Abstract
This qualitative research focuses on the online selves of women politicians in a specific linguistic and cultural context, West Bengal (WB) in India, by concentrating on both photographs and texts on social media. Empirically, it aims to understand party politics and visuals on social media through the lens of gender, during the 2021 Assembly election phase in WB. By using Luc Pauwels’ multi-modal framework, this study identifies how political parties depict women candidates and, in turn, how women themselves present themselves. It queries to what extent and how women candidates feature in the Facebook and Twitter activity of the four major political parties contesting the election in its campaign phase. It also interrogates how the visual political communication of these women candidates transgresses the boundaries between what is political and personal. Foregrounding identity construction through online spaces, it draws on epistemologies grounded in the socio-cultural context of South Asia to draw more attention to women in the field of digital social media studies.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Similar content being viewed by others
Notes
- 1.
India has a 3-Tier executive: elections are held at the federal, state and local (urban/rural) levels, to form central, state and local governments respectively. Union level elections are commonly termed “general elections” and state level, “assembly elections”.
References
Ahler, D. J., Citrin, J., Dougal, M. C., & Lenz, G. S. (2017). Face value? Experimental evidence that candidate appearance influences electoral choice. Political Behavior, 39(1), 77–102. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11109-016-9348-6
Barthes, R. (1977). Image, music, text (S. Heath, Trans.). Fontana. (Original work published 1961)
Bauer, N. M., & Carpinella, C. (2018). Visual information and candidate evaluations: The influence of feminine and masculine images on support for female candidates. Political Research Quarterly, 71(2), 395–407. https://doi.org/10.1177/1065912917738579
Beaumont, P. (2021, April 29). West Bengal elections go ahead despite India’s soaring Covid death toll. The Guardian. Retrieved from https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/apr/29/west-bengal-%20elections-india-covid-death-soaring
Bleiker, R. (2015). Pluralist methods for visual global politics. Millennium: Journal of International Studies, 43(3), 872–890. https://doi.org/10.1177/0305829815583084
Bock, M. A. (2020). Theorising visual framing: Contingency, materiality and ideology. Visual Studies, 35(1), 1–12. https://doi.org/10.1080/1472586X.2020.1715244
Cardo, V. (2021). Gender politics online? Political women and social media at election time in the United Kingdom, the United States and New Zealand. European Journal of Communication, 36(1), 38–52. https://doi.org/10.1177/0267323120968962
Coleman, R., & Wu, H. D. (2015). Image and emotion in voter decisions, the affect agenda. Lexington.
Devitt, J. (2002). Framing gender on the campaign trail: Female gubernatorial candidates and the press. Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly, 79(2), 445–463. https://doi.org/10.1177/107769900207900212
Farkas, X., & Bene, M. (2021). Images, politicians, and social media: Patterns and effects of politicians’ image-based political communication strategies on social media. The International Journal of Press/politics, 26(1), 119–142. https://doi.org/10.1177/1940161220959553
Grabe, M. E., & Bucy, E. P. (2009). Image bite politics: News and the visual framing of elections. Oxford University Press. Retrieved from https://doi.org/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195372076.001.0001
Guha, P. (2018). Gender gap in Indian politics through the lens of Facebook: Visual portrayal of women candidates by Indian media in Facebook. China Media Research, 14(2), 48–61.
Hindustan Times. (2021, March 24). West Bengal BJP chief Dilip Ghosh’s recent remark on CM Mamata Banerjee’s leg injury has stoked a massive controversy “if you want to show legs, then why are you wearing saree, wear a bermuda” he said: http://pic.twitter.com/qenht2bgrm [Tweet] Retrieved from https://twitter.com/htTweets/status/1374732066957389830
Johansson, B., & Holtz-Bacha, C. (2019). From analogue to digital negativity: Attacks and counterattacks, satire, and absurdism on election posters offline and online. In A. Veneti, D. Jackson, & D. G. Lilleker (Eds.), Visual political communication (pp. 99–118). Palgrave Macmillan. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-18729-3
Jungblut, M., & Haim, M. (2021). Visual gender stereotyping in campaign communication: Evidence on female and male candidate imagery in 28 countries. Communication Research, 1–23. https://doi.org/10.1177/00936502211023333
Kaplan, A. M., & Haenlein, M. (2010). Users of the world, unite! The challenges and opportunities of social media. Business Horizons, 53(1), 59–68. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.bushor.2009.09.003
Kazim, R. (2021, May 5). How the women of Bengal carried Mamata Banerjee to victory. The Wire. Retrieved from https://thewire.in/politics/west-bengal-women-voters-mamata-banerjee
Laha Roy, T. (2021, May 11). While TMC led digital, BJP championed traditional media with max ad inserts: TAM. Exchange4Media. Retrieved from https://www.exchange4media.com/media-others-%20news/while-tmc-led-digital-bjp-championed-traditional-media-with-max-ad-inserts-tam-%20112868.html
Lilleker, D. G., Veneti, A., & Jackson, D. (2019). Introduction. In A. Veneti, D. Jackson, & D. G. Lilleker (Eds.), Visual political communication (pp. 1–13). Palgrave Macmillan.
