The politics of appearance: Media framing of Kamala Harris’s fashion and female political leadership

This thesis investigates how media emphasis on appearance shapes perceptions of women’s political credibility through a comparative case study of Kamala Harris, former Vice President of the United States and Sri Mulyani Indrawati, former Indonesia’s Minister of Finance. It brings together framing theory, gendered mediation and multimodal discourse analysis to examine how news and lifestyle outlets construct the “politics of appearance” around women in power across different media systems. The empirical analysis is based on a purposive corpus of 30 articles and 77 images drawn from The New York Times, The Guardian, Vogue, ELLE, Kompas, The Jakarta Post and Tempo, published between 2020 and 2024. Texts were coded for four primary frames, leadership and competence, fashion and appearance, emotion and empathy and private life and personal image, plus a double bind flag, while images were examined for gaze, angle, composition, attire and context and assigned parallel visual frames. The study then assessed alignment between textual and visual narratives. Findings show that appearance centred and private life narratives together outnumber leadership frames in textual coverage, even in articles built around salient political moments. Harris is most often framed through style and persona and explicit double bind dynamics are concentrated in her US and international coverage. Sri Mulyani Indrawati receives relatively more leadership framing yet her authority is repeatedly anchored in Kebaya and other markers of respectable national femininity. Visually, leadership and appearance frames are more evenly balanced but half of all articles combine policy oriented text with fashion focused images or vice versa, producing unstable multimodal messages. The thesis argues that fashion operates as both a constraint and a strategic resource, enabling women leaders to inscribe authority and identity through dress while remaining subject to gendered and culturally specific norms. It contributes a crosscultural, multimodal perspective to debates on gendered political communication and suggests that more gender aware editorial practices must engage critically with both language and visuals when representing women in power.