Persona Studies 2017, vol. 3, no. 2
35
THE POLITICIAN/CELEBRITY AND
FAN(GIRL) PLEASURE: THE LINE
BETWEEN QUEEN HILLARY AND
PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATE CLINTON
JOC ELYN SMIT H
ABSTRACT
Whenever there is a major political event and the #TheBachelor live-
tweeting continues, or popular online media outlets such as Jezebel go ahead with
their pre-planned celebrity gossip coverage, there is outrage: seemingly, it is
impossible to keep up with—and care about—both the Kardashians and election
campaigns. During the 2016 United States’ election, however, this outrage emerged
from within campaign coverage, drawing a line between “serious political
supporter” (who is interested in facts and policy) and “emotional fangirl” (who is
interested in memes, feelings, and “girl power” above all).
Despite Donald Trump’s history of reality TV and non-political celebrity,
Hillary Clinton’s supporters were called “fangirls” and accused of celebrity-worship,
of solely getting their news from “pop” media like BuzzFeed—where foreign policy
coverage is found alongside discussions of how “dead” we are from a Clinton eye-
roll—and of allowing fandom to cloud political judgment. This paper is not engaging
in the “fake news” debate; rather, this paper explores the intersection of political
celebrity and politician in a moment when governmental politics, celebrity, social
media, and reality TV are overlapping in unprecedented ways, as well as the
intersection of “serious” political campaigning and fannish pleasure in an historic
moment for women in American politics.
KEY WORDS
Political Persona; Social Media; Fandom; American Politics; Hillary Clinton; Postfeminism
TRUMP’S TWITTER, HILLARY’S FANGIRLS: RESPONDING TO “THIS POLITICAL
CLIMATE”
It seems urgently necessary and, at the same time, redundant to talk about the celebrity persona
of the politician, or the politician as a celebrity persona, in a post-2016 North America. The
explosive and polarising events of the 2016 U.S. election left many people, myself included,
hesitant about how to continue talking about political persona, and the celebrity practices
employed by politicians, particularly through social media such as Twitter. Perhaps this is
indicative of late night comedians becoming America’s hardest-hitting reporters, but the mere
mention of a politician tweeting sounds more like a punch line, or the beginning of a rallying
speech, than an academic essay. The papers I received from my first- and second-year students
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in the Winter 2017 term, following Donald Trump’s election and Hillary Rodhami Clinton’s
historic loss, showed this same kind of hesitancy; they kept vaguely referring to “this political
climate”, as a catch-all phrase for “stuff got weird and I don’t know how to write about it in the
‘unbiased’ way I’ve been trained to write in high school”.
But “this political climate” and the “weirdness” of the past two years is not only referring
to Trump’s election, his celebrity status and dynastic-business-tycoon-cum-reality-star persona,
or his cultivation of his reactionary political persona through his unconventional use of Twitter.
It also refers to Clinton’s historic campaign, how her political persona, and her use of celebrity
practices and strategies, created an unprecedented narrative of “fangirling” around the election.
That is, young women in particular were understood to be fans of Clinton’s rather than
constituents or supporters, and this language of emotional attachment, as opposed to critical
distance, was used to dismiss Clinton and her voter base along gendered lines. Clinton’s political
persona became deeply intertwined with her social positioning within feminised spaces of pop
culture and the rallying, emotional cries of “girl power”. It is not enough to say that “what
happened”, and why Clinton lost, is “simply” because she is a woman. Her inability to seize the
presidency, and to seize presidentiality, is rooted in “a new, unstable political environment” that
requires “the massive mediatisation of the self through the integration of online culture into
everyday life” (Marshall & Henderson 2016, p. 1), and that brings the previously private
expressions of feminised emotional attachment and “fangirling” into the public sphere.
This paper is a preliminary exploration into the role of “fangirling” in Clinton’s historic
loss. The discussion to come continues the work on political persona done in the wake of Brexit
and Trump through a consideration of the intersecting discourses of pop culture fandom and
postfeminism. The concept of “persona”, and political persona in the age of social media in
particular, provides the groundwork to begin to take up these questions as persona studies as a
field, first, recognises the political dimension of all social interaction and, second, bases its
understanding of the individual as a relation to the social—“[persona] is neither individual nor
collective, but rather the way the individual negotiates their move into the collective and the
way that collective interprets this now organised individual entity” (Marshall & Henderson
2016, p. 3). I would add that, especially in Clinton’s case, the way the collective reflects and is
incorporated into this now organised individual entity is crucial to political persona as well.
In P. David Marshall and Neil Henderson’s introduction to the topic of political persona
(2016, p. 1), they claim: “persona is a way to explore and investigate this shift [in the media
environment] and moment of instability, both in the way it operated in the past as a mediatised
identity, and the way it is now pandemic and pervasive as a way of being in contemporary
culture”. Through an analysis of the evolution of Clinton’s political persona, her postfeminist
“girl power!” messaging, her public relationships with other female politicians, celebrities, and
her “regular” supporters, and the particular gendered rhetoric of emotional attachment
surrounding her 2016 campaign, this paper continues the work on political persona introduced
by Marshall and Henderson last year when they asked: “what makes political persona
constitutively different today than in the past” (p. 1)? On the flip side, how is the past present in
today’s political persona?
A politician having “fans” is not a new phenomenon—the Kennedys certainly had fans,
and Hollywood celebrity affiliations; Ronald Reagan certainly did as well, albeit in a different
way; Alexander Hamilton has cultivated a celebrity persona and fan base posthumously through
a Broadway musical; and, thinking more globally, Winston Churchill had and has fans, and gains
more as he continues to be represented in film and television (e.g. Netflix’s The Crown; BBC’s
Peaky Blinders, both within the last few years), as does the frequently shirtless Vladimir Putin,
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whose images make the rounds on social media. A fan, particularly a fan of a politician, is
understood differently than a supporter. This is similar to the often fraught distinction between
fan and academic, where the fan is understood, as delineated by Joli Jenson in The adoring
audience (1992, pp. 9 & 19), as “deviant” and “excessive” for their passion and investment in an
“object of desire […] popular with the lower or middle class […] and widely available”, as
opposed to the academic, whose interests fall in line “with the wealthy and well educated” and
thus are understood to be “preference, interest or expertise” rather than unfiltered enthusiasm.
