Compromising Positions
Americans have long believed that the private lives of their politicians are important indicators of their fitness to lead and of their ability to defend and uphold American values. For many, a sex…
Specifikacia Compromising Positions
Americans have long believed that the private lives of their politicians are important indicators of their fitness to lead and of their ability to defend and uphold American values. For many, a sex scandal renders a person ineligible, or at the very least questionably qualified, for public service. In Compromising Positions, Leslie Dorrough Smith questions the assumption that sex scandals are really about sex-- that is, that they are primarily concerned with the discovery of sexual misconduct. She argues that they are, instead, a form of cultural storytelling that uses racial and gendered symbols to create a collective sense of national worth and strength.Smith shows that sex scandals involve the use of four very powerful social tools--gender, race, politics, and religion-- that together create a rhetoric about what America is, who is eligible to formally represent it, and