Mothering Rhetorics

Lynn O'Brien Hallstein

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9780429895210
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Rhetoric
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

Once only a topic among women in the private sphere, motherhood and mothering have become important intellectual topics across academic disciplines. Even so, no book has yet devoted a sustained look at how exploring mothering rhetorics – the rhetorics of reproduction (rhetorics about the reproductive function of women/mothers) and reproducing rhetorics (the rhetorical reproduction of ideological systems and logics of contemporary culture) expand our understanding of mothering, motherhood, communication, and gender.

Mothering Rhetorics begins to fill this gap for scholars and teachers interested in the study of mothering rhetorics in their historical and contemporary permutations. The contributions explore the racialized rhetorical contexts of maternity; how fixing food is thought to fix families, while also regulating maternal activities and identity; how Black female breastfeeding activists resisted the exploitation of African-American mothers in Detroit; how women in pink-collar occupations both adhere to and challenge maternity leave discourses by rhetorically positioning their leaves as time off and (dis)ability; identifying verbal and nonverbal shaming practices related to unwed motherhood during the mid-twentieth century; and redefining alternative postpartum placenta practices.

This book was originally published as a special issue of Women's Studies in Communication.

Michelle Obama, Mom-in-Chief: The Racialized Rhetorical Contexts of Maternity

Sara Hayden

ABSTRACT

Directly following her husband’s 2008 election, Michelle Obama assumed the moniker “mom-in-chief,” and in her tenure as first lady she has extended this role to “mother” the children of the nation through her policy choices. Noting her Ivy League education and her prior work as a high-powered attorney, many White feminists decried Obama’s maternal focus. Black feminists, however, rejected those critiques, pointing to the progressive potential of Obama’s maternal persona. In this article, I explain these divergent perspectives by examining Obama’s maternal first lady rhetoric through an expansive understanding of context. Specifically, I argue that the varied readings of Obama’s maternal performances reflect the racialized rhetorical contexts within which she was acting and through which audience members understood her. This analysis points to the importance of investigating the rhetorical contexts within which both audience members and rhetors circulate and participate.

First ladies of the United States occupy a role that is complex, heterogeneous, and paradoxical (Anderson, 2004; Wertheimer, 2004). Robert Watson (2000) lists 11 duties first ladies are expected to perform, and perhaps none is as challenging as the requirement to serve as the “symbol of American womanhood” when assumptions about what an “ideal woman” entails are in constant flux (Campbell, 1996; Wertheimer, 2004). Yet if all first ladies must negotiate a complex and demanding job, Michelle Obama, the first African American woman to step into this role in the United States, has faced even greater challenges. In speaking broadly of the position, Karrin Vasby Anderson (2004) noted that “first ladies have functioned as ‘symbols’ of traditional white middle- to upper-class femininity in America” (p. 18; emphasis added). Attending to Obama specifically, Patricia J. Williams (2009) wrote, “Even when she [was] holding court at the head of the White House dinner table, she [was] a ‘black woman’ performing a ‘white lady’ role.” Obama’s assumption of the first lady role thus brought to the forefront the intersections of gender, race, and class (also see McAlister, 2009).¹

It is particularly noteworthy, then, that Michelle Obama has been popular throughout her tenure as first lady. According to a 2014 Gallup poll, “sixty-six percent of Americans [had] a favorable opinion of the first lady, unchanged from a year and a half [prior] and on par with her ratings since her husband’s inauguration in January 2009” (Brown, 2014). Indeed, Michelle Obama’s popularity outpaced the president’s, whose favorability ratings concurrently hovered around 52% (Brown, 2014).

Of course, while serving as first lady, Michelle Obama had her critics, and one thread of criticism came from what at first glance was an unexpected source: feminist pundits, many of whom were White.² Noting Obama’s Ivy League education, her previous work as an attorney, and her position as vice president of University of Chicago hospitals, what bothered many of these pundits was Obama’s choice to prioritize her maternity. For example, shortly after Barack Obama’s election to the presidency, Rebecca Traister (2008) lamented “the momification of Michelle Obama” in an article published in Salon. In response to Obama’s assumption of the moniker “mom-in-chief,” Lonnae O’Neal Parker (2013) reported that “many feminists decried her decision to give up her career and said she had been victimized by her husband’s choices.” Following her speech at the 2012 Democratic National Convention when Obama affirmed, “[Y]ou see, at the end of the day, my most important title is still ‘mom-in-chief,’” Jessica Valenti tweeted, “I long for the day when powerful women don’t need to assure Americans that they’re moms above all else” (Winfrey Harris, 2012).

