How did that heavily anthologized story, written by Alice Walker “for your grandmamma,” provoke the thought and discussion of Sarah Palin?
I don’t know… but it keeps happening.
It’s not enough for Sarah Palin to be the punchline of jokes on “The Daily Show” or to grin at me from the cover of People magazine while I buy toiletries at Target. It’s not enough for her name to be the attractive news link or the subject of an email forward. This is a different kind of invasion. Thinking about Sarah Palin means thinking about the American mythology of the family and about the way we use language to build women.
During my class’ discussion of Alice Walker’s “Everyday Use,” we tried to sort through a couple of variations on feminism. If the second wave was concerned with battling sexism, then womanism focused on an appreciation of women’s culture as well as the oppression that women of color face. In the language of womanism, woman translates to strength–of body and of will. There is no delicacy of womanhood in “Everyday Use”; the narrator is “a large, big-boned woman with rough, man-working hands” who “wear[s] flannel nightgowns to bed and overalls during the day” and can “kill and clean a hog as mercilessly as a man.”
How impressive and how empowering–and how odd that this language is now part of Sarah Palin’s persona. She’s a moose hunter, a “barracuda.” This language is odd because–from where I’m sitting anyway–the perfectly coiffed vice-presidential candidate has little in common with the poor, black narrator of Alice Walker’s story.
That is, the language version of Sarah Palin stretches to include the myth of the Supermom. I gave a different class the task of analyzing family roles in an episode of “Father Knows Best.” Margaret Anderson, television mother extraordinaire, does housework in every scene while wearing a clean dress and pumps. Her three children take turns being messy, lazy, and clever about their messiness and laziness, but she continues to work cheerfully.
How impressive and how intimidating–and how odd that this, too, is Sarah Palin. She made this joke: What’s the difference between a pit bull and a hockey mom? Lipstick. That is the rhetoric of the Supermom: she is tenacious and tender, hard-working and sweet-smelling.
In “One is Not Born a Woman,” Monique Wittig writes women have been “ideologically rebuilt into a ‘natural group'” and that this ideology is strong enough to manipulate women’s minds and bodies. Womanhood, in all its forms, is a construction, a collection of conflicting definitions.
And when I think of Sarah Palin, I picture a convergence of those conflicting definitions. The image isn’t necessarily frightening, but I also can’t help thinking about what would happen if we untangle the language of politics, history, and womanhood. What kind of Sarah Palin would we find then? And how would we talk and think about her?