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Abstract
The authors examine two Time magazine cover images: O.J. Simpson, after his arrest for the murder of Nicole Brown, and Hillary Clinton during the Whitewater controversy, arguing that the Time covers function as a visual rhetoric, invoking myths central to Western culture. The photos naturalize deep, cultural myths which assert that black men and women of all colors are evil, thereby re‐centering white masculinity.
Notes
Greg Dickinson and Karrin Vasby Anderson are assistant professors of rhetoric at Colorado State University. They contributed equally to this essay and wish to thank Karlyn Kohrs Campbell and the Colorado State University Speech Communication writing group, including Eric Aoki, Brian Ott, and Kirsten Pullen, for their contributions to this project. Correspondence to: Greg Dickinson, Department of Speech Communication, 202 Eddy Hall, Colorado State University, Fort Collins, CO 80523, USA. Email: [email protected]
Simpson appeared on the 27 June 1994 cover of Time, and Rodham Clinton was pictured on the 18 March 1996 cover of Time.
Our commentary in this essay is not related to the “actual” guilt or innocence of Simpson and Rodham Clinton in the respective cases. Of course, we acknowledge that the greatest tragedy is the loss of human life. Our discussion of the rhetorical implications of each case is not meant to dismiss the suffering of the victims.
Recent critical work asserts the need to theorize and critically engage white masculinity as a category. The most recent work argues that whiteness and masculinity are overlapping and reinforcing discourses. This work also suggests that white masculinity often figures itself as in crisis and figures white men as vulnerable to attack as a means to justify the constant securing of its borders. As Karen Lee Ashcroft and Lisa Flores argue, current films create a white masculinity that is “embodied by the hardened white man who finds healing in wounds.” Karen Lee Ashcroft and Lisa Flores, “‘Slaves with White Collars’: Persistent Performances of Masculinity in Crisis,” Text and Performance Quarterly 23 (2003): 2. See also Thomas DiPiero, White Men Aren't (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002); and David Savran, Taking it Like a Man: White Masculinity, Masochism, and Contemporary American Culture (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998).
Roland Barthes, Mythologies, trans. Annette Lavers (New York: Hill & Wang, 1972), 122.
Barthes, Mythologies, 129–30. Author's emphasis.
Writing of the signifier/signified/sign relationship in Barthes's semiotic theory, Terence Hawkes says that it is not that one term leads to the other, but that we grasp the “correlation that unites them.” This association creates the sign. Using Barthes's example, a dozen roses is empty as a signifier, nothing but a horticultural fact. Weighted, however, with the definite signified of my intentions and culturally conventionalized codes, roses come to be a sign. This signifier/signified/sign relationship is what might be called first‐order language. Terence Hawkes, Structuralism and Semiotics (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1977), 130.
Barthes, Mythologies, 127.
Barthes, Mythologies, 123.
For example, one could point to Rodham Clinton's election to the US Senate as historical proof that the Time cover did not “harm” her substantially and thus did not signify a “fall.” We might take issue even with that historical claim, but the historical trajectory of Rodham Clinton's or Simpson's lives does not alter our view of how the Time covers function semiotically.
Barthes, Mythologies, 123.
Although we recognize the crucial ways in which Simpson's and Rodham Clinton's story and the covers are historical, we are convinced that these covers serve naturalizing ends (ends that attempt to hide themselves in the alibi of meaning) and so we refuse to accept these images' alibi. Our essay, then, is not about either Simpson or Rodham Clinton in particular or even of the particular meanings of images of Simpson and Rodham Clinton, but rather about the ways their images get caught up in the naturalizing power of myth, a myth that works to assert the centrality of white patriarchy.
Barthes, Mythologies, 143.
Hawkes, 131.
Stephen H. Daniel, Myth and Modern Philosophy (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1990), 10.
See, for example, Robert L. Ivie, “Presidential Motives for War,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 60 (October 1974): 337–45.
Robert L. Ivie, “Cold War Motives and the Rhetorical Metaphor: A Framework of Criticism,” in Martin J. Medhurst, Robert L. Ivie, Philip Wander, and Robert L. Scott, Cold War Rhetoric: Strategy, Metaphor, and Ideology (East Lancing: Michigan State University Press, 1997), 71.
