in still relevant things written in 2011 for a website that is now defunct…

Few stories capture the glory and darkness of the “American Dream” so eloquently as that of Elvis Aron Presley.

Nothing about Elvis makes sense. He was a poor kid from Tupelo living in public housing in Memphis. He was straight but he wore eye make-up. He was white but he shopped on Beale. He broke every single rule.

During a particularly chaste time in American society, Elvis oozed sex – from his slicked back hair to the blue suede shoes. Of an early concert, TIME magazine offered the following description: “The lanky singer flails furious rhythms on his guitar, every now and then breaking a string. In a pivoting stance, his hips swing sensuously from side to side and his entire body takes on a frantic quiver, as if he had swallowed a jackhammer.” This was more controversial than anything Lady Gaga has ever done.

Shortly thereafter, a performance in L.A. was derided as a “sex show” and the vice squad was called. The King was unrepentant: when a judge in Florida prohibited him from swinging his hips during a concert, Elvis wiggled his pinkie finger provocatively instead.

There’s a reason they call him The King. Opera, gospel, ballads, blues, bluegrass, rockabilly, R&B… he could and did do it all, in a voice that could break your heart. In the words of one early commentator: “If ever there was music that bleeds, this was it.” Pick up any of his records today, and you’ll see that statement holds up.

But the establishment doesn’t always like innovation and, at the time, the combination of his “grunt and groin” antics onstage combined with the sexy rhythms of his music, earned Elvis a world of criticism. He was dismissed as “Elvis the Pelvis” and accused of moral degeneracy. “Old Blue Eyes” Frank Sinatra dismissed his music as “a rancid smelling aphrodisiac” that “fosters almost totally negative and destructive reactions in young people.” And maybe it did. As Bob Dylan later remembered, “Hearing him for the first time was like busting out of jail.”

My favorite Elvis story is this… when he first went to Sun Records to cut a disc for his mother, Sam Phillips’ receptionist asked who he sounded like. The 18-year-old Elvis responded with a wink and said, “I don’t sound like nobody.”

well, well. so it’s one of those mornings where i went to bed thinking i’d write about one thing and woke up to discover i needed to write about something else.

(via @kimkardashian)

because last night this struck me as nothing, beyond its imminent usefulness to me.

because really. look deep into the cockles of your heart: is this truly so shocking?

that one of the most famous women of our time would channel one of the most famous women of an earlier time in a photoshoot? for andy warhol’s interview magazine, no less.

(via @kimkardashian)

this belongs in the realm of there is nothing new under the sun.

kardashian interviewed liz taylor in 2011. in 2013, she was denounced for comparing herself to taylor in what the daily mail decried as her “most indulgent selfie yet.” in 2015, she did it again for a magazine photo-spread, in a  look i spent MONTHS trying to replicate.

(via @kimkardashian)

this is actually what people do with celebrities.

first ladies definitely do it with first ladies.

Jacqueline Kennedy in April of 1961
© 2000 Mark Shaw

and celebrities do it with other celebrities.

kardashian is not the first person to play jackie. marilyn monroe did it in 1962.

(image by Bert Stern)

UNPACK THAT.

there is a real and legitimate and incredibly important conversation to be had around the darkening of kardashian’s skin in these photos for interview magazine.

i’m not going to have that conversation here because it is part of a broader, ongoing conversation around kardashian’s problematic representations of race and there are people way more equipped to offer an informed critique.

(via @kimkardashian)

but i do want to look at the jackie kennedy connection being made here.

it’s a connection i’ve made myself in writing about our cultural reluctance to take seriously the varied nature of women’s work. in discussing jackie’s work as first lady, i evoked kardashian’s work as an entrepreneur.

love her or hate her, she is a pioneer in the cosmetics industry, and a vital part of a transmedial entertainment ecosystem that has shaped the conversations we have around women’s bodies, families and fame for the last decade.

yes, there was a sex tape. but to think this is entirely about a sex tape is to grossly misunderstand one of the most significant entertainment phenomena of our times.

look beyond the glam and the family vacays and the real estate. this is about family and race and gender and anxiety and mortality and america.

you know what other story is about all of those things?

and if you are like, what huh? jackie ain’t got nothing to do with race! oh HELLO.

i assure you: the racism around this marriage was INTENSE. onassis was repeatedly cast as “the greek” and depicted as a pirate. a crucial element of his ugliness as it was portrayed in the press was his ethnicity and, in newspaper reports following her remarriage, the papers persisted in calling her jackie kennedy, lest she be besmirched by the onassis name.

(oh, “the high-cholesterol” drama, ya’ll!!!!)

it was intense and enduring. when she died, this whole marriage (which people are always astonished to hear lasted seven years) was essentially erased.

the name of onassis was not mentioned at her funeral. the marriage to onassis was glossed in the obituaries. my academic foreverlove wayne koestenbaum said the whole relationship “was erased with the absoluteness of Soviet regimes banishing dissidents from the historical record.”

it is telling that in retelling this story through the years- even nearly 25 years after her death- this period is either not a part of the story or its significance is dramatically reduced.

it is- not coincidentally, i believe- the period during which, to americans, she was perceived as and portrayed as being unamerican.

in spite of still spending most of her time in america.

it was so intense that it is, i would argue, still part of why when people think of jackie, even when they refer to her as “jackie o”, they are typically meaning this:

(jacques lowe)

even though they are saying this:

unless they are talking about sunglasses. in which case they probably do mean the above.

the thing is. either way, we are talking about images, not about people.

in this, THE SUMMER OF DIANA, hilary mantel had an article in the guardian this weekend which made a point which is pretty much celebrity 101, though also one a lot of us miss or forget: “The princess we invented to fill a vacancy had little to do with any actual person.”

these people are images, vessels in which we insert ourselves. sites in which our own imaginations have their way.

(via @ohlighn)

when we talk about jackie, we are talking about our own invention.

we are also talking about someone who actually lived and breathed, which is part of the problem, but really, because we cannot get at the person who lived and breathed, we wind up talking about our own invention.

when i write a biography of jackie, i am still- even after all that effort- STILL writing about my own invention.

Jackie Halo Sun (Jackie van Gogh Series #23) by John Beauparlant (via Saatchi Art)

this is a collaborative exercise. i’m also writing about all the other jackies invented by different people, but in the end, the result of that is still an invention.

i am never really going to get at her, only ever at my sense of her.

(Tom Tierney, Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis paper dolls)

that is what kardashian is doing in this photoshoot.

she is playing with an image. she is making something of her own invention.

calling upon a symbol (jackie as first lady, jackie as grand dame, jackie as AMERICAN) and bringing to it a whole other set of symbols that she herself evokes as a symbol and invention.

when we look at this image, we are looking at an invention within an invention and reading that.

i’m making it sound too individual. she has undoubtedly collaborated with the photographer and the make-up people and the editor and the art director and a whole host of others.

we do not know where this idea originated. though we can probably conclude that she is interested in jackie given she bought a jackie-owned watch a few months ago. so this is a story which, independent of this photo-spread, holds biographical appeal for kardashian.

also, “new” first lady would seem to be a bit of a stretch. as this is also a narrative that has been with us for awhile (however seriously you want to take it).

BUT. what i’m aiming to get at here is the notion that it is ridiculous to think that kardashian should not be entitled to use jackie’s image in this way, that it was somehow wrong.

which has pretty much been the outcry on twitter.

(via @kimkardashian)

(via @kimkardashian)

(via Twitter)

(via @kimkardashian)

speaking as her biographer, i will say jackie is not rolling in her grave.

i will also say that it is probably inevitable that this critique would intersect with the ongoing narrative of taylor swift versus kim kardashian, recently given new life by the release of swift’s latest single “look what you made me do,” which is believed to be substantially directed at kardashian and at kanye west.

(via the daily mail)

in this scenario are jackie and swift aligned as the victims of kim kardashian?

or is it that they are aligned as white women?

(some magazine, probably summer 2012ish)

race is a part of jackie’s story in ways that are often overlookable (ie. the coverage of the marriage to onassis), still not recoverable because the archives suck and which are inaccessible to me because i am a white woman.

i can write about how most of the campaign events she did were for african american voters and how she integrated the white house nursery, but the story of black women’s relationship with jackie? that is a story i know i cannot write and one which i long to read.

in thinking about the response to kardashian here, it is worth noting: there was no significant backlash against lana del ray casting A$AP Rocky as JFK in the video for “national anthem.”

not necessarily a case of apples to apples as that was 2012 and 2017 is a different time, a different cultural and technological context. but it points to the possibility of differences in response.

(via Twitter)

i research and write about how we use stories of the lives of others to navigate the anxieties of the present.

since 1994, there has been a ruthless “grace, class, dignity” motif in jackie’s story, one which i have always found tremendously boring but have come to realize- with its nostalgia for the days of yore and preoccupation with making america great again- is also racially inflected and can be very easily mobilized to reenforce whiteness.

this is the second significant time in the last few years that jacqueline kennedy onassis’s “grace, class, dignity” image has been weaponized to glorify whiteness, albeit this time it is far more subtle than the last.

(Kennedy/Obama meme, 2014)

that was 2014.

in 2012, taylor swift was celebrated for dressing like jackie in her actual real off-stage life whilst dating a 4G kennedy cousin.

in 2017,  kim kardashian- a woman of armenian descent with a mixed-race child- dressed for a photoshoot as jackie- a woman koestenbaum once characterized as “a prime exhibit of whiteness in the whiteness musuem” (whiteness describing not color but “a placement on the U.S. racial grid”).

be real. despite the different time and different cultural and technological context, were taylor swift to step out dressed as jackie tomorrow, would the response to her doing so have changed at all?

i’m 100% sure we’d get that same “HOT PICS! Taylor’s Tribute to Jackie O!” we got in 2012.

because we live in a world where taylor swift has the privilege of doing anything she wants with jackie onassis’s image.

kim kardashian does not.

(via Twitter)

about hillary rodham clinton’s memoir…

ok, ya’ll, let’s do this. and to do this we (obviously) need my emotionally incontinent face twin, ms britney.

a lot has happened since we last spoke.

for example, the new york times published this piece on harvey weinstein.

the new yorker published this substantially less well written piece on harvey weinstein.

the new yorker published a follow-up story on harvey weinstein.

the new york times published a follow-up story on harvey weinstein.

many, many women posted on social media about their own experiences of sexual assault and sexual harassment.

there was some exceedingly valuable writing on the matter from all over the internet which i will not even attempt to condense here.

buzzfeed published this piece on kevin spacey.

assorted other venues posted articles on kevin spacey.

to say nothing of brett ratner, mark halperin, leon weiseltier, george hw bush, ben affleck, dustin hoffman, etc.

or russia.

so, like an amazingly enormous amount of stuff happened. but we’re not here to talk about that.

at least not directly. because, as you surely know by now, i am nothing if not exceedingly indirect.

no. we’re here to talk about leo.

(i’ve been told there are people who HATE gifs. do people HATE gifs? am i losing readers through my insistence on conveying my emotional states through GIFs of britbrit???

meh. i feel que será será. and i will use ALL.OF.THE.GIFS today. mwahahahhaahaa.)

so we’re here to talk about leo and- don’t you know it?!- my bff the daily mail.

you remember where we were, yeah?

i last wrote about leo in march 2016, when he FINALLLLLLLY won his oscar (gosh, what an innocent time that seems).

i last wrote about the DM’s leo reporting in february 2016, when they called him ‘LOTHARIO DICAPRIO’ (caps = the DM’s) and suggested he was going to end up ‘MISERABLE AND ALONE.’ (caps = mine)

so here we are. it’s 2017. the times they are a’changing.

yo. LOOKIT.

(via the daily mail)

people, we have reached a point where leonardo dicaprio no longer feels it is safe to flirt. what fascinating times in which to live.

this headline tho. let’s start there.

i mean, 1:

2: does this leave open the possibility that he flirted with women elsewhere on the attractiveness spectrum and simply avoided those deemed ‘pretty’?

excluding ‘pretty’ still leaves quite a generous range of levels of attractiveness with which one might flirt.

3: the passivity here is astounding, no?

(via the daily mail)

implying that dicaprio, for ALLLLLLLLLLL these years, has attracted models (coincidentally from a similar age bracket and primarily employed by victoria’s secret) through his sheer magnetism rather than pursuit.

4: plus “‘careful'”.

(via the daily mail)

which implicitly begs the question of how careless he might have been up to now. an impression in no way helped by the quotation marks.

what interests me here is the way this story is written and the response it seems to suggest to the recent revelations in hollywood. if we’re looking for examples of modifications of behavior, this is one.

something has changed.

