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.

Subscribe to Jessica Evans's posts

 

My colleague Engin Isin wrote an interesting blog in January about the episode of Hillary Clinton’s tears. He argued there that there are many signs that indicate that the image of being political now includes being emotional and many signs that men as well as women are caught in the production of this image. He pointed out that one of the main arguments against including women in politics until the twentieth century was that ‘women ostensibly represented the irrational and passionate aspects of being human and such qualities did not belong in public space’.

However, I think there is enough evidence to show that women still contend with double standards in public. In presenting themselves as public persons, they must make finely tuned decisions about the nuances of gendered meanings. In public office they may struggle to find a rhetorical style – a persona – that the press and the public will accept as ‘authentic’. Hillary Clinton has continually been cursed with the perception that she is calculated, contrived and overly macho. We will never know if her famous tears may or may not have been equally calculated, which presents us with a modern conundrum. For we demand these days that politicians must act in such a way that is ‘true’ to themselves: so here we have tears that signify spontaneity and personal expressiveness, even if those same tears risk being regarded as contrived, fake, tactical. Clinton was at the time saying ‘It’s very personal for me, it’s not just political, it’s not just public’, which underlines her use of authenticity here.

 [Photograph taken by Joe Crimmings. Accessed from FlickR and used under Creative Commons license.] 

is the double bind: if Clinton conducts herself in a male style, she risks disappointing those for whom having a woman candidate and president makes a difference. It seems to be the case that Clinton has lost the support of many professional women; and she may have suffered also for not having publicly shared her pain about the Lewinsky episode (by, for example, going on the Oprah Show!). Of course she may also not project the right kind of womanliness to attract Republican voters to the Democrat cause, having declared when Bill Clinton became president that she wouldn’t be the type of First Woman to bake. Would a man married to a female president even feel compelled to make a public statement about their role? If a woman is a strong leader she is at fault for not being a homemaker, but if she is a homemaker she is at fault for not having the qualities of the leader. The quality she needs to be a president – to hack it with the big boys – is the same quality that goes against her. If women talk loudly they are shrill; if they talk softly they are overly feminine and weak. And Clinton as a woman is described in ways that could not now be publicly used to describe Obama as a non-white; when a member of the audience at a John McCain event asked the Senator ‘How do we beat the bitch?’ McCain’s smiling reply was ‘Excellent question’.

Some commentators think that the Democratic race for nomination is inevitably reduced to that between a black man and a woman and that because the U.S population are more sexist than they are racist, Clinton will never win the candidacy and less even the Presidency. That is, to use semiotic terminology for a moment, a female signifier of difference from an unmarked (white, male) norm is more troubling than a black signifier of difference. This is not about whether people think Hillary Clinton is capable, knowledgeable, or rational; she is widely thought to be all these things, and these would be valued in a man. But these capacities are undermined by what is clearly a different wish that she show some kind of deeper, truer self, which is ‘feminine’. So far the consensus seems to be that while Obama looks unforced and his speeches are born of deep conviction, here we have a woman whose political ambitions and ambitiousness are seen to question her very humanity.

These problems appear whenever women enter the public sphere, and not just in the domain of politics. Kate McCann (whose daughter Madeleine was abducted in Portugal last summer) was probably right to complain that if she looked and acted in a more ‘maternal’ way, she would have had more sympathetic media coverage. Judged endlessly by her demeanour, which was considered too much the ice queen, there was deemed to be a necessary link between outward appearance and conduct and inner life. Her inner turmoil, then, should have been visible, her feelings closer to the surface – via dishevelled clothes, lack of care for the self, tearful inarticulacy. Because it wasn’t, and she exerted some control over her public self, she was regarded as quite possibly an irresponsible mother as well as a realistic suspect in her daughter’s abduction. I noticed that there was no similar questioning of the integrity of her husband, for Gerry McCann has been equally able to remain relatively emotionless and poker faced in public appearances.

There seems, then, to continue be a very strong wish to question the motives and even ethical capacity of women once they relenquish the maternal, the instinctive, the emotional – typically regarded as qualities belonging to private life but which they must leave behind once they step into a public, for which read masculine, role. Women often lose either way, damned if they do and damned if they don’t use an emotional register in public, either approache being judged to convey rich symbolic meanings that question their authenticity and ultimately their authority.

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.

Subscribe to Jessica Evans's posts

 

It’s an interesting prospect that the next American president could be the son of an African man (and a white woman) who went to a majority-Muslim school as a boy. But to what extent is the candidacy of Barack Hussein Obama really related to this individual man, to his policies or skills as a legislator or thinker? Will his identity as an African-American prove to be the most important factor for his success or failure as the Democrat candidate, whether or not he uses it to manipulate popular perception?

