Woman President: Confronting Postfeminist Political Culture

Introduction

Introduction Gendered Presidentiality and Postfeminist Political Culture I n April 2012, the political public relations duo Stacy Lambe and Adam Smith used the blog platform Tumblr to launch a humorous feature called “Texts from Hillary,” which paired photos of Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, wearing sunglasses and working on her smartphone, with photos of other famous figures texting. Lambe and Smith penned fictitious text exchanges between Clinton and political, journalistic, and pop culture personalities , with Clinton maintaining a witty, self-assured upper hand in each exchange. The inaugural image featured President Barack Obama reclining on a couch, asking, “Hey Hil, Watchu doing?” Her response? “Running the world.” With that, the “Obama Cool” of 2008 was cast in a negative light— one that showed the commander in chief loafing on the couch while Clinton took control. Yahoo News quickly dubbed “Texts from Hillary” the “best political meme of 2012 thus far,” and an MSNBC website asserted that the Tumblr creation “show[ed] Clinton at her coolest.” The Guardian linked the enthusiasm for “the wildly popular Hillary-celebrating microsite” to the widespread appeal Clinton enjoyed in the spring of 2012, arguing that rather than fostering a Clinton craze, Lambe and Smith “rode the wave of Clinton’s own growing popularity.” By late April 2012, pundits were once again bandying about the “p-word.” Howard Fineman noted that Clinton “wins solid marks as secretary of state, rides a wave of cult status on the web, and watches as the Beltway chattering classes wonder aloud whether she will be a candidate for president in 2016.” Although “Texts from Hillary” was, itself, an enjoyable and insightful commentary on gender in political and popular culture, closer examination of the journalistic discussion that surrounded it, and the associated “Clinton craze” of spring 2012, reveals the machinations of postfeminist presidential culture. “Postfeminism” is a label that has been applied to a diverse set of reactions to the second wave of the feminist movement, but we use it here to describe the politically charged assertion that feminism’s work is complete 2 introduction and, therefore, feminist politics are irrelevant, unnecessary, or passé. Postfeminist discourses are strategically effective at undermining material feminist politics because they paradoxically embrace feminist ideals even as they reject cultural practices and political policies that promote those ideals. A postfeminist view of the US presidency embraces the conventional wisdom that “anyone” can be president and even promotes individual women candidates while denying, downplaying, or dismissing the structural and cultural inequities that contribute to women’s political underrepresentation. The discussion of Clinton’s political persona in April 2012 frequently included an important contrast. As pundits hailed her newfound popularity, they also criticized her previous bid for the US presidency. After noting that “the past few weeks have been pretty good to Hillary Clinton,” Salon reminded its readers that “four years ago this week, as she pressed on with her presidential campaign despite falling hopelessly behind in the delegate race, an ABCNews/Washington Post survey found that 54 percent of Americans viewed the former first lady unfavorably.” On April 9, 2012, Talking Points Memo’s Benjy Sarlin cheerfully proclaimed, “What a difference four years makes: When she was running for the Democratic presidential nomination, Hillary Clinton was parodied as drab and calculated, especially compared with young and vigorous Barack Obama and winking and fresh-faced Sarah Palin. Now, she’s fueling Internet jokes based on her own brand of badass cool.” In his discussion of the multiple factors that could have contributed to the April 2012 “Hillary boomlet,” Howard Kurtz suggested that it was due, in part, to a personal transformation: “The woman has always been so carefully controlled on the public stage, so guarded in keeping her emotions in check that a brief choking-up moment at a New Hampshire diner in 2008 was hailed as a breakthrough.These days . . . she seems considerably looser.” Democratic partisan and Clinton supporter Paul Begala took Kurtz’s critique one step further, asserting that her 2008 campaign was “a mess” and touting Clinton’s “surprising and impressive” ability to blend “harmoniously . . . with Team Obama.” The narrative that emerged was a distinctly postfeminist one: women can and do capably run for president.They have the potential to be as popular with the US electorate as male candidates. Any failure of their candidacies should properly be ascribed to their personal shortcomings or strategic miscalculations rather than to the continued influence of sexism in US culture. Postfeminist views of both...