Mace, H. (2019, May 13). Mother, soil, and people: The gendering of Bengali nationalism past and present. Retrieved 12 February 2021, from Cambridge Gender and Sexuality History Workshop website: https://genderandsexualityhistory.news.blog/2019/05/13/mother-soil-and-people-the-%20gendering-of-bengali-nationalism-past-and-present/
Markham, A. (2012). Fabrication as ethical practice. Information, Communication & Society, 15(3), 334–353. https://doi.org/10.1080/1369118X.2011.641993
McGregor, S. C., Lawrence, R. G., & Cardona, A. (2017). Personalization, gender, and social media: Gubernatorial candidates’ social media strategies. Information, Communication & Society, 20(2), 264–283. https://doi.org/10.1080/1369118X.2016.1167228
Novelli, E. (2019). Visual political communication in Italian electoral campaigns. In A. Veneti, D. Jackson, & D. G. Lilleker (Eds.), Visual political communication (pp. 145–163). Palgrave Macmillan. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-18729-3
Party-wise List, All Members. (2020, November 10). Parliament of India, Lok Sabha, Government of India. Retrieved from http://loksabhaph.nic.in/Members/PartywiseList.aspx
Pauwels L. (2005). Websites as visual and multimodal cultural expressions: Opportunities and issues of online hybrid media research. Media, Culture & Society, 27(4), 604–613. https://doi.org/10.1177/0163443705053979
Pauwels, L. (2019). Visual methods for political communication research: Modes and affordances. In A. Veneti, D. Jackson, & D. G. Lilleker (Eds.), Visual political communication (pp. 75–96). Palgrave Macmillan.
Pauwels, L. (2020). A multimodal model for exploring the material culture of digital networked platforms and their practices. In D. Mannay & L. Pauwels (Eds.), The SAGE handbook of visual research methods (pp. 552–573). Sage. https://doi.org/10.4135/9781526417015.n35
Ray Chaudhury, P. (2021a). The Political asceticism of Mamata Banerjee: Female populist leadership in contemporary India. Politics & Gender, 1–36. https://doi.org/10.1017/S1743923X21000209
Ray Chaudhury, P. (2021b, May 7). How Mamata won woman vote. The Indian Express. Retrieved from https://indianexpress.com/article/opinion/columns/west-bengal-assembly-elections-mamata-%20banerjee-tmc-women-candidates-7305104/
Reese, S. D. (2001). Prologue—Framing public life: A bridging model for media research. In S. D. Reese, O. H. Gandy, & A. E. Grant (Eds.), Framing public life: Perspectives on media and our understanding of the social world (pp. 7–31). Lawrence Erlbaum. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781410605689
Roy, T. (2021, January 16). Ms. XXXXX [name concealed], you have put a condom on a Shivlinga which we Hindus, including me, hold as holiest of holies! you have thus committed an offence under Section 295A IPC (deliberate and malicious act intended to outrage religious feelings of any class by insulting ...(contd.): https://t.co/bzzxostkvw [Tweet] https://twitter.com/tathagata2/status/1350358427218837505
Russmann, U., Svensson, J., & Larsson, A. O. (2019). Political parties and their pictures: Visual communication on Instagram in Swedish and Norwegian election campaigns. In A. Veneti, D. Jackson, & D. G. Lilleker (Eds.), Visual political communication (pp. 99–118). Palgrave Macmillan. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-18729-3
Sharma, H. (2021, May 4). TMC average victory margins double BJP’s, won over 70 per cent of straight fights. The Indian Express. Retrieved from https://indianexpress.com/article/india/tmc-average-%20victory-margins-double-bjps-won-over-70-per-cent-of-straight-fights-7300993/
Steffan, D. (2020). Visual self-presentation strategies of political candidates on social media platforms: A comparative study. International Journal of Communication, 14, 3096–3118.
UNDP. (2020). Gender Inequality Index (GII). Retrieved from https://hdr.undp.org/en/content/gender-%20inequality-index-gii
Verhulst, B., Lodge, M., & Lavine, H. (2010). The attractiveness halo: Why some candidates are perceived more favorably than others. Journal of Nonverbal Behavior, 34(2), 111–117. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10919-009-0084-z
Verniers, G., & Mirchandani, M. (2021, March 22). How Mamata’s Trinamool broke the glass ceiling for women in politics. Article 14. Retrieved from https://www.article-14.com/post/how-mamata-s-%20trinamool-broke-the-glass-ceiling-for-women-in-politics
Vijayvargia, K. (2020, December 31). Jo kaam Didi ko 5 mahine baad karna hai, wo abhi se shuru karr diya!: http://pic.twitter.com/8bj63tlxtj [Tweet] Retrieved from https://twitter.com/KailashOnline/status/1344519707286638595
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2023 The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Banerjee, R. (2023). Elections and Social Media Cultures: Politics, Women and Visuals in West Bengal, India. In: Veneti, A., Rovisco, M. (eds) Visual Politics in the Global South. Political Campaigning and Communication. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-22782-0_3
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-22782-0_3
Published:
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-031-22781-3
Online ISBN: 978-3-031-22782-0
eBook Packages: Political Science and International StudiesPolitical Science and International Studies (R0)