What got me thinking about the possible meanings of ‘Obama’ was the entry of media tycoon and daytime Queen of the air Oprah Winfrey into Obama’s campaign at the end of last year. I wondered then how the personas of the ‘two Os’ could together alter the fortunes of the Obama campaign. I also wondered how her television fan base overlaps  with the political demographic that is so crucial for Obama. At their first rally together in South Carolina on December 8th, Obama drew attention to the unique nature of the event, given their ethnic origins: ‘Me being here is so unlikely…Just like Oprah being where she is so unlikely’. They were able to deploy the public personas they had already constructed through opening up their personal lives to the public – for Obama this was in two memoirs written before he was even a senator. They appealed directly to the state’s demographic (African Americans make up nearly half of all Democratic voters in this traditionally republican-voting state), peppering their speeches with ‘y’all’ and ‘you folks’. After making several references to church attendance, beauty parlours and God, Obama then danced to a Stevie Wonder song and invoked Martin Luther King: “But I’m not in this race because of the odds. I’m in it because of the ‘fierce urgency of now’’.

Oprah Winfrey and Barack Obama.
[Photograph taken by Joe Crimmings. Accessed from FlickR and used under Creative Commons license.]

7.6 million viewers watch Oprah's show a day. Will her endorsement of Obama be one of his greatest assets? Perhaps it will serve to further racialise Obama’s image, and then we have to assess if that will help or hinder him.  Whether Oprah's popularity will translate into votes for Obama in the state’s Jan. 26 primary is an open question, but it does seem the case that Winfrey’s popularity has got him out of the starting blocks pretty quickly, allowing him to tap a swathe of hitherto disinterested or disaffected black voters. Oprah's tour came as Obama had cut into Hillary Clinton’s support among female voters in some states and the opinion of US pollsters does seem to be that Winfrey could help Obama draw more middle-aged and older women, the core of Winfrey’s talk show viewership. For the key to any endorsement by celebrities is to win people over who are not already in your camp. Women account for more than half of the state’s black Democratic vote. So if her support makes a difference, it is likely to be amongst women, also considered a crucial part of Clinton’s base in early voting states. But black female voters are also prime target for the primaries in southern states, hence Winfrey’s mention of the large number of beauty parlours in South Carolina. She said, ‘We love to keep our hair done, don’t we?’ She added, ‘I know what it means to come from the South,’ a reference to her childhood in Mississippi. One middle-aged black woman interviewed after the rally said to a journalist that she admired Oprah and Obama because ‘they’re both self-made, positive African Americans’.

I think Obama is an ambiguous character; he both uses and doesn’t use his ethnic identity. He has, no doubt, very little choice in this. I think he has to capitalise on this ambiguity, as Ophrah has so successfully done. Of course it's inevitable that he’s accused of ‘acting like he’s white’ by radical blacks. Also inevitable is the danger of democrats voting for Hillary Clinton because they don’t believe a black man can win the presidency – a kind of disingenuous projection of racism onto others that makes you think of a favourite children’s joke: ‘whoever smelt it, dealt it!’ Just as important, though, is the problem of class. In the US it's common to speak in coded terms of ‘beer track’ and ‘wine track’ candidates. Obama’s biggest problem could be that he’s regarded as a brainy 'wine track' liberal and thus may lose out to a rival, Clinton, whose support is firmly rooted in the blue-collar, non-college degree communities. This seems to have been the case in the New Hampshire primary of Jan 8th.

Obama’s credibility and popularity with the electorate as a whole will I think rest on him being an African-American in a country founded on slavery who plays down the destructive aspect of racial divisiveness - he is indeed a 'positive', 'post-racial' African-American. Although he is young and relatively inexperienced compared to Clinton, you could argue he is indeed more 'urgent'. And that's because, as Andrew Sullivan has recently argued in the US magazine Atlantic Monthly, he may be able to bridge the fissures that threaten American culture, represented by the great divide between white secular-minded liberals and neo-conservative religious fundamentalists. Can he hold a mirror up to America in which it sees itself in multi-ethnic unity? However, to successfully attract the black vote in order to achieve the Democratic nomination is one thing; he also must successfully represent the economically marginalised and socially conservative voters across the US. Perhaps this is an even bigger challenge.

More on the 2008 US election

• Tears in her eyes
• Is there a double standard for women in public?
• Sarah Palin: when politics is personal, ignorance is a woman

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.

Subscribe to Jessica Evans's posts