This onion article asks, “Do we really want the first woman leading the free world to be such an outright take-charge type?”
Why am I laughing when I read this article?
Pinning down exactly why something is funny can often be very difficult, for humor plays on the conscious and unconscious references and values that we have picked up from popular culture, and infuses them with wit, irony, and nonsense until we are forced to giggle. Like most Onion articles, this one is written in an almost completely sarcastic tone of voice. When the author chides Hillary for being too calculating and pushy, he is really rebuking his audience (and Hillary’s critics) for expecting conciliatory, ameliorating “feminine” qualities in a presidential candidate. The author takes the joke further by insulting Hillary in a finger-wagging, grandmotherly sort of way: he admonishes her for being “impolite”, “self-promoting”, and “a little too ambitious”. Clearly, these are essential qualities for any serious politician. However, they are the qualities that little girls in the US have traditionally been warned against. Like most intelligent humor, this article is funny because it carries a greater message: in order to treat Hillary as a serious candidate, we must divorce our notions, ingrained or subtely inculcated with our way of thinking as they may be, of femininity from the way in which we judge whether she would make a good leader for our country or not.
To Gerald Collins, author of this article: I am Joanna Wasik, and I approve this message.
Below is the video in which Hillary announces that she will be running for president. She touches upon her political platform, and does emphasize certain issues which she knows are important to woman voters (see blog posting below, “female voters”). Note that she says she “definately” wants to talk about better healthcare, and also mentions her work fighting for women’s rights and children’s education.
There are two ways in which Hillary could conduct campaign strategy with regards to her gender: she, like other recently elected female politicians, could try to ignore or mitigate her gender and instead focus on issues that speak to her broadest base of voters; in other words, run her campaign as a male candidate would. Her second option would be to try and capitalize on her difference to garner support from voters that she would otherwise not be able to reach.
Hillary seems to be taking a two-pronged campaign strategy, combining both of the above approaches. On the one hand, she is attempting to downplay the fact that she is The Female Candidate, and instead emphasizing that she is running for office because she beleives that she is the best person, irrespective of gender, for the job. On the other hand, however, she is using her gender to play to a very specific audience: the female voter. For example, as the article mentioned below states, she “appears to be splitting the difference, playing up domestic issues that could have a special appeal to women without presenting them as such”. Read the rest of this entry »
In this blog, I hope to explore prevailing stereotypes about female politicians, and chart how they are working for or against Hillary. As the title of this blog suggests, I want to know: are we ready for a female president?
Although it is often hard to get past Hillary’s significance as The Female Candidate in the upcoming elections, one must remember that her gender identity interesects with all of her social and political ones as well. To truly understand Hillary and the phenomenon of a female running for the office of president, I will try to also address her entire political persona: her stands on the issues, her popularity ratings, her trips and her speeches. However, in the end, since gender is the one part of her persona that Hillary cannot feasibly alter, I’d mainly like to explore the following question: will Hillary’s gender be the decisive factor in her victory or loss?
