Following the money: News, sexual assault and the economic logic of the gendered public sphere

Abstract

This article engages with news coverage of the sexual assault scandal involving elite politician Dominique Strauss-Kahn and hotel cleaner Nafissatou Diallo to explore what their media treatment reveals about current relations of gender and power in the public sphere. Several key questions inform the analysis. What happens when a low status complainant speaks to power? What strategies of denigration take place to challenge her credibility? And how (in what terms) do the media make sense of the encounter between the two parties? Feminist media analyses of sex crime in the news have shown how misogynist attitudes underlie the depiction of women who speak out. This analysis reveals how the rules of media engagement are stacked against the speaking subject because she is both female and poor. It finds that economic inequalities, as well as those of gender and race, are dramatically inscribed in the mythic narratives of news. The overall conclusion is that the public sphere and its dynamics of denigration and disrespect toward women who complain are problematically organized along faultlines embedded in the gendered socio-economics of the public and private/domestic realms.