Why Monica Still Matters

With the “war on terrorism” having gone global and the GOP’s conquest of the last refuges of American liberalism moving into high gear, it feels like literally last millennium that many Americans sat glued to their TV and computer screens to see the latest ripe detail of Bill Clinton’s affair with Monica Lewinsky. Indeed, Starr’s keel-hauling of Clinton seems not only long past but also trivial, in the wake of Al Qaeda’s attacks, the Bush administration’s relentless assulats on the federal tax base, and the war against Iraq. Linking the Clinton/ Lewinsky/ Starr affair to more current events appears difficult to do in a way that makes the scandal significant in itself as opposed to merely a distraction from other and perhaps more profound cultural, political, and economic forces that prepared the way for the recent Republican juggernaut. These forces would include the construction of the Islamist enemy-figure in popular discourses, the bipartisan support for maintaining a vast and growing military apparatus even after the Cold War’s end, and the entrenchment of Democratic leaders’ unwillingness to challenge corporate-led globalization.

Nevertheless, the current hegemonic formation also depends on a much wider array of discourses of sexuality, gender, race, and class. A closer look at the Clinton scandal, in turn, shows that these discourses gained strength in the late nineties not behind the backs of the scandal-mongers and -watchers but rather on political terrain that the scandal helped forge. Lauren Berlant and Lisa Duggan’s collection Our Monica, Ourselves: The Clinton Affair and the National Interest provides just such a salutary retrospective of those events that so many Americans claim they would rather forget, and that the mainstream media long ago dropped from their routines of coverage. The authors in this challenging and worthwhile volume show us that far from being tawdry and politically inconsequential sensationalism, the Clinton scandal fortified a variety of developing discourses of power and thus contributed positively, even vitally, to the current composition of political-cultural hegemony.

Our Monica, Ourselves works at the margins of traditional scholarly writing. While nearly all the contributors are professional academics, fewer than half of the eighteen essays stick to the standard prose and argumentation of the academy. Rather than simply scholarly, the book is better described as scholarly-activist. This is a matter of explicit intention for the editors, whose introduction presents the volume as “a progressive forum for thinking through the largest cultural, political, and public-policy issues raised by . . . the Clinton/Lewinsky affair.”^[1] Berlant and Duggan seek to redress what they correctly see as the paucity of views on the scandal from “the cultural/political left in the political public sphere,” perspectives almost entirely excluded through “the conventions of the corporate news media.”^[2] But there is something more than critical analysis as such going on here: the title’s reference to Our Bodies, Ourselves, explain the editors, indicates the book’s further ambition to provide a site for something approximating a discovery or reconstitution of the (embodied) self. In other words, Our Monica, Ourselves has a practical purpose that goes beyond enlarging the public sphere, although the editors’ mixed vocabulary for describing that purpose makes it somewhat ambiguous. The book aims further to assist readers in overcoming the “alienating terms” of dominant discourses about sex and sexuality — or, alternatively, in a more Foucauldian and less humanist register that is more in synch with most of the contributors’ theoretical sensibilities, to generate “a nonnormalizing history of sexuality” that might lead to a new “sexual ethics.”^[3]

This lengthy book is loosely organized into five parts, and features essays by some very well known, established scholars in cultural studies and critical theory as well other more junior but fine contributors. Part One, with essays by Eli Zaretsky, and Dana D. Nelson and Tyler Curtain, foregrounds the questions about democracy raised by the scandal. In Part Two, the authors (Laura Kipnis, James R. Kincaid, Simone Weil Davis, Sasha Torres, and Toby...