Victims and Villains: Exploring the Media's Representations of Gender in the British Press and the Impact of These Depictions on British Muslim Experiences of Belonging

A recent spate of “multicultiphobia” in Europe has seen German Chancellor Angela Merkel recently pronounce the failure of multiculturalism, a sentiment further echoed by British Prime Minister, David Cameron and the then President of France, Nicolas Sarkozy. It has been suggested the continued existence of radically different practices by Muslims highlights an “illiberality” about multiculturalism, since the latter is alleged to license these practices. This paper presents findings of content and critical discourse analyses based on the researcher’s doctoral thesis examining the media’s representations of Muslims around the period of the London bombings. It presents a comparison of how gender is represented in the British press, exploring in particular how these debates play out with respect to structure and agency. 503 articles were analysed in the six-month period preceding and following the attacks on London from five major national newspapers. It will be shown how belonging for Muslims can become a problematic negotiation as a result of these representations. While Muslim “differences” are recognised, their negative representation signifies that there exist limits to what can be tolerated in multicultural states. It is argued that alleged failure of multiculturalism is a reflection of multiculturalism’s inherent liberality rather than illiberality. The fact that radical alterity beyond the spaces allotted by liberalism cannot be tolerated represents the failure of multiculturalism.