White feminist responses to Obama can be understood as part of a broader critique of dominant ideologies that posit maternity as a woman’s first and most important role (Douglas & Michaels, 2004; Hays, 1996; O’Brien Hallstein, 2010, 2011), yet when discussing Obama, many Black women rejected these critiques, pointing to the progressive potential of Obama’s maternal persona. As Tami Winfrey Harris (2012) pointed out, Black women in the United States have rarely had the opportunity to prioritize motherhood; moreover, positive images of Black mothers are largely absent in popular culture, media, and politics. Deborah K. King (2010) agreed that White pundits misinterpret what mothering means for Michelle Obama, arguing that Obama’s actions must be understood within the African American context of othermothering.

In this article, I seek to explain the divergent responses of Black and White scholars and pundits through a consideration of the complex, dynamic, paradoxical, and racialized rhetorical contexts of maternity within which Obama’s first lady performances circulated and participated. Building on the work of James Jasinski (1997), Kristan Poirot (2014) writes:

A rhetorical context is not merely an aggregate of immediate variables (e.g., audience, rhetor, medium, topic obstacles, setting, etc.), nor is it exclusively the producer of pressing exigencies. Rather, context saturates public discourse, comprising both itself and rhetorical acts as amalgamations and orchestrations of various traditions. These traditions are more enduring than any immediate political scene, and they in turn comprise and are constituted by a multitude of rhetorical acts. (p. 10)

In what follows, I argue that Obama’s first lady rhetorical performances and the conflicting responses to them can be understood as invoking the varied traditions of dominant White mothering ideologies, the denigration of Black motherhood in mainstream, White culture, and the African American tradition of othermothering. As Obama participated in this complex and dynamic contextual field, I maintain that she constructed a polysemous set of texts that were read differently by her Black and White audiences and that functioned simultaneously to reinforce and resist sexist and racist norms. This article thus contributes to both an understanding of maternal appeals and discussions of polysemy.

The article proceeds as follows: I begin with a review of scholarship that explores the function of maternal appeals on the public stage followed by an overview of literature that addresses polysemy. I then turn to a discussion of White feminist critiques of the institution of motherhood and ways in which Obama’s maternal first lady performances could be understood to reinforce those institutions. Next, I offer a discussion of dominant images of African American maternity in juxtaposition to African American maternal practices and Obama’s mothering specifically. Then, I provide an analysis of some of Obama’s actions and words in light of the African American tradition of othermothering. I conclude by discussing the implications of understanding mothering rhetorics within a multifaceted and fluid rhetorical context.

Polysemous maternity

Rhetorics of maternity

The varied reactions pundits offered in response to Michelle Obama’s maternal first lady performances echoed similarly divergent responses found in scholarship that explores the uses of maternal appeals on the public stage. Some scholars see a liberatory potential when women claim maternity as the grounds for their authority. Jennifer A. Peeples and Kevin M. DeLuca (2006), for example, explore how a group of women use motherhood to promote environmental justice in their communities. Isaac West (2007) considers how the maternal pacifist group La WISP reconstituted the meanings of war and peace through the writing and selling of cookbooks to support their cause. Mari Boor Tonn (1996) argues that “symbolic motherhood” was a particularly potent rhetorical strategy in the hands of Mary Harris “Mother” Jones. And Valeria Fabj (1993) praises the use of maternal appeals by the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo, arguing that these mothers were able to demand information about the children who disappeared during the Argentine military dictatorship of 1976 to 1983 because they cloaked the political aspects of their critique in motherhood.

Yet not all scholars offer positive assessments of maternal appeals. Like Fabj (1993), Karen A. Foss and Kathy L. Domenici (2001) explore the rhetoric of the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo; however, Foss and Domenici suggest that the maternal appeals Fabj celebrates led to the dismissal of the mothers’ protests as irrational. Lynn Stearney (1994) similarly questions the value of maternal appeals in ecofeminist activism, arguing that such appeals reinforce an association of women with reproduction while also implying that caretaking activities are women’s responsibilities. In a slightly different vein, Katie L. Gibson and Amy L. Heyse (2010) question the progressive potential of maternal appeals through an examination of Sarah Palin’s rhetoric during the 2008 presidential campaign. Palin, these authors maintain, enacted “a persona of motherhood by employing domestic examples, maternal appeals, and a feminine discursive style” while also “joining the RNC’s [Republican National Convention’s] celebration of hegemonic masculinity” (p. 239).

