In Traister’s piece “The Circle of Entrapment: The Heavy Price of Rage” anger is discussed as a performance. Traister explains how in the 2016 election Hillary was considered to be performing her anger in a way that was “imitative and inauthentic.” While her male candidates outwardly declared their anger, they were praised for being honest and calling out the system. However, when Hillary raised her voice she was pegged as hysterical and too emotional for the role of president. Relating back to Cambell’s “Hating Hillary” piece, Hillary was acting against the historically defined feminine rhetorical style when she expressed her anger. The feminine rhetorical system requires women to reaffirm their “womanliness” in the public sphere through repeated tropes of nurturance, intimacy, and domesticy. The performance of the public female does not allow for anger because anger is not maternal, in fact it is it’s opposite. Traister suggests that the public believes men’s anger is a response to something external; however, a woman’s is believed to be caused by something internal. Anger is considered ugly and can be linked back to the belief that a woman’s blood is toxic and must be expelled, much like her angry words are considered poisonous in the public sphere. Relating back to the Witch of Edmonton, Mother Sawyer’s curses released an actual manifestation of evil into the community. As an old woman, Mother Sawyer no longer menstruated and so her angry speech took the place of the expelled toxicity from her body. Like Mother Sawyer, Hillary was blamed for her own anger because she was a woman with built up toxicity and no outlet of maternity that could turn her toxic blood into nurturing lactation. To the American public, Hillary Clinton was a woman barren of maternity and compassion and instead filled with venomous rage that rather than nursing America, threatened to infect the land with a corruption of tradition.
Further, I think in the case of Michelle Obama not even the feminine rhetorical style could help her in her public speech. As Cooper suggests in “Eloquent Rage”: “The black American woman’s body is bound up in the burden of reproducing the condition of unfreedom.” Not even maternity can make the black body “acceptable” to the historically produced patriarchy. The concept of nurturing is not applied to black mothers. Rather, Cooper highlights the phenomenon of “misogy-nior” in which black mothers are blamed for the failings of the black community. It seems crucial that when considering something like the feminine rhetorical style we remember that this style is only granted to certain women who are allowed to be seen as mothers. Black women, such as Michelle Obama, are not granted maternity. Rarely has the media demanded for a focus on Michelle and her daughters as they have done for Hillary. Instead, the public is all too ready to place Michelle in the “angry black woman role,” she is not even given a choice between the two poles Traister defines as “strength” and “adorable.” Rather than demanding Michelle play on an identity such as that of mother, the public stripped her of any identity besides that of black rage or respectability politics that pits her against the black community (where one side supports respectability politics and the other advocates for black rage.) While Clinton’s rage pit her against tradition, Michelle Obama’s rage pit her against her own identity.
yes–all very important points. I think the concept of “misogynoir” is particularly helpful in thinking intersectionally about the compounding threats black women face. Esp. good point about how Michelle Obama’s public policing alienates her from her own identity.
excellent! I love these connections between the present moment and examples from our texts–where very similar things seem to be happening. I particularly like the idea you develop here of Hillary as a “bad” mother–not nurturing, and not “doing” her maternal gender properly–in Butler’s terms.
While doing the readings for tomorrows class, I found myself interested in the way that Michelle Obama’s excerpt from “Becoming” interacted with and exemplified Cooper’s piece “Eloquent Rage: A black Feminist Discovers her Superpower.” Because I read Cooper’s piece first, I ended up tracing certain images of both black respectability and rage shown through Michelle’s words. In some ways, Michelle stood as an exemplary of respectability politics. In the line “It had been painful to step away from my work, but there was no choice, my family needed me,” a picture is painted of Michelle as an exemplary figure of the ‘good black mother’ as touched upon by Cooper in her discussion of the church. I saw this as the tugging on certain nationalized imaginaries such of that as the “American family,” an image that most Americans remain affectively tied to, and thus politicians, or people attempting to gain power in any way, often play with in order to gain support/votes etc. Another nexus (of a politics of respectability) is added on to this with the Obamas, however, as, in the white imaginary, they will always still be othered from those same affective images. This reminds me of what I was saying in my last class–that even if people, in moments, are pushed into a politics of respectability, or decide to use as a political strategy, it always has a very firm limit. Michelle was still seen as ‘angry,’ a bitch, emasculating to Barack, even while simultaneously playing the part of the good girl, “collecting gold stars,” being the perfect mother, the supportive wife.
