When Is the Personal Political? The President’s Penis and Other Stories

Abstract

The boundary between the personal and the political is contested. Feminist interventions in this contest since 1970 have been particularly significant. A brief discussion of how feminists have theorised the personal/political division serves as an introduction to my analysis of current struggles over that division in Western liberal democracies. My analysis focuses on the workings of representative processes. Efforts to represent interests are strongly interlinked with the representation of meanings or images. Representations rely on, even if they resist, dominant discourses which privilege certain meanings and interests over others. To illustrate this analysis I use media representations of the Clinton versus Paula Jones case, which has produced considerable debate about the personal/political boundary. The continued high poll ratings Clinton received at that time suggest that his sexual behaviour was not seen as interfering with his political performance. In contrast, assessments of Jones’s political credibility appear considerably tied to evaluations of her ‘personal’ life. The difficulties of representing marginalised gender and class positions within current representative systems are explored in order to account for these differences.