Australian Cartoonists' Caricatures of Women Politicians - From Kirner to Stott-Despoja

Abstract

In June 1999, the Labor Party’s deputy leader, Jenny Macklin, argued that cartoons such as the following two of Meg Lees were offensive and demeaning to women politicians because they reflect the cartoonists’ limited and unimaginative view of senior women in politics. For Macklin, women politicians are stereotyped as housewives, or objects for male sexual gratification, rather than depicted as ‘the politician that is the woman’.1 These claims are worth examining and are done so here in relation to cartoonists’ caricatures of some senior women politicians, in particular former Democrat leaders Meg Lees, Cheryl Kernot and Natasha Stott- Despoja; former Victorian Premier, Joan Kirner and the phenomenon that was Pauline Hanson’s One Nation.