This is not to say that Michelle does not fight back against, refuse to pander to, or is not aware of the consequences/realities of respectability politics. I really like the word Cooper uses to describe Michelle’s tactics: micro-resistance. For Cooper, she sees in the act of refusal, which she qualifies as an act of rage. In the way that women are always expected to look at themselves through an external male gaze, and black women even more so, and thus regulate their bodies (their appearance, their movements, their speech etc) through this lens that is not their own, refusing, or pushing back against this is an inherent form of resistance, and one that, at times, Michelle takes on.
Thus, whether Michelle Obama practices certain elements of respectability politics to advance her position/goal etc., is outside the point Cooper is trying to make (as she even acknowledges her strategic usage of it). The problem is much deeper than that. The problem is about space. The way that bodies (specifically black female bodies) are so tightly regulated and contained is terrifyingly shown in the policing of Michelle Obama. There is no space to move, to fuck up, to be average, to be angry, to want to feel pretty, to let yourself be ugly, to be, in the most general sense: dynamic. It is not about whether or not the specific body of someone like Michelle is doing a disservice by practicing certain elements of respectability, but rather about the overarching narratives of rage and respectability that shame black rage and elevate other forms of ‘legitimate’ rage (aka white male rage), which only further obscures/gives space for any form if black female rage. Its a never ending feedback loop of domination, policing, obscuring, and flattening that thus occurs. And the main consequence of this falls on the bodies that are most tightly contained in these systems that hem us all in, the body of the other, to be anything more than that.
This all reminds me of a quotation from The Art of Cruelty by Maggie Nelson. I think it pretty well sums up what means to leave space for something like rage to rush in. I also think it recognizes the importance of the everyday, the riot of regular (the most harmful violence is sometimes the most mundane.) And it asks what if: what are the dimensions that we do not yet understand? What it would it (the world! ourselves!) become if we were no longer hemmed in, if we were no longer so tightly contained to moving in such a incapacitating flow?
‘space defies the logic of revelation, which insists there is something beneath the surface of our everyday, be it ultimate meaning, the face of God, our fundamental nature, a final terror, ecstacy, or judgement…that will be revealed when the veil is finally lifted. In lieu of this logic, space offers a horizontal spreading, the possibility of expansion into dimensions no one yet thoroughly understands. Space is also intrinsic the creation of freedom..The one essential prerequisite of all freedom is simply the capacity for motion, which cannot exist without space.”
Fascinating comments about space in particular here, Amy–just as you were reminded of this by some of our reading, I am reminded by the quotation about space of feminist epistemology–specifically Iris Marion Young, who writes “Throwing Like a Girl”, thinking very much about how women are taught not to use space, to hold back, to confine themselves in a space policed by others. I also liked your cross-reading of Obama and Cooper, which I agree is really interesting on the question of rage vs respectability.
As it turns out, my grandfather just read Michelle Obama’s book Becoming, and he suggested that I read it about two weeks ago. So, it was incredibly enriching and rewarding to read snippets from the book in preparation for reading the whole thing over break. I think I may have been in fifth grade when Barack Obama was elected president, and I certainly remember everyone in my family and at my school talking about the historic moment of electing our first black president. But what was almost never talked about was the significance that Michelle played in Barack’s election, so I was really interested and intrigued to read her various stories relating to all of that.
Connecting this blog post directly to something in the reading (which I realize that I should do at some point), I was particularly fascinated by the eerie parallels between how the media portrays women in positions of renown and/or power – Michelle in this instance, but I am also thinking about Hillary (which I focused on in Kari and my presentation) and AOC and other figures that we have discussed in class. After contemplating the power of news media in elections, I started to wonder about the extent to which people interpret news media in ways that benefits them as opposed to ways that are truthful. The news media had so many different methods to “read” into Michelle’s every fashion choice (much like they did with Hillary) instead of focusing on what is actually important – what she was saying in her numerous amazing speeches.
A specific passage from Becoming that relates to what I have discussed above is the one where she says that she feels a rejuvenated “ownership of her voice” after she has other people (who I believe she explicitly identified as speech writers) control her public appearance, because she is freer to “be herself” and not worry about public backlash or negative opinion or, even worse, how she acts or what she says negatively impacting people’s impressions of her husband during the peak of the election season. I completely understand that, and I would be ridiculously careful if I were in her position of notoriety. But I can’t help but feel sad because Michelle had to give up so much of her agency and independence to someone else (probably a male speechwriter). Finally, there are also numerous connections between this fine line – Michelle being herself and potentially causing the public to think negatively about her presidential candidate husband – and the stereotype of the “angry black woman” that we have previously discussed in class. I’m happy to flesh out those connections more in class, but I think I’m at a suitable stopping point for now.
