Avant-Garde Militarism and a Post-Hip-Hop President

Abstract

Feminist global politics scholars have long investigated militarized masculinities to demonstrate the toxic and mutually constitutive relationship between war, militarism and masculinity. This article investigates this relationship in the political sphere by analysing the embodiment, performance and construction of presidential masculinities. In particular, I compare and contrast the presidential masculinities of George W. Bush and Barack Obama. Through a multimodal discursive analysis of online presidential photo galleries, I demonstrate that Obama has recast US presidential and African American masculinities in contradictory but significant ways. I argue that Obama constructs and performs a hybrid presidential masculinity that is contemporary, demilitarized and characterized by a post-hip-hop ghetto-style cool. This presidential masculinity and the avant-garde militarism that accompanies it stands in stark contrast to Bush and cleverly camouflages, even reinvigorates, ongoing US militarism across the globe. After all, Obama further institutionalized the ‘War on Terror’, but has a Nobel Peace Prize amongst his accolades. Throughout, I elucidate the concept of presidential masculinities, noting their relationship to hegemonic masculinities. I conclude that Obama's hybrid presidential masculinity may very well be a more sophisticated deployment and embodiment of US hegemonic masculinity in the twenty-first century.

Keywords:

• Barack Obama
• war on terror
• presidential masculinity
• hegemonic masculinity
• militarized masculinities
• militarism

Notes on contributor

Emma Cannen is a PhD candidate in the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences at the University of Technology Sydney, where she has taught courses in global politics, international studies, gender studies and sociology. Her thesis, Investigating US and Venezuelan Presidential Masculinities in the First Decade of the ‘War on Terror’, looks at the presidential masculinities of George W. Bush, Barack Obama and Hugo Chávez and their relationship to militarism and geopolitics in the region. She also researches Indonesian and Australian militarized masculinities.

Notes

1 American Exceptionalism is an ideology that believes America is exceptional and has a god given destiny to lead the world in its own image.

2 See http://www.whitehouse.gov/ [link ‘Photos & Video’]. All images in this article are reproduced in line with US federal copyright legislation (http://www.usa.gov/copyright.shtml).

3 See Jeffords (1989), Niva (1998), Youngs (2006) and Messerschmidt (2010).

4 See Young (2003), Agathangelou and Ling (2004), Leatherman (2005) and Mann (2008).

5 I understand militarization as a socio-political process where the ‘roots of militarism are driven deep down into the soil of a society’ and militarism as an ideology that privileges militaristic beliefs (Enloe 2004: 219–20).

6 See http://georgewbush-whitehouse.archives.gov/president/gallery/photoessay/index.html.

7 The most notable limitation is that Obama's images do not include the assassination of Osama bin Laden in May 2011. This is important because Obama re-militarized his presidential masculinity in lieu of this symbolic end to the WOT. Mann (2008) identified a process of ‘manning up’ after 9/11 and I propose that a similar process occurred after Obama killed bin Laden. This offers an interesting juxtaposition to the broader de-militarization in Obama's visual discourse I identify here and is the topic of my current research.

8 This camouflage politics framework draws on Hunt and Rygiel's (2008) approach to developing feminist counter narratives to ‘official’ war stories in order to uncover the politics, agendas and interests such stories camouflage, and Messerschmidt's (2010) replication of this approach in masculinity studies.

9 See Kitwana (2003), Brown (2005) and Peoples (2008) for discussions of the depoliticization of hip-hop and its roots in and potential as a protest masculinity.

10 Thanks to an anonymous reviewer for helping me frame my argument this way.