Those Were the Days?

Our Monica, Ourselves: The Clinton Affair and the National Interest Lauren Berlant and Lisa Duggan, eds. New York: New York University Press, 2001. vii + 340 pp.

When I told colleagues that I was reviewing a collection of essays on the cultural politics of the Clinton-Lewinsky scandal, they looked sort of wistful: "Ah, for the days when that was important." Though taken slightly off-guard, I found it hard to object to this response. It would be absurd, after all, to draw parallels between the mass-mediated figures of Monica Lewinsky, on the one hand, and Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein, on the other, and any comparison of the national sexcapades of 1999 and the global terrorscapes of 2003 would strike many as obscene. Still, the events of September 11, 2001, did not come out of nowhere. As many commentators have noted, the neoconservative imperialism and evangelical militarism of the second Bush administration's "war on terror" were crafted between the onset of Bill and Monica's affair during the government shutdown of 1994 and the publication of the Starr Report in 1999. Critical of the "incoherent policies of the Clinton Administration" as well as the "isolationist impulses from within their own ranks," a marginalized group of Republican hawks called, in their 1997 "Statement of Principles" for the "Project for the New American Century," for a reinvigoration of "American global leadership" through a return to the "Reaganite policy of military strength and moral clarity." That the signatories to this document included not only foreign policy wonks Paul Wolfowitz and Elliot Abrams but also moral majoritarians Gary Bauer and Dan Quayle indicates the interweaving in the middle of Clinton's second term of themes that would pave the way for the rise of George W. Bush, for the moralizing unilateralism of his style of globalizing nationalism, and even for the fundamentalist Christian Right's newfound concern for the global oppression of women, especially those living in regions tied to (but not yet aligned with) U.S. "fundamental [corporate] interests."¹

What is interesting about the essays that make up Our Monica, Ourselves is that they map this discursive terrain without really being aware of it. Lauren Berlant and Lisa Duggan, the editors, describe the collection as seeking a "medium-range perspective—offering reflective, after-the-fact assessments by politically progressive journalists, scholars, and activists addressed to the questions: How does the intersection of sex and politics shape U.S. public culture? What can the alternating waves of public obsession, revulsion, and boredom generated by this scandal of sex and justice tell us about the national interest?" (1). They also note, as do many of the contributors, the coincidence between the moral melodrama of White House infidelity directed by a Republican Congress and the signing by a Democratic president of various policies designed to coerce (inter)national heteronormativity—most notably, the Defense of Marriage Act, the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Act, and the Illegal Immigrant Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act of 1996. Why, given this historical context, Berlant and Duggan ask, did the mass media's seemingly instinctive adherence to the generic conventions of moral/sex-panic discourse not produce a horrified national response? Why did that generic commitment to "conservative notions of sexual normalcy and propriety" not lead to a decline in Clinton's popularity (2)? What do these counterintuitive events tell us about the ways in which overlapping racial, class, gender, regional, religious, and sexual identifications were mobilized, solidified, and transformed by the publication of the most intimate (and banal) details of the Clinton-Lewinsky affair? These questions provide the thematic foci of Berlant and Duggan's volume, just as they implicitly informed the events themselves and the media's representation of them as critical to the national interest.

The essays in turn agree to disagree on the largely national stakes of both the media archives and the debates they inspired. Eli Zaretsky locates the scandal...