In the excitment of our launch here this week, I–oops!–forgot to post my own column, XY FILES (myths and facts about a new generation of men). So here we go…
Remember all that stereotyped talk during the primaries about how Barack leads like a woman (meaning, collaboratively) and Hillary leads like a man (meaning, I suppose, pantsuits)? In a Boston Globe column last Feburary, Ellen Goodman described Barack as “the quality circle man, the uniter-not-divider, the person who believes we can talk to anyone, even our enemies.” He finely honed a language “usually associated with women’s voices,” she said. Goodman quoted political science professor Kathleen Dolan, who saw Obama as “the embodiment of the gentle, collaborative style without threatening his masculine side.”
Well now that it’s Obama vs. McCain, the gender of leadership has become, well, a little homogenized. It’s dude v. dude. Again. And one of my newfound heroes Jackson Katz (educator, author, filmmaker, bigtime FOF — that’s friend of feminism, mind you) is currently working on a book about “presidential masculinityâ€Â that I can’t wait to read.
According to an article in UCSF Today, Katz says this election is nothing new when it comes to the important role that race and gender have historically played in campaigns for the White House.  While the level of diversity among this year’s crop of candidates is of course unprecedented, Katz suggests that the battle between the two presidential contenders still boils down to a question of who best represents the stereotypically masculine qualities of a leader: strength, steadfastness and vitality.
“This year, it’s still about masculinity,†he says. “It’s just white masculinity versus person-of-color masculinity.â€
Or is it? Isn’t the Hillary/Sarah effect (ew – I hate putting them so close together like that) still having an impact on the way we talk about leadership’s gender these days?  GWP readers J.K. Gayle and Renee Cramer had some interesting comments on this all back in February, when HRC was still in the race. I’d love to pick up the thread again, now that the debates are all black man vs. white man. Read the rest from Katz, and let me know what you think!
Comments
Virginia — October 11, 2008
Great topic, Debbie. My FSC colleague Lisa Eck studies hybridity and postcolonial literature: at the gym the other day, she was noting that in our public discourse we don't have much language to talk about "hybrid" status (multi-cultural, multi-racial, multi-ethnic). Obama=black candidate, McCain=white candidate is how it goes. We don't know how to listen, observe, or theorize (eek!) about hybridity. So as I was thinking about what you, and Jackson, and Ellen Goodman, and others have been talking about, I thought, wow, Obama offers a kind of hybrid gender performance, and it is working damn well!
Obama isn't hepped up on cartoon masculinity like McCain...and yet it doesn't make sense to think of hm as using "feminine" styles in any definitive or exclusive sense. (For cartoon femininity, see Palin, Sarah.) Finally, he certainly is not androgynous in that misfit, uncomfortable "Pat" sense (remember, Pat on Saturday Night Live? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pat_(Saturday_Night_Live)). But he his repertoire is wide, and he is using all sorts of masculine and feminine skills that are working well.
Maybe with the rise of Obama (and other leaders like him?!?!?) we will have the opportunity to sharpen our language to notice how the plot unfolds when we are observing a candidate who contains, is directly influenced by, multiple statuses all at once. And that goes for race as well as gender.
One way that I think about Obama's apparently successful gender expression comes from social psychology. Research on masculinity and femininity shows that children who are androgynous--that is they use skills that are typically associated with being a boy and those associated with being a girl--have greater social intelligence. They are more effective socially, better liked, more accomplished, and more appealing as partners. Read here: http://goliath.ecnext.com/coms2/gi_0199-1225686/Androgyny-gender-role-behavior-and.html.
Girl with Pen » Blog Archive » Hey, XY Files: Masculinity…or something else? — October 11, 2008
[...] on Oct 11th, 2008 2008 Oct 11 Debbie’s post on presidential masculinity in the XY Files got me thinking. My FSC colleague Lisa Eck studies hybridity and postcolonial literature: at the [...]
J. K. Gayle — October 17, 2008
Thanks for bringing this up!, and Virginia's comment is insightful as usual! Makes me think about why Obama's so likeable.