Good–I certainly agree the media outlets encourage the creation of what Michelle Obama calls a performative politics–hence her perceived need to train herself out of certain natural and passionate gestures and expressions. She had to make sure she never public expressed anger–all the while watching white men make political capital out of it.
In reading Brittany Cooper’s chapter “Orchestrated Fury” I felt thought I knew what she meant. Thought is the key word in that sentence. My understanding was an intellectual one, as it will always be to a certain extent as a white person trying to understand the experiences of people of color. But Cooper’s incredibly effective writing lulled me into a false sense of understanding that was upended and redefined by her presence on stage in conversation with Traister. From the moment she opened her mouth, Cooper wielded the audiences discomfort as a rhetorical device. In her comment, she refers to trump as “your president, and yes he’s your president I mean the room of people who elected him looked a lot like this.” Later, she discussed her ambivalence at speaking at Rutgers as she usually prefers to speak “outside of institutional surveillance” at which point Traister let out a nervous laugh. She calls out the audience directly as liberals who falsely believe themselves to be enlightened because they didn’t vote for Trump and attend elite schools where they learn about social justice buzzwords.
This is not the sort of Black anger that Traister herself discusses as a rage that can be “fetishized and celebrated” by white people and used as by white women specifically to “perform the emotion in their steed” (76). It is not a rage that garners gifs and memes that white women can use to prove our “wokeness”, it instead garners our nervous laughter and in that nervous laughter is the potential for actual change. Comfort leads to complacency and Cooper deliberately and effectively wields white discomfort for self-reflection and change.
Perhaps the most powerful example of Cooper’s use of eloquent rage that “isn’t always loud (read meme-able) but [is] always effective” came when Cooper took a question from the audience. At the beginning of the Q and A, Cooper had explicitly asked the audience members to “please let it be a question. We love y’all but we don’t need to hear your life story tonight”. One of the audience members began a long and difficult to follow discussion of the issues of institutional power (I think?) and Cooper quietly cut in saying, “I don’t want to be rude I just want to answer your-“ the woman then cut her off, raising her voice and saying “I’m almost finished so just let me finish” and Cooper coolly but sharply responded “no just let me moderate. I need you to get us to the question”. The questioner (who appeared to be white) felt entitled to demand a platform that is not her own and use that platform to lecture two experts on the issues of patriarchy and white supremacy. As Cooper notes “white rage and white fear are reactions to perceptions amongst white people that there power might be slipping away”. This “enlightened” white liberal and (as its later revealed) academic is used to having as much time as she wants to express her ideas and when this class/race privilege is questioned, she responds with much more obvious, impassioned frustration than Cooper expresses at any point in the hour and a half she is on stage. As a Black woman, Cooper is not granted access to this un-orchestrated anger lest she be caricatured and dismissed but she uses a tactful and filtered anger to leave the questioner stammering nonetheless.
Charley–excellent and very insightful points–I too was very interested in the moments in which Cooper deliberately uses discomfort to make a point–there is another very striking moment when she challenges a male audience member and says she will ‘Pelosi’ him and shut him down because he simply won’t get to a question… Really liked your analysis of the difference between reading Cooper’s work and seeing her perform her work as a labour of embodied feminism.
I was in fifth grade when Barack Obama was elected president and inaugurated into office in 2009. I can say with certainty that I was not caught up in the politics as a fifth grader, other than the obvious “we just elected our first black president!” that floated around my home and my middle school. So, it is incredibly interesting to me, as a senior in college, to look back to these formative political years from a futuristic standpoint (one in which we are experiencing a very different political climate), and to look specifically at the role that Michelle Obama played in her husband’s election.
What struck me most while reading these articles is the way in which the media was, and still is, used to spin images of Michelle Obama, and any other strong, female presence, into whatever they want. The idea that anything can be read and interpreted in ways that benefit the interpreter, is inexplicably tied into one’s political image. That news sources and journalists and bloggers, etc. can read Michelle Obama’s outfits or hairstyles or spin one of her speeches into ways that it was never intended is baffling, frightening and incredibly interesting. That one can “read” Michelle Obama, in the context of Barack Obama running for president, versus Barack Obama as president, versus Barack Obama welcoming Donald Trump to office—and that all these “readings” of Michelle can vary wildly and drastically—is intrinsic to the performance of her gender.
