Containing Sotomayor: Rhetorics of personal restraint, judicial prudence, and diabetes management

ABSTRACT

This essay explores how rhetorics of diabetes management informed Sonia Sotomayor’s judicial persona during her ascent to the Supreme Court. Sotomayor’s confirmation hearings were clouded famously by institutional racism and sexism. She was accused repeatedly by congressional Republicans of being intemperate, emotional, and illogical in a judicial sphere that prizes circumspection, deliberateness, and collegiality. As part of a larger strategy to counter such claims, the Obama administration forwarded her lifetime of managing type-one diabetes as proof of personal control, and by extension judicial prudence. This strategic invocation of intersectionality, using a disability to rhetorically “contain” race and gender, helped to successfully resituate universal notions of wisdom and secure Sotomayor a seat on the nation’s highest court.

KEYWORDS:

• Intersectionality
• judicial confirmations
• disability studies
• chronic conditions
• health and medicine

Acknowledgment

The author is grateful to Isaac West, Suzanne Enck, and Mary Stuckey for their generous feedback. Thanks also to Dominic Manthey for his editorial assistance.

Notes

1. Jeffrey Rosen, “The Case Against Sotomayor,” The New Republic, May 4, 2009. https://newrepublic.com/article/60740/the-case-against-sotomayor; John Derbyshire, “Essentialist Jurisprudence,” The National Review Online, May 4, 2009. https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/essentialist-jurisprudence-john-derbyshire/.

2. The most famous version of the speech was given at a 2001 memorial lecture for the University of California, Berkeley, School of Law. See Sonia Sotomayor, “A Latina Judge’s Voice,” Berkeley La Raza Law Journal 13, no. 1 (2002): 87–93. http://scholarship.law.berkeley.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1108&context=blrlj.

3. Peter Baker and Jeff Zeleny, “Obama Hails Judge as ‘Inspiring’,” New York Times, May 26, 2009. http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/27/us/politics/27court.html.

4. See Rosen, “The Case Against Sotomayor”; Derbyshire, “Essentialist Jurisprudence.”

5. Karen Tumulty, “Sonia Sotomayor and Type-1 Diabetes,” Time, May 27, 2009, http://swampland.time.com/2009/05/27/sonia-sotomayor-and-type-i-diabetes/.

6. As the National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases (NIDDK) points out, “People will have different A1C targets depending on their diabetes history and their general health.” See, “The A1C Test and Diabetes,” September 2014, https://www.niddk.nih.gov/health-information/diabetes/diagnosis-diabetes-prediabetes/a1c-test.

7. Linda Martín Alcoff, “Sotomayor’s Reasoning,” The Southern Journal of Philosophy 48, no. 1 (2010): 122–38; José Esteban Muñoz, “Wise Latinas,” Criticism 56, no. 2 (2014): 249–65.

8. Lisa A. Flores, “Between Abundance and Marginalization: The Imperative of Racial Rhetorical Criticism,” Review of Communication 16, no. 1 (2016): 13.

9. Josue David Cisneros, The Border Crossed Us: Rhetorics of Borders, Citizenship, and Latina/o Identity (Tuscaloosa, AL: University of Alabama Press, 2013), 146.

10. W. J. T. Mitchell, “Seeing Disability,” Public Culture 13, no. 3 (2001): 395.

11. On diabetes and personal agency, see Lora Arduser, Living Chronic: Agency and Expertise in the Rhetoric of Diabetes (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2017).

12. Amy Borovoy and Janet Hine, “Managing the Unmanageable: Elderly Russian Jewish Émigrés and the Biomedical Culture of Diabetes Care,” Medical Anthropology Quarterly 22, no. 1 (2008): 10.

13. Lisa Duggan, in “Proliferating Cripistemologies: A Virtual Roundtable,” eds. Robert McRuer and Merri Lisa Johnson, Journal of Literary and Cultural Disability Studies 8, no. 2 (2014): 166. Emphasis in original.

14. See, Cassandra Jackson, “Visualizing Slavery: Photography and the Disabled Subject in the Art of Carrie Mae Weems,” in Blackness and Disability: Critical Examinations and Cultural Interventions, ed. Christopher M. Bell (East Lansing, MI: Michigan State University Press, 2011), 31–46; Sharon L. Snyder and David T. Mitchell, Cultural Locations of Disability (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006); Ellen Samuels, Fantasies of Identification: Disability, Gender, Race (New York: New York University Press, 2014).

