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cHaPTER 12 michelle Obama, “mom-in-chief” Gender, Race, and Familialism in Media Representations of the First Lady bonnie j. dow On February 24, 2009, when President Barack Obama made his first address to a joint session of Congress, First Lady Michelle Obama watched from the gallery, wearing a sleeveless purple dress. Mrs. Obama’s apparel became the subject of media discussion in the days that followed,primarily for its featuring of her bare arms in the dead of winter. In a March 7 column titled “Should Michelle Cover Up?” Maureen Dowd reported a conversation with her New York Times colleague David Brooks about the first lady’s “amazing arms.” Brooks complained that the first lady’s overt display of her“physical presence”was inappropriate for“sensually avoidant ”Washington, DC, and remarked,“She’s made her point. … Now she should put away Thunder and Lightning.”1 As ABC News reported on its Web site that same week, in the course of a month Mrs. Obama’s bare arms had appeared not only at the president’s speech but in her official White House portrait and on the cover of Vogue, provoking considerable public discourse. That discourse ranged from admiring comments about her well-toned biceps and her much-publicized workout regimen to critiques that her fashion choices were too informal and ill-suited to the season.2 Yet, as Joan Faber McAlister has observed, the issue was not as much about the sleeveless style as it was about the arms themselves and how they signified. Critics were “animated by the anxiety over the sight of muscular arms (fit for manual labor but unfit for display in polite company) on the figure of the first lady.”3 This is not an essay about the first lady’s body, but the eruption of “Sleevegate,” as one reporter termed it,4 brings into focus one of the specific personal burdens faced by Mrs. Obama as mass media attempted to make sense of her meaning as the nation’s firstAfricanAmerican first lady: 236 : bOnniE j. dOW the long history of dominant white culture’s obsession with black female bodies as icons of otherness,difference,primitivism,and aberrant sexuality . This “ageless drama of defining the black female form” can easily be traced through the fame of the exotic physique of the “Hottentot Venus” in early nineteenth-century Europe,to cultural constructions of American slave women as commodities, breeders, and sexual lures, to public commentary on the physiques of tennis stars Venus and Serena Williams over the last decade or so.5 Cultural anxiety regarding the “difference” (from white norms) attached to their bodies by majority white publics is merely one aspect of the burden that black women historically have carried. For Mrs. Obama, it is but one constituent of the array of burdens borne by a black first lady forced to reconcile her all-too-visible difference—and its links to racial stereotypes—with the normative expectations attached to an institution previously occupied exclusively by white women.6 Much of what follows relies on a comparison of representations of the first lady in mainstream media directed at white audiences and in mainstream media directed at black audiences. My experience with this discourse indicates that white-targeted media have talked about the first lady’s body in a way that black-targeted media have not. The “body problem”offers a useful entry point into a broader discussion of a central dimension of Mrs. Obama’s personal burden (as well as a central dimension of her rhetorical/cultural significance) as our first African American first lady: her function as a signifier for the dialectic between sameness and difference that swirls around her and the first family in the public imaginary. For example, in stories from the early days of the Obama presidency, magazines targeting white women tended to talk about Mrs. Obama’s muscular arms as impressive and enviable—as somehow otherworldly and unbelievable on someone who does not train her body for a living.7 They fetishized her difference from ordinary (white) women, seemingly doing so to praise her, while also domesticating her somewhat transgressive physique by framing it within the postfeminist and maternalist politics of self-care, that is,“Mommy works out so that she can be a happierandbetterMommy.”8 Importantly,profilesof Mrs.Obamainwhite health and lifestyle magazines did not mention the health problems that disproportionately affect African American women—obesity, diabetes, heart disease, tuberculosis—focusing instead on the First Lady’s fitness regimen and...

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