In Michelle Obama’s book, she writes that she only feels a new “ownership of her voice” after she has other people—namely speech writers—controlling her public appearances; she is freer to “be herself” because she is no longer as concerned about the backlash from her public appearances that she experienced prior to more intense scrutiny of her image. This, to me, appears antithetical to the power that Michelle has, even today. While she writes that she feels like she is herself, everything she does is orchestrated behind the scenes in an attempt to write her into a role that will help her husband’s campaign and subsequent presidency. We have seen this policing of the female image throughout the plays that we have read over this semester, from the female voice to actions. While it is true that Barack Obama’s image was also policed—every politician/person in the spotlight/celebrity’s image is—Michelle talks about it in ways that were “freeing,” which surprises me.
These appear to be attempts to control the image of the “angry black woman,” which Michelle was characterized as before she began to take control of her image by outsourcing control to others. Perhaps this was a way for Michelle to exert a manner of control of other people’s perceptions of her. Regardless, it is interesting to think about the importance of Michelle’s image on the election of her husband and during his presidency, and her importance as a First Lady. Fifth grade me would be shocked to learn about this intense image policing and just how much hard work went into Michelle’s public persona—and the proliferation of gendered, racialized stereotypes in American society today.
Really good and interesting points, Kari–and I liked the way you were comparing your reactions now, in the present political moment and in the wake of our reading this semester, to your responses to the Obamas when they were elected. I do agree on the paradoxical nature of Michelle OBama’s reaction to the policing of her speech–that in some way it is freeing to allow her public performance to be managed for her–this seems to tie in with your earlier point about the ways women are alienated from their bodies and their identities.
November 26, 2019 at 12:28 am
In Traister’s piece “The Circle of Entrapment: The Heavy Price of Rage” anger is discussed as a performance. Traister explains how in the 2016 election Hillary was considered to be performing her anger in a way that was “imitative and inauthentic.” While her male candidates outwardly declared their anger, they were praised for being honest and calling out the system. However, when Hillary raised her voice she was pegged as hysterical and too emotional for the role of president. Relating back to Cambell’s “Hating Hillary” piece, Hillary was acting against the historically defined feminine rhetorical style when she expressed her anger. The feminine rhetorical system requires women to reaffirm their “womanliness” in the public sphere through repeated tropes of nurturance, intimacy, and domesticy. The performance of the public female does not allow for anger because anger is not maternal, in fact it is it’s opposite. Traister suggests that the public believes men’s anger is a response to something external; however, a woman’s is believed to be caused by something internal. Anger is considered ugly and can be linked back to the belief that a woman’s blood is toxic and must be expelled, much like her angry words are considered poisonous in the public sphere. Relating back to the Witch of Edmonton, Mother Sawyer’s curses released an actual manifestation of evil into the community. As an old woman, Mother Sawyer no longer menstruated and so her angry speech took the place of the expelled toxicity from her body. Like Mother Sawyer, Hillary was blamed for her own anger because she was a woman with built up toxicity and no outlet of maternity that could turn her toxic blood into nurturing lactation. To the American public, Hillary Clinton was a woman barren of maternity and compassion and instead filled with venomous rage that rather than nursing America, threatened to infect the land with a corruption of tradition.
November 26, 2019 at 1:03 am
Further, I think in the case of Michelle Obama not even the feminine rhetorical style could help her in her public speech. As Cooper suggests in “Eloquent Rage”: “The black American woman’s body is bound up in the burden of reproducing the condition of unfreedom.” Not even maternity can make the black body “acceptable” to the historically produced patriarchy. The concept of nurturing is not applied to black mothers. Rather, Cooper highlights the phenomenon of “misogy-nior” in which black mothers are blamed for the failings of the black community. It seems crucial that when considering something like the feminine rhetorical style we remember that this style is only granted to certain women who are allowed to be seen as mothers. Black women, such as Michelle Obama, are not granted maternity. Rarely has the media demanded for a focus on Michelle and her daughters as they have done for Hillary. Instead, the public is all too ready to place Michelle in the “angry black woman role,” she is not even given a choice between the two poles Traister defines as “strength” and “adorable.” Rather than demanding Michelle play on an identity such as that of mother, the public stripped her of any identity besides that of black rage or respectability politics that pits her against the black community (where one side supports respectability politics and the other advocates for black rage.) While Clinton’s rage pit her against tradition, Michelle Obama’s rage pit her against her own identity.
