The sexist attitudes toward Hillary Clinton have become glaring. Lemon Hound posted a link to an interesting article that discusses this issue. Even though I chose to caucus for Obama, I’m very aware of this awkward space Hillary has had to inhabit and I don’t like it one bit.

I don’t care how you self-identify — woman, man, feminist, anti-whatever — the blatant sexism in this primary campaign should make you pause.

I’m reading Michael Warner’s Publics and Counterpublics right now. His analysis of the dominant publics sphere as inherently embedded in 19th-Century values seems on target to me. He argues that the the binary between public and private are:

the very scene of selfhood and scarcely distinguishable from the experience of gender and sexuality. That makes them hard to challenge. In the case of gender, public and private are not just formal rules about how men and women should behave. They are bound up with meanings of masculinity and femininity. Masculinity, at least in Western cultures, is felt partly in a way of occupying public space; femininity, in a language of private feeling.

This explains, largely, to me, why sexism has been able to prevail in this primary presidential campaign. I know I often feel the effects of being in the double bind when I choose to speak my mind, in either public or private arenas, because, as Warner points out, speech acts have specific contexts and spaces in which they are considered appropriate. Public space for women’s speech, it seems to me, is still very much under construction.