Posts Tagged ‘Sarah Palin’

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.”

Meghan McCain’s diary-like account of her father’s campaign trail is a quick read. A fresh college graduate, McCain forfeits her plans of graduate school or opening up a clothing boutique and decides to follow her parents on the road to presidency. From the beginning, McCain identifies her father’s campaign to be out of touch with the younger crowd and aims to rally this demographic with her blog McCainBlogette.com. McCain contributes to her father’s campaign by documenting their travels with a twenty-something’s voice, including photographs and inside jokes. While on the twenty-month trail, McCain runs into snarky territory with other campaign workers, gets sent to an image consultant in California, and is eventually asked to leave the campaign.

Between lack of sleep, Coca-Cola consumption, and squeezing into her Spanx, McCain recounts her first meeting with the Palins and her father’s reluctance to share his running mate’s identity with his family. McCain feels betrayed when she learns that Sarah Palin was invited to the family’s ranch and struggles with how to relate to  Palin  and her children.

McCain is not a perceptive or particularly compelling writer, but she’s not trying to be. When retelling events from the campaign, McCain sticks to the same tactile details: UGG boots, makeup, and outfits. She inhabits a friendly, impassioned tone when addressing her readers, perpetually flogging the central idea that her father is not a bad person and that she was raised to think for herself. She shares memories from her childhood and past elections, specifically being approached by reporters at a young age and her reaction to her father’s famous comment on her hypothetical pregnancy. She lightly muses on the conditions of being a “daughter-of” — the pressures endured by daughters of political figures and the standards they impose on one another.

McCain does touch on some more complex topics, grazing them with her bubbly voice as she observes the sexism that ravages female candidates, the manipulation of campaign managers, and the stigma of being called a RINO (Republicans in Name Only). Her account from the makeup chair, more amiable than poignant, does provide a narration uncommonly paired with politics and thus a different point of view of McCain’s campaign. As the moderate Republican with the “stripper hair” and glittery heels, McCain’s confessional, vernal writing succeeds in garnering sympathy as the odd girl out of the GOP. As passionate about the future of the Republican party as she is about her Diane von Furstenberg dress, McCain addresses her own political beliefs superficially, encouraging her young Republican readers to consider more moderate social views while retaining their belief in small government.

To read more about Meghan McCain, click here.

Susan J. Douglas introduces her book, Enlightened Sexism: The Seductive Message that Feminism’s Work is Done, with a definition of what she has coined  as “enlightened sexism.” This new brand of sexism promotes the idea that feminism is no longer needed given certain milestone achievements for women’s rights.

Douglas writes, “Enlightened Sexism a response, deliberate or not, to the perceived threat of a new gender regime. It insists that women have made plenty of progress because of feminism — indeed, full equality has allegedly been achieved — so now it’s okay, even amusing, to resurrect sexist stereotypes of girls and women.”

Douglas supports her thesis by calling on a wide range of  media examples from the 1990s and 2000s such as Melrose Place, the Spice Girls, the reality TV boom, Gossip Girl, and Sarah Palin. Douglas also chronicles feminist efforts that were destroyed by enlightened sexism, such as the birth and death of notoriously smart Sassy magazine, a teen publication Douglas describes as presenting articles and ideas to young girls “[that] could have appeared in the Village Voice or Mother Jones.”

Douglas’s promotes a well-researched concept, as the sexist thread that runs through the manufactured “girl power!” of the 90s up through films like Legally Blonde and Mean Girls is consistently observed. Readers can appreciate Douglas’s wide ranging perspective as she includes pragmatic statistical research, her own experiences raising her millennial daughter, and observations of her students at the University of Michigan.

Most central to Douglas’s idea of enlightened sexism is the birth of reality TV:

As reality TV has evolved in the early twenty-first century and become formulaic, one of the biggest formulas has been to rely on stereotypes, like “the slut” and “the bitch,” and to insist that women be defined by their relationships and assessments by men. As a woman who worked as a “resident psychologists” on one of these shows reported, she was “struck by how embedded in the show’s narrative were the common stereotypes of gender” and how it was in the editing room that “the nonconscious ideology of sexism” took control of the footage. It is in reality TV where the spritzy new girliness of chick flicks and women’s magazines in the late 1990s began to curdle into something more reactionary.

Despite many thoughtful observations, Douglas’s writing wavers when uniting all of her experiences and research into one solid narrative. Successfully, she deconstructs the implicit sexism in Legally Blonde protagonist Elle Woods, explaining that it was Elle’s girliness and attention to hair care practices that won the final court case, not her knowledge of law. But Douglas’s voice struggles when balancing her research with a conversational, informal tone, often relying on jokes to conclude her chapters rather than the analysis her findings merit. Her anecdotal style can often stray too far from central points, detracting readers from the significance of her topic and her riveting research.

Regardless of Douglas’s wayward voice, her research warrants reading. Enlightened Sexism has much to share about Y2kers — young girls and boys who came of age post-2000 whose first experiences with media were Spice Girl lyrics, reality TV characters, Sex and the City, and Buffy the Vampire Slayer. By tearing into these influences with a critical eye, Douglas taps into a new wave of feminists, calling into question the media consumed in their not-so-distant childhoods and ensuring a new effort on the feminism front. Douglas’s book serves as a strong encyclopedia of media depictions of women for the past two decades, a resource surely needed among feminists of all walks and ages.

To read more about Susan J. Douglas, click here.