Posts Tagged ‘politics’

Eighteen Acres, the debut novel by Nicolle Wallace, communications director under George W. Bush and campaign advisor for John McCain and Sarah Palin, approaches contemporary politics from the angle of women’s commercial fiction. The three main characters each carry different careers within the realm of US politics: Melanie Kingston, the White House chief of staff, Charlotte Kramer, America’s first female president, and Dale Smith, a White House correspondent.

Read the entire review on Bookslut.

Since Sarah Palin & Co stuck the Republican flag in feminism and started touting the movement for their own political advances, I’ve been paying close attention to how the media has described this appropriation. The call outs in magazines, online media, and blogs that have been covering this “movement” usually cycle through the following phrases: “new feminism,” “conservative feminism,” “Sarah Palin’s conservative feminism,” or “right-wing feminism.”

Read this entire post on Feministing.

Here is an excerpt of my review of Traister’s fantastic book. Read the entire review on Bookslut.

Rebecca Traister’s all-encompassing book on the cultural impact of the 2008 presidential election on women voters covers a lot of ground in, surprisingly, very few pages. Traister, a Salon.com reporter who covered the election extensively, draws from own her reporting as well as acute analyses of MSNBC coverage, daytime television talk shows, and many, many print pieces. Incorporating such powerful voices as Melissa Lacewell-Harris (now Harris-Perry), Jessica Valenti, Gloria Steinem, and Rachel Maddow, Traister examines the sexism endured by Hillary Clinton by both the conservative and liberal media, the divide among liberal woman voters, and the catapulting of Sarah Palin as the queen of “the new feminism.”