(via the daily mail)

alas:

(via the daily mail)

although, before you go lamenting PC madness run amok, please note that, while leonardo dicaprio no longer feels safe flirting with women, the daily mail has absolutely no qualms about gratuitous photographs of women in bikinis:

(via the daily mail)

fear not! the times they haven’t changed too much.

doesn’t this sound like an SAT word problem though? there is 1 star of titanic at a party. 40 people were at the party, including an unspecified number of beautiful women. how many women didn’t he talk to?

and how many were his ‘type’?

(via the daily mail)

what reader response do you think the daily mail is gunning for here? sympathy for dicaprio? does the fact that he can no longer speak to women at parties doom him to a future of MISERABLE AND ALONE?

since george clooney’s marriage, the narrative of dicaprio’s bachelorhood has moved to the fore. he’s probably the most visible bachelor at the moment, given the general assumption that prince harry (who also, at one point, HAD TO MARRY) will marry meghan markel soon.

dicaprio doesn’t have to marry, anymore than any of us have to marry and certainly not for dynastic reasons. but, as a single man of a certain age, an austenish assumption that he should want to marry lingers.

this is not entirely the doing of the daily mail, as dicaprio himself leaned into this narrative when campaigning for his oscar.

‘that time will come when that time comes,’ he said, a rather fortune cookie way of stating obvious facts about temporality, which was, of course, interpreted as him needing and looking to find the right girl in order to settle down.

(would that we lived in a world where he could have been honest and said, I AM GLORIOUSLY SINGLE AND HAVING THE TIME OF MY LIFE, if that was indeed how he felt.)

fun fact: dicaprio is one of the few famous men whose past relationships are regularly mentioned in reporting on his life (macaulay culkin, of course, being the other- albeit kunis specifically). this is a distinction rarely bestowed upon men which almost always occurs in reports of women.

that is not to say that male stars’ love lives are never mentioned, because they are. but usually it’s the most recent relationship or a particularly noteworthy one. reports of men’s lives do not usually include an itemized listing of past involvements. reports of women’s often do, suggesting that relationships are the work of women’s lives whereas men’s work takes priority in the story of theirs.

dicaprio emerges as an exception.

a man of 42 has had some relationships. holy buckets.

this article fascinates me because it seems to be positioning dicaprio as an avatar for considering how such a person should exist in this brave new world where men must be ‘careful’ around women. ie. not grope, not harass, not assault.

note the automatic assumption that dicaprio’s behavior must be adjusted. that the way in which he moved through the world a month ago is now open to question. and also the way in which this is being framed as not really being a choice.

i’m not mocking dicaprio here. these do not seem like safe times in which to have a friend group entitled ‘the pussy posse’. (THIS. now. go.)

but i’m not sure that not talking to women is the answer either, which seems to be what happened here.

(via the daily mail)

so leo was on lockdown at this party.

the undercurrent of the mail‘s reporting is a latent exasperated sigh of ‘WE CAN’T EVEN TALK TO WOMEN NOW!’ which aligns with the mail‘s broader editorial agenda of PC MADNESS RUN AMOK.

but it’s not exactly that there was no mingling. leo’s friends apparently still operated as wingmen:

(via the daily mail)

and i know, i know, we must find new methods and it is the daily mail and i am asking for the moon here, but how sketchy does this sound?!!

it makes the ‘ladies’ sound like prostitutes and the ‘pals’ sound like pimps. harassment and assault are no longer allowed, but are business cards and wingmen the answer?

is it really that hard to just talk to a woman as though she were a human being and be a decent human being yourself?

(via the daily mail)

this troubles me. for a number of reasons. one of which is its conflation of flirting with sexual assault, and the idea that we live in a world where flirting is no longer allowed.

(via the daily mail)

i am totally ok with the end of ‘the day of the dark VIP room’ (though shouldn’t it be ‘the night’? do VIPs VIP room in the day?? dear VIPs, please weigh in). of all of the losses here, the end of ‘the day of the dark VIP room’ seems minor.

(please: when it comes time to make a documentary about this cultural moment we are in, let it be called THE END OF THE DAY OF THE DARK VIP ROOM.)

though i’m slightly concerned that, with the business cards, there will be a shift from the public space of the dark VIP room into private spaces, which doesn’t seem ideal.

but what worries me most is this:

(via the daily mail)

there is an assumption being made here that women are dangerous now in a way that they were not a month ago. and the response to that, this article seems to suggest through its depiction of dicapario’s behavior at this party, is not talking to women in public.

people, that is not the way.

if anything, we need to talk to each other more than ever if we are to understand the ways our behavior effects others and the inequalities and internal biases that exist, the various shittinesses of this system that are in us and of which we are all a part.

one of the most fundamental shifts that has occurred in the past month has been an expansion of our understanding of so-called ‘rape culture’, and the realization that it isn’t exclusively rape that we’re talking about. rather, rape sits on the extreme end of a spectrum that includes many, many other behaviors- ranging from sexual harassment to micro-aggressions- which reenforce women’s oppression in daily life and which significantly impact the lives of both women and men.

it is my hope that that realization- that expansion of our understanding of the behaviors that constitute sexual aggression- will translate to a shift in behavior.

what i would hope it would not do is translate to a situation where women are seen as dangerous- an insidious, misogynistic trope as old as the hills.

and LO! when you say for years and years that someone HAS TO MARRY, eventually they will and you will be right.

(via @KensingtonRoyal)

so harry will marry. as was probably likely all along as royals usually eventually do.

the question here was never really will he?

the question was always who?

please know that, because there were multiple megans in my eighth grade year, the megan whose name was spelled meghan was always called ‘megHAN’. meaning i now read the future duchess (of sussex?)’s name as megHAN. and likely will always. (please note also that NONE OF THESE PEOPLE ARE PRINCESSES! to call duchesses princesses is gauche.)

so yes, harry will marry megHAN markle. who i guess we can brand as ‘an american princess’ if we must have a princess.

which it seems we must.

i would like to point out two things.

one.

the american gossip industry is going to lean into this story SO EFFING HARD.

i mean, the british royal family is already the bread and butter of the american gossip industry.

would there have been a people magazine without diana?

how many of these articles featured mention of her american great-great-grandparents?

and now? a REAL first-generation american.

living in london, meeting the queen, being royal.

that is good copy. especially for america. especially after years of trying (mostly unsuccessfully) to make kate a taboid thing.

her dominant tabloid narrative being reduced now to, simply, BABIES!!!

whew. WAS THAT NOT EXHAUSTING?!

(where are the HOW BABY CHANGED WILLIAM’S LIFE covers?)

anyway, i assume megHAN will provide us with some better story lines, because she is (1) american, and the tabloids are going to love that and, accordingly, establish her as a new revenue stream. (2) because she seems genuinely extroverted, as opposed to kate, whom i imagine is introverted, hence the awkward. but also (3):

THE AMERICAN WORK ETHIC, ya’ll.

do not laugh.

it is a thing.

i think we’ve already seen it in the couple’s interview, where markle talked about ‘boots on the ground.’

typically, one does not talk about duchess-dom in terms of ‘boots on the ground.’ that is a phrase for volunteering and/or theaters of war.

markle has given up her job and is ready to get to work.

that’s not as clear cut as i’ve made it sound there as, as a royal, she is inhibited in many ways, one of which is that she must remain apolitical. but i’m not sure there’s ever been someone who’s entered the royal family quite so prepared and seemingly gung-ho to do heavy lifting. from day 2.

the kate rollout was glacial in comparison.

so that is my first point: STORIES GALORE!!

possibly about a working woman rather than babies. no doubt, a fairytale princess working woman who has made great sacrifices and lives in radiant splendor and wears couture, but a working woman nonetheless.

two.

holy moses, how glad are we all that we are not marrying a prince?

confession: i do not believe markle for one second when she says that she really had no idea who prince harry was because americans don’t really know things about british royalty.

that is bunk.

we sooooooo know.

she is my age. she was my age when diana died. ain’t no one who was a girl our age then who didn’t at least know who harry was. yes, we all thought william was the cute one (oh, the cruel truths unfurled by time!) but we knew harry too.

so yeah, no. not buying that.

i will buy, however, that there is absolutely no way of preparing for the sheer shitpile of intrusive press coverage that comes when one gets engaged to a prince.

in their interview, markle said this:

it’s easy to be cynical about that. to be all ‘ooooh, you’re an actress. i always see people watching suits on their commute. don’t be acting like this is something different and like it’s something you didn’t want.’

that’s a tricky thing. the things we choose to do in spite of the hazards and horrors and with full awareness of what we imagine those hazards and horrors might be (but about the specifics of which we are often wrong).

i’m not sure we give people in public life enough credit for persevering in public life- credit we would, no doubt, expect from EVERYONE in our lives were we to attempt the same or something similar.

i write a blog post that feels vaguely exposing and expect trumpets and shares.

i read about a celebrity’s complaint about a depiction of some aspect of their life and tut they should’ve thought about the consequences before putting that out there.

just because you have something approximating a choice doesn’t mean it isn’t also awful. just because you chose to marry a prince doesn’t mean you deserve what you incur.

behold the last week in the life of the daily mail:

so that is INTENSE, non?

we have reached a point (ie. two weeks into these people’s engagement) where markle’s mother’s dog walking is a top story.

which is laughable while also being frightening, an indication of the level of paparazzi scrutiny these people are living under.

two weeks in, markle has been sold out by a friend to the daily mail, and her family has been put under surveillance.

there was an article in the daily beast about how harry came to realize he would need to marry a celebrity as only a celebrity would be comfortable with this level of attention. but this level of attention is other-worldly. and it begs the question: would the attention be so fierce were the roles reversed?

something to ponder: how different would this story look had diana’s sons been daughters? if it were men marrying into the family rather than women?

regendering is helpful…

a different story indeed.

if we’re having a reckoning, hey, let’s look at biography.

this is edward klein:

(via twitter)

we need to talk about him.

edward klein is a biographer. perhaps you know his books:

a cheerful lot. perhaps also noteworthy that ted kennedy- who at the very least was complicit in a woman’s drowning- appears to fare the best.

and, of course, the latest:

(2017)

edward klein has been eclipsed a bit by jerry oppenheimer of late but he’s in the mix and i do not want him to be overlooked.

we’re not actually talking about the sex lives of dead people here. this involves the sex lives of dead people but it is bigger that. and it opens up the issue of c. david heymann. because what edward klein creates a c. david heymann dilemma.

i will explain.

the c. david heymann dilemma is the problem of having a work by someone whose work you rely upon as a researcher. because they did interviews with people now dead, because their work is foundational, because whatever.

you need it because it’s doing X, Y and Z.

HOWEVER.

and this is BIG ASS GIANT HOWEVER.

that person themselves is EPICALLY problematic.

in the case of c. david heymann, because his work has been discredited time and again. and it got increasingly shoddy as his career wore on. this is why i’ve repeatedly banged on about jackie and bobby: a love story– it’s evidence is sturdy as toothpicks, but it has been used to support subsequent accounts. it is heymann who sarah bradford cites in america’s queen when she claims rfk was the love of jackie’s life.

as a researcher, when using anything from c. david heymann’s giant book on jackie, i ask myself whether i think it’s even remotely possible that it is real, whether he actually probably did interview that person and whether that person actually probably did say those things.

c. david heymann’s archive is a shitpile of notes that seem related to nothing he actually published in his books, so this usually involves me reading newspaper accounts of that person and trying to determine whether their speech patterns are similar to those present in heymann’s work. it also involves stringently testing his evidence against the evidence available elsewhere.

so all of heymann’s work that i use, i triple-test– which maybe should be the standard of biographical research but really isn’t.

perhaps this sounds like a niggling thing that affects only me or only people who write about jackie. um… no.

i remember seeing the book on many bookshelves at friends’ houses when i was growing up. in 1991, heymann’s book was adapted into a three-night television event with roma touched by an angel downey (incidentally one of the 45 people president donald j. trump follows on twitter).

(Clarion-Ledger, 6 October 1991)

(Statesman Journal, 13 October 1991)

fyi, if you’ve read a newspaper story about jackie onassis, marilyn monroe or elizabeth taylor in the last thirty years, you’ve been exposed to c. david heymann’s work to some degree as he’s constantly used as source material in spite of his dubious ethics.

AND in spite of an industry-wide awareness of his dubious ethics and calls on simon & schuster to stop reprinting his books.

think of it like a disease. the biographical accounts of c. david heymann have been reprinted and adapted into tv films. they have infected everything from newspaper reporting, subsequent biographies and obituaries. heymann himself appeared on tv repeatedly as an expert.

the reach of this one’s man interpretations and inventions is VAST.

and that is one man.

i mention that one man because he provides a useful framework for considering the impact of all of the other men doing similar work.

