Political leadership as an act of balance: The hybrid feminities of female leaders : An actor-oriented analysis of Annie Lööf and Ebba Busch Thor

The aim of this thesis is to apply an actor-oriented perspective to the study of gendered political leadership. For decades, this research area has been predominantly focused on how the media produces gender-stereotypical coverage of female politicians without taking into account their own self-representation. As a consequence, I argue, this research field paradoxically tend to reproduce an overall image of female politicians as helpless victims of the representation of others without capacity to exercise agency on their own. The purpose of this thesis is to examine how female politicans construct their own public persona in contemporary political reality. Departing from gender theory, this paper analyzes the social media representation of Annie Lööf - leader of the Swedish centre party - and Ebba Busch Thor - leader of the Swedish Christian democratic party. Using qualitative thematic analysis, this study finds that the online image of thevtwo party leaders overwhelmingly corresponds to traditional feminity, which contends a common assumption that female politicians actively try to abandon mainstream femininity in favor of their public images as political leaders and as a way to break free from "otherness" in a mascunilized political arena. This suggests that hybridity is a useful term in the study of gendered political leadership. A conclusion is that women politicans not always keep their femininity low-key, but may choose to embrace critical aspects of femininity in their leadership role and therein achieve a delicate balance between masculine leadership and authentic womanhood that makes them accepted as political leaders