Politicians are not the kinds of cultural texts and objects of desire/interest Jenson
describes. And while certain politicians, and their supporters, may be taken more or less
seriously based on their class positions (this was certainly the case for George W. Bush and
Donald Trump and their supporters, and how they were represented particularly in leftist
conversation), it is not specifically class I want to consider here. I focus on age and gender, and
how “the girl” as subject position connotes a passion and lack of detachment that precludes
critical distance and becomes grounds for the dismissal both of the girl and the object of her
passion and attachment. For Clinton’s supporters (her voters, both famous and not, as well as
her political campaigners and colleagues), to be cast by both sides as not only fans, but fangirls,
contributes to the construction of a political persona that is, first, closely tied to the frivolity and
femininity of Hollywood and “traditional” pop culture celebrity (as opposed to political
celebrity), and, second, connotes an immaturity and an inability to make decisions based on
reason and logic, as opposed to instinct and emotion.
Whenever there is a major political or world event and the #TheBachelor live-tweeting
continues, or popular (women’s) online media outlets such as Jezebel go ahead with their pre-
planned celebrity gossip coverage, there is outrage. It is seemingly impossible to keep up with—
and care about—both the Kardashians and election campaigns, particularly for girls and
women. Similar to the way the female sports fan needs to prove her fandom through knowledge
of obscure trivia, it seems that girls and women must prove their commitment to serious news
and topics—or sports—by abstaining from their more frivolous passions during more serious
times. It is this distinction between the serious and the frivolous, and how this distinction
occurs along gendered lines, that is at the core of my analysis of Clinton’s political persona.
Political persona is distinct from, although inextricably related to, “persona” more broadly, as it
is based not necessarily on a desire for emotional attachment or affective response (although
this is part of it), but on her “claim to explicit, legitimate political authority over others, and the
means by which these claims are accepted” (Marshall & Henderson 2016, p. 16). Thus, while I
explore Clinton’s persona in relation to pop culture fandom and the rhetoric of “fangirling” more
broadly, my goal is to bring these increasingly more public discussions of fan attachments
specifically into the conversations around (gendered) political persona that have come to the
fore in the field of persona studies.
Rhiannon Bury, in Cyberspaces of their own: female fandoms online (2005), argues that
this view of female fans, and girls and women generally, as unable to separate their fannish
passions from more serious concerns has as long a history as the concept of “fandom” itself.
Bury states:
In the 1920s, when the abbreviation of the Latin fanaticus came into use, sports
writers used it playfully whereas film and theater critics used it pejoratively in
reference to women who supposedly attended performances for the sole
purpose of admiring the actors. (pp. 36-37)
To be a fan of sports, an area of pop culture fandom dominated by boys and men, is to be
playfully engaged—and to be playfully engaged with the game, and the rules and the strategy,
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not the players and their bodies, personalities, or feelings. Similarly, boys and men who are
“into politics” are often imagined to be spectators, interested in strategy and policy, and are
maybe even described as “policy wonks”, a term Clinton used to describe herself in a keynote
address at a conference of Minnesota health care professionals in 1993, although she came off
as cold, rather than playfully strategic (Campbell 1998, p. 9).
Masculine passion and obsession are associated with technical mastery, data, and
memorabilia collection; men have, as Henry Jenkins has been arguing for decades, been
pathologised for their fan attachments and “geeky” behaviour, but the engagement and the
connotations of (and therefore responses to) said engagement for male fans is drastically
different from that of female fans, or fangirls. Jenkins (2013) argues that the male fan, especially
the science-fiction or comic-book fan represented in The Big Bang Theory, are seen as
emotionally detached from everyday life. Like the boys and men “into politics”, they do not
connect on a human or emotional level, but through their “fantasy worlds”, whether that is Star
Trek or Star Wars or foreign policy. This often translates into a perceived inability for the male
fan to engage with women, or to engage in sexual or romantic activity. Jenkins states:
[E]ven though Big Bang has added female characters in recent seasons, the
women remain largely outside the fannish circle: it’s almost a crisis anytime a
woman ventures into the comic shop; Bernadette and Amy are both female
scientists, but they do not show much interest in science fiction. (p. xvi)
Not only does The Big Bang Theory—which Jenkins argues is a more nuanced representation of
fans on mainstream television than he had previously seen (p. xv)—represent male fans as weird
and detached from human emotion, but the TV show also represents women as outside of that
world. When Penny, the main female character, is depressed about her dead-end job and gets
into online gaming to cope, it is only at the suggestion of one of the fanboy characters (Sheldon),
and she quickly becomes addicted, has a “lightbulb” moment when she is hit on by one of the
other fanboy characters (Howard) within the online game, and snaps out of it, all within one
episode (“The Barbarian Sublimation” 2008). Clearly, this is not her world, and not how she
copes with sadness, loss, or lack of direction.
When women are “fans”, both the objects of their fandom (often, celebrities or
relationships between characters, as opposed to science-fiction world-building) and their mode
of engagement are understood to be different from male fans. Female fans carry with them the
connotation of being “too close” to the object of their fandom; they care too much, are too
involved, and are, as fan studies scholars Katherine Larsen and Lynn Zubernis (2012, p. 1) say,
“anything but detached”:
Male media fans may fear that being a fanboy evokes images of the 40-year-old
virgin still living in his mother’s basement and collecting Star Wars light sabers.