(and it is worth pointing out that this is primarily men. which is not to say that men are biologically incapable of portraying a woman’s humanity in a biographical account or that women are not writing biography at this level [i will likely be refuting kitty kelley’s 1978 claim that jackie had electro-shock until i die].

it is to say that women’s writing of women’s lives tends to look a little different, primarily because it involves a wider range of interpretations as relates to women’s options and choices in life.)

enter edward klein.

full disclosure: j’adore klein’s just jackie.

it is HORRIBLE TRASH, do not get me wrong. but what it does do it does with gusto. and it is an excellent specimen of a particular type of popular biography- which is more gossip as biography than biography as art.

there is a place for that and i have enough scholarship that i will be defending the right of popular biography to exist from beyond the grave, STILL.

my defense of it comes with a sharp awareness of the gravity of the damage it does. and we need to be talking about that more, particularly as relates to the damage it does to the stories of women.

my work researches the intersections between celebrities and culture, biography and gossip. i’m especially interested in a biographical form which lynn z. bloom has previously dubbed ‘super-pop.’ this form features extremely simplistic portrayals of the biographical subject, in terms of character, motivation and psychology. this is usually the first few biographies that comes out about a politician or the only biographies that come out about a film star. it’s incredibly close to gossip reportage but in book form. a form, incidentally, which lends its claims a gravitas of which they are usually not deserving.

super-pop isn’t an exclusively female phenomenon, but there is a crucial difference in the telling of male lives in super-pop, and that is that male lives receive a range of biographical treatments whereas women’s lives usually do not.

the story of robert kennedy is not confined to the realm of super-pop. in contrast, the story of his wife has been:

the super-pop biographies of women written by men are characterized by a malevolence of many colors.

the hatchet job klein pulled on carolyn bessette kennedy in the kennedy curse (2001), where- with very little evidence beyond hearsay- he mainstreamed and popularized the  tabloid rumor that she was a cocaine addict, is noteworthy.

writing in the independent in 2004, clare longrigg noted:

(via the independent)

wild and unpredictable. unlikeable perhaps??

rebecca traister has written about the ways in which our national narratives, particularly those relating to HRC, have been shaped by male journalists and media figures with misogynistic attitudes towards women.

it’s time we look at our biographers too.

this is the cliché: that biography is actually more about the biographer than the biographical subject.

hence, any profile of kitty kelly wonders why she writes about her subjects’ weight so much. any review of my book will probably wonder why i’m so obsessed with independence.

for awhile now, klein’s books have come under fire for being political hatchet jobs dressed up as biographies. peggy noonan declared his 2005 book, the truth about hillary, ‘poorly written, poorly thought, poorly sourced and full of the kind of loaded language that is appropriate to a polemic but not an investigative work.’

in reporting upon klein’s 2016 lunch with donald j. trump, media matters called klein’s work ‘clinton-bashing “fan fiction.”‘

biography is about the biographer and it is ideologically shaped.

hence, at the height of the women’s liberation movement, the biographer willi frischauer wrote of jackie kennedy on inauguration day: “the future was closing in on her and kept her keyed up as she approached the climax in any american woman’s life, the inauguration of her husband as president of the united states.”

because that is all? there isn’t any more?!

klein’s ideological agenda wasn’t so evident at first.

in the 1980s, he’d been a reporter for vanity fair, where he wrote about jackie. it seems he wrote some novels for doubleday so, even though his claims they were BFFs are suspect, he may’ve run into her now and then. in the 1990s, he wrote books about the kennedys that weren’t all that different from christopher andersen’s books about the kennedys, which was kind of odd.

but for more than ten years now, klein has been up to something altogether else.

given his appearances on fox, it’s tempting to think that klein is preaching to the choir.

even rush limbaugh was skeptical about blood feud in 2014. ‘some of the quotes strike me as odd,’ he said ‘in the sense that i don’t know people who speak this way.’

to be fair, i wouldn’t say that reading just jackie i ever thought the people speaking in the book sounded like real people. that was actually the fun of reading it. the lushness and implausible detail with which the settings were described, the sheer improbability of the dialogue, which was clearly invented.

true story: in just jackie, we are told when people put their drinks down.

ain’t no way there’s a footnote for that. and ain’t no way klein could’ve known because he was not there. and who, in recounting a story to a biographer, says when people put their drinks down?

this seems harmless, because who cares if the putting down of drinks is not factually accurate. i have picked possibly the smallest sword for the fight i want to have here in pointing out something pretty insidious, but i’mma run with it.

because what klein does in just jackie- through the inclusion of such details, such inventions- is unnecessarily restrict jackie’s life to that of a domestic drama. it suggests her life was so small, so limited, that the setting down of drinks and the details of phone calls matter enormously. this is trumpeted as closeness and intimacy, just the thing we all allegedly want from biography. but also just the type of thing that we more often get in biographies of women than those of men.

this matters. for one thing, klein may have had a more profound role in shaping the french perception of the relationship between the clintons and obamas than we ever dreamed.

but also because these are the stories that circulate in our culture. klein and oppenheimer and andersen and heymann before them are called to appear on television shows, their work is cited in newspaper articles, their books are turned into movies. whether or not you choose to read them, you are encountering their work because it is out there, in ways we may not even see, because it goes uncited.

biography has sex problems. i have been writing about this for YEARS. we need to deal with it now.

HEY-O.

you remember our old friends, butofcourse

(via)

and you know i’ve written about this AT LENGTH.

because i find these things terribly poignant. and i think they speak to the human condition.

who among us hasn’t been here at some point?

or here:

or HERE:

?????

in my prior discussions of the pathos of jackie dolls on etsy, i have had occasion to talk about the pathos of dolls in general and the pathos of jfk dolls on etsy too. often they are a set:

often, he is just as perplexing in doll form:

entirely too often, he veers towards howdy doody.

well, YO.

today, i’mma bring you a new horror. a horror so great (i’m doing it again- building up a drama in the intro that the reality will not live up to, but whatev…)

a horror so great that i literally called my father into the room so that we could go on the journey together.

we’ll skip the first image and do then them in order, starting with her:

the thing is this isn’t so bad. i mean, she is ALARMINGLY dead-eyed, yes, but it could be worse.

and it captures something of her.

even if it is only the distance between her eyes.

while i do not know that i would look at this and think, my lands, that is a jackie kennedy doll! i would at least probably recognize is as a doll engineered to look like jackie kennedy, as so many things were in the early 1960s.

(Yale Joel—Time & Life Pictures/Getty Images)

and so, in the landscape of horrible imitations i will deem this, at the very least, not egregiously awful.

i should pause here to note that one of the major contributing factors to the pathos of the jackie dolls on etsy is the photographs of the jackie dolls on etsy.

we’ve discussed this for in relation to this image:

which haunts me to this day, a full two years since i first encountered it, and which i swear i will one day frame.

(what would students make of this coming into my office? hmm…)

my point being that it isn’t just the dolls. it is the positioning of the dolls in various poses so as, ostensibly, to best show them off for sale.

as a buyer of a jackie doll on etsy, i no doubt want to see the back of the jackie dolls.

as someone randomly looking at photographs of jackie dolls available for purchase on etsy, i couldn’t care less about their condition. i care about the precarity of the circumstances in which they seem to find themselves.

but i am aware of the photographer and the photographer’s mission. and the potential haphazardness with which one, as a seller and a photographer, constructs a scene.

do i think i have spent 9,000,000,000% more time analyzing this image than the person who took it?

absolutely.

do i think the person who took the photographs of the jackie doll under discussion… this jackie:

in attempting to sell this jackie and her jfk companion deliberately positioned this jackie doll and this jfk doll so as to make it appear they were initiating above-the-clothes sexual acts?

that i do not know. but while we’re on the subject…???!

ignore jfk doll’s face. we will return.

for now, note the pose.

and note all we bring to this biographically.

these are people with whom we are, many of us, quite visually familiar in terms of their everyday lives.

they ate:

(Jacques Lowe)

they read:

(Jacques Lowe)

they gazed into the bright american future:

(Jacques Lowe)

very occasionally in public they held hands:

so this is rather more intense than we usually see them:

i am not convinced any of these advances are wanted.

are their arms meant to be interlinked? or were they deliberately arranged to be indifferently reaching for one another’s groins?

the other photographs give no clues.

we have jackie doll’s legs coyly tucked beneath her as they taught us at ballet class:

the standard trompe l’oeil hair…

is the necklace glued on? is it unlatchable? who IN THE WORLD has fingers small enough to close that clasp? other than jfk doll?

the obligatory out of focus shoe bottom snap:

upon seeing this:

my father exclaimed: right where they shot him!

which- given that every single google image search for jackie or jfk invariably results in an unwanted encounter with jfk autopsy photos- i can, without any hesitation, officially confirm.

from the jfk doll’s bullet entry site we move to jackie’s bosom:

i imagine the pearl necklace (which [enter factsOline] is far longer than any she ever wore, fyi) is indeed glued in the back and hangs loose here.

i also fail to understand why mid-century doll producers were incapable of making a jackie doll who wasn’t barrel-chested.

i know, i know, it’s because she’s strung up internally and the barrel chest results from the linking of her cloth body and her wood arms via her nipples. like so:

BUT WHY??!?!?!

surely there were better ways available to make dolls.

barbie (whose eye make-up is better than i remembered) was not having this problem.

(via)

whycome they were?

because, FOR REAL. no.

(Mark Shaw)

while we’re here, let me go ahead and point out that there ain’t no way that jfk doll’s feet could hold up jfk doll:

is that why these dolls are always sitting down?

because, due to horrible manufacturing decisions, their feet are three times smaller than their bodies demand?

omg, LOOK AT THEIR TINY HANDS!

i was so busy looking at where their hands were that i failed to notice that they are ridiculously small.

so i think we can definitively conclude that, yes, jfk doll could handle the clasp of jackie doll’s pearl necklace.

in light of these dolls, barbie looks like a legitimate human being, non?

i truly do not understand why, given the great advances made in the mass production of dolls in mid-century, these dolls are such shite.

and now… coup de grâce.

i’m reading a biography of judy gardland. fun fact: in the mid-1930s, at MGM, in the makeup department they were doing 1,200 make-ups per HOUR.

riddle me this: how many make-ups do you think this jfk doll has been subjected to?

because HOLY MOSES that is unreal.

as a reminder, jfk looked like this:

credit where credit is due: they kinda nailed the hair:

otherwise, um.. no. (though returning to it half an hour after writing this, is it not so bad?! are my eyes adjusting? does it just take time, like seeing in the dark, and eventually the true jfk reveals himself from beneath the oily mask of brows and blush?? or is it simply that, over the course of writing this blog post, i have come unhinged?! )

does this doll look familiar?

my father thought pee-wee:

then again my father always thinks pee-wee.

but, to go a bit more high-brow, is it not the spitting image of rex harrison?

(though this is now begging the question of whether rex harrison is pee-wee!)

particularly older rex harrison…

plus, y’know, a dewy glow and a paintpot of rouge.

having never once thought that jfk bore any likeness to rex harrison, jfk doll raises the possibility.

i’ve written before about how i loved playing with paperdolls as a child because they enabled mixing of people across periods. so that kermit roosevelt could flirt with marilyn monroe and the father from the american family of the pilgrim period could marry vivien leigh.

(totally tangential sidenote: in 2018, let us all move through life with john [colonial]’s joie de vivre:

pretty please.)

this jfk doll raises the possibility of a lineage that joins us all, a link running from rex harrison to pee-wee to barbie to jfk to humankind.

i appreciate both the unlikeliness and the proximity.

perhaps we are all a paintpot away from being rex harrison and closer to pee-wee than we now know.

fine. we will do this.

(Jacqueline Kennedy on her way to the State Dinner with Her Majesty the Queen Elizabeth II)

FACT TIME WITH OLINE!!!

beware: SPOILERS ABOUND.

HOLY BAUBLES, BRO.

my father had literally just, like, AN EPISODE before- the one where the windsors collaborate with the nazis in britain 2000.0- asked, “how much of this is true do you think?” and i said, “we must wait for jackie.”

because i know jackie and jackie is, therefore, a barometer of truth by which we can judge the accuracy of historical interpretations.

if they get jackie wrong, then it throws everything into doubt.

(Jacqueline Kennedy at President Kennedy’s Inauguration, January 1961)

i would like to start on the most superficial of superficial levels, with my usual complaint.

why IN THE HEAVENS can people not accurately recreate historical clothes for film and tv?

they have pictures!

they can SEEEEEEEEEEEEE the clothes!

they have access to the materials to make the clothes!

it is their job to make the clothes right!

and then they make the clothes wrong.

is this a copyright issue? that would make no sense because they copied queenie’s dress waaaaaaay better than they copied jackie’s. jackie’s dress is more a failed copy of this dress:

(via the JFK Library)

married to a recolored copy of this dress:

(via the JFK Library)

queenie’s seems to be a copy of the dress she wore in 1961 as she modified it the following year, with darker straps.

