Sex in the Language of Politics -- Sexing the Political: A journal of Third Wave Feminists on Sexuality

sex in the language of politics

Years ago, as an elementary school teacher for a summer program in Boston, I had to explain to a bright seven-year-old girl why a woman had never been president. When I told her – not in so many words, of course – that it had to do with centuries of patriarchy shaping the political public sphere, she nodded sagely, as if she'd heard this line before, and replied, "Okay then, I guess I'll have to run for president myself."

These, of course, are the moments that make us rejoice in the practice of education, that nourish our optimism and our hope for change. Even when such changes occur on the local level, with women serving as town mayors and on city councils, their effects are deeply felt; and who could forget 1992,the much touted "Year of the Woman"? But in the months since the presidential election, my hopes have occasionally flagged in the face of the enduring cultural, and frankly sexual, biases that are woven into the fabric of our political lives. In the tradition of pedagogy, then, let me give a few examples.

In late November, as lawsuits developed on both ends of the political spectrum, an unfamiliar word entered the vernacular: chad. However, the language used to describe the state of certain questionable chads was strangely familiar (and, I would argue, not coincidental). Chads that had been poked with a voting implement but not punctured became "dimpled," and chads that were pushed through, distended but still attached, were labeled "pregnant" – the logical conclusion being that an unmarked ballot could only be described as "virgin." Listening to these descriptions, I couldn't help but think that Thomas Hardy had returned to us a century on, with "dimpling" reminiscent of Arabella's manipulation of her comely cheek in Jude the Obscure, and the cultural anxiety over the election's possibly "illegitimate" progeny paralleling the story of unplanned pregnancy in Tess of the d'Urbervilles.

The striking confluence of politics and sexuality in the furor over the presidential election suggests, it seems to me, a larger cultural concern over the presumed neutrality and objectivity of the political realm. All Americans are born into their citizenship, we are told; never mind that some experience that citizenship far differently than others, and that this difference is often marked along lines of gender, race, and class. At the same time, however, women who enter the political realm must struggle against the enduring stereotypes of irrational femininity – hence the preposterous (and if you ask me, hilarious!) Cold War notion that a female president suffering from PMS might erroneously push The Button – and the still-dominant perception that women's true place is in the private, not the public, sphere.

And again, it's no coincidence that the rhetoric of virgin and pregnant ballots, the sullied purity of the democratic ideal, emerges against the background of, among other female political triumphs, Hillary Rodham Clinton's Senate victory. Hillary's position as a "strong woman" positions her as exemplary to some, threatening to others. Laura Ingraham's recent book The Hillary Trap, for example, suggests that Hillary is not a fighter but rather a victim of self-compromise, concession, and submission – yet another stereotypical feminine role. Shortly after the November elections, news reports suggested that as the former First Lady becomes "just another freshman senator" making speeches for $140,000 a year, her famous husband will still pull in $100,000 per speech, plus millions of dollars in a book deal – allowing him, in the words of one newscaster, "to support his wife in style." Comments like this reveal just how sexualized politics still are, suggesting not only how far women have come, but how far we have yet to go.

Lise Sanders was born in 1970 and raised on a farm outside Seattle by feminist parents who gently corrected her when, despite her mother's doctorate in chemistry, she proclaimed at age six that she wanted to be a nurse because "everyone knows that women can't be doctors." She went on to receive a PhD in English Literature from the University of Chicago and currently teaches literature and gender studies at Hampshire College in Amherst, Massachusetts. She is the co-editor of Embodied Utopias, a forthcoming collection of articles on gender and space, and is presently at work on a book as well as a series of personal essays on women, politics and culture.