viz. - Michelle Obama

Objectifying the Office - Michelle Obama and the Spanish Magazine Controversy

Cate Blouke — Fri, 07 Sep 2012 19:36:38 +0000

Image Credit: cropped version of Karine Percheron-Daniels magazine cover image

Even the First Lady can't escape the objectification of black women's bodies (at home and abroad).

The Internet has had a lot to say about the Spanish magazine cover unveiled last week depicting Michelle Obama bare-breasted, swathed in an American flag. Most reactions have been vehement condemnations, accusing the artist (Karine Percheron-Daniels) of racism at worst, and poor taste at best. The image involved certainly raises a lot of questions (about race, art, censorship, and objectification), and I'll get into more detail when you see the (theoretically) Not Safe For Work images after the jump.

The image is based on a painting by Marie-Guillemine Benoist titled Portrait d'une négresse, completed in 1800 and currently hanging in the Louvre. While the painting is a depiction of a slave, according to at least one art historian the portrait “may be seen as a voice of protest, however small, in the discourse over human bondage.”

Karine Percheron-Daniels, the artist responsible for the cover image, has responded to the various attacks and accusations of racism with a statement explaining her thought-process and expressing a (seemingly) sincere admiration for Mrs. Obama. And, to be fair, this image is one in a series of nude political figures including the likes of Abraham Lincoln, Princess Diana, Eva Peron, and Obama himself (among others).

It interests me that most coverage of the "story" has chosen to censor the image of Mrs. Obama while leaving the breast in the original portrait bare. This explicitly condemns Percheron-Daniels' work (as not-art) while retaining the artistic value of the original.

While much to do is being made of the artist’s choice of source painting, I’m particularly interested in the significance of the choices Percheron-Daniels made in her adaptation – particularly the shifting of the subject’s gaze.

In the original work, the woman depicted confronts the viewer directly – a much more active role than the demure, side-long glance of the Percheron-Daniels’ portrait. As such, the new image removes any agency from its subject, turning her body (and face) into an object to be gazed upon. This ties in with the Spanish magazine’s rather odd caption – that Michelle Obama’s face will be key in the upcoming election – as well as the continued American obsession with Mrs. Obama’s arms.

It also seems significant that Percheron-Daniels chose to incorporate the American flag, tying the image into nationalism. On the international stage, then, the cover portrays America as being inescapably tied to its roots in slavery, and the first lady is presented as an aesthetic object. And given the kind ofappalling headlines some coverage has indulged in, the incident is certainly disheartening – particularly if you heard NPR’s recent interview of GOP-leaning veterans in which Bobbie Lucier (of Indianapolis) complains that “It's about time we get a first lady in there that acts like a first lady and looks like a first lady.” And one can’t help but chalk that kind of comment up to race.

Hat tip to this year's viz. editor Rachel Schneider for helping me talk through these ideas.

Beyonce: Let's Move Campaign and Inter-cultural Rhetorics

noelradley — Sat, 30 Apr 2011 21:24:24 +0000

H/T Beverly Mireles

The Beyonce video above was launched this month as a part of Michelle Obama's "Let's Move Campaign" on behalf of the National Association of Broadcasters. The video mobilizes inter-cultural rhetorics in support of public health, most obviously with the shift mid-video from hip hop to Latino-inflected dance moves and music. The 'flash workout' indicates the need for solidarity among minority populations most affected by the state of food and exercise culture in America. Healthy bodies and race relations, the video communicates, are the same cause. The flag waving at the end of the video underlines a populist appeal.

Of course, it's not so simple as Michelle Obama , Beyonce, or the NAB would have it. The class signals in the main video, such as the cafeteria workers joining the flash dance, seem wishful thinking. The young women in the "Behind the Scenes" video talk about their unhealthy diets with self-reflection, but it doesn't seem the problem gets solved with Beyonce flippantly (petulantly?) taking a bite from an apple in the main vid.

For the most part Beyonce's fully energized and empowered movement authenticates what would otherwise a paradoxical performance as school girl. The school girl costuming becomes a way for Beyonce to occupy and enable--rather than exploit--the nubile teen sexuality of the young people participating. And although for a lot of the video it's hard to see past Beyonce to the young bodies moving behind and beside her, there are some grainy shots of the young subjects taking their own videos with flip cameras. These few shots keep the flash mob from merely becoming Beyonce's glorified back up dancers. All in all, it's not perfect, but I think it's definitely salvageable and interesting cultural work.

