What’s in a Frame? Framing Females

Problems need solutions. Public policies are no different. Framing shows us how to find those solutions. Diagnosis/prognosis – what is the public-policy problem? Emanuela Lombardo and Petra Meier give great insight about framing gender in the EU.

Here’s the key, though: One follows the “problem” with no question. It’s not: What is the solution? Instead, so often in political communication, and particularly with bloggers amplifying mainstream media, the media provides the frame – the prism – or the cage, and then subtly suggests: Here is the solution. Voilà!

Ideational intersectionality, or what I call the vortex, means organizing your solution in sections after we — a collective we, not “they” (established media, mainstream politicians supported by their lobbyists, or the polarized partisan few, like cracked Tea Potters) — define the problem.

What section of the intersection should we tackle first? Think fruit. How do you peel an orange? What about a tangerine, since the skin comes off so easily? How do you eat half a grapefruit? What about the decorative red cherry on top?

Social movements, like the civil-rights movement, should lead the way in ideational intersectionality. With women* and girls being more than half the population, African-Americans constituting 12 percent, and then throw in Latinos and LGBTers – we’re huge. The problems and the solutions are ours for the taking.

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*Women, in fact, are so common that they can’t even represent a class, according to the anti-women men still sitting on the Supreme Court bench, like Antonin Scalia, Clarence Thomas, Anthony Kennedy, Samuel Alito, and John Roberts, as discussed in my introduction in and Risa Liberwitz’s astute commentary in Telling Stories Out of Court: Narratives about Women and Workplace Discrimination.

About the Author: Ruth O'Brien

Professor Ruth O’Brien, who earned her Ph.D. in political science at UCLA, joined the Graduate Center’s doctoral faculty in 1997 and, in 2004, founded the “Writing Politics” specialization in political science. She also serves as an adjunct affiliated scholar with the Center for American Progress. In her research and books, she focuses on American politics, law, political theory without national borders, globalism, and American/global dichotomy. She edits the award-winning “Public Square” series for Princeton University Press, showcasing public intellectuals such as Jill Lepore, Jeff Madrick, Anne Norton, Martha Nussbaum, and Joan Scott. O’Brien is also launching “Heretical Thought,” an Oxford University Press political-theory series that is global in outlook. Her latest book, Out of Many One: Obama and the Third American Political Tradition (2013), with a foreword by journalist Thomas Byrnes Edsall, distinguished professor at Columbia’s School of Journalism, was honored with a 2013 “Author Meets Critic” American Political Science Association convention session. She also wrote Bodies in Revolt: Gender, Disability, and a Workplace Ethic of Care (2005), Crippled Justice: The History of Modern Disability Policy in the Workplace (2001), which received an honorable mention from Gustavus Meyers Center for the Study of Human Rights and Bigotry (“Meyers Center”), and Workers’ Paradox: The Republican Origins of the New Deal Labor Policy, 1886–1935 (1998). “Writing Politics” emanated from two books she contributed to and edited: Telling Stories out of Court: Narratives about Women and Workplace Discrimination (2008) and Voices from the Edge: Narratives about the Americans with Disabilities Act (2004), which earned another honorable mention from the Meyers Center. O’Brien’s controversial blog led Rush Limbaugh to dub her a “professorette.”

What’s in a Frame? Framing Females