season of the bitch

Some thoughts on Palin coverage from the Washington Post:

The top comparison, of course, is to Hillary Clinton. It’s far too easy to reach out to the last woman to run for the office, but Palin was chosen by McCain to join the ticket with little work of her own, while Clinton may have at first gained the spotlight through her famous husband, but busted her own butt on the campaign trail for months.

The other comparison I found, as Palin’s image went down, was to Harriet Miers, Bush’s failed appointee to the Supreme Court, who was challenged by the Right as well as the Left and withdrew her name from consideration. The Right complained that she was unqualified, and several op-ed writers noted that Palin, similarly unqualified, was embraced by those same people. They note that it’s a matter of ideology, not qualifications, that the Right really cares about.

Fewer mentions of the beauty pageant than I thought I’d see, though definite implication, again by op-ed writers, that McCain was besotted with Palin and chose her because of her looks and charm.

Others pointed out, as Campbell Brown did, the sexism of keeping Palin away from reporters and in the perception that Obama and Biden had to be nicer to Palin than she did to them. True equality, one noted, would come when they could call a woman out for being a bully without fear of being called one themselves.

Charisma and charm and the difference between them were noted as well–as charming people “get invited to parties,” and charismatic people “get invited to boardrooms.”

Everyone’s favorite characterization of Palin, in straight news stories as well as op-eds, was “hockey mom.” I bet hockey was discussed more in relation to Sarah Palin than it ever has been before in this country. I’ll get an actual tally of the “hockey mom” references, but my thoughts on “hockey mom,” in no particular order:

1. Hockey is the whitest sport in America. While the “soccer mom” conceit implied suburban whiteness, hockey implies an even greater whiteness.
2. Hockey also implies violence not inherent in soccer or little league.
3. it’s still an unpopular sport in the U.S.–but this played to Palin’s advantage. Hockey mom, like “lipstick,” she was able to claim for herself. When you hear that term, you now think of Palin.

Op-ed writers also love to mock other op-ed writers who liked Palin. I didn’t end up with any rabidly pro-Palin op-eds, just some rather catty anti-Palin ones.

Her ambition, much like Hillary Clinton’s, was constantly mentioned, but with Palin it was often coupled with criticisms of her abilities. Ambitious women are still something to be feared, but the implied contrast with Clinton says, “At least that woman deserved to be ambitious.”

From the beginning to the end, almost every writer noted that Palin was chosen to try to peel off disaffected Clinton voters, and many pointed out that the attempt failed and that Palin polled better among men than among women.

I’m not comparing coverage of Palin to coverage of similar candidates, so I can’t compare how often she was quoted, but I can note that when she is quoted it’s often in an attempt to make her look bad. Her quotes are rarely used to illustrate her knowledge or issue positions, and instead to show her on the campaign trail or her defenses of herself when she’s screwed up (whether it’s Troopergate, interviews or the debate).

Questions about her kids faded into the background as questions about her competence took center stage.

It may have simply been the size of my sample, but I found few articles about the clothing scandal. Maybe when I collect my Salon.com articles, I’ll find more.

Comments?

I’ve made the joke several times lately that Sarah Palin kills feminism. That my most stridently feminist friends (and myself) find ourselves yelling words we wouldn’t normally allow anyone to call a woman at the TV, and that we find ourselves making the arguments against her that we would hesitate to make against another woman.

I was an Obama supporter, so I’ve been making arguments against a female candidate for a while now, and I will go to my grave defending the notion that that doesn’t make me a bad feminist. But my arguments against Hillary Clinton (and my serious arguments against Sarah Palin) were policy-based. I don’t want a warmongering president. I would like to maintain my rights to my reproductive system. Etc.

But the major arguments repeated over and over again about Sarah Palin are still the same old sexist arguments writ larger. She’s incompetent. She spent too much money on clothes. She’s nothing but a pretty face. She’s bitchy. She’s incapable of making difficult decisions. Her family is used as a prop.

