Gendering Political Representation A Multimodal Analysis of US Campaign Training Websites for Women

Organizations that offer targeted political campaign training for women tackle the issue of women’s underrepresentation in US politics. They do so by offering practical training programs whose goal is to encourage women to get involved in public life and make their voices heard in the political domain. These organizations’ websites promote these programs by providing information about the practical aspects of the campaign trainings on offer, at the same time as they showcase, visually and verbally, role models of elected and to-be elected women politicians that set examples for other women to follow. This is achieved by exploiting the affordances of complex digitals texts that construct meaning through an integration of carefully selected verbal and visual semiotic resources. By combining a multimodal approach with a discourse-analytical perspective, this contribution identifies and analyzes the specific semiotic choices in the selection of the visual materials and the discursive strategies in the accompanying texts extracted from the websites of US organizations specialized in political campaign training for women. The analysis shows that two distinct role models of women politicians are visually and verbally negotiated in the sampled web pages.