Robert Hariman and John Louis Lucaites, “Performing Civic Identity: The Iconic Photograph of the Flag Raising on Iwo Jima,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 88 (2002): 365. See also John Louis Lucaites and Robert Hariman, “Visual Rhetoric, Photojournalism and Democratic Public Culture,” Rhetoric Review 20 (2001): 37–42; John Louis Lucaites, “Visualizing ‘The People’: Individualism vs. Collectivism in Let Us Now Praise Famous Men,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 83 (1997): 269–88; Kevin Michael DeLuca and Anne Teresa Demo, “Imaging Nature: Watkins, Yosemite, and the Birth of Environmentalism,” Critical Studies in Media Communication 17 (2000): 241–60; Cara Finnegan, “The Naturalistic Enthymeme and Visual Argument: Photographic Representation in the ‘Skull Controversy,’” Argumentation and Advocacy 37 (2001): 133–49; Keith V. Erickson, “Presidential Rhetoric's Visual Turn: Performance Fragments and the Politics of Illusionism,” Communication Monographs 67 (2000): 138–57.
Hariman and Lucaites, “Performing,” 366.
Roland Barthes, “On Photography,” Grain of the Voice: Interviews 1962–1980 (New York: Hill and Wang, 1985), 353; Umberto Eco, Semiotics and the Philosophy of Language (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984), 223–4.
Our claim that the authors were unsatisfied with the unretouched photograph is not premised upon an assumption about authorial intent. Indeed, if the editors were cognizant of their own dissatisfaction, they most likely attributed it to a stylistic preference. Our analysis will show the ways in which the edited photos became more appealing because of their ability to resonate tacitly with larger cultural myths about whiteness, patriarchy, and guilt.
Kenneth Burke, The Philosophy of Literary Form, 3rd edition (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1973), 191.
Time, 27 June 1994: cover; Time, “To Our Readers,” 4 July 1994: 4.
Time, 18 March 1996: cover; Newsweek, “Road to a Subpoena,” 5 February 1996: 33.
Richard Dyer, “White,” Screen 29 (1988): 46.
Barthes, Mythologies, 138.
Thomas K. Nakayama and Robert L. Krizek, “Whiteness: A Strategic Rhetoric,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 81 (1995): 291. This study answers Nakayama and Krizek's call for reflexive examination of whiteness as a strategic rhetoric. We concur with their contention that “the construction of discursive space of whiteness has material effects on the entire social structure and our places in relation to it” 305.
Shawn Michelle Smith argues that United States notions of a “racial type” and the corresponding “white middle class” developed in the nineteenth century in part through photographic practices. Crucial, for Smith, is that the photographic archives created in the nineteenth century asserted that race and character could be read from the face and that the images of race were always dependent on gender. Shawn Michelle Smith, American Archives: Gender, Race, and Class in Visual Culture (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999).
DiPiero, 5; Savran, 8.
A. Cheree Carlson, “‘You Know It When You See It’: The Rhetorical Hierarchy of Race and Gender in Rhinelander V. Rhinelander,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 85 (1999): 113, 125.
DiPero, 13.
DiPiero, 7.
Ronald L. Jackson II, “White Space, White Privilege: Mapping Discursive Inquiry Into the Self,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 85 (1999): 45.
Judith N. Martin, Robert L. Krizek, Thomas K. Nakayama, and Lisa Bradford, “Exploring Whiteness: A Study of Self Labels for White Americans,” Communication Quarterly 44 (1996): 139. For an analysis of the ways whiteness influences audience understandings of popular culture texts, see Naomi R. Rockler, “Race, Whiteness, ‘Lightness,’ and Relevance: African American and European American Interpretations of Jump Start and The Boondocks,” Critical Studies in Media Communication 19 (2002): 398–418.
Peggy McIntosh, “White Privilege and Male Privilege: A Personal Account of Coming to See Correspondences Through Work in Women's Studies,” Wellesley, MA: Center for Research on Women, Wellesley College, 1988.
