(M)Other-in-Chief: Michelle Obama and the Ideal of Republican Womanhood

Abstract

On 4 November 2008, the people of the United States witnessed something that had never occurred in the nation’s history. For the first time since its founding, a black woman was set to become the First Lady of the United States. (It’s fair to say that the election of her husband as the first African American President of the United States was an auspicious occasion as well.) With the historic event of Barack Obama’s election to the presidency, and to the title of the leader of the free world, the attention given to Michelle Obama as the new First Lady was, to say the least, extensive and rapt. But among all of the discussions of J. Crew and Target, biceps, hairstyles, and inaugural gowns, much less was being made of the significance of a black woman as First Lady, than of a black man as President. While it is obvious why focus has been largely aimed at President Obama concerning the momentous intersection of race, manhood, citizenship and the meaning of the presidency,¹ the role to which Michelle Obama has ascended is arguably far more complicated and fraught, and one in which it could be far more challenging to ‘succeed’. This essay looks at the meaning of American womanhood as embodied in the role of the First Lady of the United States, and the complicated ways in which Michelle Obama must work to inscribe those meanings onto the overdetermined terrain of black womanhood. In doing so, it also reveals some of the larger contours of new femininities, in particular, the primacy of a performative consciousness that has evolved as a mode through which to suture together the disparate social demands of imagined womanhood in the new millennium in order to forge a coherent, translatable identity of femininity.