ABSTRACT
In our final chapter, the least fictional of our case studies, we engage with the limited ways in which news discourse works to construct Australian women political leaders, especially in terms of class and gender. The semioscape of constrained political power, delineated through the figures of Pauline Hanson, Julia Gillard and Julie Bishop, is the only example where a more reactionary form of postfeminism is articulated, specifically in terms of a pronounced ambivalence towards feminism. This ambivalence suggests that politics remains a masculine domain and that patriarchal national mythologies continue to shape political institutions and the conventions of reporting politics, and hence women are particularly constrained here.
