The politics of normalising gendered violence: feminised austerity and masculinised wealth creation

According to UN data, 1 in 3 women worldwide are subject to violence. Yet male sexual violence often fails to be part of public discourse. To explore this relative silencing of discussion is to consider how media narratives normalise male violence towards women. Using the UK austerity measures as an illustrative case study, we explore how mediated political discourses keep masculine wealth out of our ‘imagination’. Connecting the language of violence to policies which harm women, discursively reinforces the notion that violence and women are intimately linked. We further maintain that restoring gendered language to our discussion enables us to make visible underlying power structures, which are premised in violent relations of gender. The article’s key contribution is to argue that it is the structural embeddedness of neoliberal hegemonic masculinity, and its mediation in political discourse, is what enables violence towards women to be both so ubiquitous and yet unremarkable.