In other words, the fear is of being perceived as sexually unsuccessful […] For
female fans, the site of fan shame may be different, and perhaps more persistent
in a decade when Comic Con fanboys are reclaiming the word ‘geek’ with
revolutionary fervor. While male media fans fear being perceived as not sexual
enough (the stereotypical fanboy virgin living in his mother’s basement),
female fans seem fearful that being a fan makes them too sexual, or at the very
least too emotional. (p. 59)
Bury notes that the term fangirl “quickly became a powerful heteronormative minus-
male subject position” (2005, p. 37), always the hopelessly delusional fangirl, carrying the
“pejorative connotations of crazy, hysterical, and stalker” (Zubernis & Larsen 2012, p. 228), and
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39
never a woman, never an objectifying or objective fan or supporter. During the 2016 U. S.
election, however, this outrage emerged from within campaign coverage, drawing a gendered
line between the behaviours and emotional responses of the “serious political supporter” (who
is interested in facts and policy) and the “emotional fangirl” (who is interested in memes,
feelings, and “girl power” above all). The “personalisation of politics” that “is often configured as
a threat to ‘real’ issues” (Marshall & Henderson 2016, p. 4) is even more threatening when the
candidate, her supporters, and her “brand” are rooted in the figure of the “girl”.
“AFFECTIVE CLUSTERS” AND TWITTER FOLLOWERS: POLITICAL PERSONA, CELEBRITY,
AND SOCIAL MEDIA
While celebrity politicians and political celebrities are not a new thing, the requirement for a
politician to have a celebrity “brand” (and for a celebrity to take a political stance, although that
is another matter outside of the scope of this paper) is relatively new. In 2004, Graeme Turner
wrote in Understanding Celebrity that it is “probably a commonplace observation to point out
that the systems used to produce celebrity in the entertainment and sports industries are very
similar to those now used to produce the public persona of the politician” and he predicted that
the “rise of gossip journalism and the talk show” will continue to influence “how the process of
mass mediated self-presentation must be organised” (pp. 130-1). Similarly, in a 2006 chapter on
celebrity politicians focusing on Bono and Arnold Schwarzenegger, Philip Drake and Michael
Higgins suggested that politicians were beginning to address their electorate as audiences, and
that “[c]ontemporary politicians are aware that an appearance on a popular television show
enables them to reach a wider public and circulate their image more effectively than any
conventional political speech in parliament” (p. 88). Thus, just over ten years ago, celebrity
studies scholars were viewing political celebrity as the cultivation of a distinctly different
persona, with a different “audience” in mind, than Hollywood or “traditional” celebrity.
Reaching even further back to the 1990s, Bill Clinton’s sex scandal being both political
and celebrity news was a novelty. His saxophone playing on The Arsenio Hall Show (which was,
of all places, late night television:, a media slot that has now become almost mandatory for
politicians to retain relevancy, particularly with younger constituents) in 1992, made political
history (“3 June 1992”). By June 10, 2013, however, Hillary Clinton had “taken to Twitter” (to
use the terminology employed when a celebrity tweets in a noteworthy manner, usually in
response to a controversy or a particular story. For example, Kim Kardashian “took to Twitter”
to defend herself against critics of her nude selfies). As Karrin Vasby Anderson and Kristina
Horn Sheeler point out in “Texts (and tweets) from Hillary: meta-meming and postfeminist
political culture” (2014, p. 224), in her “inaugural tweet”, she addressed “the short-lived but
enormously popular Tumblr ‘Texts from Hillary,’ in which [then] Secretary of State Clinton was
pictured engaging in fictional text exchanges with politicians, leaders, and celebrities”. What is
fascinating is that not only has the culture shifted in the last two or three decades —from seeing
politicians’ appearances on television shows that are not dedicated to politics or news as
noteworthy, to seeing Obama’s tweets going viral or Clinton responding to a Tumblr meme
about herself as not just entertaining but normal—but also that Hillary Clinton was there the
whole time.
Thus, while I consider her political persona as the first woman to almost become
president, I want to keep in mind her status and reputation as a political celebrity, public figure,
and feminist icon prior to her run for president, and how her previous persona impacts this
particular narrative of “fangirling”. Clinton and her supporters were often dismissed in an
explicitly gendered way specifically during her 2016 presidential campaign. But this dismissal,
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and the employment of the rhetoric of fangirling that became the grounds for this dismissal, is
inextricably tied to Clinton’s previous political persona (as a lawyer, senator, first lady, and
Secretary of State) as well as her move to seize power (rather than having it bestowed upon her
by Bill Clinton—i.e. her role as first lady—or Barack Obama—i.e. her role as Secretary of State—
or the viral memes of Tumblr—i.e. her role as the sassy, taking-no-shit, badass texting Hillary)
and her cultivation of a pop-culture-savvy celebrity persona in “this political climate”, where a
social media presence is a requirement seemingly regardless of who you are or what you do.
In 2014, Marshall published a call-to-action for “persona studies”, or “the mapping of the
proliferation of the public self”. He argued that since the 1970s, celebrity news has become
more and more normalised as part of our culture, with the biggest moment perhaps being “the
migration of celebrity stories from the back-sections to the front pages of the newspapers” and
the consequent collusion of gossip and news, the breakdown of celebrity and politics “via a
more intense revelatory news discourse on the intimacy of political scandals and their play of
public and private” (pp. 154 & 157). Perhaps no one—outside of the royal family—experienced
this collapse of public and private in political news in the same way that Bill and Hillary Clinton
did with the infamous Monica Lewinsky scandal, and Hillary Clinton’s involvement in said
scandal—both the fact that she was implicated in a scandal at the apex of celebrity and political
news, and the fact that she was both pitied and blamed as the “jilted wife” in the narrative of the
scandal—cannot be ignored in an analysis of her 2016 persona.
