Melania Trump: a Case Study on How We Consume Politicians’ Wives

1 DIGGING INTO THE ALLURINGLY OPAQUE Melania Trump: A Case Study on How We Consume Politicians’ Wives 본 자료는 저작권 법에 의해 보호되는 저작물로, Ringle사에 저작권이 존재합니다. 해당 자료에 대한 무단 복제/배포를 금하며, 해당 자료로 수익을 얻거나 이에 상응하는 혜택을 누릴 시 Ringle과 사전 협의가 없는 경우 고소/고발 조치될 수 있습니다. 2 Intro 2016년 11월에 있을 미국 대통령 선거를 앞두고 도날드 트럼프가 미 디어에서 한시가 바쁘게 오르내리고 있습니다. 한국 미디어에서도 도 날드 트럼프가 이민자나 여성에 대한 발언으로 종종 구설수에 오르는 반면 그의 아내인 멜라니아 트럼프에 대한 이야기는 비교적 덜 알려진 것 같습니다. 아이러니컬하게도 그의 아내도 이민자 출신의 모델이었 습니다. 멜라니아 트럼프의 사례로 정치인의 아내들이 어떻게 문화적 으로, 사회적으로 소비 되는지 알아볼까요? 우선 슬라이드 9-10번에 있는 유튜브 동영상과 트위터 계정을 통해 Melania Trump를 만나보세요. 그 다음엔 슬라이드 14-25번에 있는 기사를 통해 Melania Trump가 어떻게 인식되고 있는지 살펴보세요. 자 그럼 이제 Ringle의 튜터와 함께 미국의 영부인이 될지도 모르는 Melania Trump에 대해 더 자세히 알아볼까요? Photo credit: GQ Magazine 3 Intro Not a day passes by without seeing Donald Trump’s face on media these days. His incendiary remarks on immigrants, ethnic minorities, and women often upset people and leave the public divisive. While we see and hear from him more than once a day, many people do not know much about his wife, Melania Trump. Ironically, Melania Trump is an immigrant herself. Born in what is now Slovenia, Melania Trump became an American citizen only in 2006. This photogenic lady also used to be a model in Europe and NYC. How do we think and talk about Melania Trump or other politicians’ wives? What do we ask of them? How does media portray them? Why? Meet the woman who might become the next First Lady of the United States and think about these questions with your Ringle tutor today. Photo credit: GQ Magazine 4 Politicians’ Wives How many of these women do you know? What do you know about them? 5 Left: Carla Bruni Left: Michelle Obama Right: Nicolas Sarkozy Right: Barack Obama (former president of France) (President of the U.S.) Left: Queen Rania Left: Prince William Right: King Abdullah (The United Kingdom) (The State of Qatar) Right: Catherine Middleton 7 Food for Thought Exchange your ideas with the tutor. HOW MANY? How many of these women did you recognize? What do you know about them? Do you know what they do for living or what they used to do? What are their passions? HOW DID YOU LEARN ABOUT THEM? How did you learn about these women? If you are particularly drawn to any of these women, who is it and why? MEDIA PORTRAYAL What do you think about how they are portrayed in media? Does it make you feel like they are real human beings too? Why or why not? IN YOUR COUNTRY? Is there any politician’s wife that is well-known or popular in your country? Introduce her to your tutor and explain why she is well known. If not, is there any public figure’s wife that is well known? 8 Meet Melania Trump 9 INTRODUCING MELANIA TRUMP Interview with Melania Trump and Donald Trump Credit: ABC News 10 GLIMPSE INTO MELANIA TRUMP’S MIND AND LIFE Melania Trump’s Official Twitter Account 11 Food for Thought Exchange your ideas with the tutor. FIRST IMPRESSION Is this your first time seeing Melania Trump? What is your first impression on her? A MODERN ROMANCE? What kind of couple do Donald Trump and Melania Trump want the people to believe they are? In other words, what kind of image are they projecting? Why do you think they are doing so? RELATIONSHIP DYNAMIC From the interview clip, what kind of relationship or power dynamic do you observe between Donald Trump and Melania Trump? Or between the interviewer and Melania Trump? PEEPING THROUGH HER TWITTER What did you notice about her Twitter account? What kind of image do you think she (or perhaps her publicist) wants to project to the public? 12 “Nobody Will Ever Know” Discuss the following article with your tutor. 13 “Nobody Will Ever Know” It wasn’t always this way. Once upon a time, a man could marry his Slovenian sweetheart, invite Bill and Hillary Clinton to the lavish wedding, and only the society pages would bother with it. “It was completely different than it is now,” Melania Trump tells me, recalling those bygone days of sanity, speaking in her now famous accent, a kind of dreamy Transylvanian. Back then, in 2005, it didn’t seem odd that she and Donald Trump would mark their happy occasion with the former president and First Lady, then a senator from New York. “When they went to our wedding, we were private citizens,” Melania reminds me. Just two private citizens getting hitched at the groom’s 126-room Florida palace. He in a tux; she in a $100,000 Dior