Hillary Rodham Clinton and the 2016 Election by unknow

Author:unknow
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Lexington Books

Chapter 7

Chelsea’s Mom, Charlotte’s Grandma

Negotiating a New Role in the Presidential Construction of Hillary Clinton

Debbie Jay Williams

As Hillary Clinton announced her candidacy for president in 2016, she did so with a “grandmother’s glow.”1 Yet her possible bid again raises the issue of the role gender will play in the construction and control of her candidate persona. Much of this struggle for control of identity occurs, Alice Eagly and Steven Karau argue, because characteristics associated with a leader role—agency, reason, and strength—are stereotyped as male and may thus be viewed as incompatible with characteristics associated with the female gender role—being emotional, dependent, and nurturing.2 Female candidates thus face a conundrum of how to maintain a feminine identity while being perceived as a competent leader because it appears that one precludes the other. In a study of prejudicial responses to Hillary Clinton and Sarah Palin, Sarah Gervais and Amy Hillard analyze responses to both women to account for this publically perceived incompatibility between “leader” and “female.” Gervais and Hillard also conclude that a female candidate will struggle when seeking to construct both a positive feminine persona and the persona of a leader competent enough to merit election to public office.3 However, though this research appears to identify public perception as the issue, for Clinton and any other woman who might run in 2016, the issue is one of media portrayal. Deborah Jordan Brooks’ post-2008 quantitative study of public perception of female candidates reveals that the public is actually becoming more open to the possibility of a female president.4 The problem, Brooks notes, is less one of public stereotyping than of journalists’ negative portrayal of women and perpetuation of gender stereotypes. Brooks offers a warning: “As a starting point for eliminating the influence of the conventional wisdom about gendered double standards, journalists need to stop perpetuating inaccurate information on this topic . . . The degree to which the media have embraced the conventional wisdom is truly stunning.”5 The issue with the propagation of misinformation by the news media is attributed by Shawn Parry-Giles to the role they seek to play as gatekeepers. Journalists write “both [as] biographers and character judges,” seeking to reveal a politician’s or candidate’s true or “authentic” persona to the public.6 In the news media’s portrayal of politicians, Parry-Giles notes that journalists use perceptions of gender which “bring together ideological forces that can empower yet also bind the nation’s political leaders, [while] offering a gender baseline that fuses with other markers of political authenticity to define an individual leader.”7 Thus, journalists have a great deal of power to perpetuate and maintain socially accepted stereotypes about gender and leadership roles in their portrayal of political figures.

To illustrate this problem in news media’s treatment of Hillary Clinton, Parry-Giles uses thick description of television and print media. These media examples highlight the disjunction between Clinton’s pursuit of leadership roles and the news media’s expectations of what her gendered behavior should be, a conflict often framed in the language of “rhetorical violence.”8 Parry-Giles

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