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Women, Power and the Media Aston University, Birmingham Saturday 15th - 16th September 2007 Call for Papers Women are increasingly gaining access to positions of political power. Recent evidence of this is displayed among other facts by the appointment of a female head of state in Chile, Germany, Jamaica, Liberia and South Korea. In France and in the US, election campaigns are currently being fought which raises the prospect of the first female presidency. The increasing presence of women as political leaders challenges traditional social conventions that, until recently, have been based on a gender-based division of roles and have constructed political leadership as a male responsibility. Femininity and power have been commonly seen as incompatible. This raises the question of whether the growing prominence of women in political leadership roles in any national context is matched by the social reception of female leaders and how the public react to and reconcile femininity and power. This process can be examined by using the methods of historical, sociological and psychological analysis. A complementary perspective is provided by looking at the language used to name, portray and qualify women in the public forum. In so doing, it is hoped to explore asymmetries that exist with respect to femininity and power and to demonstrate how these are linguistically constructed in the public domains. The media are a particularly fruitful domain of study for such investigations, as they shape and are shaped by received social conventions. The main aim of this conference is to bring together studies assessing the (a)symmetrical treatment of female political leaders in the media. The intention is to establish the extent to which gender bias marks political leadership. We particularly welcome discourse-based studies that may look at the way leaders are named, discussed and qualified in a monolingual or contrastive perspective. We invite contributions from discourse analysts, sociolinguists, translation scholars, and semiologists. Papers from philosophy, social sciences as well as literary, film and cultural studies will also be considered. Abstracts in English of no more than one page including references will specify which leader is considered, for what particular period, which corpus is used, what parameters are looked at, and the extent of asymmetrical treatment of the considered leaders. They should be sent by email no later than May 15th 2007 to Pierre Larrivée [[log in to unmask]]. The organisers will seek to publish a selection of the papers presented. Calendar: Deadline for abstracts 15th May 2007 Acceptance Notifications 15th June 2007 Conference 15th September 2007 Organisation Committee Dr Sylvia Jaworska Dr Pierre Larrivée Scientific Committee Dr Urszula Clark Dr Angela Kershaw Dr Pam Moores Dr Raquel Medina Dr Christina Schaeffner Prof Anne Stevens