Michelle Obama: First Lady, American Rhetor. Edited by Elizabeth J.NatalleJenni M.Simon. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2015. 157 pp.

Abstract

Michelle Obama: First Lady, American Rhetor. Edited by Elizabeth J. Natalie and Jenni M. Simon. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2015. 157 pp. In this book, Elizabeth J. Natalie and Jenni M. Simon offer a series of essays focusing on how rhetorical critics can begin to understand Michelle Obama's historic presence as first African American First Lady. At heart of collection is question of Obama's agency as a speaker. It is helpful to conceptualize agency as Michael C. Leff does in his article, Tradition and Agency in Humanistic (Philosophy and Rhetoric 36: 135--47 [2003]), where rhetorical agency is movement between tradition and invention. Leff describes agency as a type of continuum, explaining that speakers build on what has come before them (tradition), but also have opportunities to say something new (invention). First Lady rhetoric, in many ways, must be grounded in tradition and, so, brings with it a set of gendered constraints (these essays further complicate those constraints by giving attention to intersection of race with gender). The authors in collection argue that, while Obama faces unprecedented rhetorical obstacles, she successfully navigates space between tradition and invention, leading to a largely celebratory analysis of Obama's public discourse. Across these essays it is evident that Obama rhetorically constructs herself as a family-oriented black woman in a public sphere that is not always welcoming to Mom-in-Chief' (5). In Chapter 2, Tammy Vigil begins her analysis with Obama's 2008 Democratic National Convention address--a point before Obama has become Mom in Chief--and shows way in which Obama articulates a version of traditional femininity common to First Ladies by focusing on family and relationships. Vigil also brings lens of intersectionality to bear on this relational focus: Casting herself as a supportive wife rather than an assertive woman, Obama depicts herself in a familiar manner, encouraging listeners to perceive her as similar in stature, character and demeanor as many past First Ladies and distancing herself from stereotypical caricatures of highly educated and African American women (23). Here, Vigil acknowledges rhetorical constraints on Obama in terms of gender and race and reads her self-presentation as strategically traditional. Yet, she also marks way in which Obama moves outside of this more traditional First Lady discourse in her discussion of family. Obama remains, topically, in a fairly-safe rhetorical space for First Ladies, but what she does within that space is to move toward inclusivity rather than reifying nuclear family as ideal. Obama's rhetorical focus on family, children, and motherhood--specifically, her conceptualization of self as Mom in Chief--is highlighted in most of essays. In Chapter 3, Jeanne M. Persuit and Deborah A. Brunson point out that Obama's adherence to tradition is not viewed favorably by some within feminist circles. Though some other First Ladies may have received similar criticism, Persuit and Brunson show how history of respectability factor (45) for African Americans, along with the devalued, fetishized, and exotic image of Black women (46), constrains Obama in ways that white First Ladies have not been constrained in past. …