Political candidates draw on their personal identities to build social identity-based coalitions
In this chapter, Kreiss and McGregor focus on candidate and campaign strategic attempts at “identity ownership” (Kreiss, Lawrence, and McGregor 2020) during primary election campaigns, especially through digital and social media. Identity ownership occurs when voters perceive a candidate as a plausible “prototype” (Jackson and Hogg, 2010) for a particular group. This prototypicality is marked by the perception that a candidate fits within and represents said group’s characteristics, norms, and values. To date, a robust body of literature has analyzed candidate “issue ownership” (e.g., Egan 2013), wherein politicians seek to align themselves with the issues their party is perceived by voters as having unique competency to address. Here the authors build on their previous work to analyze and empirically document how during primary elections candidates craft rhetoric and campaigns create communications that attempt to make some identities salient in the minds of voters, align candidates and their platforms with particular intrapartisan social identities, and craft and “extend” their own identities for electoral gain. Their argument is that through communication, and especially given the affordances of digital and social media that facilitate speaking to narrow slices of the electorate (Kreiss, Lawrence, and McGregor 2018), candidates and campaigns strive to construct and convey the identities of the groups of constituents they seek to represent, including conveying information about the policies they will pursue through the lens of appealing to these particular social groups.
Think of narratives that alienate, essentialize, and undermine people based on identity-based differences as identity propaganda
This article develops the concept of “identity propaganda,” or narratives that strategically target and exploit identity-based differences in accord with pre-existing power structures to maintain hegemonic social orders. In proposing and developing the concept of identity propaganda, we especially aim to help researchers find new insights into their data on misinformation, disinformation, and propaganda by outlining a framework for unpacking layers of historical power relations embedded in the content they analyze. We focus on three forms of identity propaganda: othering narratives that alienate and marginalize non-white or non-dominant groups; essentializing narratives that create generalizing tropes of marginalized groups; and authenticating narratives that call upon people to prove or undermine their claims to be part of certain groups. We demonstrate the utility of this framework through our analysis of identity propaganda around Vice President Kamala Harris during the 2020 US presidential election.
Audiences across platforms consume and create meanings about media in transgressive ways
Feminism can reflect the cultural moment, especially as media appropriate and use feminist messaging and agenda to various ends. Yet media can also push boundaries, exposing audiences to ideas they may not be familiar with and advancing public acceptance of concepts once considered taboo. Moreover, audiences are far from passive recipients, especially in the digital age. In Media-Ready Feminism and Everyday Sexism, Andrea L. Press and Francesca Tripodi focus on how audiences across platforms not only consume but also create meanings—sometimes quite transgressive meanings—in engaging with media content. If television shows such as Game of Thrones and Jersey Shore and dating apps such as Tinder are sites of persistent everyday sexism, then so, too, are they sites of what Press and Tripodi call "media-ready feminism." In developing a sociologically based conception of reception that encompasses media's progressive potential, as well as the processes of domestication through which audiences and users revert to more limited cultural schemas, Press and Tripodi make a vital contribution to gender and media studies, and help to illuminate the complexity of our current moment.