Sally Robinson, Marked Men: White Masculinity in Crisis (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000), 5–6.
Savran, 5.
For additional discussions of white masculinity in crisis in popular culture, see Susan Faludi, Stiffed: The Betrayal of the American Man (New York: W. Norton, 1999); and Susan Bordo, The Male Body: A New Look at Men in Public and in Private (New York: Farrar, Straus, & Giroux, 1999).
Savran, 5.
For example, Savran in Taking it Like a Man, discusses discourses from a wide range of cultural performances including drama, film, politics, and white supremacist literature, finding across this range of discourses a more or less unified discussion of the white male in crisis. The range is even greater than Savran suggests. Mary Douglas Vavrus argues that television news domesticates patriarchy in stories about “Mr. Mom”; Nick Trujillo shows how discourses surrounding former baseball pitcher Nolan Ryan reinforce hegemonic masculinity; Gordon Stables points to how notions of masculinity were used and reinforced to argue for military intervention in Kosovo. See Mary Douglas Vavrus, “Domesticating Patriarchy: Hegemonic Masculinity and Television's ‘Mr. Mom,’” Critical Studies in Media Communication 19 (2002): 352–75; Nick Trujillo, “Hegemonic Masculinity on the Mound: Media Representations of Nolan Ryan and American Sports Culture,” Critical Studies in Media Communication 8 (1991): 290–308; Gordon Stables, “Justifying Kosovo: Representations of Gendered Violence and US Military Intervention,” Critical Studies in Media Communication 20 (2003): 92–115.
DiPiero, 9.
DiPiero, 10. See also, Bordo, The Male Body, 43.
Thomas Nakayama, “Show/Down Time: ‘Race,’ Gender, Sexuality, and Popular Culture,” Critical Studies in Mass Communication 11 (1994): 162–79. Indeed, even Race Traitor, a journal devoted to unmaking the privileges of whiteness, works, almost in spite of itself, to re‐center whiteness. Lisa A. Flores and Dreema G. Moon, “Rethinking Race, Revealing Dilemmas: Imagining a New Racial Subject in Race Traitor,” Western Journal of Communication 66 (2002): 198.
DiPiero, 12; Nakayama and Krizek, 291; Sarah Projansky and Kent A. Ono, “Strategic Whiteness as Cinematic Racial Politics,” in Whiteness: The Communication of Social Identity, ed. Thomas K. Nakayama (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 1999): 150.
Plato, Phaedrus, trans. W.C. Helbold and W.G. Rabinowitz (New York: Macmillan, 1956), 38.
Michael Osborn, “Archetypal Metaphor in Rhetoric: The Light–Dark Family,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 53 (1967): 115–26.
Plato, 39.
Of course, few following the media coverage of the Simpson case thought explicitly of Plato's dialogue the Phaedrus in making sense of the story. More important is to point to the long and powerful history connecting darkness with evil, and in particular the evils that come from sexual desires.
Richard Dyer argues that white is never identified as itself. All‐American is always already white, and thus any non‐white who becomes all‐American also “transcends” race, leaving behind his “color” for the status of human and American. See also Nakayama and Krizeck.
Focusing on only one incident of the Simpson coverage, we are making an argument that parallels Ann duCille's provocative essay on the ways the media “enraced” Simpson. See Ann duCille, Skin Trade (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996), 136–69. The scholarly literature on the Simpson affair is immense. See, for example, John Fiske, Media Matters: Everyday Culture and Political Change (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994), xiii–xxvii; Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Black Man (New York: Random House, 1997), 103–22; Susan Bordo, Twilight Zones: The Hidden Life of Cultural Images from Plato to O.J. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 66–106; Henry A. Giroux, Channel Surfing: Race Talk and the Destruction of Today's Youth (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1997), 173–90; George Lipsitz, The Possessive Investment in Whiteness: How White People Profit from Identity Politics (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1998), 99–117; Michael Eric Dyson, Race Rules: Navigating the Color Line (New York: Vintage Books, 1997), 10–26; Elizabeth Mari Grabe, “Narratives of Guilt: Television News Magazine Coverage of the O.J. Simpson Criminal Trial,” Howard Journal of Communications 11 (2000): 35–48; and Elizabeth Banks Hindman, “‘Lynch‐Mob Journalism’ vs. ‘Compelling Human Drama’: Editorial Responses to Coverage of the Pretrial Phase of the O.J. Simpson Case,” Journalism and Mass Media Quarterly 76 (1999): 499–515.
