-Caveat Lector- http://chronicle.com/free/v47/i44/44b01101.htm The Chronicle Review (The Chronicle of Higher Education) July 13, 2001 Issue Section: The Chronicle Review Page: B11 The Meta-Monica Mythology By ELAINE SHOWALTER Early in April, HBO invited professors and students from the New York area to participate in taped interviews with Monica Lewinsky that will be the basis for a documentary to be televised next January. While Lewinsky herself had pitched the idea of a program about her recent years of "intense growth and perspective," Sheila Nevins, head of HBO's documentary unit, had the idea of organizing it around academic discussions with students of constitutional law, women's history, psychology, and American history. "It may be her journey," Nevins told The New York Times. "But for us, it's an investigative report. It's not just Monica: It's Monica in history; it's Monica in privacy; it's Monica in trauma." I had written about Lewinsky's trauma in an opinion piece in the Los Angeles Times, and so I was among those contacted by HBO. On a warm spring evening, I accompanied 23 Princeton undergraduates to one of the taped Q & A sessions at Cooper Union, where Abraham Lincoln once spoke. The Princeton students, most in my seminar on "Conspiracy Theory," joined about 150 law students who represented every kind of aspiring attorney -- from clones of Alan Dershowitz to My Cousin Vinny wannabes -- in asking Lewinsky about her experiences since her affair with President Clinton. Before the taping, we all signed confidentiality agreements barring any public discussion of the content of the interview until the program airs, and we had to go through metal detectors before we could begin. But during the two-hour session, Lewinsky spoke without intermediaries, moderators, or lawyers, and called on questioners herself. Sitting on the edge of the stage like Liza Minnelli, tossing her thick black hair, answering at length, laughing and crying, she mesmerized the audience. As one of my students, Anne Griffin, later observed, "It was a cross between a Barbara Walters special, a Jerry Springer script, and a sleepover -- a semi-lit room, a determination to tell all, one semi-diva at the center of attention." I was initially skeptical about the academic trappings of the program, because Lewinsky's journey did not seem to require scholarly analysis. But now, having read the recently published Our Monica, Ourselves: The Clinton Affair and the National Interest (New York University Press), I see that the staging was inevitable. As the book jacket notes, "the affair between Bill Clinton and Monica Lewinsky now stands as the seminal cultural event of the 90's." Our Monica, Ourselves is a collection of essays edited by Lauren Berlant, a professor of English and director of the Center for Gender Studies at the University of Chicago, and Lisa Duggan, an associate professor of American studies and history at N.Y.U. Not surprisingly, the Lewinsky affair has produced diverse -- and sometimes conflicting -- analyses from the broad spectrum of "feminist and queer writers, progressive journalists and activists, leftist scholars and cultural critics" whom the editors asked to contribute. The book's title harks back to the feminist health guidebook Our Bodies, Ourselves: A Book by and for Women, and links the Lewinsky case to the history of American sexuality. But like previous cultural-studies anthologies on the O. J. and Anita Hill/Clarence Thomas cases (and like cultural studies itself), it also ranges widely, offering a field day of critical ingenuity. Lewinsky herself gets the full Monica, the soup-to-nuts cultural-studies treatment of the creation and reception of a quintessential cultural icon. There are also essays on Linda Tripp, the Starr report, porn parodies of the scandal (like "Swallow the Leader"), the presidential penis, and the hypocrisy of television news. Key issues include our culture's "heteronormativity" ("a simultaneous fascination with and aversion to explicit public descriptions of sex, particularly sex other than married heterosexual intercourse"); race, ethnicity, and class; conspiracy theories; sexual politics; and ethics. Several contributors stress Clinton's shape-shifting image in the affair, the way he seemed to take on the attributes of various racial and sexual minorities. His ability to be all things to all people, they suggest, accounted both for his popularity and for the inchoate hate he attracted. Toni Morrison was among the first to suggest (in The New Yorker) that Clinton was metaphorically the first African-American president; here Tyler Curtain, who teaches English and queer theory at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, adds that Clinton was also metaphorically the first queer president, a lover of oral and anal sex who, significantly, was compulsive about bestowing on friends and acquaintances that iconic queer text, Leaves of Grass. By contrast, Micki McElya, a doctoral candidate at N.Y.U., argues that Clinton was Bubba, a white-trash president. (So much for Yale and the Rhodes scholarship.) Toby Miller, a film theorist at N.Y.U., points out that commentators both condemned Clinton for his good-old-boy exploits and feminized him for "his weight problems, his teariness, his physical affection, his interest in feelings, his linkage of intellectual power and emotional bravado -- and his unreliable side, for all the world some throwback to the image of women as inveterate liars." Interestingly, there is relatively little in the book on Lewinsky herself, as opposed to the various media and political stereotypes of her -- a criticism some historians have leveled at the field of