but, can she have it all?

Music: Namlook: XIX (2004)

Mark Sheilds, one of my favorite political pundits, appeared last Friday on the Lehrer News Hour and said that what was most remarkable about the Palin pick was the "woman issue." With a broad brush he asserted right-leaning conservative women were emboldened by Palin's attempt to be a mother and a full time politician. For them, Palin represents a model of contemporary success, the woman who has it all. Left-leaning feminists, Sheilds said, were questioning Palin's fitness for motherhood. They argue that it will be impossible for Palin to both be a good leader of the Senate and a good mother. How can she lead, it is (apparently) asserted, if she has a special needs baby, a pregnant teen daughter, a son off to Iraq, and yet another daughter in school? Indeed, for weeks now the "can she have it all?" question has become a framing device for numerous media segments. Just this Friday, standing in the check-out line at Randall's, my houseguest noted the cover of Us magazine, which claimed to reveal Palin's "embarrassing" family secrets. It would seem Palin's maternal leadership is synecdoche for how she would govern a country.

There is something very interesting here about the politics of maternity to ponder, but let's be clear about two things: First, Shield's broad brush is a bit too broad; I've yet to hear any feminists play the "good mother" card, nor have I heard spirited defenses of the Super Hockey Mama from self-confessed conservatives. I'm sure you can find some blogosphere hack making such claims, however, such assertions are merely fantasies running their due course through us; that is, these issues are scripted and lie in wait in the popular imaginary until someone can sell a newspaper or magazine by making the "unfit mother" label stick. I suppose fantasies are realities of sorts but, nevertheless, the perception that a feminist pundit is playing the good mother card is just that: a perception. Second, as Debbilicious has already argued, the argument that Palin's bid for the Veep, or that she has parented a pregnant teen, is somehow a symptom of poor decision making is unadulterated, misogynistic bullshit. Sexism knows no party.

That said, there is a (presumably) postmodern observation to be made: whereas Clinton's bid for the White House truly represented a woman who aspired to, and who could be, president, the rhetoric surrounding Palin was that she was "picked." In other words, this is not a political leader who just happens to be a woman, but rather, here is a political leader who was selected because she is a woman. The difference here is not only indexed by the way in which each woman was greeted by the press (one, as too manly; the other, as feminine but "tough"), but by the way in which their respective stories are reported. The question, "but can she have it all?" is certainly rhetorical, for it unquestionably suggests its own answer: "well, of course not!" Or to put this in a kiddie morning cereal way, "Silly woman, presidential politics is for men!"

The appeal of the Palin pick to a certain set of conservatives is, however, not really postmodern at all. The contrast between Palin and Clinton is. If we focus on Palin alone, we find that a very "primitive" form of communication is in play: the exchange of women. However flawed we have come to learn Claude Levi-Strauss was (e.g., he falsified his data), his central observation about kinship systems remains uncontested: for whatever reason, society as we know it is based on the exchange of women; it is based on the circulation of women as objects. From a theoretical standpoint, there is no reason that men or children are not exchanged, it just happens that women have been the object of value, for good or ill (mostly ill). The Palin pick is an indirect reminder of this basic, social dynamic. To denote its special status as an event, let us capitalize: the Palin Pick.

In her monumentally influential study Psychoanalysis and Feminism, Juliet Mitchell bends over backwards to protect Levi-Strauss from the charge of anti-feminism. It's amusing to read, but we must remember this study is almost forty years old and published in the last gasps of the second wave. Nevertheless, she correctly underscores that Levi-Strauss' theory of kinship understood familial relations as a form of communication, a dynamic establishment and reestablishment of society through the exchange of signs:

Levi-Strauss has shown how it is not the biological family of mother, father, and child that is the distinguishing feature of human kinship structures. . . . The universal and primordial law is that which regulates marriage relationships and its pivotal expression is the prohibition of incest. This prohibition forces one family to give up one of its members to another family; the rules of marriage within "primitive" societies function as a means of exchange and as an unconsciously acknowledged system of communication. The act of exchange holds a society together: the rules of kinship . . . are society.

Contemporary society as we know it is a displacement, or rather a metonymy. Carol Pateman's book, The Sexual Contract, advances a very convincing argument that this "primordial" exchange is the basis of contractarian theory itself: the so-called "social contract" is at some mythic remove the law of exogamic exchange. Pateman argues this is also what Freud was after in his recovery of Darwin's myth of the primal horde. It all comes back to an agreement or promise made over an exchange, and historically, the object has been the body of woman.

If we look at politics from this structural-anthropological vantage, we can better see the ideology that animates the differences between Clinton and Palin as political figures. Jean-Jacques Rousseau observed centuries ago that the sovereign represented the father of a family. Clinton faced difficulty, not only for the reasons that Karlyn Kohrs Campbell has detailed (e.g., the double-bind of femininity), but because she has to play the role of father. The Palin pick, however, is a reassurance that the tired and traditional "primordial" order of the social remains intact: McCain is a more familiar patriarchy and represents the Primal Father, with the attendant right to enjoy his women. The attractiveness of Cindy McCain and Sarah Palin are unconscious reminders of the exchange of women. Again, it is not biology that is important here, but the "choice" of women as an unconscious form of communication. In short, the Palin Pick is a not a feminist selection, but an unconscious signal that woman is being put back in her "natural" place. The Palin Pick restores the order that Clinton's aspirations disrupted.. The Palin Pick, in other words, can be read as a subtle form of punishment.

The insider Republicon comments that the McCain pick was "cynical" underscores this irony; the Palin Pick is actually anti-woman, reducing this flesh and blood human being to a body of exchange (so reporters are busy playing "gotcha" and expressing shock when she turns out to have a brain!). The anti-woman character of the Palin Pick is signaled precisely by the question, "but can she have it all?" The obvious, scripted answer, as I said, is "no." But the more subtle answer is "yes, but only if she remains an object of barter, and doesn't become the barterer herself."