“Home-wrecking whore”: Barnaby Joyce, Vikki Campion, journalism, and the gender politics of the media sex scandal

ABSTRACT

This paper addresses journalistic coverage of Australian politician Barnaby Joyce’s extramarital relationship with his one time employee, Vikki Campion. The paper suggests that it is productive to examine this coverage as constituting a media sex scandal. Media sex scandals are useful in terms of what they suggest about the gender politics of the society in which they unfold. The Joyce-Campion scandal is revealing because it suggests how the single woman who is involved in a relationship a married man continues to be demonized in a way that the man is not. This, in turn, demonstrates how marriage or rather, a particular, (hetero)sexist model of marriage continues to have a degree of social currency.

KEYWORDS:

• Media sex scandal
• gender
• journalism
• marriage
• Australia

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. For the sake of clarity, the paper will refer to Barnaby Joyce as “Joyce” and his wife as “Natalie”.

2. This is not to suggest that media sex scandals were non-existent prior to the 1980s (see Gamson 2001, 186).

3. In an op ed about the Joyce-Campion scandal, journalist Misha Ketchell (2018) takes the story as evidence that “personal lives” are “fair game” in the Australian media in the manner that they were not in the 1980s. Ketchell buttresses this point by citing the relative media silence surrounding former Australian prime minister Bob Hawke’s extramarital affairs. There is no space in this article to ascertain the accuracy of Ketchell’s argument.

4. In contemporary Western culture, the single woman has been represented in multiple, contradictory ways. Anthea Taylor examines some of these representations in her book Single Women in Popular Culture (2012).

5. The term “marriage equality” has encompassed the legalization of marriage between same-sex couples. This term has been used for several reasons. The historian Timothy W. Jones (2015) highlights one of these when he writes: “By using the language of ‘marriage equality’ rather than ‘gay marriage’, proponents of change assert that marriage between same-sex partners is essentially the same as between opposite-sex partners.” Joyce was one of several conservative politicians who abstained from participating in this vote (Ireland and Bourke, 2017).

6. The asterisks appear in Wilson’s article.

7. In that film’s end, Alex is famously punished for her transgressions, killed by none other than her married lover’s devoted, domesticated wife.

8. The woman who accused Joyce of sexual harassment was apparently not one of his employees.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Jay Daniel Thompson

Jay Daniel Thompson lectures in media writing in the Media and Communications program in the School of Culture and Communication at the University of Melbourne. He also supervises graduate theses at Victoria University. Dr. Thompson’s research interests include writing for digital media (with a focus on journalism and social media), media rhetoric, and gender and sexuality studies. E-mail: [email protected]