Image Analyses of Gender and Politics: Charting the Future of Visual Methods in Political Science

The ways in which images are consumed by the public have significant implications, for example, on gender stereotyping of women candidates (Jungblut and Haim 2023), social media influencers’ effects on youth (Schmuck, Hirsch, Stevic, and Matthes 2022), and women politicians’ self-representation on media (Bast, Oschatz, and Renner 2021). Social scientists are debating how to analyze images in a growing age of social media (Chen, Sherren, Smit, and Lee 2023), yet there has been limited discussion about how gender and politics scholars conduct image analyses, defined as the study of photos and videos in a way that interrogates “the appearance of things…[and] what lies behind those appearances” (Henny 2012, 43; Emmison, Smith, and Mayall 2012). This paper offers a systematic analysis of how past gender and politics scholars have used images in research (whether for content analysis, in experiments, etc.) and what ontological and epistemological claims they have made (or not) made about these images. I explain what Penny Tinkler (2014) calls a “naïve” realist view of images “as a transcription or copy of the real world” and the alternative view that images are “constructions that have a complex relationship to the world they depict” (2014, 3) . I argue for the latter view in the study of gender and politics and I suggest ways that future gender scholars can think more extensively about the ontological and epistemological implications of images for the study of politics.