The Discursive Performance of Femininity: Hating Hillary

The Discursive Performance of Femininity: Hating Hillary Karlyn Kohrs Campbell When William Jefferson Clinton was elected president in 1992, polls revealed continuing unease at the prospect of Hillary Rodham Clinton as first lady. In a USA Today/CNN/Gallup Poll of November 10-11, citizens were divided equally between those who saw her as representing their values and lifestyles more than her predecessors and those who did not.1 Perhaps the most bizarre expression of unease was the Spy magazine cover of December 1992 showing her head on the body of an S & M dominatrix. As a way to counter fears of the power of the first lady, what an insider called "a sense of corrosive mystery" about her activities,2 she was given a defined and recognized role. She had an office in the West Wing of the White House; she became head of the task force of health care reform; she met with members of Congress, testified before congressional committees, and spoke before audiences all around the country seeking agreement about the goals that a health care plan should meet. Clearly, these efforts were unsuccessful in allaying fears or garnering approval for her role. In 1996, Henry Louis Gates Jr. wrote that "Hillary-hating has become one of those national pastimes which unite the elite and the lumpen,"3 and Garry Wills wrote: Hillary Hate is a large-scale psychic phenomenon. At the Republican convention there was a dismemberment doll on sale. For twenty dollars you could buy a rag-doll Hillary with arms and legs made to tear off and throw on the floor.... Talk shows are full of speculation about Hillary's purported lesbianism and drug use. Fine conspiratorial reasoning sifts whether she was Vince Foster's mistress or murderer or both. The Don Imus show plays a version of the song "The Lady is a Tramp" with new lyrics about the way the lady "fornicates" and "menstruates" and "urinates," concluding, "That's why the First Lady is a tramp."4 Karlyn Kohrs Campbell is Professor of Speech-Communication at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis, Minnesota. © Rhetoric & Public Affairs VoH1No. 1,1998, pp. 1-19 ISSN 1094-8392 2 Rhetoric & Public Affairs These and other outrageous attacks amaze because they violate the norms of public decorum and courtesy, and as such, they challenge us to find some explanation. Obviously, many factors have affected attitudes toward the current first lady, but no prior presidential spouse has occasioned the kind of attacks that have been directed at Hillary Rodham Clinton.5 In order to find parallels, one must return to nineteenth-century reactions to efforts for women's rights generally and for dress reform in particular. They reveal powerful social expectations about the public performance of gender roles. The idea that gender is a performance, an "illusion ... discursively maintained" by "words, acts, and gestures"6 is argued in two major works by Judith Butler. She writes: "Gender norms operate by requiring the embodiment of certain ideals of femininity and masculinity, ones that are almost always related to the idealization of the heterosexual bond."7 Butler relies primarily on scholarly work that builds on the insights of Michel Foucault and other continental writers, but the notion of gender as performance and of gender norms as requiring the embodiment of certain ideals of femininity has a history that supports and elaborates Butler's claims and, in an important although limited way, illuminates the dynamics surrounding reactions to the gender performance of U.S. First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton. Butler's works develop two key ideas. First, that sex, the arrangement of one's genitals, and gender, "the cultural meanings that the sexed body assumes," are distinguishable ; that is, "a gender cannot be said to follow from a sex in any one way."8 Simply put, gendered behavior will be culturally coded and will vary from culture to culture and through time, and such codes are not mandated by biological sex. Second, that gender is behavior; it is "embodied"; the body, itself a cultural construction , is "a mere instrument or medium" through which cultural meanings are expressed.9 Moreover, "[t]he practice by which gendering occurs, the embodying of norms, is...