Our Monica, Ourselves: The Clinton Affair and the National Interest

339 Pages·2001·1.904 MB·English

by  Lauren Berlant and Lisa A. Duggan

Our Monica, Ourselves
SEXUAL CULTURES: New Directions from the Center for
Lesbian and Gay Studies
General Editors: José Esteban Muñoz and Ann Pellegrini
Times Square Red, Times Square Blue
Samuel R. Delany
Private Affairs
Critical Ventures in the Culture of Social Relations
Phillip Brian Harper
In Your Face
9 Sexual Studies
Mandy Merck
Tropics of Desire
Interventions from Queer Latino America
José Quiroga
Murdering Masculinities
Fantasies of Gender and Violence in the American Crime Novel
Greg Forter
Our Monica, Ourselves
The Clinton Affair and the National Interest
Edited by Lauren Berlant and Lisa Duggan
Our Monica, Ourselves
The Clinton Affair and the National Interest
Edited by
LAUREN BERLANT AND LISA DUGGAN
a
NEW YORK UNIVERSITY PRESS
New York and London
NEW YORK UNIVERSITY PRESS
New York and London
© 2001 by New York University
All rights reserved
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Our Monica, ourselves : the Clinton affair and the national interest /
edited by Lauren Berlant and Lisa Duggan.
p. cm. — (Sexual cultures)
ISBN 0-8147-9865-9 (alk. paper) — ISBN 0-8147-9864-0 (pbk. : alk. paper)
1. Clinton, Bill, 1946– —Sexual behavior. 2. Clinton, Bill, 1946– —
Impeachment. 3. Lewinsky, Monica S. (Monica Samille), 1973– 4. Political
culture—United States. 5. Culture conflict—United States. 6. Sex—
Social aspects—United States. 7. Sexual ethics—United States. 8. United
States—Social conditions—1980– 9. United States—Politics and government—
1993– 10. United States—Moral conditions. I. Berlant, Lauren Gail, 1957–
II. Duggan, Lisa, 1954– III. Title. IV. Series.
E886.2 .O96 2001
973.929'092—dc21 00-012212
New York University Press books are printed on acid-free paper,
and their binding materials are chosen for strength and durability.
Manufactured in the United States of America
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Contents
Acknowledgments vii
Introduction 1
Lauren Berlant and Lisa Duggan
PART 1: DEMOCRACY AND PRESIDENTIALISM
1 The Culture Wars of the 1960s and the Assault on the Presidency:
The Meaning of the Clinton Impeachment 9
Eli Zaretsky
2 The Symbolics of Presidentialism: Sex and Democratic Identification 34
Dana D. Nelson and Tyler Curtain
PART 2: BODILY IMAGINARIES AND SEXUAL PRACTICES
3 The Face That Launched a Thousand Jokes 55
Laura Kipnis
4 It’s Not about Sex 73
James R. Kincaid
5 The Door Ajar: The Erotics of Hypocrisy in the White House Scandal 86
Simone Weil Davis
6 Sex of a Kind: On Graphic Language and the Modesty of
Television News 102
Sasha Torres
7 The First Penis Impeached 116
Toby Miller
PART 3: FANTASIES OF RACE, CLASS, AND ETHNICITY
8 The Return of the Oppressed 137
Frederick C. Moten with B Jenkins
v
CONTENTS
9 Trashing the Presidency: Race, Class, and the Clinton/Lewinsky Affair 156
Micki McElya
10 Moniker 175
Marjorie Garber
11 Monica Dreyfus 203
Tomasz Kitlinski, Pawel Leszkowicz, and Joe Lockard
PART 4: FEMINISM AND SEXUAL POLITICS
12 The President’s Penis: Entertaining Sex and Power 225
Catharine Lumby
13 ’Tis Pity He’s a Whore 237
Ellen Willis
14 Loose Lips 246
Jane Gallop with Lauren Berlant
15 Sexuality’s Archive: The Evidence of the Starr Report 268
Ann Cvetkovich
PART 5: ETHICS AND MORALITY
16 Sex and Civility 285
Eric O. Clarke
17 “He Has Wronged America and Women”: Clinton’s
Sexual Conservatism 291
Janet R. Jakobsen
18 Sexual Risk Management in the Clinton White House 315
Anna Marie Smith
Contributors 337
vi
Acknowledgments
We would like to thank Eva Pendleton, Alison Redick, and Micol Seigel for re-
search assistance, Sexual Cultures series editors José Muñoz and Ann Pellegrini for
their enthusiastic encouragement, and Eric Zinner and Cecilia Feilla of New York
University Press for technical support and editorial savvy.
vii

Introduction
Lauren Berlant and Lisa Duggan
It was a moment of astounding incoherence. The Clinton affair—the sex, the
lying, the investigation, the impeachment—was a historic public event, yet cen-
tral to it was a debate about whether it was worthy of attention. Had politics and
prurience become identical, and whose fault was that? All parties—the press, the
public, the political parties, the president and his prosecutors—hurled charges
that the others were up to their necks in corruption. People scurried to find the
moral high ground, but then again it seemed that we were drowning in moral
high grounds, too. In the wake of the deluge of publicity and contradictory eval-
uation produced by the Clinton/Lewinsky affair and its aftermath, Our Monica,
Ourselvesseeks a medium-range perspective—offering reflective, after-the-fact as-
sessments by politically progressive journalists, scholars, and activists addressed to
the questions: How does the intersection of sex and politics shape U.S. public cul-
ture? What can the alternating waves of public obsession, revulsion, and boredom
generated by this scandal of sex and justice tell us about the national interest?
In another time, the sexual scandal in the political sphere that organizes this book
might have taken on a mythic aura. “Did she put on his knowledge with his
power/Before the indifferent beak could let her drop?” asked Yeats about Leda and
1