In sport athletes sometimes push themselves to the limits and beyond. Boxers still come out when they should probably stay in their corner and throw in the towel. Corporeal achievement is crucial, so perhaps it’s not surprising, even if damaged limbs and a whole season out or even a career destroyed are sometimes the outcome.

In other areas of experience, where bodily competition is not so central, it may be more difficult to comprehend the French justice minister Rachida Dati’s decisionto return to work only five days after giving birth by caesarian section. Perhaps, as an ambitious, successful woman of 43, she was anxious about showing any signs of weakness?

Rachida Dati.
[image by Ma Gali, some rights reserved]

It certainly made the papers and she did look stunning: a supreme embodied achievement. It was newsworthy, because most people don’t don 5 inch stiletto heels a few days after surgery, even if they have a reputation for wearing stunningly fashionable clothes and dressing impeccably in the day job. The tabloid press did focus on what she was wearing with some voyeuristic pleasure, for example the Daily Mail’s concern with her being ‘more glamorous than ever’.

More seriously, could it be the feminist concerns with women’s hard won rights to maternity leave being so flagrantly disregarded by a high flying successful woman in high office that make this an important matter to explore in the political public arena? As Madeleine Bunting noted in the Guardian, 'this is bad for her and bad for us too’.

As a public figure, Dati also has some responsibility and her actions have meanings about what is important for all of us. Dati’s actions make it clear that, not only are the rights that women have fought for to protect their physical well being as mothers, but also the relationship between the mother and her child which represents emotional intimacy, much less important than career success. Breastfeeding her baby and its accompanying intimacy will be very difficult under these circumstances, but although breastfeeding may be promoted by health professionals it occupies a very uneasy place in contemporary culture.

Bunting’s feminist political argument is countered by French claims that things are different across the channel, as Agnès Poirier argues. Poirier suggests that ‘French women view themselves as women first, mothers second’ and ‘don't see maternity as their sole raison d'être. You could call it feminism’. However, it is still more usually women who give birth and women who breastfeed. (A US woman who had her breasts removed, grew a small beard and became legally male as Thomas Beatie, subsequently gave birth very publicly as a man, albeit with a woman’s reproductive organs, apart from the excised mammary glands. The beard, like the shoes, may be a distraction).

There are, of course different feminisms, but Poirier’s version is somewhat disembodied with no recognition of the specificities or values of embodied experience. Resting after major surgery, accessing the legal and civil rights that are embedded in contemporary neoliberal governance and investing in emotional life do not constitute throwing in the towel or turning your back on competition and success.

About the author

Kath Woodward is Profesor of Sociology at the Open University, focusing on gendered identities. She has recently completed research into anti-racist organisations in sport.

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The size zero debate has re-emerged recently, with the feminist academic and cultural commentator, Germaine Greer, again venturing into the terrain of popular culture to express the view that celebrities Cheryl Cole of Girls Aloud and the reconstituted Katie Price are ‘too thin’. Greer has been criticised for her claims that ‘a healthy girl is a fat-bottomed creature’.

This story may tell us more about the inadvisability of those from the academy entering the field of popular culture and speaking its language rather than confining interventions to providing an informed critique. However, Greer’s comments do raise questions about what is a ‘healthy body’ and how far conventional representations of size zero women might challenge or reconstruct the ‘healthy body’ for women.

Sport is all about healthy bodies and healthy lives and sport is not an area where one might expect discussion of appearance, either of being thin or of being fat, except insofar as body size might interfere with and impede or enhance the body practices which make up sporting performance. The Beijing Olympics produced representations of strong athletic women, who excelled in their sports, as I noted in my recent Invisible Athletes blog. Maybe things were changing and sexualised images of women agonising over dress size and even the tiniest bit of extra flesh were no more, at least not in sport. Kira Cochrane described it as the shift from ‘wags to winners’.