The reasons Marshall gives for this desire for “intimacy” in both celebrity and political
news offer more insight into Hillary Clinton’s ongoing celebrity; he argues that the fascination
and focus on celebrity demonstrates that “despite all the efforts at providing the material and
information for an informed citizenry, we are drawn to emotional connections that express
another force of organisation, interest and connection” (2014, pp. 153-4). That is, we want to
engage emotionally. While we may scoff at the newest scandal, or laugh at former leader of the
Canadian New Democratic Party Tom Mulcair doing Drake’s “Hotline Bling” dance in an attempt
to appeal to youths, or even dismiss those who want to keep up with the Kardashians while
terrorist attacks are occurring in the world, we do care. Marshall explicitly links this
contradictory response to individualised consumer capitalism and contemporary advertising’s
focus on selling sentiment and emotion—similar to Pepsi’s attempt to sell the refreshing taste of
resistance against police brutality using Kendall Jenner in 2017 (“Kendall Jenner for PEPSI
Commercial”).
Marshall posits that as “celebrity culture” becomes more of a “wider persona culture”—
meaning, as Alice Marwick and danah boyd (2011) argue, that celebrity is less of a line
separating the famous from the regulars, but a continuum along which we all engage in similar
practices of self-branding, or constructing a “persona”—what is at the heart of this wider
persona culture is affect (2014, pp. 161-2). According to Marshall:
[Lawrence] Grossberg’s (1987: 175-197) concept of an “affective economy,”
where emotion is attributed and in a sense rationalised, captures the way that
public individuals congeal not only attention but clusters of support not
dissimilar to the way that social media use attracts friends and followers for
individuals. […] Moreover, affect can move through populations as it attaches
to other retained but unconscious emotional memories and thus can exhibit
patterns of contagion, magnification and amplification […] Affect allows us to
understand the movement between the self and the social [… and] in combining
affect theory with making sense of how social networking is reorganising
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41
society, one can begin to see that the various micropublics social network
culture produces are in effect affect clusters. (p. 162)
In other words, people’s emotional responses and attachments congeal around particular
figures, celebrities, or personae, and these attachments—which Marshall likens to social media
followers—can define the relationship between the self and the social, the private and the
public, and can therefore create “affect clusters” or “micropublics” around particular figures
and/or feelings.
There are several reasons why this argument is particularly enlightening when it comes
to Clinton’s persona and her so-called “fangirls”, one of which Anderson and Sheeler (2014, p.
228) state succinctly: back when “she officially launched her [first] presidential campaign in
January of 2007, Clinton was a known political commodity with a long public history” (emphasis
added). Her “affective cluster”, so to speak, already existed when she launched her Twitter
account, her bio (in 2007) lauding her as a “wife, mom, lawyer, women & kids advocate, FLOAR,
FLOTUS, US Senator, SecState, author, dog owner, hair icon, pantsuit aficionado, glass ceiling
cracker, TBD” (qtd in Anderson & Sheeler, pp. 224-5). Anderson and Sheeler focus on how, in
her bio and elsewhere, she tried to capitalise on that pre-existing affective narrative and congeal
new emotional attachments around a pre-established figure. But, at the same time, these
attempts “to define herself ‘not as a staid politician but as a witty, self-effacing and almost hip
netizen’” and “by [her] passions, [her] famil[y], and the chapters in [her] li[fe]”, as opposed to
simply her profession, were ultimately ineffective at broadening her affective cluster (Anderson
& Sheeler, p. 225). The passion, enthusiasm, and lack of rational detachment associated with her
political persona and her affective cluster limit “its potential to promote effectively female
presidentiality” (Anderson & Sheeler, p. 230).
Democratic strategist and digital director of Obama’s re-election campaign Teddy Goff
claims that Clinton’s Twitter bio “suggested someone more interested in building genuine
relationships with her fans than in being ‘on message’ in the traditional, political sense of the
term” (qtd in Llorente 2013). Marshall and Henderson (2016, p. 4) point out that this move is in
line with contemporary political marketing strategies: there is an “increasing move to affect in
politics” and “voters are drawn to politicians who resemble their values and attitudes”. But as
Anderson and Sheeler point out, Clinton was “a woman who once was reviled in U.S. political
culture” (2014, p. 238). Karlyn Kohrs Campbell recounts in her article, “The discursive
performance of femininity: hating Hillary” (1998, p. 1), that Clinton was pictured on the cover of
Spy magazine in 1992 with “her head on the body of an S & M dominatrix”; she was “given a
defined and recognized role” in the White House “as a way to counter fears of the power of the
first lady”; in 1996, Henry Louis Gates Jr. “wrote that ‘Hillary-hating has become one of those
national pastimes which unite the elite and the lumpen’”; also in 1996, Garry Willis wrote that
“Hillary Hate is a large-scale psychic phenomenon […] Talk shows are full of speculation about
Hillary’s purported lesbianism and drug use”. Any attempts to soften or make likeable Clinton’s
political persona must not only take Clinton’s femininity into account, but they must also occur
within the context of this “Hillary-hating” that has become integral to Clinton’s persona.
As of May 2017, Clinton has removed “glass ceiling cracker” from her Twitter bio, but
she has left her political credentials as well as “hair icon” and “pantsuit aficionado”—clear
cracks at her celebrity persona, rather than her politics (@HillaryClinton 2017). However, this
persona, and the jokes about her hair and her clothing, is inextricably tied to Clinton’s decades-
old, persisting image as a tough, authoritative, ball-busting, masculine and/or emasculating
woman succeeding in a place she does not really belong (Campbell, for instance, describes how
she is both inappropriately feminine and masculine: she rhetorically performs masculine
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expertise, as opposed to feminine intuition, as a woman in “male spaces”, e.g. the courtroom, the
White House, and thus unsettles everyone (1998)). The political persona she is attempting to
capitalise on in her Twitter bio is the same political persona that has kept her from breaking the
glass ceiling, as opposed to just cracking it.