15. See Chris Bell, “Introduction: Doing Representational Detective Work,” in Blackness and Disability: Critical Examinations and Cultural Interventions, ed. Chris Bell (East Lansing, MI: Michigan State University Press, 2011), 1–2.

16. Subini Ancy Annamma, David Connor, and Beth Ferri, “Dis/Ability Critical Race Studies (DisCrit): Theorizing at the Intersection of Race and Dis/ability,” Race Ethnicity and Education 16, no. 1 (2013): 1–31; “Proliferating Cripistemologies: A Virtual Roundtable,” ed. Robert McRuer and Merri Lisa Johnson, Journal of Literary and Cultural Disability Studies 8, no. 2 (2014): 149–69.

17. Karma R. Chávez and Cindy L. Griffin, “Introduction: Standing at the Intersections of Feminisms, Intersectionality, and Communication Studies,” in Standing in the Intersection: Feminist Voices, Feminist Practices in Communication Studies, eds. Chávez and Griffin (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2012), 2.

18. Chávez and Griffin, “Introduction,” 8.

19. Sara L. McKinnon, “Essentialism, Intersectionality and Recognition: A Feminist Rhetorical Approach to the Audience,” Standing in the Intersection, 190.

20. McKinnon, “Essentialism, Intersectionality, and Recognition,” 192.

21. Bonnie J. Dow, “Authority, Invention, and Context in Feminist Rhetorical Criticism,” Review of Communication 16, no. 1 (2016): 60–76.

22. Dow, “Authority, Invention, and Context in Feminist Rhetorical Criticism,” 66.

23. Leslie A. Hahner, “Constitutive Intersectionality and the Affect of Rhetorical Form,” Standing in the Intersection, 155.

24. Hahner, “Constitutive Intersectionality,” 147.

25. Troy Duster, Backdoor to Eugenics (New York: Routledge, 1990).

26. See Helene A. Shugart, Heavy: The Obesity Crisis in Cultural Context (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016), 80–2; Arleen Marcia Tuchman, “Diabetes and Race: A Historical Perspective,” American Journal of Public Health 101, no. 1 (2011): 24–33.

27. Gloria E. Anzaldúa, Light in the Dark/Luz en lo Oscuro: Rewriting Identity, Spirituality, Reality, ed. AnaLouise Keating (Durham, NC: Duke University Press Books, 2015); see also, Suzanne Bost, Encarnación: Illness and Body Politics in Chicana Feminist Literature (New York: Fordham University Press, 2010), 15; AnaLouise Keating, “‘Working toward Wholeness:’ Gloria Anzaldúa’s Struggles to Live with Diabetes and Chronic Illness,” in Speaking from the Body: Latinas on Health and Culture, eds. Angie Chabram-Dernerseian and Adela de la Torre (Tucson, AZ: University of Arizona Press, 2008), 133–43.

28. The Sotomayor case may strike some as especially ironic considering the ways the legal system has consistently prohibited appeals based on multiple identity categories. See Isaac West, Transforming Citizenships: Transgender Articulations of the Law (New York: New York University Press, 2014), 110.

29. Carolyn Nielsen, “Wise Latina: Framing Sonia Sotomayor in the General-Market and Latina/o-Oriented Prestige Press,” The Howard Journal of Communications 24, no. 2 (2013): 124.

30. Rosen, “Case Against Sotomayor.”

31. Rosen, “Case Against Sotomayor.”

32. Ta-Nehisi Coates, “The Meme Builds More,” The Atlantic, May 6, 2009, http://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2009/05/the-meme-builds-more/17170/. Emphasis in original.

33. Amy Goldstein and Jerry Markon, “Sotomayor Has Said Gender and Ethnicity ‘Make a Difference’ in Judging,” Washington Post, May 27, 2009, http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/05/26/AR2009052600914.html.

34. Sam Stein, “Sotomayor’s Medical History Sparks Wider Debate,” The Huffington Post, May 13, 2009, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/05/13/sotomayors-medical-histor_n_203032.html.

