Female combativeness in election posters?

Gidengil and Everitt's article "Gender and Reported Speech in Campaign News Coverage" (Political Communication 20: 209-232, 2003) is making me think about the gender aspects of posters.

The authors report research that women candidates can -- and do -- stress their combative side, i.e. stereotypically masculine traits, without losing their stereotypically feminine attributes. But if they overemphasize combativeness the media focus on this to the exclusion of the candidate's other aspects and ideas, and voters react negatively. Do female candidates stress combativeness in their posters?

Issei Ogata

Ogata returns to form with six intriguing new characters.

After some rather bland shows in the last couple of years, tonight Ogata portrayed three women and three men all with very distinctive characters and in interesting situations..

The first character is an elderly Japanese tourist drinking in a cafe in Paris. He gets drawn into a couple's argument that escalates when the husband's lover appears on the scene. This is a brilliant and very funny portrayal of confusion: about foreign countries, about love, and about younger generations..

The next character is a manual laborer who hangs around the supermarket (perhaps in Ota-ku, near Haneda Airport) where his estranged wife works. He is obviously well-known to everyone in the area as a drinker and waster, but is unable to understand why his wife has had a restraint order served to prevent him from coming within 300m of her or their son..

A cosmetics saleswomen resigns from her job, but before she leaves she gives everyone in the office a piece of her mind. She is not very bright and is soon persuaded that most of her accusations are wrong. Nevertheless, she demands a huge resignation fee and sets fire to the office when it is refused. This sketch was clearly inspired by the incident in Nagoya this year, and it was an interesting attempt to imagine how somebody could arrive in such a situation. But the sudden telescoping of several hours of action into a few minutes at the end was rather unconvincing. It might have been better to end the sketch at the point when she took out her lighter -- at which point everyone in the audience knew what was going to happen..

We join a single-parent carpenter and his enormous invisible family for New Year (the carpenter is very unusual in making repeat appearances in Ogata's shows over the past few years)..

Perhaps the highlight was the owner of a fish shop in some remote village. She is having a crush on the violinist from Tokyo who gave a concert the previous evening. When the violinist appears at her shop the next morning she is caught between decorum and common sense on the one hand and lust and a desire for adventure on the other..

The show finished with an aging female singer singing fantastically wacky songs to her aging female audience..

Munger review of The Winning Message

I just read Michael Munger's perceptive, and very funny, review of Adam Simon's The Winning Message: Candidate Behavior, Campaign Discourse, and Democracy (Cambridge Univ. Press, 2002).

Munger summarizes Simon's argument that political campaigns are about persuading unattached voters, who tend to have moderate views. Candidates try to focus campaigns on issues that it is in their advantage to discuss, which are rarely the same issues on which their opponents want to campaign. So debate on issues is unlikely to happen.

Munger's final comment is that we are unable to use outcomes of previous campaigns as guides to how to fight future campaigns. Election results do depend on how candidates campaign, but every campaign is unique.

The review is in Political Communication, 20:191-195, 2003.