Bodies vs. Behaviors: The Problems with Childhood Obesity Campaigns

ladysquires — Thu, 07 Apr 2011 13:24:40 +0000

(Photo Credit: Billboard, Georgia Childrens Health Alliance, via Body Impolitic)

No one could argue that efforts to promote healthy eating and exercise among school children, such as Michelle Obama's "Let's Move" campaign, aren't well-intentioned. But as Paul Campos argues in this recent Daily Beast article, too often anti-obesity campaigns focused on children stigmatize the very individuals they are supposedly trying to help. The image above, a billboard produced by the Georgia Childrens Health Alliance, is a case in point. These scowling children with warning labels slapped across their stomachs seem to have crossed the line from being victims of genetics, environment, lack of opportunities for healthy exertion, and inavailability of affordable healthy meal choices to, I guess, being perpetrators. Something has clearly gone wrong here. Seriously, how would you like to be one of the kids in these pictures with your body held up as a symbol of a national crisis?

Far too often, anti-obesity campaigns in general tend to focus on simply changing bodies rather than changing behaviors, pointing to a simplified understanding of the relationship between body size and health, stigmatizing bodies rather than promoting positive behaviors and improving access to exercise and healthy food. Though the intended message may be, "We are here to help you be healthier and happier by teaching you how to practice self-care," it comes across as, "seriously, just quit being so fat already." The effect is to encourage unhealthy weight loss strategies and further ostracize fat kids. As Campos argue

Michelle Obama spoke movingly last week at a press conference about how parents agonize over the pain bullies inflict on children. Maybe she should talk to Casey Heynes about that. Heynes is a 16-year-old Australian fat kid who according to his father has been bullied for years by classmates about his weight. A few days ago, some of them decided to record their latest attack on a camera phone.
The first lady would, no doubt, be horrified by the suggestion that her Let’s Move campaign, which is dedicated to trying to create an America without any fat kids, is itself a particularly invidious form of bullying. But practically speaking, that’s exactly what it is. The campaign is in effect arguing that the way to stop the bullying of fat kids is to get rid of fat kids.

No humane person would argue that the answer to keeping gay and lesbian teens from getting bullied is to get rid of gay and lesbian kids, though I acknowledge that the analogy isn't perfect. Yet childhood obesity campaigns tend to problematically suggest that in order to address the problem of fat kids being bullied and ostracized, we need to change the fat kids, but somehow we have yet to master a rhetoric that would promote healthy behaviors and tolerance at the same time.

Visualizing (Post-)Racial Protest and Politics

Rachel Schneider — Wed, 28 Apr 2010 21:25:18 +0000

Image Credit: Screenshot from Towleroad

H/T: Hampton Finger

It’s been hard to miss the recent media coverage of the new Arizona immigration law SB 1070, which allows police to stop individuals and require them to show legal papers proving their citizenship upon “reasonable suspicion.” Many have interpreted this as legalizing racial profiling, which has caused protests to spring up against this, most recently the one pictured above where individuals smeared refried beans in the shape of a swastika to point out the potentially fascist implications of the bill. What makes me curious is how racial tensions have been visually deployed during the theoretically post-racial Obama presidency.

I was fortunate to recently attend a talk at the University of Texas’s John L. Warfield Center for African & African American Studies given by Dr. Soyini Madison on the topic of “White Anger, Crazy Patriotism, and (Post) Black Performativity.” In this talk, Dr. Madison discussed how what she refers to as “crazy patriotism,” which she accounts for as something like a sacred belief in nationalist ideology, first projected their frustrations onto Michelle Obama to portray her as an angry black woman who hates America (as seen on a New Yorker cover previously discussed on viz.), then re-appropriated it as a righteous anger that seeks to preserve American values. This discussion seemed relevant for viz. readers if only because Dr. Madison constantly referred to the visual “momification” of Michelle Obama on newspaper stands nationwide.

Image Credit: Jezebel

Jezebel’s recent post on her magazine covers notes how frequently she likes to pose with her hands clasped:

Why do so many Mobama covers feature the First Lady with her hands demurely clasped? Deliberate signaling of her approachability? Or is it just how she likes to pose? What does it all mean?

Jezebel is clearly onto something here: the pearls she wears, along with her clasped hands, her manicured nails, and the apple on the table all serve to portray the First Lady as a suburban middle-class mom whose causes and views are all as wholesome as the organic foods she grows in her home garden. Yet while some have criticized her for this momification, Madison points out how this particular post-black identity allows the Obamas to displace crazy patriotism yet still maintain race as a part of the discussion. (It’s interesting to consider how her image helps sell magazines as a note, though—she helps sell magazines directed at African-Americans, but “doesn’t produce more than an occasional lift” for general-interest publications.)

