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- All Subjects: Gender
- Creators: School of Politics and Global Studies
The Gender Quota of Costa Rica: An impactful method to address women’s issues through representation
On the night of any presidential election, cable news networks have access to much of the same data, including exit polls, votes by precinct and votes by county. Still, the order and the time that they make their state-by-state projections often differs. At any given moment during election night, the total electoral votes for a candidate can be different from one network to another.
The question this thesis set out to answer was: why is there difference between when cable news networks call each state, and subsequently the entire election in the race for president? To answer this question, research was broken into three different parts: cable news biases, the methodology behind how the cable news networks produce election night coverage, and finally, an analysis of the actual 2016 election night coverage of Fox News, CNN and MSNBC.
To visualize the analysis of the 2016 election coverage, all of the data collected was put into GIFs that showed minute by minute how the three cable networks called the election, from start to end. The GIFs included a map of the country, and a running total of electoral votes for each candidate.
The media often portrays and the public often percieves white women and women of color politicians experience feminist obstacles, such as the masculine-feminine double bind and being dehumanized in the same way. Many of these representations of women of color politicians in society do not incorporate the impact of intersectionality and confining gender schemas; therefore, women of color politician’s experiences are often lumped together with that of their white women counterparts. This phenomenon ultimately contributes to the persistence of color-blind racism in the United States, which negatively effects the life outcomes of women of color politicians and women of color in general. In effort to help lessen the effects of color-blind racism locally and in government, some tools on how to reflect on one’s own biases are provided and avenues for change are proposed.
Religion and gender are two contemporary, heavily influential social identity markers that the media engages with. In India, Bollywood simultaneously interacts with religious and gender identity by producing many movies on Hindu-Muslim inter-religious romantic relationships in the twenty-first century. Bollywood’s Hindu-Muslim romance movies are stories with a central focus on a romantic relationship in which one lover is Hindu and the second is Muslim. The masculinity and femininity of the Hindu and Muslim characters are not accidental; it is meticulously articulated in every movie. This thesis explores two sets of patterns in the movies: themes in love stories and gender identity across the protagonists. It is important to note that representation of religious identity in Bollywood is highly debated with a special emphasis on Muslim identity since they are a religious minority and the political "Other". This thesis acknowledges that the presence of Muslims in Bollywood is complicated and not black and white, but it focuses on the representation of Muslims that is connected romantically with Hindus.