Queen Elizabeth II walks through a guard of honour formed by Boy Scouts during her visit to watch their 1962 gangshow at the Golder’s Green Empire in London. (Photo by © Hulton-Deutsch Collection/CORBIS/Corbis via Getty Images)

WHY?!

that is just dumb. if you’re going to match the jewelry, why bungle the dress?

ok. so that’s that. that is MINOR, fyi. that is a detail of dress.

but i always start there precisely because that is MINOR. if you’re going to bungle the MINOR, if you’re going to miss on the shoulder strap color (WHY, tho??!!! why?!) then i think that’s worth questioning, because it opens up broader questions about truth claims.

but this is TV, oline! this is netflix fun! who is making truth claims?

AHAHHAAHAHAHHAAHEM.

(via the daily mail)

the makers of the crown, my friends.

(via the daily mail)

“rooted” perhaps, yes, in the “fact” that these were real people, and then billowing wildly in the maelstrom of interpretation and invention.

i do not understand why we must insist on marketing these productions of creative nonfiction as though they were god’s honest truth. as though the things we do not know were knowable. and as though dressing up an actress in an interpretation of someone’s life in an exact replica of a hairpiece magically makes the interpretations in the script exact too.

it helps the actress, probably yeah sure. but each life is far more complicated than a hairpiece one wore of an afternoon.

again, these are small beans. a hairpiece, straps on a dress. but herein is the root of the problem. each of these things is one thing. in claiming accuracy for them, accuracy is being claimed for the whole.

(via the daily mail)

the research process here is, howshallwesay, NOT rigorous.

(via the daily mail)

some people read some things, watch some documentaries and visit the British Library (true story: literally pretty much anyone is free to do that). then they consult with robert lacey, who wrote some biographies of the queen.

ONE MAN, people. one man, who is deemed an expert because he is one of many people who first wrote a book about the queen twenty years ago, vets the script to ensure historical accuracy.

hey, what about a woman too? or a whole team of experts? there’s a cartload of things in the jackie episode alone which would not have survived peer review.

my point being: i don’t think we fully appreciate the power single individuals wield over our understandings of lives in circumstances like these. that is a lot of responsibility for one man- over the story of the queen and phillip and margaret and charles, but also all the ancillary characters.

here is my beef (and it is my beef with jackie too because my research is about the way we muddle in people’s life narratives to produce culturally useful stories and the ways in which those stories are connected to the times in which they are told while also having long-term nefarious effects):

this is awful, what we are doing to this woman right now.

(Jacqueline Kennedy at the christening party for Anna Christina Radziwill, London, June 1961)

inevitable probably and we’ve been doing it for years and whatever it is that i want to do with her may not be all that much better but i hope that it will be more humane and at least it will be something different.

i should say that i do not know jackie. i know a lot of details about her though i would not characterize them as “facts.” norman mailer’s marilyn monroe term “factoids” is probably the best we’ll ever have for most of these people that we talk about as though we really know them.

i have lots of factoids. and among those factoids, there ain’t nothing like what was depicted in the crown.

(Jacqueline Kennedy at the christening party for Anna Christina Radziwill, London, June 1961)

there are a lot of jackie biographies. a lot of them are problematic. and, collectively, they claim a lot of ridiculous things for which limited evidence exists. even in them, there is no account of the events the crown depicts.

jackie was in london. jackie and jfk met the queen. she reportedly wanted her sister there because her sister lived in london then and, given her position, she liked to include her sister in things so she wouldn’t feel left out and because she herself had more fun when her sister was there to share in it.

the kennedys were also in london, in addition to the state visit, to attend the christening of lee radziwill’s child.

5th June 1961: US statesman John F Kennedy (1917 – 1963) (left), 35th president of the USA, arrives at Westminster Cathedral, London, for the christening of his sister-in-law Princess Radziwill’s daughter. His wife Jacqueline Kennedy (1929 – 1994), holding Princess Radziwill’s other child by the hand, is on the right. (Photo by Keystone/Getty Images)

the story that exists is that jackie wanted lee at the state dinner and the queen (or, likely her people), due to the restrictions against allowing divorced people in the monarch’s company, refused. at a dinner party later, jackie reportedly cracked a joke that she was punished for this and that the queen didn’t even invite margaret either.

that is the extent of it.

so no appalling judgements uttered indiscreetly at dinner parties due to an amphetamine-induced loquaciousness. no conspiracy by jfk and rfk to spread rumors of her statements through the court to guarantee british cooperation in ghana. no jfk abusing jackie in the east wing.

(Jacqueline Kennedy at the christening party for Anna Christina Radziwill, London, June 1961)

BUT. there are glimmers of truthiness here, which is why it reads as just close enough to something we think we know that it could be possible that it happened in this way. and those glimmers? they connect to the narratives that have already been constructed in other tv movies, films, etc.

yes, the kennedys were likely involved with “dr.” max jacobson during this period. he accompanied them to vienna for the khruschev summit. and, yes, the shots he administered were unlikely to have been “just vitamins.” familiar with the narrative of the kennedys? if so, then the events of the “dear mrs. kennedy” episode probably chimed nicely with the “moral issues and inner turmoil” episode of the kennedys, which, bizarrely, juxtaposed jackie’s alleged raging drug addiction with examination of the kennedy administration’ s desegregation policy.

(it would behoove us as a culture to ask ourselves why jackie keeps getting tarred so much more harshly with this drug business than jfk…)

thus, the crown simultaneously draws on the narrative constructed in the kennedys while contributing to it by providing further “evidence.” if you saw and believed the account in the kennedys, then the depiction in the crown provides further proof. and vice versa.

a fiction built upon a fiction reenforces the fiction as fact.

(Jacqueline Kennedy at the christening party for Anna Christina Radziwill, London, June 1961)

but the fictions are “rooted” in fact.

yes, jackie probably sometimes said bitchy things, sometimes at dinner tables. (this is, after all, a woman on record calling indira ghandi “a prune.”) accounts of her maliciousness, though, often suggest it was delivered through impersonations rather than cutting remarks.

she was (probably) shy, mercurial, liked to flirt, had more men friends than women, but there is also a lot of evidence to suggest that she had an unerring sense of judgement- of situations and people- upon which jfk relied enormously.

wouldn’t that have been interesting to see? jfk asking her for her assessment of the windsors rather than his manipulating her with hoover-like dexterity while rfk cackles in the distance…

you know, the men don’t have to be monsters for the women to be interesting.

Britain’s Queen Elizabeth II, centre, walks with American President John F. Kennedy, right, and his wife Jacqueline Kennedy, as they enter an ante-room in Buckingham Palace, London, on June 5, 1961, before a dinner given by the Queen in honour of the visiting President and his wife. (AP Photo)

the women don’t have to be fighting for us to care either.

the story of the queen going to ghana was probably strong enough to stand alone, without being embedded in this broader kennedy narrative which- while effectively establishing the americans as gauche drug addicts who don’t look at their protocol sheets- also, in the end, detracts from the queen’s own character by implying she wouldn’t have gone to ghana and exercised such canny statecraft had jackie (puppetted by jfk) not hectored her into it with catty table talk.

earlier in the episode, when the two women are together at buckingham palace playing with the corgis,  jackie is vulnerable and the queen is nurturing. it’s a scene which suggests the possibility of a far more interesting, less demeaning narrative than that which the crown gives us.

this is the queen of the united kingdom and the queen of america. it is 2017/18, and this is the best we can do? what possible hope has everybody else?

the thing about presidential portraits is that they usually aren’t all that exciting. partly [SWEEPING GENERALIZATION] possibly perhaps because there haven’t really been presidents who were particularly interested in art or in portraiture as an art form.

be real: do you remember bill clinton’s presidential portrait?

i was a news junkie as a child and i remember significant portions of the clinton cabinet but, hand on heart, i swear i had never once seen his presidential portrait until i sat down to write this and thought oh, i should google that. 

here ’tis:

george w. is slightly more wild west but similarly boring:

this one is by john howard sanden. clinton’s was by simmie knox, the first african american artist to receive a presidential portrait commission. but the general vibe of both is southern CEO.

(though confusingly, there’s also a nelson shanks portrait of clinton:

where he looks like robert redford in a restoration hardware catalog and which a number of outlets refer to as his ‘official portrait’. that this was by nelson shanks, of the frilly blouse diana painting:

as opposed to the TOTALLY WAY MORE INTERESTING portrait by henry mee:

makes me now long for a series of american president portraits by henry mee. anyhooo…)

the same dude did laura as did george w.

and the same dude did hillz as did bill:

the thing i find interesting about these four is how totally corporate white america they appear. and how not late 20th/early 21st century art they are.

this is like TRADITIONAL TRADITIONALIST TRADITION portrait painting.

seriously, and i am not even making this up, i literally just looked at this painting and thought why is there an early 20th century candlestick telephone back there? is this portrait set in 1902?! 

doubtful. but also, wtf is that?

my point is: presidential portraits have historically been BORING.

even grace coolidge’s portrait, which i always found profoundly exciting, was profoundly exciting only because it featured a dog.

and she wore red and looked a little glamorous. also she seemed to be doing something. at the very least here, we are meant to believe she had taken the dog for a walk on the lawn.

in this sense, HRC’s portrait represented a departure from the traditional first lady portrait in that she was portrayed in more of an office setting than usual. not an actual office, mind you, but she was at the very least dressed as if departing for work. the women prior were more often portrayed as inactive and in fancy dress.

nancy reagan stood in a dark corner, for example.

this was said to be a throwback to jackie (or part of nancy’s jackie pretentions), who wore a nightgown and looked tense.

the jackie portrait was HATED when it came out, with attention focused disproportionately on her hands. and the jfk portrait too was rather controversial for its deviation from the norm:

 these were seen as radical departures at the time, though now they don’t look all that wild do they?

but there is a moodiness to the kennedy pics which the other portraits often avoid.

this is straight-forward stuff.

especially the post-kennedy portraits.

lady bird, for instance:

who looks vaguely evocative of one of the less imaginative vigée le brun’s. or betty ford:

in an image that isn’t all that different from the image any woman might have had produced to celebrate a thirtieth anniversary in 1977.

rosalynn carter’s looks freaking BLEAK in contrast, non?

american portraiture in the age of holly hobbie!!

so my point here is not that portraiture is boring. it is that portraiture can be UH-MAZING.

but american presidential portraiture has, historically, but dull as dirt. and there has been an extreme avoidance of any artistic risk.

this is one of the many dimensions of what is so interesting about the obama portraits by kehinde wiley (his) and amy sherald (hers).

i cannot decide whether it is that i think every commission that has come before these has been primarily about THE OFFICE- of president or first lady- rather than about the people occupying the office, or if i think it is the exact opposite! that the portraits have treated the occupiers of the office as people rather than symbols and tried to humanize them.

i started with the former but am coming around to the latter. in which case the difference here, with the obama portraits, is that they emerge first and foremost as symbols.

so many of the prior portraits appear to me to have been aimed at trying to capture the sitters as they were, in a specific, pre-established context. this pair jettisons that context and all of that seems secondary to what these people meant.

the presidential portraits are never all in one place together really, but imagine for a moment how this would look. how these images would interrupt the room. how stodgy and antiquated everything that came before would feel upon seeing them and how, in that moment, they would appear a glimpse into the future. a hopeful future at that.

today, class, a close reading of the DM’s article of 16 february 2018, entitled: “Sisters who competed to snare the world’s richest men: Schooled by their mother to seek out power, a new book reveals the jealousy between Jackie O and sister Lee and how they both bedded JFK.”

(via the daily mail)

i mean, just right there, yeah?

oh but wait for it.

first tho, BEHOLD the synergy of content and advertising:

(via the daily mail)

because lee radziwill’s 1961 thoughts and the advert for this trump thing on showtime weren’t enough, we needed the layering of the little bites muffin popup over the white house dinner table.

GENIUS.

so yeah. couple of things. this is tom leonard- presumably not the scottish poet nor the michigan politician, but rather the DM’s US correspondent tom leonard- reporting on j. randy taraborelli’s new book for the DM. tom leonard, IN NEW YORK.

(via the daily mail)

which, i think, is where he usually is since he’s the US correspondent. anyhoo.

full disclosure: i have not yet read taraborelli’s new book, because i am waiting for it to fall below $12. but i have read his other kennedy books and have a phd in jackie so i feel fairly confident in saying i know that of which i speak.

further disclosure: i am increasingly righteously enraged by the casual sexism that pervades popular biography and writing about popular biography in the mainstream press.

there is a part of me that wants to just laugh at how dialogue-heavy this is:

(via the daily mail)

much like the scene in edward klein’s just jackie where lee radziwill sets her drink down, the novelistic attention to detail is ludicrous while the evidentiary support is totally absent. who did lee radziwill say this too? that is not made clear here.

but look at that again. any words stand out?

be real, how many (heterosexual- because this can also be code) men in public life have been characterized as hissing?

i’m trying to think of famous brothers and literally all i can come up with is the kennedys and the afflecks, but imagine robert kennedy being quoted as saying this exact thing. the verb would be different, non?

so THAT’S a problem.

another problem: this shite.