The question that I think can come from pairing together what seems like two different discourses is to see how the visuals of post-raciality still lean on racially encoded signifiers. Just as refried beans serve as shorthand to identity an angry Hispanic speaker, Michelle is dressed and posed to present a nonthreatening blackness to viewers.

William Faulkner once wrote that “the past is never dead, it’s not even past.” We can see in these images that while some commentators and Tea Partiers might argue that this law doesn’t involve racial profiling and that Obama is not subject to racist attacks, racism and its legacy remain problems with which we must cope—especially when people are already being arrested according to this law's logic.

Mapping Relations

EmilyBloom — Tue, 13 Oct 2009 21:54:12 +0000

Image Credit: New York Times

Family trees are distinctively antiquated visual representations, yet they remain ubiquitous. In the past week alone, The Boston Herald published a family tree by the New England Historic Genealogical Society showing that Ben Affleck and Matt Damon are related and New York Times ran an interactive tree based on the research of genealogist Megan Smolenyak documenting Michelle Obama’s family history. Both maps include the very familiar hierarchical arrangement of lines and circles or squares. The Damon-Affleck map cuts right to the chase, foregoing all other strands, and directly linking the actors to William Knowlton Jr. (1615-1655). The First Lady’s genealogy is much more interested in the journey than the destination; each node of the tree has a short description of the family member and links to their genealogical record. Looking at these two maps, I was led to consider why the family tree endures despite the wealth of technologies available for re-mapping relationships? Why does the old visual arrangement of radiating lines still seem to capture our attention? And finally, what are we really mapping when we map kinship on a family tree?

Most immediately, the family tree implies the presence of roots—a metaphor that Alex Haley significantly mined in his book and miniseries. The Times (London) used a similar visual metaphor in a family tree for Barack Obama in which they, rather tastelessly, represent his African ancestors as the roots and his American ancestors as the tree.

Image Credit: Times (London)

Issues of subterranity are rendered even more explicit by trees revealing hidden histories, particularly, as in the case of Michelle Obama’s geneology, histories of slavery, interracial kinship and upward mobility. On the New York Times’ “Room for Debate,” scholars discuss the significance and meanings of Michelle Obama’s family tree. Among these voices, several expressed doubt about whether the family tree can generate significant public debate on the issues it reveals. As Mary Frances Berry writes, “race-mixture stories have attracted sustained public interest only when some celebrity or a president, as in Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings, is involved.” Other scholars lamented the inability of the genealogical chart to tell the history it purports to represent. Martha Hodges writes that the simple line connecting two individuals does not reveal the violence that could be contained in that encounter, particularly between a slave girl and an unknown white forbearer. On the other hand, Ira Berlin points out that the connecting line not only obliterates violence, but also other complicated emotional connections between individuals. In both cases, the family tree does not depict affective ties—whether those of pain, shame, betrayal, love or joy.

Image Credit Left: Clauset, Moore and Newman in Nature

Image Credit Right: The Boston Herald

In a recent article in Nature, “Networks: Teasing out the missing links,” Sid Reidner describes the limitations of the family tree's “highly unrealistic, insular population” in our age of increasingly complex social organizations. Reidner cites work by Aaron Clauset, Cristopher Moore & M. E. J. Newman in creating a "hierarchical random graph" that represents the links omitted in a standard family tree. While the creators of this model use it to predict relationships when information is missing, this chart also offers an interesting visual representation of relations that emphasizes the multiplicity of links, rather than the simple procreative line. While a much messier affair, the Clauset, Moore and Newman model makes for a more compelling glimpse into the Affleck-Damon connection, for instance, than a tree– no matter how deep the roots.

White House, Green House

EmilyBloom — Tue, 22 Sep 2009 21:30:33 +0000

Image Credit: The New York Times

Nestled between the white monuments of Washington D.C. is a new dash of green. On September 17th, Washington D.C. opened a weekly farmer's market near the White House. This opening, ceremoniously attended by Michelle Obama as well as hundreds of shoppers, led me to think about the ways in which the First Lady has championed the sustainability movement. One of her first ceremonial acts as a resident of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue was to plant a garden. The White House website includes a film about digging this garden and compares Michelle Obama to Eleanor Roosevelt, the only other First Lady to plant produce on the White House lawns. In her remarks at the opening of the Farmer's Market, Michelle Obama refers to the White House gardens as "one of the greatest things that I've done in my life so far" and describes supporting the Farmer's Market as an extension of her commitment to making healthy food more widely accessible.