dress that laborers’ hands had toiled upon for a legendary 550 hours, affixing 1,500 crystals —jewels fit for private citizens like them. A pair of ordinary people, really, uniting in matrimony, as Billy Joel serenaded the couple and guests slurped caviar. Those were, in some ways, simpler times. But things change quickly—which is perhaps the enduring fact of Melania Trump’s entire improbable life—and when your husband works up a plan to make America great again, the very same Clintons you once smiled with on your wedding day can now become your family’s mortal enemies. And you can think, as Melania Trump says she does, that it’s no huge deal, really. “This is it, what it is,” Melania tells me. “It’s all business now; it’s nothing personal.” 14 “Nobody Will Ever Know” Of course, Melania had the foresight to imagine that politics would bring chaos. Donald’s first wife, Ivana, may have wanted Trump to be president, but Melania, his third, was never hot on the idea. “When we discussed about it, I said he really needs to make sure he knows he really wants to do it, because life changes,” Melania says. We’re speaking on the phone, though I have no idea where she’s calling from. Is she in her penthouse, a gilded triplex in the Trump Tower? Perhaps somewhere out on the campaign trail? While she’s a crowd-pleaser on the stump, she appears infrequently and only when she deigns to. “Nobody controls me. I travel with my husband when I can,” she says, “when I know that I can go, and I know that my son is okay alone for a few days with the help.” While Donald often says that Melania would make a stellar First Lady, the former model offers little clue about what a move to the White House would mean for her. She once said she would be “traditional,” like Jackie Kennedy, and on the question of what causes she might support, she has noted she is already involved in “many, many charities.” She elaborated: “Many different charities involving children, involving many different diseases.” In this respect, she is just like her husband. She’s alluringly opaque. She makes meaningful eye contact and emphatically repeats affirmative, folksy banalities—she “has a thick skin,” she takes things “day by day,” she follows the news “from A to Z”—until the interviewer either is transported into a supra-verbal understanding or decides it’s pointless to press for specifics. But unlike her husband, Melania is reserved, polite, and steady, say those close to her. “There is a peace in her,” one old friend from Slovenia tells me. She is a homebody. She’s rich, but not a socialite; she prefers family to the It set and retires early after events. 15 16 “Nobody Will Ever Know” This image of a retiring homebody, of course, is not the one that Trump’s enemies present when they conjure her in the White House. Ahead of Utah’s primary, allies of Ted Cruz posted a photo from a shoot for a 2000 issue of British GQ in which a naked Melania is lying on her stomach on a white bearskin rug. “Meet Melania Trump. Your next First Lady,” read the ad, aimed at conservative Mormon voters. “Or, you could support Ted Cruz on Tuesday.” Trump shot back in a cryptic, menacing message that he would “spill the beans” on Heidi Cruz and then re-tweeted two photos, side by side: one, a mid-sentence Heidi, looking like a gargoyle; another, a bronzed, blue-eyed Melania, looking like a fox. “The images are worth a thousand words,” the caption read, though Trump’s tweet itself was really communicating only four: “My wife is hotter.” It’s easy to think America has changed a lot since Hillary Rodham Clinton was chastised in the early ’90s for her ambition as First Lady—refusing to sit at home and make cookies. But our conception of a presidential spouse hasn’t evolved much. Michelle Obama, a Princeton graduate and legal hotshot who was once her husband’s law- school-era mentor, has been mainly confined to dealing with soft issues: childhood obesity, planting vegetables. Rather than Hillary or Michelle, it was Laura Bush—a teacher who supported her husband’s turning from bottle to Bible—who seemed most suited to Middle America’s idea (or at least a man’s idea) of a First Lady. Of course, the paragon of them all is still Jackie Kennedy, endlessly glamorous and endlessly tolerant of her husband’s philandering. 17 “Nobody Will Ever Know” Those who know Melania say the Jackie template isn’t a bad one for her to aspire to.

Load more