cultural studies itself. The centerpiece of the analysis of stereotypes is Marjorie Garber's hilarious, surprising, and richly documented take on Monica as the Jewish-Aerican princess, the zaftig and insatiable "Heidi Abramowitz" of Joan Rivers's dark imagining. While Lewinsky's Jewish identity was not so much an issue for the American news media, Garber, who teaches cultural studies at Harvard University, shows how it entered into jokes, inspired anti-Semitic conspiracy theories in the Middle East, and played into cultural images of both the exotic Jewish seductress and the heroic Queen Esther. In particular, the elements of oral sex in the scandal clashed with other stereotypes of the sexually fastidious Jewish woman, Garber notes, quoting Jackie Mason ("A Jewish girl with oral sex? I don't believe it.") and Andrew Morton's biography of Lewinsky, which includes a joke told to her by the president ("What do you get when you cross a Jewish American Princess with an Apple? A computer that won't go down on you."). Garber stresses the paradox: the comic stereotype in the United States, the ferocity abroad. I had framed my Princeton seminar on conspiracy theories as a way to study persistent narratives of paranoia and blame that surround random events, and, to me, the most fascinating aspect of this book is its examination of the many and varied conspiracy theories that surrounded the scandal. Some Syrians and Palestinians hinted that Lewinsky was working for Mossad. The Chinese press claimed she was an agent of the Russian secret police, while the Russian parliament, oddly regarding her as a potential champion of the Arab world, appealed to her to persuade Clinton to stop the bombing of Iraq. The section on ethical issues raised by the case is also provocative. In a sharply reasoned essay on Clinton's patriarchal sexual politics, Janet J. Jakobsen, from the Center for Research on Women at Barnard College, asks whether feminists failed Lewinsky. Jakobsen faults feminists for not opposing "the 'Monica is a tramp' line." But she also argues that impeachment was not a feminist issue: "The impeachment drama did not display any concern for the well-being of Monica Lewinsky or Hillary Rodham Clinton," but rather "replayed an old, old story -- one in which women have little power and no good choices." Taking another feminist angle, Anna Marie Smith, who teaches government at Cornell University, notes that "feminists will remember the Clinton-Lewinsky affair as a moment in which sexual-harassment policy was turned inside out." In her view, Lewinsky's enthusiastic consent in the affair contradicted and subverted feminist prohibitions on sex in the workplace. What makes the case troubling to me, in feminist terms, is not exclusively the damage Clinton did to Lewinsky, but how his behavior undermined and belittled the status of all the women working in the Clinton White House. My daughter was one of Clinton's foreign-policy speechwriters; before she was 30, she had traveled to Bosnia, Belfast, and the Middle East with his team. Now, in the wake of the affair, any bright young woman who worked in the administration gets winks and nudges. Clinton's willingness to put the women in his family and his workplace at risk is the damning other side of his public pro-women policies. Over all, Our Monica, Ourselves shows, the Clinton/Lewinsky saga creates a meta-Monica mythology. The stained dress becomes the human stain (as the feminist critic Jane Gallop, who teaches at the University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee, says: "It has the power of the scarlet letter, and it's there approximately in the same place, and like the scarlet letter it's about sex breaking out of its confines"); the cigar is much more than a cigar. Indeed, given the Freudian orientation of many of the essays (and academic interest in how culture is marketed), I'm surprised that no one takes up the iconography of Lewinsky's subsequent business activities, like the handbags she markets. I have one of the handbags -- the Bali Bamboo Black Tote (invoking, according to Lewinsky's Web site, "the mystery of the Far East"). In an interview in Elle, Lewinsky said about her handbags: "They have a certain durability. You can do almost anything to them and they're still standing." What more could an interpretively minded scholar want? Was the Lewinsky I saw at Cooper Union aware of this range of cultural nuance and allusive complexity? Without violating the terms of the confidentiality agreement, I think I can say that her intellectual journey has not included exposure to cultural studies. Indeed, when the documentary airs, it might inspire the editors of Our Monica, Ourselves to prepare a second volume, more about Lewinsky's own view of what happened to her than about their own interpretation of her experience. That book might be even more zaftig than this one, for, unlike characters in a novel, subjects of cultural studies like Lewinsky have the disconcerting ability to come up with their own stubborn views of who they are and what their stories mean. Elaine Showalter is a professor of English at Princeton University. Copyright � 2001 by The Chronicle of Higher Education ======================================================= Kadosh, Kadosh, Kadosh, YHVH, TZEVAOT FROM THE DESK OF: *Michael Spitzer* <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> The Best Way To Destroy Enemies Is To Change Them To Friends ======================================================= <A HREF="http://www.ctrl.org/";>www.ctrl.org</A> DECLARATION & DISCLAIMER ========== CTRL is a discussion & informational exchange list. 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