Elsewhere I explain the varied assessments of maternal appeals’ utility and function through reference to the metaphorical family structures within which they are embedded (Hayden, 2003). Turning to George Lakoff’s (1996) discussion of the nation-as-family metaphor, I argue that when embedded in the “nurturant family” metaphorical structure, maternal appeals have the potential to function progressively. However, when embedded in the “strict father” metaphorical structure, maternal appeals are likely to promote a conservative, nonliberatory rhetoric. Yet this explanation does not shed light on the differing responses to Obama’s maternal performances. It is not that the metaphorical structure of Obama’s maternal performances shift; rather, different pundits offered conflicting readings in response to the same texts, suggesting that these pundits are responding to the same metaphorical structure in varied ways. To explain these discrepant interpretations and reactions, then, I suggest that Obama’s maternal appeals be considered within an expansive understanding of rhetorical context and the concept of polysemy.

Polysemy in rhetorical studies

Polysemy—the idea that audiences receive different meanings from the same texts—has been widely discussed in rhetorical and media studies, yet, according to Robin E. Jensen (2008), the term was not commonly used until the 1980s, when scholars such as John Fiske and Stuart Hall sought to offer an understanding of an audience’s active and subversive relationships to media texts. Unlike neo-Marxists, Fiske, Hall, and others argue that although media promote dominant, oppressive messages, audience members have the ability to resist those messages and the power relations entailed therein (e.g., see Bielby & Harrington, 1994; Fiske, 1986, 1991, 2006; Hall, 1994, 1996; Lewis, 1991; Press & Cole, 1994; Yousman, 2013). Moreover, scholars in this tradition attribute the impetus to resist dominant meaning to the subject positions of audience members; the polysemy of a text, Fiske (1986) maintains, lies “in the ways that different socially located viewers will activate its meaning potential differently” (p. 394; emphasis added).

Leah Ceccarelli (1998) offers a typology of polysemy as employed by rhetorical critics. Noting that scholars use the term to reference different things, she urges writers to be more specific, suggesting polysemy can be broken down into at least three types. She defines resistive reading as a practice wherein audience members read against rhetors’ intended meanings, a form of polysemy most closely aligned with scholars working in the tradition of Fiske and Hall. Strategic ambiguity, in turn, involves rhetors purposefully inviting multiple meanings from audiences, and hermeneutic depth references the practice whereby critics uncover the multiple extant meanings a text might invite.

Ceccarelli’s (1998) typology has been used frequently by rhetorical scholars (e.g., see Asen, 2010; Endres, 2012; Meyer, 2003; Perks, 2010; Rockler, 2001; Schutten, 2006; Terrill, 2000; Waisanen, 2013); it is not surprising, then, that it offers a productive framework for understanding some of the divergent responses to Obama’s rhetoric. For example, as I argue in the sections that follow, there are moments when Obama seems to utilize strategic ambiguity to couch her more pointed critiques of U.S. culture and politics; moreover, building on the work of Reid-Brinkley (2011), I suggest these moments can be understood as instances of “signifying,” a language strategy that emerges from African American traditions.

Resistive reading, however, is a less useful concept when it comes to understanding audience responses to Obama. Again, Ceccarelli (1998) argues that resistive reading occurs when audience members read a meaning other than that intended by the rhetor. To illustrate this concept, Ceccarelli discusses the varied ways Northern and Southern newspapers depicted Abraham Lincoln’s second inaugural address. She references “Lincoln’s own description of the message” (p. 400) to elucidate what he intended, concluding that Northern papers “read the message as it was designed by Lincoln” (p. 402), whereas Southern papers “misread him” (p. 410). Thus Ceccarelli points to the potential for readers to discern nonintended meanings from texts activated as a result of audience members’ social context.

What Ceccarelli (1998) pays less attention to, however, are the social and rhetorical contexts within which the rhetor is circulating. Indeed, ther...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Citation Information
• Notes on Contributors
• Introduction: Mothering Rhetorics
• 1 Michelle Obama, Mom-in-Chief: The Racialized Rhetorical Contexts of Maternity
• 2 Fixing Food to Fix Families: Feeding Risk Discourse and the Family Meal
• 3 #SpoiledMilk: Blacktavists, Visibility, and the Exploitation of the Black Breast
• 4 Standpoints of Maternity Leave: Discourses of Temporality and Ability
• 5 Rhetorics of Unwed Motherhood and Shame
• 6 Empowering Disgust: Redefining Alternative Postpartum Placenta Practices
• Index