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21. It's the Masculinity, Stupid

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21. It's the Masculinity, Stupid JACKSON KATZ 21. IT’S THE MASCULINITY, STUPID A Cultural Studies Analysis of Media, the Presidency and Pedagogy INTRODUCTION A revealing story made its way around Washington political circles early in the new century about the first – and fateful – meeting of Karl Rove and George W. Bush. It was 1973 and Rove, a 22-year-old aide at the Republican National Committee, was asked by chairman George H.W. Bush to go to Union Station to meet his son and give him the keys to the family car. As Rove describes the encounter, reported in Newsweek magazine (Fineman, 2004) – he was blown away by his first impression of the then-27-year-old Bush. “I’m there with the keys and this guy comes striding in wearing jeans, cowboy boots, and a bomber jacket. He had this aura,” Rove remembered. What Rove saw in Bush as he walked through a train station lobby was something the incipient conservative king-maker later packaged and sold with great skill: an aristocratic white man with an affected blue collar Texas swagger who possessed in the force of his personality the raw material for electoral success in the U.S. at the end of the 20th century and the beginning of the 21st. As a young Republican activist just out of college, Rove seemed to know intuitively what many professional political consultants – especially those who work for Democrats – have only recently begun to figure out, that the “aura” he felt from George W. Bush was the stuff of political power in the media era. With historically fateful consequences, he helped turn that insight – and that aura – into 62 million votes. In this chapter, I provide a general introduction to the importance of masculinity studies in education and cultural theory. Specifically, I intend to sketch out some of the key elements of a multiperspectival cultural studies analysis of the central role in contemporary U.S. culture and politics played by media-driven constructions of presidential masculinity. Over the past few years, researchers and theorists in political science, women’s studies, communication, sociology and other academic disciplines, along with journalists and bloggers, have begun to pay closer attention to the ways in which gender functions in presidential politics. Not surprisingly, much of the pioneering work in this area has been done by feminists, whose main area of interest has been women as candidates and voters, and the changes in U.S. politics occasioned by women’s increasing political activity and electoral participation. Feminist theorists have examined such issues as cultural barriers to the acceptance of women’s executive-level leadership, and the role of national Z. Leonardo (ed.), Handbook of Cultural Politics and Education, 477–507. © 2010 Sense Publishers. All rights reserved. KATZ security in shaping public expectations about the qualities necessary in a president. (Han and Heldman, 2007; Norris, 1997). In addition, feminist standpoint theory maintains that initiating research into the social world from women’s lives yields a wealth of otherwise inaccessible insight. Because women are “outsiders” to dominant institutions such as politics and media, “thinking up” from women’s lives provides a lens through which to observe the myriad ways the presidency is gendered masculine, many of which remain invisible to men and male journalists and social theorists, “whose life patterns and ways of thinking fit all too closely the dominant institutions and conceptual schemes” (Harding, 1991). Because my study concerns the way presidential masculinities are constructed in media culture, feminist scholarship that examines how women are forced to navigate the complex cultural expectations around women’s leadership in the political realm is especially revealing not only of the extent to which the presidency has always been a masculine institution, but of some of the mechanisms through which this is achieved. Building on current and earlier feminist scholarship, scholars and activists inside and outside the academy have recently turned their attention to the gendered aspects of men’s candidacies and gendered voting patterns. For example, it is now common to read in mainstream journalism about the problem Democrats have had for several decades in attracting white working-class male voters. (Brownstein, 2003, Kuhn, 2007, Teixeira and Rogers, 2000). Notably, however, few of the books, articles, op-ed columns and blog postings that discuss this issue offer much analysis of media culture and its relationship to gender and presidential politics. Those studies that do address this subject tend to highlight topics such as coverage about women candidates’ hairstyles and clothing, although some scrutinize representations and discourse about men as well. (Han and Heldman, 2007). Occasionally an analysis manages to combine insights about both women candidates and male voters. In an astute op-ed about Hillary Clinton in The New York Times, Susan Faludi argued that Clinton’s tenacity and fighting spirit that emerged in the 2008 Democratic primaries was attractive to white male working-class voters, who could relate to the new kind of masculinized femininity that she seemed to embody. “Her new no-holds-barred pugnacity and gleeful perseverance have revamped her image in the eyes of begrudging white male voters,” she wrote, “who previously saw her as the sanctioning ‘sivilizer,’ a political Aunt Polly whose goody-goody directives made them want to head for the hills” (Faludi, 2008). To date, feminists who have analyzed media content typically have focused on the role of media culture in the construction of various types of femininities. Consider the pioneering feminist media literacy work of Jean Kilbourne (1979), the work of Naomi Wolf (1991) on western constructions of female beauty, the work of bell hooks (1992) on race and representation, or the work of Susan Bordo (1994) on women’s bodies and media. As these and other feminist theorists and activists have long maintained, images of women’s bodies as represented in advertising and other contemporary media are much thinner, more waifish, whiter and younger than women’s bodies in the real world. These portrayals of the “feminine ideal” function in the symbolic realm as a means of taking power away from women, because thin, waifish women literally take up less space in the world, and hence are 478 .
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