At the U.S. 2012 general election, six minority women were newly elected to the House of Representatives, a net increase from 21 to 23, and a rise from 23% to 27% as a proportion of all women in the House (CAWP 2010, 2012). Among this group was Iraq War veteran Tulsi Gabbard (D-HI 2nd District), the first Hindu American to serve in Congress. Despite generally positive coverage, her local paper also framed Gabbard's identity as an “underdog … on the margins of popular respectability.” In Utah, Mormon Mia Love ran the first viable black female Republican campaign, securing 47% of the vote in the state's overwhelmingly white 4th District. Love was frequently framed positively as a “historic candidate” and was invited to speak at the GOP convention that year. Despite this, her self-portrayal as a product of the American dream—linking her second-generation Haitian identity to her partisan politics—drew sharp criticism. Local campaign coverage even interrogated the legality of her family history with headlines such as “Love's Immigrant Story may be True, but Some Questions Linger.”

Leaders' debates have become a feature of contemporary election campaigning. While they are an historical feature of the US landscape, in the UK they are a more recent phenomenon. The second UK 2015 general election leadership debate comprised seven candidates, of which three were women. While a Times poll reported Nicola Sturgeon as the 'winner', much of the coverage focused on the relative strengths and weaknesses of the candidates. Using qualitative thematic analysis, and adopting the notion that gender is 'performed' (cf. Butler, 1999) we explore three features of coverage of the debate. First, the ways in which the debate itself was constructed as a masculine activity through a series of highly gendered metaphors; second, how newspaper frames reinforced gendered notions of masculinity and femininity in respect of political leadership; and third, how the success of women in the debates was constructed as the emasculation of their male rivals. Crucially, we focus not just on the 'feminisation' of women in the political arena, but also on the ways in which masculinity is posited as a criterion for the evaluation of politicians of all genders. Main article There has been much public discussion of politicians' awareness of the media's ability to frame their public perception. Media play an active role in shaping how we perceive the behaviour of politicians (cf. Street, 2001), and a great deal has been written in terms of the techniques and strategies used by

Internationally, scholars have raised substantial concerns regarding unfavorable news coverage of female political candidates and representatives. However, prior research has scarcely considered the intersectional effects of political actors’ race and gender in this context. I investigate these dynamics through a case study of the U.K. 2010 general election, a breakthrough year for black, Asian, and minority ethnic (BAME) women in British politics. Only three had previously been elected to parliament but a further seven joined their ranks that year. While headlines celebrated the possibility of a “small revolution” resulting in “the most diverse parliament ever,” the press also subjected BAME female candidates to exceptional scrutiny regarding their credentials and ability to “transform politics.” Employing a quantitative content analysis of national newspaper coverage, I find that the apparent newsworthiness of BAME women’s intersectional identity was a double-edged sword. While they arguably enjoyed a visibility advantage compared with white female candidates, their coverage was also exceptionally negative and narrowly focused on their ethnicity and gender. I argue that as national legislatures become increasingly diverse, single axis analyses of the effects of politicians’ race, gender, or other axes of identity are insufficient to capture their combined effects on press coverage of politics.

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