Camila Montiel McCann

I am a doctoral candidate in my third-year. I research in the field of gender and language and my PhD examines the linguistic positioning of women and minority genders in Britain’s broadsheet newspapers. I apply a combination of feminist critical discourse analysis and feminist poststructuralist discourse analysis to analyse news articles, retrieved using Nexis. My key areas of interest are hegemonic femininity and intersectional feminism, far-right populist discourse, media studies and postfeminism. My PhD [working] title is: ‘Negotiating hegemonic femininity in Trump’s world: The positioning of ‘woman’ as a political tool in British broadsheet newspapers’. My research aims to analyse the representation of women and minority genders in British broadsheet news articles and how this may be used to update, maintain, or undermine hegemonic femininity. I apply intersectional feminist theory to produce a model for hegemonic femininity that explains how and why certain femininities are marginalised whilst others are privileged. I am interested in how (post)feminism has become appropriated into neoliberal capitalist discourse in order to adapt hegemonic femininity so that it remains appealing to an increasingly feminist-aware public. My research examines how this appropriation may be manipulated for political purposes, particularly by the populist far-right.