| This study examines how news media in Australia depict or comment on the speech and the lecturer, former Australian Prime Minister Julia Gillard, after she made the speech fighting back the criticism of sexism from Tony Abbott. In the speech, she listed numerous examples to support her charge, and told of her personal offence at many of Mr. Abbott's actions, which all around one simple core value that woman are born to be weak on political arena than man. This 15-min speech has rapidly gone viral, becoming one of the hottest issues in 2012.Content analysis and discourse analysis were adopted in examining Australian news report of this speech within the period of three months, from October 2012 to January 2013. The analyzing samples were drawn from 8 major newspapers in Australian-The Australian, The Daily Telegraph (Sydney), The Age, The Courier Mail (Brisbane), The Herald Sun (Melbourne), The Mercury (Hobart), The Advertiser (Adelaide), and The Sunday Telegraph. A key-word searching engine was employed in determining involved samples with the key word "Post-feminism", "Misogyny speech" and "Julia Gillard". The number of final effective samples is 101.The paper is based on the discussion of the theories of Post-feminism. After a specific investigation of the definition and characteristics of Post-feminism, this paper tries to analyze how the misogyny speech was portrayed in Australian news media combined with a literature review of related research in media's role in determining female politicians. The content analysis focuses on the perspective of media's reports and the attitudes towards Gillard's speech. And the results indicated that although the perspective and standpoints of every news media slightly differs from each other, most media coverage still hold a negative view and interpret this event as a political issue. The discourse analysis respectively discussed the view that Australian news media hold in the motivation of Gillard's delivery, the understanding of the post-feminism and whether or not this speech should be regarded as a manipulation of gender strategy. Results of the analysis revealed that the reason why the first female prime minister was constructed as a unscrupulous, weak and selfish women by most Australian new media was that those institution have put too much emphasis on the political context over the motivation, and have no clear definition of misogyny, and the media's double-standard interpretation of post feminism also have been involved. This kind of limitation in interpretation of Post-feminism has become a main reason why the speech has attracted many negative feedbacks domestically. |
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