Phenomenal Woman: Michelle Obama's Embodied Rhetoric And

Phenomenal Woman: Michelle Obama’s Embodied Rhetoric and the Cultural Work of Fashion Biographies Stefanie Schäfer ABSTRACT Michelle Obama’s role as the first black First Lady of the U.S. is contextualized in discourses of feminism and race, in the historical meaning of the First Lady, and in the world of fashion and celebrity. Her strategy in engaging these discourses is described here as an ‘embodied rhetoric,’ in which she caters to media attention but refuses to comment on her fashion choices, thereby creating a void for interpretation that is filled by a plethora of readings. Drawing from biography and iconicity theory as well as fashion and First Lady Studies, this article discusses three iconic appearances of Obama that demonstrate her stances on the First Lady’s role, black female stereotypes, and fashion as empowerment, respectively. It examines the cultural work of two genres of celebrity texts, biographies and fashion biographies, in order to extrapolate her ‘real’ character and historical meaning for American womanhood. Obama’s case illustrates the inter- dependence between iconic persona and public mythmaking: The First Lady’s ‘office’ serves as a template for the creation of an American fashion icon. As a consequence, the Presidency is no longer a solitary office, but one occupied by a First Couple ruling by political and fashion power. This article discusses three iconic appearances of Obama that comment on her First Lady role, on black female stereotypes, and on fashion as empowerment, respectively. It examines how biographies and fashion biographies interpret these appearances in order to extrapolate her ‘real’ character and historical meaning for American womanhood. I’m a woman Phenomenally. Phenomenal Woman, That’s Me. (Maya Angelou, “Phenomenal Woman”) On June 7, 2014, Michelle Obama memorialized the African American poet Maya Angelou by recalling the impact the poem “Phenomenal Woman” had on her as a young girl: “I was struck by how she celebrated black women’s beauty like no one had ever dared to before. […] [I]n that one singular poem, Maya Angelou spoke to the essence of black women but she also graced us with an anthem for all women, a call for all of us to embrace our God-given beauty” (Sklar). Angelou’s “Phenom- enal Woman” exists quite literally as a physical phenomenon, a being-in-the-world differs from hegemonic norms of beauty and complexion. In the poem, admirers wonder about this phenomenality, which is not expressed in words but communi- cated through the lyrical I’s looks, gait, and posture. She is “phenomenal” because she is “extraordinary” and “known through the senses rather than through thought or intuition” (s. v. “Phenomenal”, Merriam Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary). The 236 Stefanie Schäfer poem “Phenomenal Woman” records the inquiring gaze of “pretty women” and “men themselves” who wonder about the lyrical I’s phenomenality, which is not so much expressed in words or hypotheses, but felt (Angelou 2009). In her memo- rial speech, Obama celebrates the (black) female body in a rare personal statement about her experience as black girl growing up on Chicago’s South Side and her public role as first black First Lady and emerging fashion icon. As First Lady, Michelle Obama has emulated Angelou’s phenomenal woman: Her appearances and fashion choices create media hysteria, and yet she remains somehow beyond grasp, a “diptych of glamorous mystery woman and regular PTA mother” (Steinhauer). Obama has refused to comment extensively on her role as the first black First Lady, thus creating a discursive void that in turn has culled a plethora of spectators eager to interpret her style and fashion choices. She has articulated what I call an embodied rhetoric, using her physical presence and black womanhood as a signifier that speaks through fashion statements, White House rituals, and the First Lady’s role as an exemplar of American womanhood. My analysis explores the visual and rhetorical strategies employed by biographical texts to establish Obama in the tradition of First Ladies. The texts I examine include biographies by journalists and fashion biographies that are often described as coffee table literature.1 Generally, these texts are propelled by a subjective fal- lacy. They illustrate the authors’ own relations, as (fashion) biographers, to their subject based on an emotional engagement with Michelle Obama. Likewise, aca- demic contributions from black feminist or historical perspectives portray Obama’s First Ladyship as decisive for the future of US-American womanhood and race relations.2 In trying to fill Obama’s First Lady image with meaning, commenters piece together a multifaceted media persona. In historicizing her First Ladyship, they mythologize her.3 In looking for the ‘real’ Michelle Obama, they continue an American cultural tradition of iconicity from the nation’s cultural imaginary. Biographies function as top-down/bottom-up devices for creating biographical subjects: They interact with previous texts (such as media coverage), respond to a specific reader interest in a person, and aim to present ‘true’ readings of their subjects’ lives. Biography scholarship has focused on how this feeling of authenticity can be created by debating the many roles available to the biographer.4 Recent 1 The fashion biographies discussed are Mary Tomer’s Mrs. O. The Face of Fashion Democ racy (2009), Everyday Icon: Michelle Obama and the Power of Style by Kate Betts (2011), as well as Swimmer (2008). The journalist biographies examined here are Mundy; Lightfoot; Kantor. 