This cover photo‐illustration of Simpson is part of a larger visual discourse about Blacks in the United States. Paul Martin Lester, in a content analysis of photographic coverage of African Americans in newspapers over the last century, argues that while total numbers of photographs of African Americans have increased, the representations are resolutely stereotypical. See Paul Martin Lester, “African‐American Photo Coverage in Four US Newspapers, 1937–1990,” Journalism Quarterly 71 (1994): 392. African Americans are consistently represented in one of three ways: as criminals, sports figures, or entertainers. Simpson has the dubious distinction of being represented as sports hero, entertainer in movies and advertisements, and accused criminal.
Publishing the booking photograph necessarily emphasizes the long tradition of media images linking black men and crime, whether those connections are intended.
duCille, 149–51.
A wide range of media studies over the years show that the media consistently represent crime in a racialized manner, and that these representations serve to reinforce racism. For example, see Robert Entman, “Blacks in the News: Television, Modern Racism and Cultural Change,” Journalism Quarterly 69 (1992): 341–61; Herman Gray, “Race Relations as News: Content Analysis,” American Behavioral Scientist 30 (1987): 381–96; Lester; Tali Mendelberg, “Executing Hortons: Racial Crime in the 1988 Presidential Campaign,” Public Opinion Quarterly 61 (1997): 134–57; Mary Beth Oliver, “Portrayals of Crime, Race, and Aggression in ‘Reality‐Based’ Police Shows: A Content Analysis,” Journal of Broadcasting and Electronic Media 38 (1994): 179–92; David Pritchard and Karen D. Hughes, “Patterns of Deviance in Crime News,” Journal of Communication 47 (1997): 49–67. At the same time, mediated messages are interpreted in different ways, to some extent based on group allegiances. In a careful analysis of the “racial divide” on the innocence of Simpson, Neuendorf et al. argue that immediately following the trial and the year after the trial the strongest predictor of judgments of guilt or innocence was whether the respondent identified her/himself as white/non‐white. In fact, the white/non‐white question was a stronger predictor than black/not‐black. Whites overwhelming judged Simpson to be guilty, while those identifying themselves as not‐white, black and as strong supporters of affirmative action—whether white or black—were more likely to judge Simpson as not guilty. Kimberly A. Neuendorf, David Atkin, Leo W. Jeffries, Theresa Loszak and Alicia Williams, “Explorations of the Simpson Trial ‘Racial Divide’,” Howard Journal of Communications 11 (2000): 247–66.
Mendelberg, 151.
See, for example, Lester, 392; Lipsitz, 112.
Of course, the headline “An American Tragedy” is a literary allusion to Theodore Dreiser's novel of the same name. The novel (and the movie A Place in the Sun) dramatizes a distinctly American tragedy in which a poor boy tries to overcome class boundaries and is executed for his attempts. Clyde Griffith's hopes to reach beyond his class lie not so much in hard work, intelligence, or ingenuity, but rather in falling in love with and marrying an upper‐class woman. Even as he pursues this upper‐class woman, he continues his relationship with a poor woman who works with him at his uncle's factory. He impregnates this factory worker, and she demands that he marry her, a demand that blocks Clyde's progress towards his goal. Clyde murders (or does he?) the poor woman, is found guilty for the act and is executed. Clyde's and Simpson's narratives dramatize the dire consequences of pushing against dominant boundaries. Clyde must pay for reaching out of the place assigned him by class; Simpson must pay for reaching out of the place assigned him by class and race. This revised American Tragedy is complex and nearly perfectly structured. Stepping out of the ghettos—coded as both poor and black—Simpson eventually falls.
Lipsitz, 216–7.
