My dear Pop Feminist sent me an article to look at for my Palin project, and I must say she hit the nail on the head. It might even be a twofer, as it’s got things I can use for my Missing White Girls project as well.
The article is “‘Security Moms’ in the Early Twenty-First-Century United States: The Gender of Security in Neoliberalism,” by Inderpal Grewal. And it’s brilliant.
The security mom, first phrased as Grewal refers to it by Michelle Malkin, is a conservative mother who supports and is used to support the militarised national-security state that must defend against outsiders. And we know who those outsiders are, right? The racialized “Other.” The ‘illegal immigrants,’ the black inner-city dwellers, and most of all, those scary Muslim extremists.
Grewal points out that Malkin’s security mom relies on feminist discourse. The conflating of public and private spheres in feminist critiques of domestic violence is inverted in “security mom” talk and in state action against violence against women, which is of course turned outward against the racialized Other rather than inward against the husbands and boyfriends who statistically pose a much larger threat to women.
The theoretical innate susceptibility of women to violence, the innate concern for “security” that Malkin posits, is part of the construction of the state.
“Thus the mother defines the proper gendered female subject within the home, community, civil society, and nation as defined by right-wing religious movements as well as the neoliberal state,” Grewal says.
Sarah Palin’s favorite self-referential term is “hockey mom,” but we can clearly see her in this construction. The emphasis there is not on hockey (though it is interesting to look at a relatively unpopular sport in most of the US, but a more violent one than the usual “soccer”) but on the “mom” part. Palin’s motherhood is a weapon and a campaign tool. She is mother both to a special-needs infant and a soldier (and a pregnant teen, who “chose” life though Palin would take that choice from others). Her motherhood, as well as her good looks, casts her as a proper female body and makes her possession of phallic symbols both literal (pictures of her with guns) and theoretical (her place of power on the Republican ticket).
Palin takes Malkin’s construction one further: we can imagine her not only anxiously calling her children’s cell phones to see where they are (though apparently not to make sure they’re using protection), but we joke about her wielding the shotgun in the proverbial shotgun wedding. We can easily picture her at the door aiming a gun at terrorists real or imagined.
“Whereas in the past the discourse of safety from rape for white women justified the lynching or imprisonment of black males, the safety of middle-class women. . . required the detention of Muslim males as well as the surveillance of everyone. . .This fear of the racialized figures of male violence of course hearkens back to a history of such representations, particularly of the black or brown male rapist,” Grewal notes.
And Palin on the campaign trail likes to invoke the specter of terrorism in combination with Barack Obama, her black male opponent. Though she strikes the pose of the tough mom, her beauty and whiteness are used then to symbolize the white womanhood that must be protected from the racialized Other.
“By making the mother into both the subject and the agent of security, motherhood becomes governmentalized. However, the increasing power of the religious right and the control of reproduction suggest that this subject is also the focus of sovereign and disciplinary power, producing domestic subject-citizens whose empowerment coincides with the needs of the nation and the state,” Grewal continues.
And Sarah Palin of course is the darling of the religious right, the pro-life mom of five who pushed for creationism in schools. She is a proud member of “Feminists for Life,” a perfect example of the co-optation of feminist discourse by the right. Her mother’s body is held up as an example and an excuse for the need to police other women’s bodies.
These are just some thoughts on this article. I’m sure I’ll have more later. Suggestions/arguments welcomed!
I’m glad you got so much out of that article!