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On the centennial the #19thAmendment 
’s ratification I make this observation: Michelle Obama performs politics in exactly the way many politically powerful women have, including notable suffragists—by using our gendered ideas of politics to claim a space that is “not politics.” https://twitter.com/reuters/status/1295642904782942209
’s ratification I make this observation: Michelle Obama performs politics in exactly the way many politically powerful women have, including notable suffragists—by using our gendered ideas of politics to claim a space that is “not politics.” https://twitter.com/reuters/status/1295642904782942209
Obama’s speech drew on a cultivated persona of “hating politics.” Part of why that rings true(ish) despite her location as a fixture in Democratic Party politics is her lean into femininity as oppositional to the “masculine” realm of politics. Not new: https://twitter.com/cmmcconnaughy/status/1290666000896143360?s=21 https://twitter.com/cmmcconnaughy/status/1290666000896143360
It’s not only not new, it is a tool designed to reach for a non-partisan read of politics that would otherwise be read as partisan **exactly because** it is known that the political goal at hand requires less partisanship, not more. A broader coalition. A pulling together.
As Obama herself said in the speech, this is a strategy complicated for her by her race—by the way being Black reads as being partisan. She pushes right back against that, though, with intimacy and motherhood themes:
