About
When listing the top five reasons that Hillary can’t win the upcoming presidential election, the one that is invariably listed first is the most obvious: gender. Women in the United States started voting in 1920, but they have not yet come close to holding the number of political positions that would be representative of the country’s population, and, clearly the US has never elected a female president. In this Inside Politics article, (http://www.insidepolitics.org/heard/HillaryClinton.pdf) Hillary’s gender is named as her most obvious impediment because of prevailing prejudice and stereotypes about women’s ability to be politicians. However, the outcome of the upcoming race is by no means preordained, and these same sterotypes may also unexpectedly work to her advantage.
In this blog, I hope to explore those stereotypes, 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? However, as Judith Butler suggests, “If one ‘is’ a woman, that is surely not all one is; the term fails to be exhaustive…As a result, it becomes impossible to separate out ‘gender’ from the political and cultural intersections in which it is invariably produced and maintained” (Judith Butler, “Subjects of Sex/Gender/Desire”, 343). 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 decicive factor in her victory or loss?
bibomedia.com said,
March 7, 2008 @ 1:37 am