Citizenship, Gender, and Intimacy: First Ladies in the Television Age

Abstract

The figure of the first lady of the United States (FLOTUS) initially gained visibility thanks to the media technologies of the industrial age, but in the TV era this visibility exploded, and with it came a stark intensification of the potential for intimate connection between figures at the highest levels of national governance and citizen subjects watching at home. In the same years that broadcast television was at the height of its power, neoliberalism and post-identity politics were on the rise, and worked to refigure definitions of citizenship to be more concerned with the health and prosperity of individuals and families, and less concerned with collective struggle against structures of injustice. For women, this privatized and atomized regime of intimate citizenship fit with the contours of traditional femininity, even as they were being updated to reflect postfeminist imperatives that called women to engage in civic and economic life while still maintaining the primacy of their commitments to home and family. FLOTUS TV became an essential technology of citizenship for women viewer/voters working through these ever-more complex formulations of ideal femininity. This project traces both real and fictional representations of first ladies on television from the inception of the medium in the 1950s, to the declining hegemony of broadcast and cable in the 2010s, to demonstrate how the heightened visibility of first ladies made FLOTUS TV a site of both instruction and debate over definitions of femininity and citizenship that were increasingly narrow, frequently contradictory, and did little to pose substantial challenges to structures of injustice. Ultimately, these apolitical politics of intimate citizenship seem to have worked to (partially) defuse progressive and feminist challenges to power, and disciplined the ambitions of women who wished to rule.