By cheerfully gaining the upper hand with a “cool” Twitter bio, and through “imagined
exchanges with politicians, leaders, and celebrities” in the “Texts from Hillary” memes (Smith
and Lambe 2012), Clinton generates a strong affective response amongst her supporters,
primarily women, who have stood by her, respected her, defended her, and idolised her all
along. However, this affective response, while celebrating “women’s power”, does little to
address “the misogyny that constrains women in politics” and “derid[es] women who fail to
achieve the successes modeled by […] tokens of success” (Anderson & Sheeler 2014, p. 233). In
other words, the power of Clinton’s persona is a postfeminist power; it celebrates the (potential)
success of one “glass-ceiling cracker” while failing to address the underlying misogyny—the
equation of presidentiality with masculinity—that stops women from destroying said ceiling
altogether.
Despite her failure to turn “cool” into “presidential”, Clinton is more than just the first
woman to almost become president of the United States, and the impact of her persona reaches
far beyond her political office. She is and has been a feminist icon for many women for decades,
and has been a consistently present figure in the lives of many women (and men) who voted in
the 2016 U.S. election, or watched (nervously) from afar. Personally speaking, I recall bonding
with my own mother over the media’s unfair treatment of Clinton during her husband’s
presidency and the fallout of the Lewinsky scandal. Clinton is referred to as the hero for nerdy,
driven girls growing up in the 1990s and early 2000s in television series such as Gilmore Girls—
an entire episode revolves around the protagonist, Rory Gilmore, worrying she will not get into
Harvard because her “Hillary Clinton essay will be just like every other girl’s Hillary Clinton
essay because apparently that’s all we can think of” (“Application Anxiety” 2003)—while young
female celebrities such as Lena Dunham, Amy Schumer, Katy Perry, Ilana Glazer, Abbi Jacobson,
and more tout her as their badass, political, pantsuit-wearing hero. For these women, Hillary
Clinton is Madeleine Albright meets Princess Diana meets Madonna meets Meryl Streep. There
is a power (and a longevity) to her persona as a distinctly female celebrity that transcends her
simply being a politician.
In “this political climate”, governmental politics, celebrity, social media and reality
television are overlapping in unprecedented ways, and “serious” political campaigning is
intersecting with fannish pleasure and outrage in an historic moment for women in American
politics. Potential voters are viewed simultaneously as potential “fans”, and the discourse of
fangirling is used both to dismiss women’s affective responses to political candidates (female
political candidates in particular) and to create affective communities, or clusters, that cohere
around women’s responses to their Queen Hillary—a political celebrity and trailblazer in her
own right for decades—almost becoming the first female president of the United States of
America.
THE CULTURAL VALUE OF (FAN)GIRLS: POLITICAL PERSONA, FANS, AND FEMININITY
While politicians having a celebrity persona and fan base is not “new”, the use of the specific
rhetoric of fangirling, and the incorporation of fangirl desire and enthusiasm into the politician’s
celebrity persona, is a more recent phenomenon, as pop culture fandom and the practices of
fangirling in particular have entered the public sphere and the mainstream media. Fangirling
has become more visible as the “bedroom culture” of “teenybopper” celebrity worship that
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43
Angela McRobbie (1991, p. 11) discusses in her earlier work—creating collages of New Kids on
the Block from Tiger Beat, pretending to make out with a poster of Donny Osmond, watching
90210 while gushing about the newest plot developments on a three-way call during
commercial breaks—has become part of the public sphere of online social media, so much so
that the language of fangirling has entered into dominant discourse (e.g. using the word “squee!”
to respond to something that gives one “the feels”, or makes one feel overwhelming emotion).
The private sphere is now being enacted in public; the bedroom is both in the privacy of the
home and on the public platforms Twitter and Tumblr. Consequently, these once private
expressions of emotion are witnessed by the general public, and by the objects of the fangirls’
fandom, thus shifting cultural perceptions of fans, girls, and the object of fandom: and these
“objects”, or cultural texts or celebrity personae, shift to respond to these newly public displays
of adoration and support.
Clinton did not invent the concept of a politician having “fans”, but the persona that was
cultivated for herii throughout her 2016 presidential campaign (which is distinct, although not
wholly separate, from her previous political persona) was unique in three ways. First, this
discourse of fangirling had already become public and mainstream, so was easily leveraged by
politicians, journalists, and other commentators in response to her vocal, passionate, and largely
female fan/supporter base. Second, while politicians have arguably always been “celebrities”,
the cultivation of a social-media-based celebrity persona for politicians has only become
mandatory within the last decade, as discussed in the previous section, and thus Clinton is part
of the “new class” of politicians required to use the tools and practices of persona and image
management used not only by “regular” or Hollywood celebrities, but by everyone else as well
(Kim Kardashian-West has a Twitter account; as does Barack Obama; as does Hillary Clinton; as
do I; as does my retired, decidedly non-famous father).
Third, Hillary Clinton is a woman. Both former U.S. President Barack Obama and current
Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau have “fangirls”—they are relatively young (for
politicians), attractive, photogenic, amicable, and clearly successful, so of course the girls would
fall for their smiles. But there are some key differences between Obama, Trudeau, and Clinton.
Obama’s and Trudeau’s fangirls are understood to base their fandom on sexual or romantic
attraction (the stereotypical fangirl previously discussed). Clinton’s fangirls, alternatively, are
running on a message of solidarity and “girl power”, which is inherently more threatening to the
status quo.
