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‘Basic Instinct’ in Parliament: Discursive intersections of class, sexuality, and gender in talk around the UK House of Commons
Laura Kilby (University of the West of Scotland)
In April 2022, Labour deputy Leader Angela Rayner found herself as frontpage news when a mainstream UK Sunday newspaper ran a story claiming that she attempted to ‘distract’ the, then, Prime Minister Boris Johnson by crossing and uncrossing her legs during House of Commons debate. In this talk I will present research that adopts a macro/micro discourse analytic approach to examine a corpus of 74 articles associated with this news story to develop an intersectional understanding of media portrayals of Angela Rayner as a White, working-class origin woman politician. I will outline two overarching discourses that construct Angela Rayner through opposing lenses of unrespectability and respectability. Both confer and invoke classed and gendered notions of the (un)respectable woman, whilst upholding the ‘elite male as norm’ and invoking a classed, gendered double bind for women in political life. I will argue that these discourses serve to restrict working-class women’s ability to adopt, reject, or demolish elite, masculine standards and caution against working-class women politicians by framing classed and gendered markers as inherently incompatible with elite political life. In drawing conclusions, I suggest that this technology of governance has implications for voting decisions, our shared understanding of the overall appropriateness of working-class women in positions of power as well as our treatment towards them.
In-person: Court Room (Lord Balerno Building), Heriot-Watt University, Edinburgh; Online: click ‘Join via MS Teams’.