(via the daily mail)

(oh, hello, truman, my apologies )

my sweet lord, wtf is that?!

i know, i know. i get that it is tom leonard’s definition of the word ‘geisha’- though i would also note how this definition strips the word of any connotations of effort, training and performative skill.

 a woman whose job and talent is performance is quite a different thing from someone who exists only to passively captivate men.

captivate itself has connotations of enchantment which suggest mystical attraction rather than intelligence.

while we’re here, i LOATHE how a quote from the 1960s-1980s is leveraged nearly 40 years later to perpetuate a stale idea of who these women were.

i’m not claiming they weren’t competitive or that their relationship wasn’t toxic. but look at how the possibility of any other interpretation is obscured by the ferocity of the gendering of the language used in telling this story.

lee radziwill hisses.

the sisters are geishas.

this story is pretty much like every competition narrative ever written about two women:

(via the daily mail)

and the women are universally awful.

(via the daily mail)

i’m all for portrayals of complicated and unlikeable women.

bring it on.

but i do not think this is that. this is a story of archetypes.

maybe they were all awful, unlikeable people. as a biographer, i do get the sense that there was a lot of slapping in the house where jackie and lee grew up. but why do i get that sense? because i’ve read books like taraborelli’s that told me this. i’ve not seen first hand evidence of it. i do not really know.

but i think we’ve an obligation to imagine.

this, for instance, doesn’t sound totally great:

(via the daily mail)

nor does growing up in a culture where, as a woman, your entire value and existence is predicated on attaining the interest and financial support of a man.

i currently feel that approximately 45-47% of my existence depends upon securing the attentions of a man. my god, imagine if you were like janet or jackie and lee and it was the ENTIRE thing?!

we’re talking the 1920s-1960s. that is long ago but it also isn’t. when i read articles like this, it feels a hell of a lot closer than it should be.

i mean, how complicated is this!!!

it’s about economic anxiety, cultural expectations, parenting, family relationships.

i am simultaneously aware that janet auchincloss probably had a very difficult life, was probably exhausting to live with and yet has probably also gotten a horrible shake from biographers who paint her as a villain.

janet = “shameless”

jackie = “ice cold”

lee = “mercurial”

admittedly, husted was “dull” but better to be a dull man than an icy woman!

truly. answer me this: is janet auchincloss all that different from mrs. bennet?

all she appears to want here is a better life for her daughters, easier than hers. admittedly, her methods appear to have been occasionally characterized by a violence absent in the bennet family, but the narrative is not all that different. and yet, the bennets are part of a comic romance while janet and her daughters have been, for years now, trapped in a narrative mash-up of mommy, dearest and the house of mirth.

i am not making light of the violence. but i am looking at all the paths that have been bricked up and by which we might better understand these people’s stories. because our understanding so far has been ruthlessly constrained and one-dimensional. for a story about three people, it’s ridiculously de-complex.

ok, let’s roll.

jfk’s political ambitions sound phallic:

(via the daily mail)

some love affairs and marriages are had…

(via the daily mail)

and LO.

(via the daily mail)

i was drinking coffee when i got to this part of the article- which is DEEEEEEEEEEEP down, literally 35 paragraphs in- and nearly choked.

WE DO NOT KNOW IF THIS IS TRUE!!!!

not friends and enemies but FAMILY MEMBERS!!

i mean, props for admitting you do not know. but who are these family members? i want names! because i suspect they are the same family members who have been talking all along. there is never anything new in these books. we are deep in an echo chamber full of the whispers of people saying things that have been said before.

people i’ve interviewed have actually parroted back to me things they read in previous books as evidence for what they were telling me.

that is actually not first-hand evidence. that is something you read in a book.

predictably, onassis does not fare well here:

(via the daily mail)

“old goat” being a strange compromise between pirate and toad.

seriously, is a requisite for a kennedy book contract that you despise everyone involved?

(via the daily mail)

for the record, i have never read anything suggesting onassis was with jacqueline kennedy while she was wearing the suit and the suit was not by chanel.

and fun fact: taki gave us taki’s magazine which bequeathed us richard spencer.

the article goes on.

janet is “conniving”, lee is “bewildered” and “furious” and “utterly mortified”, jackie is resentful. so it goes…

and then everybody dies.

(via the daily mail)

are you exhausted? i am exhausted.

the thing is, WE CAN DO BETTER!!!! and i know i’ve been shrilling and stridenting about this for ten years now and i don’t sense any real change but i still think we can do better. EVEN THE DAILY MAIL.

there are other ways to tell these stories, more humanely, more fully, more complexly. janet auchincloss can be a bitch but how did her economic insecurity, the precarity of her marriage, the precarity of her whole existence as a woman who was given limited options contribute to that? and how did that, in turn, contribute to the possibilities handed down to her daughters- who we NEVER hear from in these pieces where their comments are always cocktail chatter rather than things they actually wrote.

in 2001, lee radziwill spoke to the biographer sarah bradford.

look at the possibilities that opens up. where is that article? that book? bring it.

GRAB ME MY SMELLING SALTS.

an extraordinary day has come.

(via the daily mail)

couple of pedantic things first…

just to bring in a little historical context, the daily mail has discovered the phenomenon called gaslighting before. back in august 2013.

(via the daily mail)

and unmentioned in this 2018 article is the fact that the concept arises from the play gas light (1938) and was further popularized through the 1940 and 1944 film adaptations.

this year it’s celebrating its 80th anniversary as a term denoting systematic psychological manipulation. so a “modern dating trend” it is not.

(via the daily mail)

this bullshit is old school.

what is happening is that gaslighting is a concept which, thanks to things like the book/film the girl on the train and lauren duca’s teen vogue article of 2016, has recentishly received significant cultural attention and of which people are newly aware. and so people are also increasingly aware of how gaslighting plays out in the everyday, in their own power dynamics at home, work, etc.

so do you know how gaslighting works? gaslighting can work in many different ways. for example, it could manifest as withholding information from someone and acting like something which is a long-standing concept is totally brand spanking new and a “modern dating trend” resulting from online dating and, therefore, something that people should be concerned about as modern daters rather than as human beings living in the world.

hmm…

the mail‘s take on gaslighting is- as we have all come to expect of a publication whose feature coverage is approximately 83% stories on WOMAN WITH A BODY APPEARS IN PUBLIC- not great.

recognizing that there may be mail readers who have never heard of this concept before, i can see how having it defined here could be helpful and will give the mail a quiet clap for trying.

(via the daily mail)

i do not want to take away from the mail‘s try but i do want to point to the ways in which the mail‘s language, as is its wont, perpetuates a hotbed of problematic assumptions.

“women are often the most susceptible victims of this,” for example. what does that mean? that women are more susceptible to believing what they are told? or that they are crazy?

also, to whom does “gaslighting” sound benign?!

(via the daily mail)

it sounds more like something you’d be taught not to do in driver’s ed.

this article is basically a PSA on gaslighting and an advert for this book (WHICH WAS PUBLISHED IN 2007!!!! which begs the question of why the mail is hyping it here [oh, because it was reprinted in january of this year, which i suppose is further testament to the au currance of gaslighting]) :

(via the daily mail)

(note how everything said here could also be said of the editorial agenda of the daily mail.)

but it also frames gaslighting as a somewhat normal aspect of so-called “modern dating,” normalizing it without offering any statistics on the pervasiveness.

(via the daily mail)

so that gaslighting is framed as something we’re all sort of doing now, along with ghosting and all these other things i- someone involved in “modern dating”- had never heard of:

(via the daily mail)

(via the daily mail)

even though gaslighting isn’t included in this round-up, it is explicitly positioned in this article as a part of “modern dating” of which modern daters need to be aware.

in the grand tradition of students who are writing about a book they haven’t read, the mail then turns to psychology today and summarizes an article for us.

(via the daily mail)

a pertinent section the mail seems to have missed is this:

(via the daily mail)

hence lauren duca’s amazing teen vogue article on donald j. trump. what the mail portrays here exclusively as a “modern dating trend” is a psychological strategy of abuse with far broader applications and implications. but then, demanding nuance from the daily mail is like demanding syntactical clarity from donald j. trump, so that just ain’t going to be.

here is my frustration with this article: the fundamental assumption it makes is that this is all about women.

(via the daily mail)

this appears to be the tack of dr. sterns’ book as well so that could, in part, account for this (though, really, i think that gives the mail far too much credit… see above, re: editorial agenda of WOMAN WITH BODY APPEARS IN PUBLIC) and perhaps it is true that women are disproportionately the victims of gaslighting behaviors.

BUT. the mail exclusively looks at gaslighting as a “modern dating trend” that affects women without once asking who the fuck is doing all this gaslighting of women.

this is a short article. i’ll give it that (i am trés generous today). maybe there wasn’t time to mention anything about men. and maybe there wasn’t room to put it in the news section and that’s why it’s in Femail. and maybe that’s why the word women appears five times and the word men doesn’t appear once. (there is a lone male pronoun in the “modern dating trends to know” box, indicating that the mail is at least aware that men have relationships too.)

(via the daily mail)

THIS IS A TREND THAT CAN SURFACE IN ANY RELATIONSHIPS!!! the article tells us, immediately shifting to suggest that THIS IS A “MODERN DATING” TREND PERPETUATED BY NO ONE AND WHICH AFFECTS ONLY WOMEN. which is a pretty good way to get men off the hook here and to immediately limit the impact of the discussion at hand.

i’m not arguing that gaslighting doesn’t affect women. i’m arguing that portraying gaslighting as a “women’s issue” and focusing exclusively on the victims and effects of gaslighting while suggesting it is a part of “modern dating” and saying absolutely fuck-all about the perpetrators of it is pernicious.

men and women can gaslight. men and women can be the victims of gaslighting behavior. this isn’t a “women’s issue.” it’s a human issue.

that’s the harder question. how do we help men and women, boys and girls, develop healthier relationships? hmmmm, daily mail? where do you stand on that?

oh hello.

i know, i know. long time no words. forgive me. in a life of approximately 9,000,000,000 projects (give or take a few), it is sometimes hard to remain a word factory in all available venues.

but yo, i’m back!

the world is a pit of drear and suck. let’s talk about totally superficially meaningful things.

ELVIS JEWLERY.

do not ask me how i got here because i cannot tell you. not because i’m mean but because i do not know.

but know this: the world of elvis jewelry is a strange, strange place to be. and i say that as someone who has spent an indecent amount of time in the land of jackie dolls.

by elvis jewelry, i should be more specific. because this maybe isn’t clear.

i am specifically talking here about jewelry featuring depictions of elvis’s head/face. specifically, rings.

like this.

(via etsy)

which, well.

i always thought chris isaak was supposed to look like elvis, not the other way around.

that is actually not why we are here though.

you think i would bring you here for that?

that is mediocre. that is small beans. i only bring out britney and her emotions for the serious stuff, the next level business.

despite all that is wrong with this thing:

(via etsy)

and seriously, wtf is up with modern masculinity that a skull with elvis hair constitutes “manly”?

but yeah, not even that really qualifies as next level business.

this, my friends, THIS is the next level business:

(via etsy)

HAVEYOUEVERCANYOUEVEN?

because, obviously, right off the bat, there’s this:

which is kind of uncanny.

and yes, yes, you can get that in a ring too.

though, bizarrely, the elvis version looks more like the real thing than this.

anyhoo. back to the matter at hand.

(via etsy)

i’m not even going to dignify the insanity of that price point with further discussion.

gosh, his eyeholes look satanic, do they not?

also, something about the joinder under his chin makes it looks like he has a teeeeeeensie teeninie body. or, at the very least, like he is a head balanced on a display stand. a head in a museum.

there is nothing scarier than a head in a museum.

there are many, many things scarier than a head in a museum.

but we’re not here to talk about that. we’re here to talk about superficial things and elvis rings.

i do wonder what was the artistic justification for keeping his mouth open.

(via etsy)

i mean, i get he was a singer and singers sing with their mouths open, but it looks rather odd on a piece of jewelry, no?

more like a cri de cœur.

a prolonged, inescapable existential scream of noooooooooooooooo!

immortalized in sterling silver. (alas, this moment is not available in gold.)

but then we do not live in a golden moment.

perhaps i just see that because i am reading this creation in this particular historical moment of drear and suck. perhaps in some other, golden time, i would see copious joie de vivre.

but no. in our current times, it looks rather as though he is gazing into the abyss.

