Women and the White House: Gender, Popular Culture, and Presidential Politics. Edited by Justin S.Vaughn and Lilly J.Goren. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky. 2012. 324 pp.

Abstract

Women and White House: Gender, Popular Culture, and Presidential Politics. Edited by Justin S. Vaughn and Lilly J. Goren. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky. 2012. 324 pp. Women and White House: Gender; Popular Culture, and Presidential Politics is a first-rate collection of essays on in which popular culture both reflects and shapes perceptions of female political leadership. While previous research has addressed this topic for specific candidates, this book is first to comprehensively study it. 'Women and White House fills a hefty gap in presidential scholarship, and editors carefully situate analysis in this literature along an extensive discussion of study of popular culture, advent of mass media, and rise of new media. The rich examples and accessible writing make this an ideal book for both graduate and undergraduate students studying presidency, gender, and political communications. The volume is structured around four themes. The first is candidate framing, the in which messages about candidates are conveyed, controlled, altered, and framed, particularly different that male and female candidates are presented to and try to present themselves to public (p. 16). Linda Beail and Rhonda Kinney Longworth find that Sarah Palin reframed expectations that female candidates must conform to traditional femininity through her complex gender performance during 2008 election. Mary McHugh examines framing of Palin and Hillary Clinton in sketches from Saturday Night Live and The Colbert Report, and concludes that these comedy shows humanized candidates and led press and voters to consider issues of bias and sexism more directly but less confrontationally than in almost any other forum (p. 54). The second theme of book is portrayals of American presidency in traditional popular culture outlets (film and television) with an aim to discern what these productions teach us about how presidency is integrated into consciousness in deeply gendered ways (p. 17). Goren meticulously compares representations of race and gender in film, and concludes that men of color have been portrayed as viable presidential candidates for over two decades, while women are virtually absent and shown only as accidental presidents. Goren concludes that this disparity was influential in 2008 election. Joseph Uscinski identifies a fear of femininity in representations of women's leadership in film, and Vaughn and Stacy Michaelson generate a useful typology of in which presidential masculinity is reinforced in this medium: Hollywood screenwriters frequently wield femininity like a weapon, reinforcing cultural presumption of inappropriateness of female and using it to show weakness of feminine male presidents (p. 155). The third theme of Women and White House is portrayals of American presidency in less conventional popular culture outlets: daytime talk shows, tabloid magazines, and viral videos. …