Getting Motivated--Dr. Condoleezza Rice

After a most productive week, I did nothing all weekend. I finished grading and submitted my final grades for the session today. So my ties to teaching here are officially completed. But beyond that, I did very little other than laying around the house, watching movies, talking on the phone, and eating. I thought about packing a lot more than I actually packed. I did do a little purging, but my efforts were minimal at best. I may still accomplish some things on that front this evening. I do want to finish up packing my office.

My mind has been on auto-pilot so I was hoping to take this moment to think about work for a moment. It's time to motivate. My dissertation project begins with an introduction to Condoleezza Rice, and although I've done a lot of work on African-American women, I haven't written anything yet on Dr. Rice. My intention in writing about her for my dissertation is not to dissect her politics. Rather, I want to analyze how she has been constructed in the press as an African-American woman, as well as investigate what (if any) rhetorical strategies she has used which combat (or reinforce) these images. I am thinking about opening my dissertation with a discussion of the article "Condolezza Rice's Commanding Clothes" in the Washington Post. Traditional readings of women and political communication have long noted that attention to clothing and attire is more of an issue for women than for men in politics. News coverage has always described women politicians in terms of their appearance (hair, dress, looks), martial status, or children disproporationately to men in politics--it is not news that we get this long article on Rice's attire in a nationally recognized news outlet. But most scholarly conversations about dress and politics do not look at persons of color. So I think it will be useful for me in my dissertation to contribute to my field by demonstrated the ways in which the combination of race AND gender shape the way a woman might be portrayed in public. As a number of Black women scholars (Patricia Hill Collins, Deborah Gray White, Audrey Edwards) have noted, there are historical images of Black women that contemporary women must compete with. Many of these images revolve around sexuality, including:

• The hypersexualized Jezebel: From the tempting mulatto slave woman to the fantasized MTV Video Vixen
• The asexual mammy: Rooted in images of the nurturing Southern woman, perpetuated in continuing images of Black women in supporting roles on TV and film who always give care to the main character but without being shown to have a life of her own
• The dominant matriarch: Fed into by both sociology and media--Images of Black women as bossy, aggressive, and emasculating

What intrigues me about this article, and others that I have seen on Rice, is that it fuses many of these images. More importantly, it keeps sexuality at the forefront--Black women's sexuality has always been open for conversation, spectatorship, and debate (If you haven't seen it, take a look at the film The Life of Sara Baartman: The Venus Hottentot). Black women's sexuality was historically (and arguably still is) public property; a huge difference from White women's sexuality which was to be chaste, hidden, and private (also problematic). In this case Rice's choice of attire is not just read in terms of the Matrix or style, but with an emphasis on dominance and sexuality. Concerned Women for America, rightly expressed anger at the racist and sexist nature of this article, but I think wrongly linked this to a partisan slight. Black women have longed been reduced to cariactiture images on both sides of the aisle, and knowing more about the history of Black women would reveal that political ideology has very little to do with how Black women are constructed in the eye of the American public and across the world. (Racism and sexism exists in both blue and red states--a post for another day). I hope that providing my readers with a more in-depth background of the images of Black women will provide for a richer reading of the political context that Rice (and the other women in my study) face outside of just partisan politics.

The more I think about this, the more I think I will use this moment to introduce the project. I have been planning to start with Condoleeza Rice, but was searching for an avenue--I think this just may be it. Gotta do some more reading and writing on it...