One of the Beijing medallists was double gold winner Rebecca Adlington, whose image adorned the cover of the Observer Sport Monthly on November 23^rd, somewhat surprisingly heavily made-up with golden ringlets and posing seductively in a swimsuit and high heels. The swimsuit is not so surprising for a swimming medallist and she is well known as a fan of designer shoes with high heels. Indeed this is her contribution to the BBC Sport’s page on possible Sports Personality of the year .

However, the actual poses on the cover and inside the magazine, reminiscent of a 1950s card girl and the accompanying text in which Adlington expresses her anxieties about her spare tyre and body weight, is troubling and even depressing. The possibility of a post feminist parodic display is unconvincing, as is the likelihood of the OSM providing handy hints on what to wear for the forthcoming Personality of the Year awards (a swimsuit?). If this is meant to be a humorous piece, it seems unjust, as Adlington deserves admiration for her massive sporting achievements, rather than trivialisation. The article on Shane Warne, in the same magazine does not reveal his body anxieties nor offer him advice on cosmetic care. Even sports women who are elite athletes are constituted and certainly represented within the same discourses that frame the celebrities of the mainstream of popular culture. It seems that even by winning Olympic gold women cannot escape the tyranny of the slim, thin body.

About the author

Kath Woodward is Profesor of Sociology at the Open University, focusing on gendered identities. She has recently completed research into anti-racist organisations in sport.

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In the last month or so I’ve become intrigued by the spectacle of the Republican ‘pick’ of Sarah Palin for the vice presidential candidate. I say spectacle because Palin is everywhere in US news bulletins and in the ‘blogosphere’, alternately spoofed, lampooned and applauded as ‘everymom’, and even turned into an action doll range wearing a school girl uniform with a red bra and a gun holster.

Once upon a time, two white male candidates would have been apparently able, quite unproblematically, to ‘represent’ all Americans including women and non-whites. I’m not saying that the absence up to now of non-white and non-male candidates for high political office was a ‘good thing’. I’m saying that the campaigns for non-white and non-male candidates in these US election campaigns have strongly veered towards a position where the capacity of candidates to represent something beyond their own interests or personal identity is now radically in doubt.

If you think back to Margaret Thatcher, there was little sense in which anyone expected her to ‘represent feminism’, just because she was female, and rightly so in fact, although it was a bitter pill for many to swallow. She was first of all a Conservative. She was also tellingly represented as a female masquerading as a male, but that kind of sexism notwithstanding, one lesson many (including feminists) learned from the Thatcher episode was that anatomy is not destiny. Thatcher showed many woment that you cannot assume that one’s best interests are represented by someone ‘like you’.

Thatcher showed you cannot assume that one’s best interests are represented by someone ‘like you’.

So, to return to the US elections: one black candidate (Obama) and one female candidate (Clinton), followed by one female VP nomination on the Republican side, has blown the universalism of the old days out of the water. Obama’s burden of representation is: can he, as an educated black man, represent all peoples, not just non-whites, not just the middle classes? Clinton’s was: could she overcome the difficulty powerful women have in the public domain, of being likeable as well as being authoritative? Could she attract more than just the feminist vote?

In the midst of these struggles over the Democratic nomination, a textbook semiotic situation , John McCain was looking old, white and male, just because there were these other candidates who could be contrasted to him. McCain invoked himself as ‘the American president Americans have been waiting for’ (as opposed to Obama, he meant, whose Americanness was implicitly in question). But his problem as Republicans perceived it, was that against Obama and Clinton he appeared to be more like Bush, whereas he needed to put clear water between his own brand of Republican politics and the track record of the Bush administration.

Sarah Palin.
[image by Sskennel, some rights reserved]

Once Obama failed to choose Hillary Clinton as his running mate, the door was open to McCain to look like the progressive and agent of change by choosing a woman. So then the Republican party, picks Sarah Palin, a politically inexperienced self-styled ‘hockey mum’ from small town Alaska. She is often thus described, but this description is not my sexist inflection, it is exactly how she represents herself, and it is why the Republicans selected her. Palin was selected entirely for her gender and her entire pitch has been about folksy political illiteracy. Had she been a man, she would not have been picked for VP.