For example, during Obama’s 2008 presidential campaign, a “fangirl” became a celebrity
in and of herself: the “Obamagirl”. In June 2007, she, along with a four-person team, released the
“Crush on Obama” video, which Bustle claims struck “comedic, political, and somewhat sexual
gold” (Chang 2014). Obama and his campaign team never embraced nor endorsed the video,
likely due to its raunchy innuendos, which could detract from the potential presidentiality of a
relatively young, black, and not socially conservative man. However, this articulation of
America, and American women in particular, having a “crush” on Obama, as the “Obamagirl”
Amber Lee Ettinger said, “encompassed what a lot of Americans were feeling, the excitement for
hope and change” (Hannity 2012). In some ways, this video may not take the “Obamagirl” or
Obama entirely seriously, and may reflect poorly on his presidentiality, as it has been defined by
his white male predecessors. But, as Ettinger points out, “Crush on Obama” responds to an
already heightened level of excitement, optimism, and hope around the 2008 election that
transcended gendered lines, and the Obamagirl’s specific enthusiasm falls in line with the
expectations I outlined above, in that she expressed heterosexual desire for Obama. While she
may not be taken seriously—the comedic nature of her song, plus the fact that she was hired to
do this and never personally endorsed Obama, aligns her more with late-night sketch comedy
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than Tumblr fangirling—this is the kind of fangirling we are comfortable with, as opposed to the
aforementioned unabashed “girl power” enthusiasm for Clinton and a potential first female
president.
While Obama and Trudeau may face criticism for their youth, celebrity affiliations, and
lack of seriousness, the unabashed girlishness of the fangirls’ behaviour does not reflect on them
in the same way is does on Clinton. Regardless of the girls, the men’s work is their work, and
their personae retain (for the most part) the gravity associated with political office. Because of
the girls, and because of Clinton’s unprecedented femininity as a presidential candidate, Clinton
becomes increasingly associated with the frivolity of pop culture and the leisure sphere, and her
political persona loses weight (and not in the way that Trump has suggested many women
should lose weight).
It is worthwhile to return to Jenson’s aforementioned frustrations with the divide
between “serious” academic pursuits and “deviant” or frivolous fan attachments. Jenson takes
issue with the academy’s seemingly arbitrary lines between what authors/artists or
texts/works qualify as appropriate academic “work” (in her case, James Joyce) and what is “fun”
or decidedly “not work” (again, in her case, Barry Manilow). This divide is reflected in how, even
if the Joyce scholar admits to “enjoying” Joyce or being a “fan”, Joyce has been culturally
positioned as labour and Manilow as leisure. This is not completely arbitrary, nor is it not
understandable, but the point is that cultural understandings of what differentiates labour from
leisure depends on an infantilisation and feminisation of particular modes of engagement with
cultural texts and objects that is inextricably tied to the economic and cultural valuation of the
bodies engaging and the texts/objects with which they are engaging.
This narrative of fangirling (as opposed to just being a fan) is mobilised differently in
regard to Clinton than it is for Obama or Trudeau, because the object of the fangirl affection (i.e.
Clinton) is inherently feminised. The cultural valuation of this enthusiasm emerges not solely
from the fangirls, but from the reciprocal relationship between the fangirls and the object
and/or celebrity of their affection. Thus, Clinton being a woman, and being the first female
Democratic presidential nominee, is crucial to understanding the impact of Clinton’s fangirls,
and her engagement with her fangirls, on her political and celebrity persona. The incorporation
of the rhetoric and practices of “fangirling” into Clinton’s presidential candidate persona is both
explicitly gendered and tied to her particular celebrity persona, which has been part of the
North American political and public consciousness since the early 1990s, and her social media
and pop culture “literacy” or fluency, which concretises her always already feminised image in
the sphere of leisure and emotional attachment, as opposed to labour and rational thought.
A defining characteristic of both girls and youth in Western culture is a lack of “work”, of
participation in paid labour (with this definition often used to dismiss girls’ labour as “just for
fun” rather than compensable). Thus, it follows that, for youth, leisure affiliations become the
way identities are negotiated, communicated, and maintained. This is similar to how Dick
Hebdige’s (1979) punks and mods identified themselves and their socio-political and racial
positioning through fashion and stylistic choice, musical tastes and affiliations, and their regular
hangout spots (the street, the club). Hebdige was integral in shifting the way that cultural
studies scholars write about youth. Rather than approaching youth as a “problem to be solved”,
he took the styles and objects of youth (sub)cultures seriously, interrogating the “processes
whereby [these] objects are made to mean and mean again as ‘style’ in [these] subculture[s]”
(1979, p. 3). He imbued these youth cultures, and the specific cultural objects they take up and
use for their own purposes and pleasure, with value—not monetary value, but social, cultural,
and political value.
Persona Studies 2017, vol. 3, no. 2
45
However, Hebdige’s work does not do the same to value girls’ youth cultures as it does
boys’. Not all leisure, and not all work, is created equal, or valued equally, within patriarchal
capitalism, and the value of said leisure and labour is not inherent. Instead it is constantly being
created and recreated through those who engage in, witness, and critique these forms of leisure
and labour. In Where the girls are: growing up female with the mass media, Susan J. Douglas
(1994, p. 5) writes of baby-boomer girls:
According to the prevailing cultural history of our times, the impact of the boys
was serious, lasting, and authentic. They were the thoughtful, dedicated rebels,
the counter-culture leaders, the ones who made history. The impact of the girls
was fleeting, superficial, trivial […] Histories of the sixties still focus on the boys,
their music and their politics, while [the girls] appear as nothing more than
mindless, hysterical, out-of-control bimbos who shrieked and fainted while
watching the Beatles or jiggled our bare breasts at Woodstock. Idiots, hysterics,
dumbos—empty vessels.
In other words, the stories we tell about the (gendered) past become our gendered past. The
boys of the sixties counterculture have cultural value because they have been imbued with
cultural value by scholars such as Hebdige, who proposed viewing the boys as politically and
culturally meaningful rather as a “problem”, and other members of the “parent culture” (e.g.
parents, teachers, politicians, journalists, other authority figures). Anderson and Sheeler argue
that
the panoply of digital discourses that comprise political culture does not
substitute for political reality it becomes political reality. Political identity is,
therefore, less a reflection of a politician’s authentic self and more a conflation
of diverse and sometimes conflicting image fragments. (2014, p. 228)
Just as the stories of the countercultural boys of the sixties become the prevailing narrative of
the 1960s, these affective clusters of enthusiastic girls and women become Hillary Clinton’s
political persona.
