Representation of female tennis players

Stumbled across this excellent feminist take on how female tennis players are represented through language while looking for something else. There's also some very good stuff in Lia Litosseliti's Gender and Language: Theory and Practice, a text that I came across last year and used successfully with AS ENGA2 students.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/sep/02/hadley-freeman-jayceee-lee-dugard

Hadley Freeman on Jaycee Lee Dugard

Women beware women

Joanna Bourke takes a look at coverage of women's violence and asks why it's not reported in the same ways as men's violence.

Women Beware Women

Charlie Brooker on men

It's typical Charlie Brooker style - opinionated, rude, a bit surreal - but lots of fun for taking  a look at gender from a different perspective.

Charlie Brooker in The Guardian

Encouraging understanding of difference

Here's a piece from today's BBC website about attempts to offer positive representations and increased understanding of mental health problems to teenagers.

We used The Curious Incident... as an example of a text that makes an intervention into how disability and mental health (or just perceived "weirdness") might be represented, and this article could be a helpful complementary text.

Positive representations of young people

Article in this week's Guardian about the "happiness league" for young people. This could be a useful counterpoint to the scaremongering of other, less flattering representations elsewhere on the blog.

More friends and emotional security...

Karen Matthews and single mothers

Some more stuff on single mothers, linked to the Shannon Matthews' case.

Daily Telegraph article defending single mothers (and lots of comments attacking the article).

Barbara Ellen in The Guardian on "why Karen Matthews really offended the middle classes".

News of the World "Evil Karen Matthews two-timed pervert lover with sick kidnapper" (or something like that)