35. Stein, “Sotomayor’s Medical History.”

36. On the articulation of “excess” and racialized bodies see Kathleen LeBesco, Reovlting Bodies?: The Struggle to Redefine Fat Identity (Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 2004), 54–64; Shugart, Heavy, 66–87.

37. Joseph Shapiro, “Diabetes: Is It an Issue For The Supreme Court?,” All Things Considered, National Public Radio, May 27, 2009, http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=104609655.

38. Tom Watkins, “Sotomayor’s Diabetes: ‘She Overcomes it Every Day,’” CNN.com, May 27, 2009, http://www.cnn.com/2009/HEALTH/05/27/sotomayor.diabetes/index.html

39. Denise Grady, “Health Spotlight Is on Diabetes, Its Control and Its Complications,” New York Times, May 26, 2009, https://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/27/health/27diabetes.html.

40. Baker and Zeleny, “Obama Chooses Hispanic Judge for Supreme Court Seat.”

41. Michael Sauland and Larry McShane, “Like All of Her Life Hurdles, Sonia Sotomayor Shrugs Off Diabetes,” New York Daily News, May 26, 2009, http://www.nydailynews.com/news/politics/life-hurdles-sonia-sotomayor-shrugs-diabetes-article-1.410044.

42. Michael Powell and Serge Kovaleski, “Sotomayor Rose on Merit Alone, Her Allies Say,” New York Times, June 4, 2009, https://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/05/us/politics/05judge.html.

43. Sheryl Gay Stolberg, “Court Nominee Manages Diabetes with Discipline,” New York Times, July 9, 2009, https://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/10/us/politics/10diabetes.html.

44. Powell and Kovaleski, “Without Favors.”

45. Stolberg, “Court Nominee Manages Diabetes with Discipline.”

46. Powell and Kovaleski, “Without Favors.”

47. Goldstein and Markon, “Sotomayor Has Said Gender and Ethnicity ‘Make a Difference’ in Judging.”

48. For more on Latino activism see Darrel Wanzer-Serrano, The New York Young Lords and the Struggle for Liberation (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2015).

49. Ellis Cose, “Affirmative Action and Sotomayor’s Critics,” Newsweek, May 29, 2009, http://www.newsweek.com/cose-affirmative-action-and-sotomayors-critics-80217.

50. Benjamin Weiser, “Sotomayor’s Recusals Suggest Impartiality,” New York Times, July 1, 2009, https://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/02/us/politics/02recuse.html.

51. Weiser, “Sotomayor’s Recusals.”

52. Erin C. Tarver, “New Forms of Subjectivity: Theorizing the Relational Self with Foucault and Alcoff,” Hypatia 26, no. 4 (2011): 808.

53. On the history of Supreme Court hearings see, Trevor Parry-Giles, The Character of Justice: Rhetoric, Law, and Politics in the Supreme Court Confirmation Process (East Lansing, MI: Michigan State University Press, 2006).

54. Udi Sommer, “Representative Appointments: The Effect of Women’s Groups in Contentious Supreme Court Confirmations,” Journal of Women, Politics & Policy 34, no. 1 (2013): 1–22.

55. See Sylvia Manzano and Joseph D. Ura, “Desperately Seeking Sonia? Latino Heterogeneity and Geographic Variation in Web Searches for Judge Sonia Sotomayor,” Political Communication 30, no. 1 (2013): 81–99; Guy- Uriel Charles, Daniel L. Chen, and Mitu Gulati, “Sonia Sotomayor and the Construction of Merit,” Emory Law Journal 61, no. 4 (2012): 801–61.

56. U.S. Congress, Senate, Committee on the Judiciary, Confirmation Hearing on the Nomination of Sonia Sotomayor, to be an Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States, 111th Congress, 1st sess., 2009, 42 (statement of Sen Dick Durbin).

57. U.S. Congress, Senate, Sotomayor Confirmation, 541 (statement of Theodore Shaw).

58. U.S. Congress, Senate, Sotomayor Confirmation, 348 (statement of Sen. Tom Coburn). The official testimony reads, “You will have lots of explaining to do.”

59. U.S. Congress, Senate, Sotomayor Confirmation, 26; 137 (statement of Sen. Lindsay Graham).

60. U.S. Congress, Senate, Sotomayor Confirmation, 120 (statement of Sen. Jon Kyl).

61. U.S. Congress, Senate, Sotomayor Confirmation, 13 (statement of Sen Orrin Hatch); 26, (statement of Sen. Lindsay Graham); 101 (statement of Sen. Jeff Sessions).

