Media exposure of novel protests: domestic femininity in news coverage of the Great Railway Adventure protests

Social Movements often incorporate masculinity into protest events as a means of achieving media attention. This attention is then used to mobilize, increase membership, and generate social and political outcomes. This article explores the media attention potential of novel social movement actions that deal with ‘domestically feminine’ elements of protest. This article examines the case of the Great Railway Adventure, a series of protests in England organized by the Craftivist Collective and Climate Rush incorporating feminine dress, craftwork, and food. It analyzes the success of these elements in generating media attention and the role the elements play in news media’s framing of the protests. By employing a qualitative content analysis of newspaper articles, I found that the elements were able to achieve limited levels of media attention through novelty and situational irony when combined with more standard elements of direct action campaigning. These elements also shaped the content of many but not all of the news articles.