Focusing primarily on visual forms of representation, but also including material on literary representation, this volume brings together studies as apparently disparate as the iconography of power in Mediterranean prehistory and clothing and cultural meaning in the First and Second World Wars. What draws these chapters together is the common focus on how the scholar of the twenty-first century can pursue the interpretation of past representational cultural production from a gendered perspective. The fruit of research by academics from the fields of archaeology, classics and ancient history, art history and social history, and from both sides of the Atlantic, this volume is a fascinating introduction to a developing field.

Focusing primarily on visual forms of representation, but also including material on literary representation, this volume brings together studies as apparently disparate as the iconography of power in Mediterranean prehistory and clothing and cultural meaning in the First and Second World Wars. What draws these chapters together is the common focus on how the scholar of the twenty-first century can pursue the interpretation of past representational cultural production from a gendered perspective. The fruit of research by academics from the fields of archaeology, classics and ancient history, art history and social history, and from both sides of the Atlantic, this volume is a fascinating introduction to a developing field.

This broad-ranging text offers a comprehensive outline of how visual images, language and discourse work as `systems of representation'. Individual chapters explore: representation as a signifying practice in a rich diversity of social contexts and institutional sites; the use of photography in the construction of national identity and culture; other cultures in ethnographic museums; fantasies of the racialized `Other' in popular media, film and image; the construction of masculine identities in discourses of consumer culture and advertising; and the gendering of narratives in television soap operas.

What is symbolic representation? Since Hanna Pitkin’s seminal The Concept of Representation, the symbolic has been the least studied dimension of political representation. Innovatively adopting a discursive approach, this book - the first full-length treatment of symbolic representation - focuses on gender issues to tackle important questions such as: What are women and men symbols of, and how is gender constructed in policy discourse? It studies what functions symbolic representation fulfils in the construction of gender, what social roles get legitimized in policy discourse, and how this affects power constellations, ultimately revealing much about the relation between symbolic, descriptive, and substantive representation. Emanuela Lombardo and Petra Meier draw on theories of symbolic representation and gender, as well as rich primary material about political debates on labour and care issues, partnership and reproductive rights, gender violence, and quotas. Using this original data, the authors show that reconsidering symbolic representation from a discursive perspective makes explicit issues of (in)equality embedded within particular constructions, as well as their consequences for political representation and gender equality. This important exploration raises relevant new questions regarding the representation of gender that form valuable contributions to the fields of political science, political theory, sociology, and gender studies.