Abstract

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Rethinking "Intersectionality":Michelle Obama, Presumed Subjects, and Constitutive PrivilegeErin C. TarverIn February 2008, Michelle Obama famously said to a gathering of supporters, "For the first time in my adult life, I am really proud of my country." (Associated Press 2008). Her comment was swiftly seized upon by journalists and members of rival political campaigns, who used it to portray Mrs. Obama as "angry" and unpatriotic. In the weeks that followed, Mrs. Obama's undergraduate sociology thesis on black students at Princeton was cited as further evidence of her supposed racial resentment and lack of patriotism, and there were widespread rumors that an audiotape existed of her using the word whitey.1 Around the same time, Fox News ran a headline referring to Mrs. Obama as "Obama's Baby Mama" (Koppleman 2008). Subsequently, there was a concerted effort on the part of Mr. Obama's campaign to "soften" her image through appearances on the shows The View and Paula's Party, and a speech at the Democratic National Convention that highlighted her motherhood and adoration of her husband, and avoided mention of her own career or political work. Despite such efforts, and perhaps in tension with the Obama family's general popularity following Mr. Obama's election, Mrs. Obama was later characterized by a cable news pundit as being reminiscent of "Stokely Carmichael in a designer dress" (The O'Reilly Factor 2009) and thus as a potential political liability for the Obama administration.While some feminists decried the "momification" (Traister 2008) of Michelle Obama as an act of appeasement by an administration that would [End Page 150] capitulate to the oppressive expectations of a public unwilling to find expressions of independent thought or professional ambitions appropriately First Lady-like, other critics noted that Mrs. Obama was being reviled more for daring to suggest that the United States' racial history was far from being strictly historical, opening her to the charge of being an angry Negro—while, ironically, being accused of "playing the race card." Others have pointed out that specific formulations such as "baby mama" are illustrative of the fact that such representations of Mrs. Obama are not easily classifiable as either sexist or racist, but instead draw on both sorts of tropes, as have such familiar representations of black women as promiscuous, or as militant, emasculating mammies.In this article, I consider methodologies for theorizing the function of such oppressions in the public discourses surrounding Michelle Obama, and suggest that a consideration of their manifestations in this context illustrates the need for more complex theoretical tools that can problematize the constitutive effects of such discourse for a multiplicity of subjects. Through parallel analyses of Beauvoir's The Second Sex and Fanon's Black Skin White Masks, I foreground the theoretical pitfall the consideration of sex- or race-based oppressions tends to occasion: the tacit presumption of some ostensibly "neutral" subject whose constitution is inadequately addressed. I suggest, with theorists of intersectionality, that this problem will not be solved merely by the addition of alternative explanatory frameworks (e.g., adding racism to sexism as a discrete phenomenon), since doing so is neither adequately representative of the experience of oppressions nor sufficient to the task of undermining the normative/perverse dichotomy or presumption of generic subjectivity that sustains them. However, I also argue that the work of intersectionality theorists should be taken farther than it has frequently been in the past (which, though given lip service by much of the feminist community, has not always been taken to imply the need for a major methodological shift), extending its insights to offer a critique of foundational subjectivity. Concomitantly, I argue that a failure by feminist philosophers to offer this critique could unintentionally result in the reinscription of the normativity of particular sorts of subjects—which is precisely what theorists of intersectionality have been concerned to call into question. I suggest that an analysis of the discourse surrounding Michelle Obama demonstrates that insofar as the intersectionality paradigm is understood merely to require the interrogation of overlapping oppressions on a given subject or subjects, and thus as leaving uninterrogated the constitutively privileging and subjectivizing effects of oppressive discourse, uses of intersectionality will reiterate...