62. Sumi Cho, Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw, and Leslie McCall, “Toward a Field of Intersectionality Studies: Theory, Applications, and Praxis,” Signs 38, no. 4 (2013): 789.

63. U.S. Congress, Senate, Sotomayor Confirmation, 388 (statement of Sen. Patrick Leahy).

64. U.S. Congress, Senate, Sotomayor Confirmation, 35 (statement of Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse).

65. U.S. Congress, Senate, Sotomayor Confirmation, 37 (statement of Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse).

66. Muñoz, “Wise Latinas,” 251.

67. U.S. Congress, Senate, Sotomayor Confirmation, 142 (statement of Hon. Sonia Sotomayor).

68. U.S. Congress, Senate, Sotomayor Confirmation, 377 (statement of Hon. Sonia Sotomayor).

69. U.S. Congress, Senate, Sotomayor Confirmation, 359 (statement of Hon. Sonia Sotomayor). Emphasis mine.

70. U.S. Congress, Senate, Sotomayor Confirmation, 359 (statement of Hon. Sonia Sotomayor).

71. U.S. Congress, Senate, Sotomayor Confirmation, 71 (statement of Hon. Sonia Sotomayor).

72. U.S. Congress, Senate, Sotomayor Confirmation, 327 (statement of Hon. Sonia Sotomayor).

73. Terry A. Maroney, “Angry Judges,” Vanderbilt Law Review 65, no. 5 (2012): 1215.

74. Michael Doyle and David Lightman, “What has Sotomayor Revealed? Self-Control,” St. Paul Pioneer Press, July 15, 2009, https://www.twincities.com/2009/07/15/what-has-sotomayor-revealed-self-control/.

75. See the conversation between the Washington Post’s Dana Milbank and NPR’s Steve Inskeep, “Senators Share Spotlight with Sotomayor,” Morning Edition, July 15, 2009, https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=106632644.

76. Ann Gerhart, “Sotomayor Warms the Hearing Room with a Confident Touch,” Washington Post, July 15, 2009, http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/07/14/AR2009071403171.html.

77. Sheryl Gay Stolberg, “Sotomayor Leaves Passion Behind,’” New York Times, July 14, 2009, https://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/15/us/politics/15judge.html.

78. Charlie Savage, “A Nominee on Display, but Not Her Views,” New York Times, July 16, 2009, https://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/17/us/politics/17assess.html.

79. Philadelphia Inquirer, “Editorial: A Vote for Sotomayor,” July 17, 2009, http://www.philly.com/philly/blogs/inq_ed_board/A_vote_for_Judge_Sotomayor.html; Michael Goodwin, “Senators, Just Give Sotomayor Her Robe Already,” New York Daily News, July 14, 2009, http://www.nydailynews.com/opinion/senators-give-sotomayor-robe-article-1.429139; Christine M. Flowers, “The Unswoon-worthy Latino,” The Philadelphia Daily News, July 17, 2009, 21.

80. Savage, “A Nominee on Display.”

81. Savage, “A Nominee on Display.”

82. Sonia Sotomayor, My Beloved World (New York: Vintage Books, 2013), 5.

83. Sotomayor, My Beloved World, 350.

84. Sotomayor, My Beloved World, 98.

85. Sotomayor, My Beloved World, 186.

86. Sotomayor, My Beloved World, 186.

87. Sotomayor, My Beloved World, 222–3.

88. Sotomayor, My Beloved World, 353.

89. Sotomayor, My Beloved World, 126.

90. Sara Sklaroff, “Meeting the Challenge of Diabetes,” Washington Post, June 2, 2009, http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/06/01/AR2009060102882.html.

91. Charles E. Morris III, “Pink Herring and the Fourth Persona: J. Edgar Hoover’s Sex Crime Panic,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 88, no. 2 (2002): 228–44.

92. Muñoz, “Wise Latinas,” 251.

93. Muñoz, “Wise Latinas,” 256.

94. Tarver, “New Forms of Subjectivity,” 808.

95. New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene, “Epi Data Brief,” April 2013, 1, https://www1.nyc.gov/assets/doh/downloads/pdf/epi/databrief26.pdf.