(Edvard Munch, 1893, National Gallery and Munch Museum, Oslo, Norway)

his alarm is present but contained.

and maybe a little stupid? is he looking away? with eyeholes instead of eyeballs, it’s rather difficult to tell. hell, maybe he even has eyeballs, they just aren’t obvious in this pic. his tongue, in contrast, is clearly present.

.

he is pleasantly, passively alarmed. sanguine? is this right? am i reading too much into it?

i feel like he should be more alarmed, less sanguine, less pleasant, uncivil even.

but sometimes reading is hard.

maybe i’m asking too much of an overpriced ring on etsy that bears bad resemblance to the celebrity upon which it is based.

on the occasion of my 33rd birthday, an older man i considered a professional mentor sent me a facebook message asking if i wanted children and whether i might help him continue his line.

i was in paris. alone, in polka dot pajamas, eating all of the pasta and all of the cake, drinking champagne, taking baths, reading ali smith’s there but for the… and watching the group. and then, amid the standard slew of birthday texts from beloved friends, i received a message from this man.

i remember very clearly that it was 10:30, and that i set the phone down on the bed next to me, face down, and cried.

this man is an expert on an author. we’d only met twice in real life but i considered him a mentor. he’d put me in touch with the people who gave me my first podcasting gig. he’d written me recommendation letters for fellowships. i thought he respected my work.

now, he asked if i wanted to have children. he asked, he told me, because one of his kids had died and he was estranged from the other and, he wrote, “i do not want my line to die with me.”

this made me want to take a hundred thousand baths plus a hundred thousand more.

because he was married.

because he was in his sixties.

because he was someone i considered a mentor.

because, for all of those reasons and common decency, i should never have been compelled to think about continuing his line. much less in terms of my self.

it was a message to which i did not reply because i could find no way to frame a reply without apologizing.

i am sorry about your son. 

i am sorry about your daughter. 

i am sorry about your life. 

i am sorry but please do not imply that you want my womb. 

i refused to apologize and so sent no reply.

a year passed.

it seemed obvious enough what he was asking, but it was hard not to give him the benefit of the doubt. because it seemed a horrible thing to get wrong and because i so seldom trust myself as a narrator.

i imagined i might have misunderstood.

imagining this didn’t make it better. it maybe made it just slightly more bearable.

when the author on whom this man was the expert published a somewhat controversial book a year later, suddenly, there he was. on CNN, in the New York Times, talking about the author, hawking his own book on the author, vindicated by the existence of an unpublished manuscript whose existence he’d discovered years before.

in literary circles, it was a big deal. it was something a colleague of mine desperately wanted to discuss.

and i would brush her off and say i didn’t have time to read all the articles about it, didn’t have time to think about it, didn’t particularly find it interesting.

this was a close friend, and yet i did not tell her.

because it seemed such a small thing, really. and it felt like, in feeling violated by it, i was making it bigger than it was. (still, it feels i am making it bigger than it is.)

it was harassment, not assault. and the possibility always existed that i had misunderstood.

finally, worn down by her insistence that i read an article in the times, i told her.

she said, holy shit. 

he was the expert. he was everywhere.

this is, i would argue, a reason for not befriending experts, particularly experts whose subjects are still alive. when things go awry, when it devolves into sexual harassment, they’ll be all over creation talking about their subject and be totally unavoidable, try as you might.

my mother would see him on tv. she wouldn’t tell me she saw him.

for all my efforts of avoidance, i’d see him mentioned in some article (people pop up in so many unlikely places when you’re trying to avoid them), and i’d tell her.

i’d say i was trying to avoid all the controversy around the book because he was all over it and i’d rather not think about him because it made me think of that one time he asked to borrow my body. i’d say that and only then would my mother tell me she saw him on tv.

my mother doesn’t get angry. but when she said his name, there was a knife-sharp edge to her voice.

maybe it was his vindication, his televised glory, his return to media prominence, maybe he was drunk on his newfound renown, i don’t know.

but, for some reason, he realized he’d never heard back from me.

and he felt he owed me an explanation.

and so he wrote me again.

to clarify.

abandoning facebook, he chose to explain himself in an email, through what i would characterize as a “celebrity apology.” meaning it wasn’t so much an “i’m sorry” as an “i’m sorry if you were…”

which really isn’t an apology at all.

he worried i was confused or upset.

he was sorry if i felt surprised or frightened.

he was sorry if i had misunderstood.

in this email, entitled “an explanation,” he explained.

“I was thinking about giving a child to someone who might let it carry on my name— or at least the memory of me.”

because this is a memory i would want?

there had been a part of me that truly did believe i had misunderstood. that i had read his initial message wrong. that i had jumped to conclusions and assumed i’d been propositioned when really he’d been saying something altogether else, something more nuanced, and just communicated it very badly.

why i would make so many excuses of poor communication for a writer, i have no idea. but i did.

but it seems i was wrong to do so. it seems i had not misunderstood. at all. his explanation made that clear.

again, i did not reply.

later that year, the author on whom he is an expert died and, again, there was media coverage galore.

again, my mother saw him on tv.

again, my colleague saw him in articles and the pair of us sat together at lunch shaking our heads, trying to fathom the disconnect.

i told another friend this story at the time and she said, my god, oline, but he’s fucking everywhere! 

but time rolls on, the story passes, and he recedes again. and, even though he has “explained”, still i wonder if i made it bigger than it was, because the possibility always exists that maybe it was nothing, maybe i was wrong. it is always possible- even though he has explained himself quite clearly- that, somehow, the responsibility lies with me.

i am sorry if you…

a few months after that, after a glorious dinner party, i was walking home in sequins and turned on my phone, only to discover a facebook message from- you guessed it!- this man. because i had, still, at this point, not unfriended him. (i know, i know. come the fuck on, oline.)

it was a message with a link to a jackie article and no other comment.

no apology for his repeated entreaties regarding my reproductive system.

no further explanations.

no i’m sorry for having sexually harassed you. 

nothing.

just a link to an article on jackie’s style.

just under the last facebook message he sent me: the one where he suggested he might like to borrow my uterus.

immediately, i replied, told him to never contact me again, unfriended him and blocked him from contacting me on the internet in every possible way i could find.

and i thought, there. now we’re done here.

except not really, because the internet and the media and life don’t work that way.

this man’s updated book on the famous author was released later that month.

i’ve thought about this a lot in the last few weeks. every time someone has said of christine blasey ford i don’t see why she couldn’t just let it go.

thought about this man, who is- in the scheme of things- profoundly unimportant in our culture and yet whom, you will note, i have nonetheless not named here.

thought about how many people have stories like this.

and about how many names in print and faces on the screen prompt this ripple effect through the everyday lives of the other people whom they have hurt.

in between that message and the i’m sorry if you were… email, i contacted the organization through which i met this man. this prompted a flurry of internal oh my god, i can’t even imagine such a thing would be true IN OUR ORGANIZATION emails, followed by brief discussion and implementation of an anti-harassment policy.

(this was a few years ago. i would very much hope that conversation would look different now.)

i no longer attend this group’s conferences because the possibility of being in a room with this man makes me want to throw up.

he is the one who did a shitty, stupid, dehumanizing thing.

naturally, mine is the career that has impacted.

sidenote: alexandra petrie has been writing some amazing columns. this one, in particular, is worth a read.

surely, SURELY we are deep enough in our daily mail master class to recognize that the man behind the curtain has no clothes, right?

but yeah, anyhoo, here we are at exhibit ZZZ…

(via the daily mail)

given that the daily mail almost EXCLUSIVELY pedals in a genre perhaps best described as News From Elsewhere (with the exception of their EXCLUSIVE EXCLUSIVES which always have EXCLUSIVE plastered all over them so they are adequately distinguished from the pack of unoriginal content), i don’t know why i always give them the benefit of the doubt and assume that their articles are doing something other than killing time.

this article, my friends? this thing is seriously killing time. 

this article is already squarely positioned within the genre of Content From Somewhere Else, as denoted by the lack of EXCLUSIVE boasts. but if i had to pick a sub-genre, i’d probably go with Content Framed as a New Revelation Which Comes From a Book Published Many Months Ago.

true story: this is one of my most favorite things the daily mail does.

(via the daily mail)

because, as someone who has a finger on the pulse of the ridiculously gossipy, pulpy end of the biography corner of the publishing sector, i pride myself on knowing the latest releases. but i also really enjoy that moment of dislocation, of wondering, did andrew morton publish a book i missed?

what a time to be alive.

no, people. andrew morton did not publish a book we missed.

rather, the daily mail, presumably hard up for content, sent an actual person (does this not seem like a job for DAILY MAIL REPORTER, tho?!) to… the daily mail library?? (omg, if you are a member of the daily mail industrial complex, please pretty please let me know if there’s like a book room from whence these articles come…)

at which point that person read a book that was published in april 2018 and produced these “revelations.”

my absolute favorite part of this article?

(via the daily mail)

FROM WHERE?!?!?!?!?!!

a passage in a book has surfaced!

presumably this simply means that SOMEONE READ THE BOOK.

OMG THE DRAMAZ.

leave it to the daily mail to make finding something in a book sound like the leaking of the mueller report.

there is no new news here, folks, move along.

(via the daily mail)

this is meghan and harry 101. this was, like, ten whole minutes in their lifetime movie. why we needed to revisit a five month old book for an article on this NOW is beyond me.

is this our distraction from that horrifying report on climate change from the IPCC?

is it papering over the memory that a man who clearly perjured himself has been appointed to the highest court in the land?

it is merely an excuse to include the female fashion finder and green leather hugo boss skirts to us for $595?

(via the daily mail)

why we need to pretend like this is a story that constitutes “revelations” and which has emerged from the ether is beyond.

(via the daily mail)

the daily mail is so extra.

(via the daily mail)

et tu.

true story: this is all my fault.

i proposed a series of conference papers on melania’s jacket and so OF COURSE now there is story on melania’s jacket every single effing day. 

i maybe fetishize the wonders of writing about A Developing Story. my research is on how stories unfold, so i’m probably victim to the Unfolding Story Mystique.

this sits uneasily a long my deep deep hatred of wolf blitzer’s the situation room and our contemporary culture of endlessly BREAKING NEWS.

but nonetheless i fall prey.

so i’m “writing” about melania. by which i mean cranking out conference abstracts and grant applications and existing with this bizarro imagined future wherein i am someone who wants to spend a considerable chunk of the life remaining to them writing about this woman whom i do not enjoy.

apparently masochism is the life skill i honed through my doctoral studies.

my therapist did say i have an unusually high threshold for extreme emotional discomfort.

so melania. here we are.

i watched the interview.

well, that’s a lie.

i have twenty minutes remaining but apparently needed a week-long break before proceeding.

this doesn’t speak well for my ability to write more than a 250 word abstract. if 40 minutes of 20/20 (including what… 15 mins of commercials?) has done me in.

that is saying quite a lot, actually.

i write about jackie. every time i google the red dress she wore in canada in 1961 or that damned yellow dress or that one photo of her eating corn on the cob or even just her name or any variation of them, i am confronted with images from her husband’s autopsy.

so i have seen some horrible things.

this 20/20 interview though? that shit is AWFUL.

i do not know where to begin.

her advice to those families who are still separated by the administration’s immigration policies and imprisoned in detention centers, in many cases operated by and profiting the same companies who run our nation’s for-profit prison-industrial complex??

her claim of solidarity with women while demanding their claims of sexual assault and abuse rise to the level of criminal prosecutions?

her demand that evidence of sexual assault be provided lest innocent men’s lives be ruined when WE HAVE SEEN the jackshit that does?

(again, required reading: “It is very difficult to get the train to stop”)

the woman wore a dumb jacket. the story has evolved over time.

this is what interests me about it: the story’s evolution.

she has now told us that she knew exactly what she was doing, so i guess the jig is up.

OF COURSE this jacket with a message printed on the back of it was a message.

glad we cleared that up.

she put the jacket on because left-wing media… then after her visit to the detention center she put it back on “because i saw how media got obsessed with it.”

in the real world, we would call this trolling, which is pretty rich coming from someone whose primary agenda is entitled “Be Best.” presumably, she was not at her best here.

i do not think it is wrong, as an american citizen, to expect the First Lady to be better.

yes, we all have bad days. we just don’t usually use photo-ops to detention centers as a means through which to show them off.

i don’t know what will happen with this jacket in the coming months. already, it has had quite an evolution- selling on ebay for upwards of $1,000 in the immediate aftermath of the initial story then tumbling to a more reasonable $100, and spawning clever knock-offs providing a counter-commentary.

