been reporting their problem of extra workload to the dean’s

office for eight years. The meeting, we argue, is a form of institutional talk (Thornborrow, 2002) in which it is possible to analyze the role of both positional

power (pre-inscribed roles that carry different levels of status) and disciplinary power (the Foucaudlian view of power as a complex and shifting web of so‑

cial relations). We show that despite the highly gender differentiated nature of Omani society, the woman present at and contributing to the meeting was

able to mobilize an array of discursive resources such as The aim of this paper is to show how shifts in participants’ talk may result in shifts in alignment,

identity, in-groupness and out-groupness. The analysis demonstrates that discursive devices such as footing shift occur because of a particular goal that

the participants may want to achieve out of the interactional context. The analysis will show how the shift in the manager’s footing affected and influenced

the way the female librarians responded to the manager’s utterances.which enabled her to work collaboratively with her male colleagues to pursue specific

goals tied to their collective interests.