November 26, 2019 at 10:02 am
yes–all very important points. I think the concept of “misogynoir” is particularly helpful in thinking intersectionally about the compounding threats black women face. Esp. good point about how Michelle Obama’s public policing alienates her from her own identity.
November 26, 2019 at 10:00 am
excellent! I love these connections between the present moment and examples from our texts–where very similar things seem to be happening. I particularly like the idea you develop here of Hillary as a “bad” mother–not nurturing, and not “doing” her maternal gender properly–in Butler’s terms.
November 25, 2019 at 10:58 pm
While doing the readings for tomorrows class, I found myself interested in the way that Michelle Obama’s excerpt from “Becoming” interacted with and exemplified Cooper’s piece “Eloquent Rage: A black Feminist Discovers her Superpower.” Because I read Cooper’s piece first, I ended up tracing certain images of both black respectability and rage shown through Michelle’s words. In some ways, Michelle stood as an exemplary of respectability politics. In the line “It had been painful to step away from my work, but there was no choice, my family needed me,” a picture is painted of Michelle as an exemplary figure of the ‘good black mother’ as touched upon by Cooper in her discussion of the church. I saw this as the tugging on certain nationalized imaginaries such of that as the “American family,” an image that most Americans remain affectively tied to, and thus politicians, or people attempting to gain power in any way, often play with in order to gain support/votes etc. Another nexus (of a politics of respectability) is added on to this with the Obamas, however, as, in the white imaginary, they will always still be othered from those same affective images. This reminds me of what I was saying in my last class–that even if people, in moments, are pushed into a politics of respectability, or decide to use as a political strategy, it always has a very firm limit. Michelle was still seen as ‘angry,’ a bitch, emasculating to Barack, even while simultaneously playing the part of the good girl, “collecting gold stars,” being the perfect mother, the supportive wife.
This is not to say that Michelle does not fight back against, refuse to pander to, or is not aware of the consequences/realities of respectability politics. I really like the word Cooper uses to describe Michelle’s tactics: micro-resistance. For Cooper, she sees in the act of refusal, which she qualifies as an act of rage. In the way that women are always expected to look at themselves through an external male gaze, and black women even more so, and thus regulate their bodies (their appearance, their movements, their speech etc) through this lens that is not their own, refusing, or pushing back against this is an inherent form of resistance, and one that, at times, Michelle takes on.
Thus, whether Michelle Obama practices certain elements of respectability politics to advance her position/goal etc., is outside the point Cooper is trying to make (as she even acknowledges her strategic usage of it). The problem is much deeper than that. The problem is about space. The way that bodies (specifically black female bodies) are so tightly regulated and contained is terrifyingly shown in the policing of Michelle Obama. There is no space to move, to fuck up, to be average, to be angry, to want to feel pretty, to let yourself be ugly, to be, in the most general sense: dynamic. It is not about whether or not the specific body of someone like Michelle is doing a disservice by practicing certain elements of respectability, but rather about the overarching narratives of rage and respectability that shame black rage and elevate other forms of ‘legitimate’ rage (aka white male rage), which only further obscures/gives space for any form if black female rage. Its a never ending feedback loop of domination, policing, obscuring, and flattening that thus occurs. And the main consequence of this falls on the bodies that are most tightly contained in these systems that hem us all in, the body of the other, to be anything more than that.
This all reminds me of a quotation from The Art of Cruelty by Maggie Nelson. I think it pretty well sums up what means to leave space for something like rage to rush in. I also think it recognizes the importance of the everyday, the riot of regular (the most harmful violence is sometimes the most mundane.) And it asks what if: what are the dimensions that we do not yet understand? What it would it (the world! ourselves!) become if we were no longer hemmed in, if we were no longer so tightly contained to moving in such a incapacitating flow?
‘space defies the logic of revelation, which insists there is something beneath the surface of our everyday, be it ultimate meaning, the face of God, our fundamental nature, a final terror, ecstacy, or judgement…that will be revealed when the veil is finally lifted. In lieu of this logic, space offers a horizontal spreading, the possibility of expansion into dimensions no one yet thoroughly understands. Space is also intrinsic the creation of freedom..The one essential prerequisite of all freedom is simply the capacity for motion, which cannot exist without space.”
