Communication Studies

This essay examines media coverage and candidate rhetoric of Hillary Rodham Clinton and Elizabeth Dole during their 2000 political campaigns. Although gender was emphasized when Clinton was first lady, it became the tacit subtext of her run for the U.S. Senate, and Clinton’s male opponents arguably were more disadvantaged by gender stereotypes than she was in that particular campaign. In contrast, Dole’s gender was foregrounded in media portrayals of her bid for the Republican presidential nomination, making it harder for voters to imagine her as president. This study underscores the fact that although women are making strides in other realms of public governance, theU.S. presidency remains a bastion of masculinity.

The “Sex and the City Voter” construct as it was deployed in political journalism and popular culture during the 2004 campaign is problematic. Although it seemingly promoted young women’s political agency, the potency of the image came from its characterization of young women voters as a homogenous group of white, middle- to upper-class professionals, as consumers rather than citizens, and as sexually appealing and available. The construct’s assimilation into popular culture and political journalism mirrored earlier attempts by the media to characterize
feminism in the late 1990s, where emphasis was placed on young women as so-called “third wave” feminists. The 2004 campaign offers an important case study of third-wave feminist logic as it was appropriated and infused in campaign discourse and political journalism.

In this essay, I contend that political culture and campaign journalism during the 2008 U.S. presidential campaign was “pornified.” Examination of broadcast journalism, viral videos, online commentary, political pop culture, and get-out-the-vote campaigns reveals the ways in which pornographic metaphors, images, and narratives infiltrated U.S. political culture during the 2008 presidential primary and general election season. I assess the media framing of candidates Hillary Clinton and Sarah Palin, as well as that of female voters as a group, arguing that the emergence of the pornification frame signals a backlash against the gains women have made in the U.S. political system.

This article assesses the ways in which electoral systems present unique rhetorical challenges for women running for elective office, using German Chancellor Angela Merkel as a case study. In proportional systems, much of the rhetorical work occurs at the level of the party, requiring the political woman to capitalize on the rhetorical resources of the party structure in which she finds herself, advancing to party leadership, and eventually localizing the national election via the party structure. However, Merkel’s performance demonstrates that the presence of women and of feminine norms of communication can sometimes mask the hegemonic masculinity that continues to govern democratic electoral systems. The authors conclude by considering the utility of the theory of ‘‘feminine style.’’

The contention that Clinton was the wrong candidate for a “change” election also obscures another, more important, insight—not that Clinton was the wrong woman for the presidency in 2016, but that every woman is the wrong woman—and will be until cultural understanding of the presidency changes. In this brief postmortem of the 2016 campaign, I suggest that Clinton was constrained by what I call the “female presidentiality paradox,” in which any electable woman presidential candidate is simultaneously unelectable in a “change” campaign. The effect is intensified when the change endorsed by electors is a reactionary, rather than a progressive, change. Consequently, although
scholars and strategists seek to uncover the rhetorical formula that will finally propel a woman into the office of the U.S. presidency, the more urgent work is targeting the beliefs and behaviors of citizens rather than the strategies of candidates.

The centennial of the ratification of the 19th Amendment offers an opportunity to write a new story about women's democratic engagement. The goal of this issue is to honor women's democratic labor while disturbing the generic features of the typical suffrage story, considering, in particular, how suffrage and citizenship have affected and been engaged by women with diverse identities situated at various intersections. In the pages that follow, leading experts and new voices trouble temporalities, extend the cast of protagonists, and reconsider objectives, creating an expansive, contradictory, and intentionally untidy narrative.

Fortunately, in the last 20 years, the scholarship on women in politics has grown considerably, as have the number of women running for office, the number of women holding office, and thus the amount of data, artifacts, contexts, and situations to be analyzed. Karrin Vasby Anderson and Kristina Horn Sheeler, in Governing Codes, offer a solid, interesting, and insightful addition to this growing line of work. With the presentation of four intriguing case studies, the authors provide a rich and informative analysis from a revealing vantage point-the use of metaphor-to uncover what remains the frustrating and challenging language that four credible and politically astute women had to overcome, as well as some of the rhetorical strategies they successfully employed in doing so. In Governing Codes, Anderson and Sheeler offer sound case studies that focus on four prominent female politicians: Ann Richards, Christine Todd Whitman, Hillary Clinton, and Elizabeth Dole. The authors seek to balance their study by party-two Democrats and two Republicans, as well as by experience: Two of the women were elected to their state's executive post (Richards, Whitman) and two women were spotlighted on the public stage as political spouses before moving successfully into the role of candidate in a nationally covered U.S. Senate race (Clinton, Dole). The authors begin by building a framework that represents common, public sphere narratives about women, women as candidates, and women as officeholders. These common narratives include those of pioneer, puppet, hostess/beauty queen, and unruly woman. Although the development of these four lenses is well grounded and evidenced, one is left wondering if any positive narratives exist. Each common narrative is fundamentally detrimental, including the pioneer metaphor. Although that particular frame initially offers positive connotations, it also contains a selfish twist. For instance, the authors argue that a pioneer is a "trailblazer or groundbreaker," one possessing "determination, practical wisdom, perseverance, and hard work" (p. 14), a politician who can relate to the