Nancy Gibbs, “End of the Run,” Time, 27 June 1994: 32. It may in fact be the case that Simpson's apparent ability to act white is the most threatening maneuver he could make in regards to white masculinity. Simpson's successful performance of white masculinity suggests that white masculinity is a performance that is not inherent in white masculinity itself. Instead, white masculinity must be constantly recreated and protected. We thank one of the anonymous reviewers for this insight.
This telling of the possibilities of Simpson's innocence comes six pages into the article, only after all the material evidence, more importantly the “motivational” evidence of his guilt, had been powerfully presented. To make Simpson's guilt more compelling, the article not only emphasizes Simpson's blackness but also details his sexual infidelities and makes as clear as possible that Brown Simpson was white—introducing her as a “beautiful, blond, 18‐year‐old waitress.” Gibbs, 32. In short, the essay plays on every racialized and sexualized stereotype available to paint Simpson's guilt.
Lipsitz, 211–33.
James R. Gaines, “To Our Readers,” Time 4 July 1994: 4. Emphasis added.
Barthes argues that mythic signification works even if its naturalizing force is called into question, as is the case with Simpson's photo but is not the case with Rodham Clinton. Myth, Barthes claims, works in the quick glance, and its message is read in an instant. The reading of the myth is “exhausted at one stroke.” Barthes, Mythologies, 130.
Gaines, “To Our Readers,” 4.
duCille, 150–1.
Lipsitz, 222.
Nakayama, “Show/Down Time,” 163.
The Holy Bible, New International Version (Grand Rapids: Zondervan Bible Publishers, 1984), 4. Our discussion of how the Genesis account has been appropriated as Western mythology is not meant to suggest that this popular interpretation of Genesis 3 is theologically sound. Biblical texts, like other texts, are polysemous. Indeed, Carolyn Merchant observes that the Genesis 3 account can be read as a story of partnership (between man and woman) and stewardship (of nature) instead of the more popular interpretation of it as a story of dominance (of man over woman) and dominion (of man over nature). See Carolyn Merchant, Reinventing Eden: The Fate of Nature in Western Culture (New York: Taylor & Francis, 2003), 23–25. In addition, Angela West argues that theologians and feminists have misinterpreted the role of women in both sin and redemption. She argues for a perspective that draws together the insights of Christianity and feminist critique in productive harmony. See Angela West, Deadly Innocence: Feminist Theology and the Mythology of Sin (London: Cassell, 1995). For an analysis of the myriad ways in which Biblical narratives are appropriated, for both feminist and anti‐feminist purposes, see Susan Zaeske, “Unveiling Esther as a Pragmatic Radical Rhetoric,” Philosophy and Rhetoric 33 (2000): 193–220. It is tempting to assume that Eve's narrative as appropriated needs Adam. In fact, Eve is more dependent semiotically on Mary than on Adam. Eve and Mary represent the two poles possible for representations of women in Western culture, figuring women as either essentially flawed temptresses or as impossibly pure. See John Gatta, American Madonna: Images of the Divine Woman in American Literary Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 13–14; Merchant, 50–56; West, xii–xiv, 208–15.
Merchant, 2.
Merchant, 12.
West, xiii.
For background on the Clinton scandals, see Joseph R. Blaney, William L. Benoit, and Frances A. Bentzen, The Clinton Scandals and the Politics of Image Restoration (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2001); and Robert N. Roberts and Marion T. Doss, Jr., From Watergate to Whitewater: The Public Integrity War (Westport, CT: Praeger, 1997), 149–75.
Joshua Gamson, “Jessica Hahn, Media Whore: Sex Scandals and Female Publicity,” Critical Studies in Media Communication 18 (2001): 158.
Shawn Parry‐Giles, “Mediating Hillary Rodham Clinton: Television News Practices and Image‐Making in the Postmodern Age,” Critical Studies in Media Communication 17 (2000): 205–26.
Gloria Borger, “Why the Secrecy about Whitewater?” US News & World Report 24 January 1994: 30, http://web.lexis‐nexis.com/univers (accessed 30 January 1998).
Michael Isikoff and Mark Hosenball, “Cracks in the Wall,” Newsweek 15 January 1995: 28, http://web.lexis‐nexis.com/univers (accessed 30 January 1998).
