Michele Bachmann, at a PR event in Iowa today, announced that she plans to run for the Republican presidential nomination. Stressing the importance of family, she smiled her Cheshire grin and assured citizens in Iowa that they would ultimately decide the Republican ballot, and that she was their perfect candidate.
The election of 2008 gave us our first serious female contender for the role of president of the U.S. I was a proud supporter of Hillary Clinton and disappointed when she was out of the running. I was not, however, proud of Sarah Palin's spot on McCain's ticket, wondering why so many bewildered men were insisting that I ought to support Palin because I supported Hillary. This apparently happened nationwide, with many female Clinton supporters being confronted by the insane notion that just because we are women and we support women, we would automatically support Sarah Palin because she has a vagina too.
And so all across America, women found themselves explaining why we supported Clinton, why we don't support Palin and why we shouldn't have to support Palin simply because of her gender. We lectured those foolish enough to assume that we could be tricked into voting for a candidate who was ideologically opposed to the candidate we originally supported on the basis of her genitalia.
The McCain/Palin presidential bid was unsuccessful, thankfully, but fast forward 4 years and you've got Michele Bachmann--of neo-conservative mind and a member of the essentially libertarian Tea Party.
The strangest thing happens when women oppose a female politician: We get shamed, or accused of not truly understanding the magnitude of a woman, any woman at all, doing a "man's" job.
This, among other reasons, is why I feel like I have to repeat myself this year, and perhaps every election year for a very long time. The former position is absurd and easy to combat, but the latter, while equally absurd, dons a certain guise that is not as easy for many Americans to understand. Bachmann, Palin and most of their supporters have gotten very good at this tactic. In so doing, sexism is spun into a rhetorical point by a class of people who use their heteronormativity as a badge of courage. And it's a real fucking shame.
In the 2004 campaign, Palin's entrance sort of forced Fox news pundits to admit that sexism does in fact exist but it was, of course, mere opportunism. The revelation came only after other people publicly complained about Palin's candidacy and after they had endlessly criticized Hillary Clinton and anyone who ever said she was facing sexism in her own campaign for the presidency (not to mention the fact that conservatives do not exactly have the best track record from a feminist perspective).
So they used the fact of sexism to suggest that anyone who seriously doubted Palin's capability as the leader of the U.S. was primarily motivated by chauvinism. Meanwhile, Palin did everything that she could to appeal to men (and white, Christian men, at that): Emphasis on her role as a mother, her lust for money, Christian zeal, big toothy grin, and a profound love of guns and hunting. She even used rhetoric generally reserved for war when speaking about opposing political candidates in the United States. She didn't support pretty much any women's issues, as she is anti-abortion and did nothing about the women in her own state who had to pay for their own rape kits post examination.
Palin embodied everything that a male candidate might represent, but with the fact that she was a women thrown in to try to garner support from those of us who tend not to vote Republican. It didn't work, but it did seem to open a veritable Pandora's box of gender politics manipulation that is ceaselessly called upon now and has been every since.
Which brings us right back to Michele Bachmann. As with Palin, Bachmann is not at all progressive in terms of women's rights or basically any gender related political issue (she's anti-abortion and anti gay marriage to boot, among many other things). What's more, like Palin she appeals to the same demographic of people: White, Christian conservative males. What makes Bachmann a more serious opponent than Palin is that these white Christian conservatives feel like they've been kicked around and oppressed very seriously for the duration of Barack Obama's presidency. They are not overwhelmingly difficult to convince or to scare into supporting Bachmann, precisely because she is so very good at delivering the kind of rhetoric that these people are looking for.
She consistently cites examples of the diminishing place of Christians in America, complaining that they're losing ground to humanitarian secularism or--perhaps more jarring to her converts--Shariah Law. Her views on immigration are draconian, but this sort of shit really appeals to a certain demographic in America, especially now. She participates in the Tea Party movement, which is sort of terrifying in and of itself.
I'm not sure if she's aware that she occupies a seat of privilege or if she honestly believes that she and all conservative Christians across the nation are downtrodden, but she is certainly proving that she has a knack for stirring up insanity and managing to get people to swallow it wholesale. But just like Palin, Michele Bachmann uses her white, heterosexual Christian privilege as a symbol and a rallying cry for any and all white, heterosexual Christians who feel like they've lost something important since Bush left office. And I will bet you anything that just like Palin, she will use her gender as a method to combat any arguments that she represents a group of Americans who are already privileged and seek only to enhance that privilege as much as possible. She demands homogenization, and she'll pretend that being female somehow nullifies that fact.
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