Rhetorics of Motherhood

1. Theorizing Motherhood in Public Discourse

1 1 Theorizing Motherhood in Public Discourse The person I’m about to introduce to you was . . . a concerned citizen who became a member of the PTA, then a city council member, and then a mayor, and now a governor who beat the long odds to win a tough election on a message of reform and public integrity. And, I am especially proud to say in the week we celebrate the anniversary of women’s suffrage, a devoted wife and a mother of five. —John McCain When presidential hopeful John McCain surprised party and political pundits by announcing that a relatively unknown Alaska governor would serve as his running mate, Sarah Palin entered history, becoming the first female vice-presidential candidate on a Republican ticket. Her electrifying address to the Republican National Convention (RNC) marked her first solo foray onto the national stage and covered expected ground—praising McCain’s character and experience, detailing her own political accomplishments and qualifications, attacking the Democratic nominee for president, and forecasting Republican victory come No­ vember. Palin also made some decidedly unconventional moves, most notably, foregrounding motherhood to demonstrate fitness for public office. Her strategy was surprising, first, because maternity is not normally equated with political authority in America and, second, because highlighting it runs counter to female candidates’ typical selffashioning , which plays “down their softer, domestic side” and plays “up their toughness” (Toner, n.p.). Palin devoted considerable time to family in her speech, not only introducing her husband, children, parents, and siblings but also describing life as a working mother and governor (“Convention Speech”). Discussing two children, in particular, paid handsome dividends for the candidate: Her eldest son’s imminent Theorizing Motherhood in Public Discourse 2 departure for Iraq with the army infantry showcased maternal pride and patriotism while her youngest son’s diagnosis of Down syndrome added poignancy and credence to her promised advocacy for special-needs children. Palin dedicated nearly a fifth of her address to family matters and explicitly identified herself as a mother four times, most memorably as a “hockey mom” or pit bull with lipstick, an image that provocatively blended ferocity with femininity and suggested she would be as tough and tenacious in office as any man. What is more, the candidate’s rhetorical invocation of motherhood continued after the speech’s conclusion when she was joined onstage by her husband and five children. Palin took son Trig from her husband’s arms and awkwardly positioned the child to face the audience, crafting visual rhetoric that reinforced maternal ethos and communicated a pro-life message to viewers (see Figure 1.1). After all, Palin had refused to terminate her pregnancy after testing Figure 1.1. Vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin shows Trig to the nation (2008). Reuters/Mike Segar. Theorizing Motherhood in Public Discourse 3 positive for Down syndrome, so Trig physically embodied his mother’s convictions.1 Cumulatively, these references to family, children, and motherhood enabled the vice-presidential aspirant to craft engaging, credible, trustworthy character and to infuse her remarks with passion. Palin’s impressive debut before a national audience suggests that moth­erhood is still golden in the public forum—even in the twenty-first century. Over the course of her RNC appearance, motherhood served as a rhetorical topos, “a location or space in an art where a speaker can look for ‘available means of persuasion,’” according to George Kennedy (in Aristotle 45). It generated a rich assortment of appeals that Palin delivered verbally (during her address), visually and performatively (during her onstage interactions with her children), and corporeally (during Trig’s introduction to viewers). However, in addition to functioning as a topos, motherhood operated on an ideological level as well: Palin’s self-presentation as a prototypical mother brought thoughts of love, care, children, protection, morality, self-sacrifice, home, and nation to the minds of the audience. To help unpack motherhood’s multiple layers of meaning on this occasion , I turn to Roland Barthes’s indispensable exploration of first- and second-order signification (or denotation and connotation). He distinguishes between a literal, denotative level and an abstract, connotative level that taps into overarching cultural constructs. Barthes teases out these distinct planes of signification in his famous analysis of Paris-Match magazine (see Figure 1.2): On the cover, a young Negro in a French uniform is saluting, with his eyes uplifted, probably fixed on a fold of the tricolor. All...