November 26, 2019 at 10:10 am
Fascinating comments about space in particular here, Amy–just as you were reminded of this by some of our reading, I am reminded by the quotation about space of feminist epistemology–specifically Iris Marion Young, who writes “Throwing Like a Girl”, thinking very much about how women are taught not to use space, to hold back, to confine themselves in a space policed by others. I also liked your cross-reading of Obama and Cooper, which I agree is really interesting on the question of rage vs respectability.
November 25, 2019 at 7:50 pm
As it turns out, my grandfather just read Michelle Obama’s book Becoming, and he suggested that I read it about two weeks ago. So, it was incredibly enriching and rewarding to read snippets from the book in preparation for reading the whole thing over break. I think I may have been in fifth grade when Barack Obama was elected president, and I certainly remember everyone in my family and at my school talking about the historic moment of electing our first black president. But what was almost never talked about was the significance that Michelle played in Barack’s election, so I was really interested and intrigued to read her various stories relating to all of that.
Connecting this blog post directly to something in the reading (which I realize that I should do at some point), I was particularly fascinated by the eerie parallels between how the media portrays women in positions of renown and/or power – Michelle in this instance, but I am also thinking about Hillary (which I focused on in Kari and my presentation) and AOC and other figures that we have discussed in class. After contemplating the power of news media in elections, I started to wonder about the extent to which people interpret news media in ways that benefits them as opposed to ways that are truthful. The news media had so many different methods to “read” into Michelle’s every fashion choice (much like they did with Hillary) instead of focusing on what is actually important – what she was saying in her numerous amazing speeches.
A specific passage from Becoming that relates to what I have discussed above is the one where she says that she feels a rejuvenated “ownership of her voice” after she has other people (who I believe she explicitly identified as speech writers) control her public appearance, because she is freer to “be herself” and not worry about public backlash or negative opinion or, even worse, how she acts or what she says negatively impacting people’s impressions of her husband during the peak of the election season. I completely understand that, and I would be ridiculously careful if I were in her position of notoriety. But I can’t help but feel sad because Michelle had to give up so much of her agency and independence to someone else (probably a male speechwriter). Finally, there are also numerous connections between this fine line – Michelle being herself and potentially causing the public to think negatively about her presidential candidate husband – and the stereotype of the “angry black woman” that we have previously discussed in class. I’m happy to flesh out those connections more in class, but I think I’m at a suitable stopping point for now.
November 26, 2019 at 10:12 am
Good–I certainly agree the media outlets encourage the creation of what Michelle Obama calls a performative politics–hence her perceived need to train herself out of certain natural and passionate gestures and expressions. She had to make sure she never public expressed anger–all the while watching white men make political capital out of it.
November 25, 2019 at 6:24 pm
In reading Brittany Cooper’s chapter “Orchestrated Fury” I felt thought I knew what she meant. Thought is the key word in that sentence. My understanding was an intellectual one, as it will always be to a certain extent as a white person trying to understand the experiences of people of color. But Cooper’s incredibly effective writing lulled me into a false sense of understanding that was upended and redefined by her presence on stage in conversation with Traister. From the moment she opened her mouth, Cooper wielded the audiences discomfort as a rhetorical device. In her comment, she refers to trump as “your president, and yes he’s your president I mean the room of people who elected him looked a lot like this.” Later, she discussed her ambivalence at speaking at Rutgers as she usually prefers to speak “outside of institutional surveillance” at which point Traister let out a nervous laugh. She calls out the audience directly as liberals who falsely believe themselves to be enlightened because they didn’t vote for Trump and attend elite schools where they learn about social justice buzzwords.
This is not the sort of Black anger that Traister herself discusses as a rage that can be “fetishized and celebrated” by white people and used as by white women specifically to “perform the emotion in their steed” (76). It is not a rage that garners gifs and memes that white women can use to prove our “wokeness”, it instead garners our nervous laughter and in that nervous laughter is the potential for actual change. Comfort leads to complacency and Cooper deliberately and effectively wields white discomfort for self-reflection and change.
