Michelle Obama’s Arms: Race, Respectability, and Class Privilege

Abstract

The debate on Michelle Obama’s ‘right to bare arms’ illustrates that American cultural politics is far from ‘post-racial’. Through reading ‘Michelle O’ as a body out of place, at once exoticized, fetishized, and affective, this article shows the continuing location of the First Lady as white as well as exploring how stylization revisions the raced, gendered, and classed space of the First Lady’s body. It argues that, as a corporeal negation of the norms of both white upper/middle-class respectability and ‘the Black Venus’, Obama creates a space of resistance that enables a black First Lady to emerge through performativity.