Clark Vader and the Helengrad Labour Lesbians Anatomy of a political-symbolic hate campaign Lewis Stoddart –
[email protected] 2008-07-20 (This is a slightly revised edition of a research paper submitted toward a graduate diploma in political science at Victoria University of Wellington on 15 October 2007) And yet the rage that one felt was an abstract, undirected emotion which could be switched from one object to another like the flame of a blowlamp. — George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four Clark Vader and the Helengrad Labour Lesbians Lewis Stoddart –
[email protected] – 2008-07-20 Contents Introduction 2 Methodology 3 Discourse . 3 Political symbols . 7 Communist lesbian dictator 9 Communist . 9 Feminazi . 10 Totalitarian . 10 Ideological conspiracy . 11 Information control . 12 Corruption . 14 Nanny State . 15 Violence . 17 Convergence . 18 Symbolic promotion 19 Hate................................................... 20 A theory of symbolic promotion . 21 Hope................................................... 22 Appendix A: Data collection 25 Appendix B: Symbolic vocabulary 26 Appendix C: Source audio 29 Bibliography 33 1 Clark Vader and the Helengrad Labour Lesbians Lewis Stoddart –
[email protected] – 2008-07-20 Helen Clark, the first woman elected Prime Minister of New Zealand, has for decades been the subject of political attacks. These have been made on the basis of her history as an academic, her gender, domestic status and personal life, and not least her politics. John Banks and Lindsay Perigo, in their host roles on the Radio Pacific breakfast talk show The First Edition,1 crystallised various of these attack strategies into a characterisation which I describe as ‘communist lesbian dictator’. This is not to say that Banks or Perigo ever owned or controlled the discourse which feeds this charac- terisation; indeed it is quite widespread, enough so that caricatures of Clark2 routinely make fun of her ‘masculine’ characteristics, her ‘ruthlessness’, her tendency to wear red blazers, and other such symbolic matter.