As I’ve pointed out, this American election is to a very great extent fought on the turf of identity politics, brought about by a mostly ‘happy’ collusion between political parties who seek to use identity politics and media institutions that for the most part are bent on the personalisation of politics.

Identity-exploiting candidates such as Palin use whatever connection to a community they have to appeal to voters' sense of cultural familiarity, which serves to obscure the candidates' competence or fitness for office.

Republican political machinery have been active in pushing Palin’s identity profile, with conservative radio talk-show host Laura Ingraham enthusing that ‘A lot of women are calling in excited…The women of America will see that she might be the first woman vice president.’ Palin’s identity-based advantages go beyond gender, in Ingraham’s view: ‘Palin has an Eskimo husband, a Down’s Syndrome son, an Iraq-bound son.’ Of course she has traditional Republican political strengths: anti-abortion, anti-gun control, creationism, pro-oil drilling in Alaska, aggressive foreign policy inclinations and so on. But these are the default positions of  many a Republican candidate. But, only a woman could have been billed a ‘gun-toting, moose-hunting mother of five’ and have used a campaign image showing her sitting in the bloodstained snow, gun in hand, alongside the carcass of a large animal killed by her own fair hand. A mix of femininity and killer aggressiveness – an image of political woman based on the compromises necessary for women in Republican politics, combining a frontierswoman self-reliance with the sexual allure of a beauty contest winner.

Republican strategists...hope that Palin will attract disaffected Hillary Clinton voters

Republican strategists have been open in the hope that Palin will attract disaffected Hillary Clinton voters, who believe that they had a right to a woman in the White House. It’s an extraordinary thought, that Palin was picked because it was considered that her anatomy could buy her Clinton’s votes, despite the fact she wears Republican clothes. Shades of  the Thatcher experience then, to any deluded voters thinking that she is a feminist ticket.

Indeed, feminist overtures and apple pie ‘mom’ was the balancing trick that Palin offered in her first rally in Ohio as VP nominee. She began by drawing on a hackneyed feminist metaphor, and directly echoing a speech of Clinton’s: ‘It turns out that the women of America aren’t finished yet, and we can shatter that glass ceiling once and for all.’ In fashioning Palin’s affirmative action candidacy, the McCain campaign has gleefully adopted liberal feminist tactics and grievances that conservative Republicans have so long derided. No matter that Palin chastised Clinton for whining when she complained of sexism during the primary, or that McCain laughed approvingly when one of his supporters called Clinton a ‘bitch’.

However, lest she came over as an aggressive feminist (and given that conservatives traditionally scoff at the idea that American society systematically blocks women from advancement), the main theme of her speeches have been her own personal story, spliced with sentimental guff such as ‘Our family has the same ups and downs as any other, the same challenges and the same joys…I’m just one of many mums who will say an extra prayer each night for our sons and daughters going into harm’s way’.

Palin’s popularity reflects, in great part, a cultural mistrust of expertise and intellectual rigour. Her inexperience as a former mayor of a tiny town and governor of a small, idiosyncratic state for less than two years, her confident ignorance about the economy and international relations, her ditzy delivery and religious zeal, all add up to the sense of a special kind of feminine ignorance catapulted onto the world stage.

At the televised debate last week between the VPs, Palin played all flickering eyelashes and flirty folksiness, at one point actually winking at the camera. As one typical political commentator said, ‘She lit up the screen at times with her smile and occasional winks’. In recent days, though, we have had less ‘lipstick’ and more ‘pitbull’, as an increasingly desperate McCain-Palin ticket exploits the anger of Republican extremists about Obama, stirring up mob-like behaviour in the ranks. As the Republicans move into the territory of assassinating Obama on racial grounds (Palin said he is someone ‘who doesn't see America as we do’), they move further into frivolity. Ignorance doesn’t have to be a woman, and ignorance may not secure votes in the long run, but only a woman could build her political credibility on the appeal of ignorance.

About the author

Jessica Evans is Senior Lecturer in Sociology, in the Faculty of Social Sciences, and a member of the Centre for Citizenship, Identities and Governance at the Open University.

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