Karrin Vasby Anderson, “‘Rhymes with Rich’: ‘Bitch’ as a Tool of Containment in Contemporary American Politics,” Rhetoric and Public Affairs 2 (1999): 599–623.
Stephen J. Hedges et al., “Under the Microscope,” US News and World Report, 24 January 1994: 26. http://web.lexis‐nexis.com/univers (accessed 30 January 1998).
Bill Turque, “The Unsinkable Scandal,” Newsweek, 21 March 1994: 30, http://web.lexis‐nexis.com/univers (accessed 30 January 1998).
Charles R. Babcock and Susan Schmidt, “Records Show Wider Role for Hillary Clinton; Whitewater Papers Detail Involvement,” Washington Post, 13 April 1994: A1, http://web.lexis‐nexis.com/univers (accessed 7 February 1998).
“Correction,” Newsweek, 11 April 1994, http://web.lexis‐nexis.com/univers (accessed 7 February 1998).
Borger, 30.
Eleanor Clift, “Hillary: ‘I Made Mistakes,’” Newsweek, 21 March 1994: 35, http://web.lexis‐nexis.com/univers (accessed 30 January 1998).
Elizabeth Kilbert, “There Was Nothing to be Seen But Coverage Was Extensive,” New York Times, 27 January 1996: section 1, p. 9, http://web.lexis‐nexis.com/univers (accessed 30 January 1998).
R.H. Melton, “Putting the Blame on Hillary,” Washington Post National Weekly Edition, 1–7 April 1996: 37.
Melton, 37.
Isikoff and Hosenball, 28–9.
Time, 18 March 1996: 4.
Colleen Elizabeth Kelley, The Rhetoric of First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton: Crisis Management Discourse (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2001), 224–7.
David Maraniss, “First Lady of Paradox; After Two Years, Hillary Clinton is Defined by Contradictory Perceptions,” Washington Post, 15 January 1995: A1, http://web.lexis‐nexis.com/univers (accessed 7 February 1998).
Maraniss, “First Lady of Paradox,” A1.
Francis X. Clines, “State of the Union: The Scene—Capitol Sketchbook; First Lady Finds Herself Center Stage in a Subplot,” New York Times, 24 January 1996: A13, http://web.lexis‐nexis.com/univers (accessed 30 January 1998).
Terence Hunt, “The Clintons: He's Hot; She's Not,” The Associated Press, 27 January 1996, http://web.lexis‐nexis.com/univers (accessed 7 February 1998).
See, for example, Karlyn Kohrs Campbell, “The Discursive Performance of Femininity: Hating Hillary,” Rhetoric and Public Affairs 1 (1998): 1–19; Karlyn Kohrs Campbell, “Shadowboxing with Stereotypes: The Press, the Public, and the Candidates' Wives,” research paper R‐9, President and Fellows of Harvard College, 1993: 1–19; Kathleen Hall Jamieson, Beyond the Double Bind: Women and Leadership (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995); and Patricia A. Sullivan and Lynn H. Turner, From the Margins to the Center: Contemporary Women and Political Communication (Westport, CT: Praeger, 1996), chapter 4.
Barthes, Mythologies, 138.
Likewise, Barthes argues that the bourgeoisie is the center of French society precisely through the ways it infiltrates everyday life. He writes: “This anonymity of the bourgeoisie becomes even more marked when one passes from bourgeois culture proper to its derived, vulgarized and applied forms, to what one would call public philosophy, that which sustains everyday life, civil ceremonials, secular rites, in short the unwritten norms of interrelationships in a bourgeois society. It is an illusion to reduce the dominant culture to its inventive core: there is a bourgeois culture which consists of consumption alone. The whole of France is steeped in the anonymous ideology: our press, our films, our theatre, our pulp literature, our rituals, our Justice, our diplomacy, our conversations, our remarks about the weather, a murder trial, a touching wedding, the cooking we dream of, the garments we wear, everything, in everyday life, is dependent on the representation which the bourgeoisie has and makes us have of the relations between man and the world.” Barthes, Mythologies, 140.
Hawkes, 131.