While this “girl power” sentiment functions as a rallying cry, and while it clusters
support based on affect similarly to the way Obama clustered support around the affective
economy of “hope” and “change”, it could not succeed in the same way as Obama’s messaging did
because of how girls’ and women’s emotional responses are seen as overriding or precluding
rational, logical, or critical thought. This performative intimacy that Marwick and boyd argue is
required on interactive social media platforms such as Twitter works to both create an affect
cluster around, and undermine, Clinton’s presidential persona, because she is a woman, as are
most of her fans. However, this is rendered invisible through the very same narratives of
postfeminist empowerment Clinton leveraged in the launch of her Twitter account and her
presidential campaign. Anderson and Sheeler describe the narrative thusly:
[W]omen can and do capably run for president. They have the potential to be as
popular with the U.S. electorate as male candidates. Any failure of their
candidacies should properly be ascribed to their personal shortcomings or
strategic miscalculations rather than to the continued influence of sexism in U.S.
culture. (2014, p. 2)
In other words, Clinton’s failure to “congeal” enough support to secure her the presidency is her
failure, and her campaign’s; it is completely divorced from the sexism seemingly inextricably
woven through U.S. politics that equates the presidency with masculine authority.
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But the naming of Clinton’s supporters—from Lena Dunham, to Huma Abedin, to some
of my colleagues and friends—as “fangirls”, made explicit the implicit gendering of the
presidential candidates’ supporters (not just the candidates themselves) throughout the
campaign. Fangirls are different from fans. The term “fangirl” works to contain “feminine”
expressions of fandom or adoration within a particular nonthreatening ideological space; the
passion of the hysterical fangirl, shrieking and physically and emotionally out of control at the
sight of her hero, can be tolerated because it is just a teenybopper phase. The “Obamagirl” can
be tolerated because her desire is expected, and does not threaten the political status quo. This
ideological incorporation of the overly passionate girl is how Barbara Ehrenriech, Elizabeth
Hess, and Gloria Jacobs (1992, p. 526) argue parents and journalists “dealt” with Beatlemania:
convince yourselves it is “as inevitable as acne and gum-chewing, and [that] adults [will] just
have to weather it out”. This firmly associates this behaviour with not only femininity but with
youthfulness. Thus, while Clinton’s pop culture affiliations and fluency, and the fangirl passion
directed her way, may construct a “cool” persona, and may “congeal” followers and fans around
her, the association of pop culture with the feminine and the infantile ultimately conveys a lack
of seriousness on behalf of both her and her supporters.
Hebdige argues that male youth subcultures should be taken seriously, not just as a
“problem to be solved”, but because they have the “ability to symptomatize a whole cluster of
contemporary problems” (1979, p. 87). Despite decades of work by feminist cultural studies
scholars such as Angela McRobbie and Ehrenreich, Hess, and Jacobs, we, as a culture, like to
deny girls this ability; we like to deny that girls’ fannish pleasure and intense culture
attachments might mean something beyond “girl power!” and may carry weight that does not
need to be left behind in the “teenybopper” stage of life. This is why it is particularly interesting
that this rhetoric of “fangirling” was employed in a presidential election: what would it mean to
take “girlish” emotional responses seriously, particularly when they have tumbled out of the
“bedroom culture” of “teenybopper” worship and into the very public sphere of electoral
politics? Along these same lines, if “persona”, as Marshall and Henderson argue, is always
already political in its strategic negotiation of the individual in the social, “a fabricated
reconstruction of the individual that is used to play a role that both helps the individual navigate
their presence and interactions with others and helps the collective to position the role of the
individual in the social” (2016, p. 1), then how is Clinton’s persona reconstructed as her role as
an individual becomes more publicly positioned within this explicitly and loudly “girly” social?
“YAS QUEEN”: THE FEMALE POLITICAL PERSONA AND HILLARY’S FANGIRLS
Despite Donald Trump’s history of reality TV and non-political celebrity, Hillary Clinton’s
supporters were called “fangirls” and accused of celebrity-worship, of solely getting their news
from “pop” media like BuzzFeed—where foreign policy coverage is found alongside discussions
of how “dead” we are from a Clinton eye-roll—and of allowing fandom to cloud political
judgment. What is interesting is how this “fangirling” was not used as merely a descriptor for
her “regular”, “non-famous” supporters who were screaming at her as if she were a
“teenybopper” celebrity like Harry Styles. She did have a fair number of these regular, non-
famous supporters, many not even of voting age. A popular image, and one of the first that
comes up (in November 2017) in a Google Image search for “Hillary Clinton fangirls”, is that of a
young blonde girl meeting Clinton and ecstatically looking back over her shoulder with the
classic open-mouthed “OMIGOD Mom/Dad/best friend, I’m meeting Madonna/the Spice
Girls/Britney Spears/Selena Gomez!” fangirl face. It is not just her reaction that is notable here,
but also the fact that she literally is a girl. She could not actually vote for Clinton in the election,
yet she is “fangirling” nonetheless.
Persona Studies 2017, vol. 3, no. 2
47
Beyond this, however, the rhetoric of “fangirling” was also used to discuss the affection,
respect, and worship Clinton’s peers and colleagues had for her. The term “fangirl” was not
always used pejoratively. Sometimes it was, but often women—including First Minister of
Scotland, Nicola Sturgeon, and Huma Abedin, the vice-chair of Clinton’s 2016 campaign—self-
identified as “Hillary fangirls”. Abedin recalls being a 21-year-old intern meeting the then-first
lady and says she “had such a fangirl moment” and was “hooked” (Tacopino 2016); Sturgeon, on
the other hand, spoke of her excitement prior to meeting Clinton at a recent New York event,
stating, “I’ve got to be careful I don’t act like a fangirl” (AOL 2017).