2 A prominent example is Spillers, who talks about her preference for a more original Obama on the campaign trail, before Michelle sounded “softened.” She asks questions about Obama’s impact on popular culture, world-wide conceptions of race, and the image of black women. Most interestingly, she portrays the Obamas’ arrival at the White House as a watershed moment: “a veritable ‘before’ and ‘after’” (308). Mary L. Kahl wonders “how, or if, the new first lady will use her intellect and legal training in service of one or more specific platforms” (316). An exemption is Michaela Hampf’s essay, which was published shortly before this article was completed. While my topic resembles Hampf’s, this essay on Obama’s iconicity carries to term Hampf’s call for an “intersectional” approach that thinks of race and gender together (56). 3 On feminist scholarship, see Cooper; Guerrero; Harris-Perry; Traister, Big Girls; on First Lady scholarship, see Caroli. See also the short essays in Biesecker, as well as Hampf and Christ. 4 See, e. g. Shelston (5), and, for an overview on biography scholarship and its concerns, Schäfer. Phenomenal Woman 237 scholarship emphasizes the cultural context of biography in a specific moment, claiming that the narrative of Americanization constitutes American biographies because “the humblest self is still burdened with the larger, typical, latently typo- logical mission of America in the spirit becoming America in fact.”5 The analysis of texts about Michelle Obama adds another facet to biography studies: It explores the narrative strategies and functions of celebrity biographies and the cultural meaning of authenticity and proximity. This essay also ponders what notions of ‘biographical truth’ the texts display, which types of implicit readers they address, and how these strategies feed into larger cultural practices and national myths. Günther Leypoldt has defined American cultural iconicity as the “power to re- alize the essence of culture” based on “charisma” that originates from the extra- ordinariness of a person (Leypoldt 7, 13).6 Icons are both hegemonic and democratic: They have, “on the one hand, a suturing function as hegemonic tools of dominant groups to control shifting identities and interests of the mass of people and, on the other hand, as democratic element in the media age, as symbols of popular identities and interests” (Rieser 8). Examining Michelle Obama as an icon allows for a critique of the overlapping paradigms of First Ladyship, race, and womanhood, as well as celebrity and fashion.7 Celebrity, as Leo Braudy argues, is formative to American culture, and it “mingle[s] the patterns of ancient heroism with the unprecedented American individual […] whatever the specifics of their politics, publicity for them was publicity for their country” (Braudy). Today, celebrity works by attaching a life story to the body image. It depends on the mass- dissemination of visual media, as well as on confessions and performance. Celeb- rities and icons thus need to be primarily ‘storied’ to be accessible to individuals. Fashion, the second blurry category looming large in Obama’s First Lady persona, will be addressed as it is in the fashion biographies, as empowering means of identity invention and self-affirmation, but its problematic inscription into a neoliberal postfeminist agenda will also be unmasked. Clothing and fashion carry their own cultural meaning and express who we are and who we want to be.8 The decoding of fashion statements is an act of writing discourses upon the body, imagining persona, and sketching out a character. As her dress-choices have been read as messages of their own, I use three iconic appearances to demonstrate 5 Wilson 109 and 111; on the cultural situatedness of biography, see e. g. Friedson; the cultural features of an ‘American biography’ and its effects have been evoked nostalgically, but not yet theorized (see, e. g. Rollyson). 6 Leypoldt focuses on iconic persons and how they are made into icons; on the importance of iconography in American culture, see also Reynolds. 7 On fashion studies, Bruzzi and Gibson state: “Part of the perceived problem of fashion has been that academics […] have not always known with what tone to approach and write about it—it’s too trivial to theorize, too serious to ignore” (2).

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