Perhaps the most powerful example of Cooper’s use of eloquent rage that “isn’t always loud (read meme-able) but [is] always effective” came when Cooper took a question from the audience. At the beginning of the Q and A, Cooper had explicitly asked the audience members to “please let it be a question. We love y’all but we don’t need to hear your life story tonight”. One of the audience members began a long and difficult to follow discussion of the issues of institutional power (I think?) and Cooper quietly cut in saying, “I don’t want to be rude I just want to answer your-“ the woman then cut her off, raising her voice and saying “I’m almost finished so just let me finish” and Cooper coolly but sharply responded “no just let me moderate. I need you to get us to the question”. The questioner (who appeared to be white) felt entitled to demand a platform that is not her own and use that platform to lecture two experts on the issues of patriarchy and white supremacy. As Cooper notes “white rage and white fear are reactions to perceptions amongst white people that there power might be slipping away”. This “enlightened” white liberal and (as its later revealed) academic is used to having as much time as she wants to express her ideas and when this class/race privilege is questioned, she responds with much more obvious, impassioned frustration than Cooper expresses at any point in the hour and a half she is on stage. As a Black woman, Cooper is not granted access to this un-orchestrated anger lest she be caricatured and dismissed but she uses a tactful and filtered anger to leave the questioner stammering nonetheless.
November 26, 2019 at 10:16 am
Charley–excellent and very insightful points–I too was very interested in the moments in which Cooper deliberately uses discomfort to make a point–there is another very striking moment when she challenges a male audience member and says she will ‘Pelosi’ him and shut him down because he simply won’t get to a question… Really liked your analysis of the difference between reading Cooper’s work and seeing her perform her work as a labour of embodied feminism.
November 24, 2019 at 4:48 pm
I was in fifth grade when Barack Obama was elected president and inaugurated into office in 2009. I can say with certainty that I was not caught up in the politics as a fifth grader, other than the obvious “we just elected our first black president!” that floated around my home and my middle school. So, it is incredibly interesting to me, as a senior in college, to look back to these formative political years from a futuristic standpoint (one in which we are experiencing a very different political climate), and to look specifically at the role that Michelle Obama played in her husband’s election.
What struck me most while reading these articles is the way in which the media was, and still is, used to spin images of Michelle Obama, and any other strong, female presence, into whatever they want. The idea that anything can be read and interpreted in ways that benefit the interpreter, is inexplicably tied into one’s political image. That news sources and journalists and bloggers, etc. can read Michelle Obama’s outfits or hairstyles or spin one of her speeches into ways that it was never intended is baffling, frightening and incredibly interesting. That one can “read” Michelle Obama, in the context of Barack Obama running for president, versus Barack Obama as president, versus Barack Obama welcoming Donald Trump to office—and that all these “readings” of Michelle can vary wildly and drastically—is intrinsic to the performance of her gender.
In Michelle Obama’s book, she writes that she only feels a new “ownership of her voice” after she has other people—namely speech writers—controlling her public appearances; she is freer to “be herself” because she is no longer as concerned about the backlash from her public appearances that she experienced prior to more intense scrutiny of her image. This, to me, appears antithetical to the power that Michelle has, even today. While she writes that she feels like she is herself, everything she does is orchestrated behind the scenes in an attempt to write her into a role that will help her husband’s campaign and subsequent presidency. We have seen this policing of the female image throughout the plays that we have read over this semester, from the female voice to actions. While it is true that Barack Obama’s image was also policed—every politician/person in the spotlight/celebrity’s image is—Michelle talks about it in ways that were “freeing,” which surprises me.
These appear to be attempts to control the image of the “angry black woman,” which Michelle was characterized as before she began to take control of her image by outsourcing control to others. Perhaps this was a way for Michelle to exert a manner of control of other people’s perceptions of her. Regardless, it is interesting to think about the importance of Michelle’s image on the election of her husband and during his presidency, and her importance as a First Lady. Fifth grade me would be shocked to learn about this intense image policing and just how much hard work went into Michelle’s public persona—and the proliferation of gendered, racialized stereotypes in American society today.
November 26, 2019 at 10:19 am
Really good and interesting points, Kari–and I liked the way you were comparing your reactions now, in the present political moment and in the wake of our reading this semester, to your responses to the Obamas when they were elected. I do agree on the paradoxical nature of Michelle OBama’s reaction to the policing of her speech–that in some way it is freeing to allow her public performance to be managed for her–this seems to tie in with your earlier point about the ways women are alienated from their bodies and their identities.