Together, the White House gardens and the adjacent farmer's market represent a distinctive "greening" of the First Lady role. Rather than directly entering the health care debate as Hillary Rodham Clinton did in 1993, Michelle Obama argues that her emphasis on healthy eating is an important part of the discussion of health care. In her speech to the farmer's market, she said, "I've realized that little things like a garden can actually play a role in all of these larger discussions. They make us think about these issues in a way that maybe sometimes the policy conversations don't allow us to think." How do the Washington D.C. farmer's market and the White House garden participate in conversations about such issues as health care and economic stimulus? Is Michelle Obama advocating policy by digging gardens and shopping locally or are these photo ops merely obfuscations of policy discussion?

The White House website offers numerous examples of Michelle Obama's visual and spoken rhetoric on the subjects of sustainable gardening and healthy eating that could make for interesting classroom discussion.

Satire?

timturner — Sun, 20 Jul 2008 21:07:56 +0000

The recent New Yorker cover depicting Barack and Michelle Obama in radical drag, as it were, hasn't been discussed here on viz. It deserves a mention, since the nature and definition of satire has been discussed on the site before.

In my opinion, it fails utterly as satire. First of all, anytime anything requires extensive explanation AS SATIRE, it probably isn't the most adept or polished attempt. This week's New York Times "Week in Review" piece, written by Lee Siegel, agrees. In it, Siegel concludes that "By presenting a mad or contemptible partisan sentiment as a mainstream one, by accurately reproducing it and by neglecting to position the target of a slur — the Obamas — in relation to the producers of the slur, The New Yorker seems to have unwittingly reiterated the misconception it meant to lampoon."

I agree, and not because I think the Obamas are off-limits as targets for satire, or that they themselves think they are off-limits (a conclusion I've heard on cable news from some on the "lunatic fringe" Siegel mentions). To me, the so-called satire of the piece fails because, rather than seeming to satirize the intellectual laziness, the total divorce from reality, required to hold the views depicted here, it seems to satirize the Obamas themselves for producing those views, instead of those who maintain and perpetuate them. The message is confused, the execution, confusing. Grade: F.

The Serious Side of Sarcasm

Jillian Sayre — Fri, 29 Feb 2008 20:18:38 +0000

Is sarcastic, rather than bitch, the new black? To build on our discussions of the image of women in politics (see John's post about Michelle Obama's halo and Tim's recent post about Hillary and/as the Devil), I find the discussion of the two women's "edgy" humor to be quite interesting and I think it affects the way that their images are produced and read.

Katie Couric, The New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and now Newsweek have all noted how Obama's rhetoric contrasts with the optimism and hopefulness of her husband's campaign. But while most of these sources will present the trait as positive (albeit dangerous), the Times for instance called Obama "Outspoken, strong-willed, funny, gutsy", Clinton is considered dour or angry.

The funny thing is, the visual argument seems to be presented in the opposite manner. Newsweek's profile of Michelle Obama featured a good deal of "stern" pictures, despite the frequent mention of her humor in the text (she pokes fun of her husband, makes frequent jokes that not everybody gets). Despite a few nostalgic young Obama shots (and the cover which features a controlled smile on a woman who seems almost to be physically restraining herself), most of them looked like this:

both images property of Newsweek

Hillary, on the other hand, as Tim's devil picture indicates and as Jon Stewart has pointed out, seems discomforting in her happiness, the "hard-nosed realist" who enjoys lambasting hope and faith. When she makes these sarcastic comments in speeches and during debates, she smiles, even laughs. While I think we would agree that this normally says, "hey, joke here!" it is read by these critics as over-rehearsed or abusively cynical.

Perhaps what I am most intrigued by in this debacle is the disjunct of rhetorical strategy and analysis. While Obama's serious posture is productively rebellious, making her a thoughtful as well as humorous (Newsweek says that she's not the expected "Stepford booster, smiling vacantly at her husband and sticking to a script of carefully vetted blandishments"), I think Clinton joyfully produces her barbs so that the listener is encouraged to hear her and laugh along, a sort of benevolence. The effect, though, is suspicion and distance; these critics argue that her smiles actually isolate the audience and I wonder what context creates this reading.