Not long from now in October, two men in suits — Mitt Romney and Barack Obama — will stand side-by-side to debate each other four times in three weeks. Imagine those moments. The two men defending their records and outlining their case to the American people: “This is why you should choose me to lead you for the next four years.”
If you follow politics you know that Obama and Romney are more than their fiscal ideas or foreign policies. Elections are also battles for each candidate’s identity. And that identity is negotiated in the press, in the minds of the public, and in the actions of the candidates and campaigns. And a significant part of that identity is gender: the performance of certain aspects of masculinity and femininity in the private or public sphere.
As evidenced most recently by Newsweek’s cover article, “Romney: The Wimp Factor”, the media can weigh language with gendered meaning to boost their case. In our book Performing American Masculinities: The 21st-Century Man in Popular Culture (Indiana University Press, 2011) we wrote about this idea, Obama’s masculine identities during the 2008 election. The months leading up to the election show “a social process that gives bodies meaning. Gender definitions are produced through active negotiation in the rigors of the extended electoral setting. The various media […] debate the meaning(s) of these [candidates’] bodies on display.” A single night onstage at a televised debate is a metaphor for the lengthy campaign cycle. The two candidates, like actors on a stage, are watched by the audience, their motives and actions interpreted and given meaning, as the plot climaxes on election day.
Newsweek’s labeling Mitt a wimp constitutes a single moment in the ongoing public negotiation of one candidate’s masculinities. In gender studies departments across the country, it is perfectly acceptable for a male to be a bit of a wimp, a little less than the masculine ideal of traditional rugged manliness. We can celebrate a transgressive identity as a break from the norm. But, a national election is a different story, because a wimp is not presidential, not someone you want defending national security or as commander-in-chief.
This nomenclature is not sexist: a wimp can be male or female. In politics, the opposite of a wimp, a stud perhaps, can be male or female. This was the case that Hillary Clinton tried to make against Obama in her primary ads in 2008: “it’s 3 am, who do you want answering the phone [on important international decisions]?” Decisive wisdom can be the characteristic or the default attitude of any candidate, male or female. Mitt could out-wimp Bachman; Palin could out-swagger McCain. And how gender is perceived is also relative to the individual in the audience: a Hillary Clinton supporter might think she’s the only one with balls big enough to defend America, including Dick Cheney.
Newsweek’s declaring Obama a different sort of gendered term, “the first gay president,”– complete with a cover picture of Obama sporting a rainbow-colored halo out of a heavenly pride parade — might turn-off some independent voters as much as the Mitt/wimp connection. In the same way Clinton was the “first black president,” Andrew Sullivan argues the president deserves a similar title for his recent reversal on gay marriage: “Barack Obama had to come out of a different closet. He had to discover his black identity and then reconcile it with his white family, just as gays discover their homosexual identity and then have to reconcile it with their heterosexual family.” This awareness of identity is key to Obama’s projected self and to how he performs his masculinity. Whether or not this “sainting” from the gay community will hurt Obama in more religious swing states remains to be seen, but what was most interesting was how Obama couched his announcement of his change of heart.
Astutely, he framed himself — his masculine identity — as a caring father, trying to explain to Malia and Sasha “sitting around the dinner table” why their friends whose parents are same-sex couples “would be treated differently.” Obama continued: “It doesn’t make sense to them. And frankly, that’s the kind of thing that prompts a change of perspective.” An intimate domestic moment becomes a national tectonic shift. In positioning himself as a father seeing the world anew through the simple, innocent eyes of his own daughters, it complicates the situation for him and for us as his audience. Along with Malia and Sasha we question why those parents should be treated “differently when it comes to the eyes of the law.”
