Visualizing Power: Michelle Obama, Political Communication, and Lifestyle Magazines

ABSTRACT

Michelle Obama’s tenure as the First Lady of the United States (FLOTUS) comported with many of the gendered expectations of the position, yet it also marked a significant symbolic transformation in the role. As FLOTUS, Obama’s work to address childhood obesity and promote access to nutritious foods through Let’s Move! and MyPlate defined her political identity. On its face, this work echoed the gendered policy issues embraced by previous first ladies; however, we argue that First Lady Obama strategically chose to center a coordinated set of symbolically laden, food-related, and domestic-imagery tropes in mass media publications in order to leverage political influence from within the confines of the feminized role of the FLOTUS. To test this claim, we perform visual content analysis on images embedded in women’s lifestyle magazines. We find that central to her calculated approach was the keen awareness of the symbolic power of domesticized imagery as a vehicle for legible, quickly comprehensible, and, above all else, universally appealing messaging. Thus, to promote her food policy platform and target the public health issue of childhood obesity, the FLOTUS intentionally deployed motifs of food as domestic imagery, which thereby acted as a “velvet glove” tactic to politicking.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

¹ The top ten women’s lifestyle magazine titles from their ranking in 2011 were Better Homes and Gardens; Good Housekeeping; Woman’s Day; Family Circle; Ladies’ Home Journal; Cosmopolitan; O, The Oprah Magazine; Redbook; Real Simple; and InStyle.

² The top 30 women’s lifestyle magazine titles from their ranking in November 22, 2019, were Cosmopolitan; Vogue; Elle; Women’s Health; Harper’s Bazaar; Vanity Fair; InStyle; Real Simple; O, The Oprah Magazine; Allure; Women’s Day; People; Teen Vogue; Redbook; Shape; Seventeen; Health; First for Women; Lucky; Prevention; Family Circle; Woman’s World; All You; Parenting; Martha Stewart Living; More; People StyleWatch; Nylon; and Us Weekly.

³ The majority of the images printed in black and white appear to have been presented as such for aesthetic impact.

⁴ Some magazine titles only had one issue selected based on our sampling criteria, while others had several. Since these magazines all fell under the umbrella of women’s lifestyle magazines, they reflect an unbiased sampling of the extant corpus of these media artifacts that bore imagery of the FLOTUS Obama.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Amber C. Tierney

Amber C. Tierney is an assistant professor of sociology at Lake Tahoe Community College. She earned her PhD in sociology from the University of California, Irvine. Her work on the intersection of political activism, media, and policy change has appeared in Mobilization; Research in Social Movements, Conflict, and Change; Sociology Compass; and in edited volumes and was presented at the annual meetings of the American Sociological Association, the Association for the Study of Food and Society, and the Society for the Study of Social Problems.

Lauren Freese

Lauren Freese is an assistant professor of art history at the University of South Dakota. She earned her PhD in American art history from the University of Iowa. Her work on the intersection of food and popular culture has appeared in Panorama: Journal of the Association of Historians of American Art and Word & Image. She has presented this scholarship at the annual meetings of the College Art Association, Association for the Study of Food and Society, and the Eighteenth-Century Studies Association.