art of the implicit charge of this task force is to call the presidency to its ethical obligations, most particularly with respect to its rhetorical activities. And yet as any observer of the ongoing four-year cycles of presidential campaigning has come to see, American political discourse is saturated with candidate rhetoric designed to display "character" and surrogate rhetoric designed to cast doubt on the character of rival candidates. Talk radio often excoriates the character of political opponents as a premise and primary subject of political conversation. We distract ourselves with indignation, yet have trouble finding a purchase for reflective ethical inquiry and mutually respectful policy debate. In some 318 TASK FORCE REPORTS CHARACTER AS RHETORICAL PROOF Ethics, and the perceived enactment of ethics in the performed character of the speaker, form part of the "proof" of any discourse, from the audience's point of view. This form of proof Aristotle called ethos. 2 To ethos (the depicted character of the speaker or implied author), contemporary rhetorical theory has added concerns with how texts represent not only their authors but also their listeners and readers (second persona; implied audience); and how the text represents other human agents. 3 Listeners do and should assess the ethical character of a speaker as part of the speaker's general argument; the rhetorical text itself is a guide, though in the age of ghostwriting not always a reliable guide to presidential ethos. 4 Assessments of presidential ethics properly include a consideration of how the president depicts not only himself or herself but also other human agents. ETHICS OF COMMUNICATION IMPLIED BY RHETORIC ITSELF The act of engaging in rhetoric, as speaker or listener, implies ethical obligations for both. Karl Wallace wrote that "communication carries its ethics within itself," by which he meant that "public address of any kind is inseparable from the values which permeate a free and democratic community." 5 Wallace argued that in a democratic society, speakers have an implicit obligation to meet certain ethical standards-they should be well informed on the subjects they address and should acknowledge legitimate opposing views; they should be fair and accurate and should help their listeners to arrive at fair judgments by cultivating the "habit of justice"; they should reveal the sources of their motives, information, and opinion; they should make themselves publicly accountable and should prefer public to private motivations; they should "acknowledge and respect diversity of argument and opinion"; they should respect dissent. 6 Employing Wallace's sense of the implicit ethical rules of democratic rhetoric, Christopher Lyle Johnstone argues that Ronald Reagan's 1984 campaign rhetoric was deficient in meeting "the procedural standards of intelligent public deliberation and judgment." 7 He has bequeathed us a vision of the political process in which the values and forms of democratic decision-making have been replaced by activities and expectations geared more to entertainment than ETHICAL RESPONSIBILITIES 319

This essay examines how public memory is visualized in the statue to Canada's ''gay pioneer,'' Alexander Wood. By analyzing three viewing positions of the statue*the official democratic memory, traditionalist countermemory, and camp countermemory* I argue each position enacts a distinct form of remembering Wood with implications for both materializing queer memories and how space and identity are understood in the city. Based upon these visualizations, I extend arguments for how rhetoricians critique memory texts and contribute to defining ''queer public memory'' in light of this statue.

LGBT discourse. This discourse has been used to defy heteronormative characterizations of violence, confirm gay and lesbian identity, and to "queer" rigid notions of community. Tracing Shepard's memory through three contested memory frames, I argue for an expanded perspective of queer counterpublic memories and the strategic use of public memories by counterpublics. M inutes after midnight October 7, 2008, marked the ten-year anniversary of the brutal beating and murder of Matthew Shepard, an openly gay college student in Laramie, Wyoming. Targeted for his sexual orientation, robbed, verbally abused, and tortured, the young gay man lashed to a cow fence left an indelible mark in the minds of many Americans. Shepard-unconscious, cold, beaten, and bleeding-would be found the next morning by a passing biker still hanging from the fence, his hands tied behind his back. He would die five days later without ever waking THOMAS R. DUNN is a doctoral student in Communication at the University of Pittsburgh. The author would like to thank Kendall Phillips, Lester Qlson, and the anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments in developing this essay. 611 612 RHETORIC »PUBLIC AFFAIRS from his coma. News of the murder by two local men, Aaron McKinney and Russell Henderson, was a transformative moment in the ongoing discourse over the status of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) people within American society. Initial reports of his attack, vigils during his slow death, protests by antigay forces, and an unprecedented media circus all shaped a debate about what it meant to be gay in America and formed a moment in the public consciousness that transformed Matthew Shepard into an icon of unmatched appeal.'

Oscar Wilde is perhaps the most well-known historical homosexual in the public imagination. However, for a new generation of queers less connected to “gay” labels, Wilde appears other and forgettable. To reanimate Wilde’s memory for twenty-first century queers and ensure his legacy going forward, I read the 1997 Oscar Wilde monument in Dublin, Ireland. Through discursive, visual, and material analyses, I
argue the monument first complicates Wilde’s sexuality, casting doubt on his gay label. Second, the monument reframes Wilde as the practitioner of a proto-queer sensibility. In doing so, the monument marks historical anachronisms and renders Wilde a more resonant figure for contemporary queer audiences.

This essay examines memory strategies of the Obama Administration in the days immediately after the President’s gaffe-laden 2009 oath of office. Inaugurals are significant
legal and symbolic moments in American memory. However, Obama’s gaffe troubled the legal and symbolic memories of the first oath, forcing Obama to retake the oath a second time. In an attempt to modify these rhetorical challenges, I argue
the Obama administration sought to minimize the second oath by refiguring it as a technical memory that concerned only a narrow group of legal experts. In doing so, the administration was able to preserve the symbolic power of the first inaugural oath, while muting questions of presidential investiture.