(via The Outrage)

god only knows what’ll be happening with it by the time i come around to writing these conference papers next spring.

i write about jackie because i am, to this day and all these years later, righteously indignant that her story has been told so badly and that we still have so little understanding of what happened, why she mattered, why people cared then and why they still do. increasingly though, i am righteously angered by the ways in which her story has been used in american culture to further some pretty nasty ass shit.

particularly in relation to american white femininity and the policing of Black women in the public sphere.

it is my aim to shut that shit down. which is obviously entirely unrealistic because the horse has bolted the barn. (this metaphor works, right? horses and shit go together…)

melania though.

it’s a problem.

not least because this keeps happening…

which, well, SPOILER: i am not on board!!!!!

in huge part because i recognize the ways in which jackie’s image in american life has long been used to reenforce ideologies of white supremacy (ie. the facebook post above).

these allusions seem largely aesthetic rather than biographical. at least in the headlines, it is about surfaces and, primarily, clothes. this seems, ostensibly, quite frivolous.

let’s be real, to “channel” jackie at this historical moment is often so simple as wearing pink, and maybe also having brown hair. such an allusion can situate a garment or a person within a visual history, which can be helpful depending upon how sophisticated the parallel actually is.

these allusions, the ones made in headlines? these are not representative of intellectual rigor. i would argue they are also not inherently benign, operating as they do, collectively and over time, to reshape and, potentially, undermine our conceptions of history, reality and fact as well as the lives of the people they reference.

duchess kate wearing polka dots is hardly channeling princess diana, but by daily mail standards it is. does this matter? meh.

at eugenie’s wedding last week, duchess kate wore a dress similar in style and by the same designer as another dress she had previously worn. the mail, of course, headlined is as an “EXACT replica.”

(via the daily mail)

why take an inch when you could take 9,000 miles?

the daily mail is always in it to win it but this is actually quite obviously not true. it is not the exact same dress. LOOK AT THOSE SLEEVES!!!

(via the daily mail)

i do not have a degree in fashion and i do not know the official term, but the sleeve seams on the left are clearly raised while the sleeve seams on the right are flat.

THESE DRESSES ARE NOT THE SAME!!!! much less an “EXACT replica”!!

the skirt pleats were different too. so exactness is doubly refutable.

this is small beans. but then, small beans is a hill i have repeatedly opted to die on because small beans are usually emblematic of something much bigger.

in a world where an entirely different dress constitutes an “EXACT replica” and one can “channel” jackie kennedy just by having brown hair, who’s to say this 20/20 interview isn’t utterly charming, our first lady is totally harmless, and the parents of “children of tender age” who are still imprisoned in camps at our country’s border shouldn’t just “keep strong” and trust that “it will come,” whatever the hell “it” is?

and, lo, we meet again.

(via the daily mail)

holy buckets, that headline!

sidenote: i’m currently mired in essay grading, and there, in the middle of it all, whom did i see? you guessed it, mon frere, DAILY MAIL REPORTER!!!!! sigh.

so yeah, that headline’s a thing to behold, right? (and big thanks, ysenda, we’ll now all have that shite song in our heads for the rest of the day.)

i particularly like the shift from broadway song to what sounds like a text message (jackie kennedy and her sister lee were sooooooooo jelly!!!!! LOL!!!! ) to the explication of “EVERYTHING” (into which i keep inserting “shoes” because that seems like the only thing that is missing.)

perhaps unsurprisingly, because you probably know a little something about me and jackie by now, i HATE THIS.

because it’s possible to be competitive and not be The Most Competitive People Who Ever Lived, right???

no. no, it is not.

(via the daily mail)

COMPETITORS 4 LIFE, baby!!

that sounds like something that belongs on a t-shirt. do you think they had t-shirts made? did their level of competition extend into competitiveness about who could best boast of their competitiveness? or was it more subtle? limited to a tallying of the number of times they were seen on nureyev’s arm?

(via the daily mail)

because why write about a pair of women like they were people when you could make them sound like bracelets?

so obviously, this is a bit of a The Sex Lives of Dead People situation that we have going on here. but i have written about nureyev soooooooooooooooooooooooo many times that he has his own graphic here…

it is just 101 trés boring. let’s move on… 

full disclosure: i have read this book. the one this article is about. i know i’ve fallen into a bit of a habit of excoriating books i’ve not read based on the biographical knowledge i have, but this one, i’m all in. which is not to say i was impressed. 

though i’ll never really understand why it takes two whole people to produce a 336 page book, when robert caro is over there writing tomes all by his lonesome, if memory serves, kashner and schoenberger’s furious love was excellent.

the years have not been kind, alas, and we wind up here with The Fabulous Bouvier Sisters: The Tragic and Glamorous Lives of Jackie and Lee- a book in which fabulousness and glamour are notably absent and there are entirely too many situations constructed along the lines of “if jackie felt [insert such-and-such feeling/thought], she NEVER TOLD A SOUL.” a biographical claim which would inevitably lead one to wonder: THEN HOW THE HELL DO YOU KNOW??!

this is not my point though. my point is, as ever, the daily mail.

as i said, i am marking essays. check out this run-on:

(via the daily mail)

after reading that sentence, i bet she is also tired.

why have nine sentences when you could just have one?

(via the daily mail)

um… i feel that this sentence maybe doesn’t fully take into account the routine travails of being 85, the rigors of dieting for 70+ years, the challenges of living in our modern world (), and, in general, human adaptability.

if i remember correctly, one of the central theses of this book is that lee radziwill is hella’ adaptable. from the sound of it here, she’s sitting in her elegant apartment, stewing over something that happened 24 years ago. which isn’t exactly a testament to pluck.

so, 24 years ago, jackie said in her will that she had already provided for her sister. much has been made of this in the years since. the exciting new twist? because, LOVERS.

(via the daily mail)

oh, look!!! a narrative addition to the house of previous narratives, all of which were built upon the firm ground of possible things that might have possibly happened but cannot be proven true.

do you not feel secure?

FYI: BEST.BOOK.BLURB.EVER.

(via the daily mail)

I AM SICKENED BUT I CANNOT PUT IT DOWN!!!!!

i long to someday get feedback like this from peer review.

i’m curious about the “aspirational feel.” this is, according to this report, a story about female competition. two women so competitive that they fought about rudolph nureyev’s arm. what is the aspirational take-away?

having read the actual book, i can say with some authority, it is pretty much like every other book of this genre. if anything, it’s publication twin, Jackie, Janet & Lee: The Secret Lives of Janet Auchincloss and Her Daughters, Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis and Lee Radziwill, is better because it delves into the women’s relationship with their mother– a triangulation which adds an important dimension to the sibling relationship while also locating the fracturing of the sister’s relationship in janet’s decline.

it’s still largely guesses and gambles, but there are ways to do that that are compelling and take a fresh line, whist remaining the realm of being biographically possible. and then there are, of course, other ways to do that, that pretty much do the same thing everyone else has done since the beginning of modernity x10. and that is, i would argue, what we have here with The Fabulous Bouvier Sisters.

that is also what we have with the daily mail. these books are quite different, but the mail has covered them similarly, focusing on the competition angle. i critiqued their coverage of The Secret Lives… before reading it.

eight months later, when everyone’s forgot this:

here we go again, sans janet.

the mail is, as always, never circumspect. peel your eyes for this:

(via the daily mail)

the political murder of a husband? yeah, yeah, BUT ALSO THE TRAGEDY OF THE DEATH OF LOVE BETWEEN TWO SISTERS!!!!!!!?!?!?!!!?!?!?!?!?!?

one of the main take-aways from the taraborelli book was that janet, when cornered or enraged, would allegedly shout “EYES ON ME, JACKIE. EYES ON ME.” there were many points in this article where i felt so moved.

somewhere between the gold taps and the summer houses of this run-on, for example.

(via the daily mail)

gold taps will not save us, yo. and i don’t know about you but, in some sense, beneath the lavish shopping sprees at h&m, aren’t we all just children trying to learn to swim before everything starts to go wrong??? maybe i’m reading too deeply. the temporality in this one paragraph sentence threw me off.

jackie is married to onassis! lee is living on fifth avenue! they are children in the hamptons! they are on shopping sprees together! their father is teaching them to swim! EVERYTHING IS WRONG.

see how easily i captured the exact same ideas in five sentences? not hard.

this is, as it always is in these stories, about men and money.

(via the daily mail)

lee, as she always does, does not fare well.

(via the daily mail)

which begs the question of why we can never ever have a serious discussion of financial precarity? why does it always have to be a condemnation of these women marrying men, in part, because of their money rather than a contextualization of them existing in a society and being of a class where things like tallness and frizzy hair and work were so frowned upon they was essentially maritally disqualifying?

i am asking too much obviously. it is 2018. this is the daily mail. we don’t really care, do we?

(via the daily mail)

seriously. wtf is up with this fixation on nureyev’s arm? how did that make it into this piece, much less warrant a bulleted point in the opening summary?

also, girls? GIRLS? the chronology in this article is baffling but these are women in their 30s at the point in the story when they become nureyev’s BFFs. they are all adults. they are not twelve.

wait. what’s that noise? do you hear it? oh, yeah, butofcourse. it’s the ghost of gore vidal!

(via the daily mail)

be real. this isn’t our first rodeo. did you seriously think he’d miss this little soirée?

OH.BUT.WAIT. it’s the cuban missile crisis!

(via the daily mail)

so it isn’t the mid-60s. JFK has not even died yet, though didn’t he die earlier when we set his death to the side so we could mourn the tragedy of the death of the love between sisters?

well, now he’s back. and lee’s husband stanislas, who was always called stas (pronounced “stash”), is now apparently going by stan.

my brains are a bit addled from reading essays, so i OF COURSE briefly misread this as saying that stas and jack and lee and jackie all slept together for 13 days, which would perhaps be a bridge too far. but, who knows? there are few places the daily mail will not go.

if you’re at all familiar with this story and its telling then you know that, historically, it is when onassis enters the scene that the shit really hits the fan. voilá!

(via the daily mail)

to the mail‘s credit, this is a proper paragraph with multiple sentences- one reasonably sized, one gargantuan. and yet, it leaves one wanting… something, no? perhaps a conclusion stronger than “onassis didn’t really want to marry jackie because he was perhaps still possibly maybe pining FOR EVERY OTHER ROMANTIC RELATIONSHIP HE HAD EVER HAD IN HIS LIFE.”

events, naturally, escalate from here.

(via the daily mail)

yes, this is pretty much what one does when reading a book.

(via the daily mail)

BECAUSE SHE WAS CASH-POOR!!!

this is not a story of redemption, as the daily mail plays it.

(via the daily mail)

spoiler: it gets super bleak.

(via the daily mail)

in a way that makes lee radziwill sound as though she has very much taken the low road when, in the book itself, the authors seem to bend over backwards to blame jackie and suggest that jackie was essentially a style plagiarist, repeatedly popularizing and receiving credit for trends that originated with lee.

why does this matter, why do we care? same thing i’ve been saying since 2010. these stories are stupid and we deserve better. the people upon whose lives they are based deserve better.

last year, i was on a panel with someone who kept banging on about wills and finding the wills and how money was the answer. i’d just delivered a paper on shopping and i found her preoccupation with wills rather odd. but, increasingly, i think what she was saying was: follow the money.

not, like, in terms of “and then jackie married this rich man and then lee married that one,” but in a far more rigorous and substantial way, think about how money- access to it and lack of it- shaped the lives we’re researching.

yeah, it’s fun to “sit back and watch the disastrous marriage play out,” but what does it tell us that jackie was buying clothes in order to sell them, sometimes unused, so she could have cash of her own? that’s quite a different story than the accusations of “extravagant spending” and the stories of “lavish shopping sprees” and golden bathroom fixtures would suggest.

and yet, here we are in 2018, stuck with this same old tired tale about how two women with all the money in the world were so competitive they couldn’t get along.

that’s bullshit. and it’s boring.

it’s time to move on.