We may argue–but Sarah Palin IS incompetent. $150,000 IS a ridiculous amount of money to spend on clothing, especially when you’re trying to pretend you’re Joe Six-Pack Hockey Mom.

But the fact remains that we’re still making the same old arguments that have always been used against us. Inexperience, “not ready,” it was pointed out in the primaries, have always been lines used against “minority” candidates, whether that’s women or black candidates. And focus on the woman’s clothes? Yeah, we know how that works.

The coverage of the clothing scandal has been amusing–I’ve been saving bits and pieces of it on my Tumblr for later reference–but what’s been rarely pointed out is that it appears to have been a man who did the shopping for Palin. What does that say for our gender perceptions? Something different, I’d bet, but instead the frame in the news is of the hockey mom going on a shopping binge with the RNC’s credit card. It fits the stereotype of women, right? Look at what they’ll do when they get their hands on the cash. What will they do when they get their hands on the budget?

(sorry, this is just kind of me vomiting my thoughts onto the page while I’m reading)

The selection of a woman who so gloriously fits into all the usual frames for a female candidate (when so many others didn’t but were forced into them anyway) by the McCain campaign can tell us something hugely important about them: this is how they see women. They’ve bought, full stop, into the media perception of female candidates. In a year where we saw a woman candidate who was very few of these things, the McCain people still thought woman equaled pretty and family-friendly, and that competence was impossible to come by.

Perhaps they realized that any woman was going to have to face a tougher battle to prove competence and so figured it didn’t matter that Sarah Palin couldn’t hack an hour-long TV interview.

But will Palin’s reinforcement of pretty much every prevailing stereotype of women in politics have adverse effects on the next women to run? Or can we hope that people will remember that there are women out there–on both sides of the aisle, not to mention in third parties–who are competent?

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!

Hey guys. So one of the fun things I do as a communications student is study portrayals of different people/groups in the media. Obviously, this comes with a feminist slant. And I assume most of my readers here will have the same sort of viewpoint, and maybe some academic backgrounds that can help me out.

So it’s been suggested by one of my profs that I should attempt to do a little crowdsourcing experiment on this paper. I’m posting my topic here, and I would love suggestions from my readers on where to take it, and more specifically, on readings I should check out for it. I’ll be blogging my progress as it goes on, so we’ll see if this helps, hurts, or is just neutral and fun for you to watch me tear my hair out.

Proposal below the fold.

Hockey Mom, Beauty Queen, or Pitbull in Lipstick:
The Many Faces of Sarah Palin in the Media

Republican vice-presidential nominee Sarah Palin burst onto the political scene in August with her selection, seemingly last-minute and out of nowhere, to join the McCain campaign and bring something new and fresh to the ticket. Almost immediately, the media seized on her image as a young, attractive woman and the coverage overflowed with stories about her past as a beauty queen, her looks, her style, and the Internet exploded with Photoshopped bikini pictures and Palin Bingo.
The public opinion of Sarah Palin has changed as more information has come out about her, but the one thing that hasn’t is the pervasiveness of feminine stereotypes in the coverage. Feminist theorist Judith Butler has written about gender as a performance rather than as an innate quality, and it is my theory that the coverage of Palin centers on how successfully she performs certain gender roles. Other theorists have also written about the female body as signifier, and this also plays into portrayals of Palin—stories will mention her physical appearance when they would not mention the appearance of a man in the same situation.  Critical feminist theory will provide the framework for this study, drawing from several disciplines to analyze her portrayal in the news.
I plan to study the coverage of Palin in two media outlets: Salon.com and the Washington Post, and carry out a qualitative analysis of the stereotypes presented in their stories, both op-ed pieces and straight news. A random sampling of stories will be selected from the volume of stories about Palin in the two sources, and read for stereotypical descriptions of her physical appearance and personality. I will then use the feminist theorists to examine what those particular stereotypes mean, and why they are pervasively applied to Palin, often in place of discussion of policy.