While the term “fangirl” is not always used in the same way, it is always an
acknowledgement of excess—whether it is presented as a straight-up criticism or an apology, it
suggests that the enthusiasm one feels for Clinton is too much, and too much in a particularly
feminine way. It is an excuse to dismiss the over-the-top reactions as celebrity worship or
gender solidarity. Both Sturgeon and Abedin wore their Clinton fangirl labels as both a point of
pride and shame (i.e. “I respect this woman so much, but unabashed enthusiasm is so
unprofessional”).
Jessica Tarlov (2017), writing for Fox News online, began her article on Trump’s first
100 days by stating: “I’m a Hillary Clinton fangirl and I feel no shame”, as if shame were the
default. She continues: “Does that mean I don’t see her faults? Of course not”, again, as if a fangirl
cannot also be a critic. Nora Kelly (2016) opened an article in The Atlantic: “They were a bunch
of Hillary Clinton fangirls, the women who filed into the Women’s National Democratic Club
here last week to volunteer for the Democratic nominee”. Kelly characterises them as “all in
service to a candidate they feel duty-bound to defend: not only a woman who could be the
nation’s first to serve as president, but a candidate who looks, thinks, lives, and talks like them”.
This narrative of fangirling works to dismiss women’s support of Hillary Clinton in two
interrelated ways. First, women’s support and enthusiasm is reduced to gender solidarity. As
Anderson and Sheeler state, “[w]hen support for #TeamHillary is reduced to gender solidarity,
her constituency and policy platform can more easily be dismissed even as it is cited as proof of
broad cultural support for women presidential candidates” (2014, p. 238). It appears, on the
surface, to be positive thing, but it also works to reduce the candidate and her supporters to
solely their gender. Second, their political work is the result of fangirl attachment rather than
logical reasoning and support of policy, and these women are infantilised. This is a presidential
election, not a Twilight premiere; these are women working for a political cause, not girls and
women engaging in fantasy escape (and although I am suggesting this should be discussed
differently, I am not suggesting that we do not also take the girls and women at the Twilight
premiere seriously, merely that we acknowledge these as different kinds of emotional
attachment, even if they are expressed in similar manners through similar bodies).
To conclude, I want to briefly look at Clinton’s appearance on the episode “2016” of
Broad City, a Comedy Central series about two twenty-something female friends in New York
City “fucking around”, as Anne Helen Petersen puts it (2017, p. 54). In March 2016, in the middle
of her campaign, Clinton appeared on an episode of the sitcom when Ilana, one of the two
protagonists, works for her campaign. Both Ilana and her friend Abbi are ecstatic to meet
Hillary, but need to be instructed on etiquette; for starters, screaming “yas, yas, yas” is deemed
inappropriate. However, what is more interesting than Abbi and Ilana’s fangirling and lack of
professionalism generally—which is completely in character for them—is the response to the
episode.
Was “2016” a fangirl endorsement, and, if so (or if people read it as such), how is such an
endorsement folded into Clinton’s political persona? Many people read the unbridled
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enthusiasm for Clinton as an unbridled endorsement by the shows stars, writers, and creators,
the real-life Ilana Glazer and Abbi Jacobson, who argued in interviews that they were not trying
to make a political statement. In fact, they had written the episode a year prior, when the impact
may have not been the same. Jacobson states, however, that “Hillary, even regardless of where
we stand—and we love Hillary—is such an iconic figure. These girls being around her is not an
everyday thing. That’s how we felt being around her. It was like, ‘Oh, this is a different world’”
(qtd in Rosen 2016). Glazer and Jacobson reserve the right to critique, or not endorse, Clinton,
but what Jacobson says here relates back to Marshall’s “affect clusters”: Clinton’s power as a
political and public figure, as well as her status as the almost first female president, was awe-
inspiring, was deserving of unbridled enthusiasm and passion. This fangirl attachment, this
pleasure at seeing this woman you’ve grown up admiring run for president of the United States,
is powerful, but it is used to preclude critique and rational thought, and deny that girls’ and
women’s emotional attachments and responses might “symptomatize a whole cluster of
contemporary problems” (Hebdige 1979, p. 87). Political endorsement and fangirl attachment
are conflated in Clinton’s political persona; the presidential candidate cannot be separated from
the pop culture feminist hero and her fangirls.
The episode is called “2016” because it focuses on all the things that the United States
should have achieved by the year 2016: an efficient Department of Motor Vehicles, to begin
with, but also a female president of the United States. This fangirling, then—and the subsequent
mourning of Clinton’s loss—is not solely a result of the “Buzzfeedification” of political news, but
of an often lifelong desire to see this badass woman beat the odds in the biggest boys’ club in the
world. Anderson and Sheeler close their paper with a chillingly accurate prediction that I will
repeat here: “In the context of postfeminist political culture, winning the Internet proves to be
an easier task than winning the U.S. presidency” (2014, p. 239).
i I refer to her by her full name here, “Hillary Rodham Clinton”, because the inclusion of the
“Rodham” is a significant part of her cultivation of her persona as a female married politician
and lawyer. However, throughout this paper, I also refer to her as “Clinton”—both to adhere to
writing conventions, which privilege the “official” surname at the expense of the “first” surname,
often the spot reserved for the mother’s surname, and to adhere to how she was referred to, and
how she referred to herself, throughout the campaign: as Hillary Clinton (Madame President if
you’re nasty).
ii I use this passive sentence construction to note that, although Clinton was an active party in
constructing her persona, it is never clear who is “behind” a celebrity’s image, and, furthermore,
the persona is not a top-down construction: her supporters, fans, fangirls, and critics all
contribute to the creation of said persona.
END NOTES
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