(by Peter Beard in Montauk, New York, 1972)

apologies for the lack of gifs. i will be brief, because it is the end of semester and i have papers to grade. rhetoric papers. papers on argument.

that is perhaps why i am so incensed by this op-ed. because i’ve been focused on rhetoric and the evidence fails the argument here. the hasty generalization fallacy is so glaring that it is all i can see.

to summarize my own argument at the outset… yeah, maybe this just isn’t melania trump’s thing. that is not entirely fine, because: whiteness.

to be clear: i am totally 100000000000% on board with professionalizing the position of first lady. i absolutely believe that we, as an american electorate and as human beings, need to “recognize that the role [of first lady] is work” and that “these activities probably deserve compensation.”

it is a job. it is labor. it should be paid. period.

that’s all good.

the thing that is missing in this argument is this: ain’t no effing way michelle obama could’ve gotten away with this shit.

paying the first lady is a conversation that has been occurring for awhile now. in 2016, there was a piece in time arguing that paying the first lady could be a key way of fixing the wage gap.

but seriously. dream it. what if barack obama went to congress with a proposal to reshape the institution of first lady by making it a paid job and putting someone else in it. or making it a paid post and paying michelle obama for the work she actually did as first lady.

the hellmouth would’ve opened and we’d have all been sucked in, non?

know why? because michelle obama, in being a Black woman, had to be the GREATEST FIRST LADY OF ALL TIME EVER IN THE HISTORY OF THE WORLD. or, at the very least, give eight years of her life to trying.

you may or may not agree that she was successful in doing this, but- make no mistake- those were the stakes. and, be real, didn’t she make it look at least a little fun?

this op-ed gives the impression that all of the first ladies who preceded trump just loooooooved the “tasks of hosting dignitaries, traveling on behalf of an administration, glad-handing and public speaking all require skill, enthusiasm and lots of time.” like women haven’t been pasting on smiles and falling into line since the beginning of time. like we don’t know that michelle obama herself wasn’t all that eager about assuming the role, to say nothing of jacqueline kennedy, bess truman, mary todd lincoln, etc., etc.

a thing that is not mentioned, which i increasingly want to shout from the rooftops precisely because it is not mentioned, is that all the women before melania trump- with the exception of michelle obama- were white.

we tend to see michelle obama as the outlier, the first Black first lady, rather than observe that all the other first ladies were white. so that michelle obama’s Blackness is noted but the whiteness of everyone else remains unseen and the position of first lady has nothing at all to do with race, except when michelle obama occupied the post.

um… no.

trump is white. that is not inconsequential. i would argue, that in this case and in this argument, it is hugely consequential.

there are affordances of being a white woman. one of those, historically- and, admittedly, one that is quite niche- has been that, if you are a white lady and you screw up being first lady, it is, broadly speaking, not the end of the world. you are still believed to be, broadly speaking, humane. (HRC is a special case here, as always.)

think of the allowances we make for a president because he is The President. the power of the institution, of the office. same goes for First Lady. how long did the left root for melania trump to be a secret member of the resistance in spite of her history of questioning the legitimacy of barack obama’s birth certificate on the view?

the position of first lady is an institution. and like most institutions, its protections and privileges do not extend equally to everyone.

the argument that melania trump is a great way into the conversation of revolutionizing the institution of first lady is slowly being positioned as one of the silver linings of her occupancy of the post. both because she appears to be so resistant to it and, according to this op-ed, because she’s maybe not very good at it.

“If everyone could just admit that Melania is bad at this” then we could get rid of this job. we could change it and have a revolution and strike a blow for gender equality.

if we could just pause though, and look at the ways in which melania’s being bad at this, melania’s being allowed to be bad at this, is entrenched in the notion that it’s totally ok for white women to suck at things where it would totally not be similarly ok for women of color to suck, then maybe we could start to have the conversation we actually need to be having.

this is about striking a blow for gender equality, yes. but it’s a blow being enabled by the privileges of whiteness. given this op-ed and a history of white women focusing on gender rather than race, this is clearly a conversation we are perfectly comfortable having without acknowledging that. and that is not fine.

i am not here to play. there will be no gifs.

my last post was about first ladies and whiteness, and lo! we meet at that potuck again.

(via the new england historical society)

let me begin by saying, unequivocally, no, no jackie kennedy was not the first Black first lady. michelle obama was the first Black first lady.

i’m not sure what the new england historical society is doing here. using empathy, i’m going to give them the benefit of the doubt and imagine they think they have produced high quality clickbait and given us some genealogical fun facts about jackie’s ancestry.

i imagine they are totally oblivious to the ways in which this article, founded on a racist stereotype, in turn leverages that racist stereotype as evidence to put forth an argument to claim Blackness for a white woman and position her as “the first black first lady,” thus overwriting the role of michelle obama- the actual first Black first lady- in american history.

this is done with- and i’m going to be nothing but real here- daily mail levels of rigor.

we open with an allusion to beaton’s comment…

(via the new england historical society)

which is positioned as a statement of a fact, its inherent racism unacknowledged.

(via the new england historical society)

beaton “detected” jackie is Black! that’s what this says, right? we’ve not seen his comments yet, we’ll get to those, but that’s where we are. cecil beaton- who couldn’t possibly be racist because he’s british?- used racist stereotypes to describe jackie in his journal. and this assessment aligned with the “claims” of “some.” and THAT makes jackie the first Black first lady.

all aboard?

this is followed by some genealogy stuff…

(via the new england historical society)

which i’m not even going to bother to unpack because YO!

(via the new england historical society)

IT IS ALLLLLLLL UNCLEAR. WE CANNOT POSSIBLY KNOW BECAUSE WE ARE NOT GENEALOGISTS.

this begs the question, who the hell are we? there is no byline, so we don’t know who we are. which kind of matters. because if we’re a twelfth grader writing during an internship, that would maybe be one thing. if we’re a grown adult person, that would be another. if we’re 102, that might be something else. (in all of these scenarios, i am assuming we are white.) any which way though, this is a teachable moment. we are, undoubtedly, a human being and, as such, we bear a responsibility in casually putting shit like this out into the world.

we bear a responsibility for using the fucking one-drop rule as though it were a legitimate thing in order to claim Blackness for jackie.

(via the new england historical society)

this is the point at which my brains hit the ceiling. because, while i may not expect the new england historical society to be a bastion of progressive thought, quite frankly, i wouldn’t expect any institution outside of white nationalism to be favorably citing the one-drop rule in an argument in 2018.

i say this as a tennessean: when you have to look to the race laws of 1910 tennessee to back up your claim, you need a new claim.

a claim for which there is more than racist laws and anecdotal evidence.

(via the new england historical society)

there is also the establishment that this claim has been around for awhile, during earlier (racist) times.

(via the new england historical society)

to be clear, jackie may well have had Black ancestors. many, many americans do, as the author here is quick to establish:

(via the new england historical society)

the connection between this circumstance and white supremacist violence and oppression is gestured towards in the awkwardness of thomas jefferson’s familial constellation, but it is wholly ignored in connection to jackie. but then this article isn’t so much concerned with the specifics of her genealogy as with establishing her as Black, so as to make her the first Black first lady.

this is, at its core, an argument about white supremacy.

anything michelle can do, jackie can do better.

but, whether or not jackie is Black, it maybe doesn’t even matter all that much because BREAKING NEWS: the US has probably had countless “black” first ladies by now!

(via the new england historical society)

good god, how important we white people think we are.

(seriously, if anyone has any theories on or terminology for wtf this is, i would be sooooo grateful. it’s clearly not blackfishing, and seems connected to the broader delegitimization of birtherism, while also maybe being something else…?)

but back to beaton…

(via the new england historical society)

i would like to clarify something. beaton’s remarks are not catty. let’s not cloak misogyny by calling it cattiness. let’s call it what it is. his remarks are about white women, and he draws on racial stereotypes to describe them. these comments are masculinist, obviously, but they are also overtly racist.

this is how beaton described jackie:

(via the new england historical society)

it is a dig at her femininity, but it is a dig at her femininity specifically as a white woman, which operates as a dig by describing her looks in terms of stereotypes about Black people, specifically Black men.

that is some nasty ass misogynistic racist shit there.

true story though: THAT SHE WAS DESCRIBED LIKE THIS BY BEATON IN NO WAY MAKES JACKIE BLACK.

i cannot believe i have to say this to the new england historical society in 2018, but: THE WAY CECIL BEATON DESCRIBES A WHITE WOMAN DOES NOT MEAN SHE IS A BLACK PERSON.

and so, the fact that the way the new england historical society would introduce that quote is this:

(via the new england historical society)

is pernicious.

and that is the article’s end. it ends on a block quote. it gives beaton’s racist musings the last word.

i cannot decide whether it completely boggles the mind that this story was recently updated or if it’s just peak 2018.

(via the new england historical society)

come to think of it, a recurring thing here is “things that shouldn’t have to be said in 2018.” so maybe 2018 is even worse than the horridness i imagine.

oh, hello, we back.

2019 is already .

in updates on this mess, i wrote the new england historical society a very proper, emotionally detached, peer reviewed email taking research-based issue with their masterpiece, “Using Jim Crow-era Race Laws And Assorted Racist/Misogynist Writings Of Cecil Beaton, We’re Gonna Half-Assedly Argue That Jackie Kennedy Was The First Black First Lady And Michelle Obama Totally Doesn’t Count Because Black People Are Not Fully Human.”

(be real: i soooooo should be writing headlines for the daily mail. this is the genre in which i most excel.)

somewhat not surprisingly, though i had hoped for their better angels, they have not written me back.

and LO. we are here again.

not exactly in the same place but a street nearby.

and, truly, this is not a neighborhood in which i expected we would keep cruising, but, yo, i’ve got this phd in american first ladies, so, upon noting that this shite is apparently rife, i feel compelled by whatever the humanities equivalent of the hippocratic oath is to relentlessly dig in.

this is not the daily mail. this is a january 10, 2019 op-ed in the daily times– which, as best i can tell, is the delaware county daily times, out of swathmore, pennsylvania.

it seems straightforwardly enough about political disagreement:

(via the daily times)

“bleeding-heart liberals” kinda gives it away.

full disclosure: it is unlikely this author and i politically agree.

but that is not what i am writing about here. what interests me is the rhetorical choices, the system and historical moment in which they are occurring, and what they tell us about the status of first ladies in american life now.

the op-ed itself is a fairly boiler plate compliant about “filthy rich” liberal celebrities (a recognizable crowd, tho who knew jimmy kimmel was their standard bearer?!) who don’t get it and think all conservatives are dumb and all conservatives are “filthy rich, drug users”…

this argument begs the question of whether, if people on both sides of the political spectrum think everyone on the other side of the political spectrum is “filthy rich”, our time would be better spent asking why so many of us are so very poor…

but that’s a question for another day.

i am here to discuss this:

(via the daily times)

very inconveniently, at this precise moment, an article i have been working on for the last year about this very thing is still winding its way through peer review. so, unfortunately, i can’t point to a peer reviewed piece of academic LITERATOOOOOORE that the institutionally unaffiliated could rent for an hour for $24.95 and say, “lookit”.

what i can do it use microsoft paintbrush and point out that this:

(via the daily times)

is about race.

increasingly, having looked at the historical evolution of this discourse– what i call the dignity discourse in jackie’s life-narrative– in relation to first ladies across the mid-20th century and into the 21st, i am convinced that this is always about race.

in eloquent rage (2018), brittney cooper writes: “white women’s sexuality and femininity is used not just as a tool of patriarchy but also as a tool for the maintenance of white supremacy” (185-186).

how might that look, you wonder? et voilá: “class, style, correct behavior”!!

it’s easy to see how that’s about femininity, “correct” and “appropriate” femininity. but, to be pedantic for a mo, we need to start training our eyes, especially our white eyes, to see how in being about that this is also very very very often also about race. because, in america, “correct”, “good”, “appropriate” femininity is white.

this seems an especially vital skill to cultivate in a universe where we are so eager to erase the contributions of a Black first lady that Blackness is claimed for jackie using early 20th century race law.

notice how deftly this is done.

(via the daily times)

notice how these grafs, bless their hearts, appear totally race-free.

notice how they appear so race-free that i probably sound like a total killjoy/conspiracy theorist for even bringing up the subject of race in this delightfully race-free space.

notice how you would never know that michelle obama is Black just from reading this.

notice how you might not even know she existed because she is not even named. instead, she is…

this last one.

instigating.

igniting dissension.

no pride.

shameless.

that one.

notice how, because this is an op-ed that opens with discussion of celebrities, it appears to be a critique of 21st century first lady-ness, particularly former first lady-ness.

former first ladies should go quietly into the night, is the argument. they should not appear on talk shows or write memoirs and have opinions.

um…  wherefore art thou, laura bush?

jackie, lady bird, pat, nancy.

notice who is not here. notice how this list’s exclusions reveal betty, rosalynn, and hillz to be emblems of “inappropriate” femininity.

but notice how their “inappropriate” femininity is “inappropriate” femininity, white style. because they have the power of invisibility.

here, michelle obama has neither the privilege of invisibility, nor a name.

culturally, these names have a power beyond the women who held them. culturally, this position in american life has a power that still isn’t properly acknowledged.

increasingly i’m convinced we need to flip the equation. this is not about michelle obama’s Blackness– that others her, and it lets everyone else off the hook.

this is about the position of first lady’s historical whiteness, the whiteness of the institution and americans’ conceptualization of it.

this is about the ways in which that position, in its embodiment of what it is to be a “good,” “proper”, “classy”, “dignified”, “american” “woman”, continues to enable critiques of inappropriate femininity in the public sphere, which are, in reality, coded critiques of Black femininity.

this is about how, as a result of that long-existing, historical dynamic, we fail to appreciate how the casual rhetorical deployment of these names and ideas and critiques in american media occur within and work to support a broader structure of racism. and, in doing so, empower some truly gross, white supremacist shit in american culture.