Women and the White House: Gender, Popular Culture, and Presidential Politics

6. Gendering the Presidency without Gender in the Presidency

6 Gendering the Presidency without Gender in the Presidency Joseph E. Uscinski In recent years, a series of polls have found that majorities of voters at least claim to be willing to vote for a female presidential candidate. For example, a poll of registered voters conducted by the Siena College Research Institute found that 81 percent of voters would vote for a woman for president. And prior to Hillary Clinton’s primary campaign of 2008, polls found that about 60 percent of voters said they expected a woman to be the Democrats’ nominee for president in 2008.1 Thesenumbers show a significant increasein recent decadesin the public’s perception of females’ ability to campaign for and serve in the upper echelons of American power. For example, polls taken in the late 1960s showed that only half of voters would support a well-qualified female presidential candidate.2 These changing poll numbers and the recent presidential candidacy of Hillary Clinton suggest that America is in fact ready for a female president. With this said, however, these anecdotal considerations can be deceptive. First, Hillary Clinton lost the nomination race to a male candidate amid gendered treatment and a series of misogynistic attacks from both her opponent and the media.3 This misogynistic environment fit well with historical treatment of female candidates .4 Second, the observed increase of acceptance of female presidential candidates seen in polls might not indicate more willingness to elect women; it may simply indicate the public’s greater willingness to hide their long-held misogynistic attitudes in a society that no longer views such overt attitudes as openly acceptable.5 Furthermore, and perhaps most telling, poll respondents, when asked about how a woman might fare in certain aspects of the presidency, 75 percent said that a female president would perform worse than a male candidate in the area 121 122 Joseph E. Uscinski of foreign policy (perhaps the one policy area where the president has the most autonomous control).6 Based on this, the question researchers might then ask is, given that a female has never served as president and, thus, females have no track record indicating how they would perform in the White House, how can the public have such decidedly negative views about how they would perform? There are perhaps many answers to this question; however, most answers likely trace back to socialization processes that occur in a society that has traditionally harbored views that favor the leadership of males over that of females.7 In American society, notions of gender are engrained in early socialization processes and reinforced throughout life. Thus citizens can have a seemingly fully developed notion of how well a female would perform as president without ever seeing a female perform as president. In this chapter, I focus on one of the agents that act to reinforce and catalyze gendered stereotypes: popular cinema. I argue that portrayals of female characters in popular cinema, regardless of whether those characters hold high office or not, perpetuate gendered stereotypes and propagate the notion that women are “unsafe” choices to hold high office. Popular Cinema and Politics Popular culture has an important nexus with politics—it reflects, reinforces, and affects public opinions about a great variety of issues. This gives popular culture a vastly important role in democracies, because it is public opinion that drives the election and policy-making processes. By understanding the messages embedded within popular culture, we can understand the sociological forces that affect government, governance, and policy outcomes. In keeping with the theme of this volume, there is much to be learned about popular notions of gender from popular culture. There are of course many movies, television shows, and musical artists who wade into explicit political debates within their work. These statements within popular culture often represent the opinions of purveyors (whose attitudes are quite distinct from those of society in general and therefore somewhat unrepresentative). While such statements are important and fascinating in their own right, we are limited in what we can learn about society in general from such explicit popular takes on specific issues. On the other hand, almost all facets of popular culture portray something to do with gender, whether the particular movie, television show, or song is intended to address gender issues or not. For example, one cannot make a movie containing a love story without at least unintentionally portraying the power relations Gendering the Presidency...