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

1. The Mechanized Gaze: Gender, Popular Culture, and the Presidency

1 The Mechanized Gaze Gender, Popular Culture, and the Presidency Justin S. Vaughn and Lilly J. Goren The 2008 election saw significant interaction between gender-driven popular culture and politics, from Hillary Clinton’s shot-and-beer visits to workingclass bars and Hillary nutcrackers in airport gift shops to Sarah Palin’s selfidentification as a “hockey mom” and T-shirts with pictures of pit bulls wearing lipstick. Add to that Saturday Night Live sketches (including those declaring “Bitch is the new black”), fashion breakthroughs, and the cementing of femaledriven programming as an important political battleground, and the battle to become the forty-fourth president took on gender implications of significant proportions. Although popular culture has long influenced the dynamics of presidential elections, the 2008 election was unique in the overwhelming role that gender-driven popular culture and commodification played, providing a stunning reminder of how much gendered popular culture influences the ways American voters think about politics, especially presidential politics. As scholars, we quickly realized the important lessons about gender and politics that popular culture was teaching us—and the rest of the citizens who were following the campaign’s dynamics in real time. Indeed, by examining the intersecting relationships between popular culture, gender, and presidential politics, especially as perceived through the multiple lenses of the media, we can learn a great deal about the evolution of American attitudes toward the institution of the presidency, those who have occupied the office, and those who have attempted to occupy it. Perhaps more important, we can examine how these portrayalscreateapopularfilterorprismthroughwhichtheAmericanelectorate views and understands the leadership efforts of actual presidents in real time. Although the notion that politics and popular culture have a mutually rein1 2 Justin S. Vaughn and Lilly J. Goren forcing relationship is not a new one, scholars are only beginning to understand the role gender plays in the dynamic intersections between the political and the cultural. The work that has been done (and that is referenced by the chapters throughout this volume) provides a foundation for the emergence of the remaining critical questions. Specifically, this volume is motivated by the need to untangle and investigate the way our contemporary political culture frames the role of gender in politics, particularly in how citizens are encouraged (if not instructed) to observe and engage with female political leaders; how concepts of presidential leadership and presidentiality are gendered in consistent and disparate ways across different forms of media; and how popular culture influences the way gender is performed by the women who make the White House their home. To answer these central questions, we need research that is simultaneously engaged with contemporary political developments and in conversation with a broad range of existing scholarship so that we can continue to evolve and extend our theoretical understanding of the ways these powerful concepts and phenomena intersect while also rigorously observing the real-world implications of these intersections as they transpire. We have brought together the chapters in this volume in an attempt to do this, to examine the contemporary state of presidential politics, from the way we select our chief executives to the ways in which presidencies are performed, while consciously moving relevant academic debates concerning the central questions of this volume forward. In this sense, then, this volume is intended to serve a wide audience made up of scholars across several disciplines who are interested in these important intersections. Studying Popular Culture Academics from a range of disciplines have studied popular culture for a variety of reasons, not the least of which is that it is a realistic meeting place within any course or classroom—it is often the one place where faculty member and student can find an immediate source of commonality. But this relationship easily translates beyond any particular classroom to the broader space within our democracy where—because of the ease with which most Americans can access common cultural touchstones and phenomena—citizens of varied ages, partisan dispositions, class, gender, and religious beliefs can meet each other. As Joseph Foy explains, it is not just that Americans can meet each other through popular culture but that it is also the venue where Americans learn about the political system itself. According to Foy, “Many people first learn about important gov- The Mechanized Gaze 3 ernmental offices, such as the presidency, Congress, the courts, and the public bureaucracy, and organizations such as interest groups and political parties not from a...