The First Lady in Contemporary Popular Culture

From Martha Washington to Jill Biden, Mars Attacks! to Scandal, and the Ladies’ Home Journal to Vogue, this diverse collection examines how the nation’s First Lady has become an important cultural icon within an underestimated yet symbolic position in US social politics and culture.

Academic work on the First Lady has tended to be historical or biographical in approach, but The First Lady in Contemporary Popular Culture takes the field in a new direction by focusing instead on representations of the First Lady. It explores how real and imaginary American First Ladies have been represented, reconsidered, and re-imagined by different writers, filmmakers, and fashion designers. Despite her apparent marginal position at the periphery of US politics, as this collection shows, representations of the First Lady have become increasingly significant on the cultural stage in the 21st century.

Using a range of feminist, cultural, media, postmodern, race, and communication-based perspectives, the contributors suggest new ways of understanding the First Lady and the complexities of her office. The authors explore campaign autobiographies, Curtis Sittenfeld’s speculative fiction, James Patterson’s on-the-run thrillers, as well as atypical representations of the First Lady, such as in Roland Emmerich’s box office hit Independence Day (1996), gossip magazines, and historical fashion plates.

Removed from the patriarchal hierarchy of White House politics and expectations, the First Lady emerges as a cultural force of her own, and this collection demonstrates how she subtly carves out cultural agency and gender identity despite her perceived (in)visibility in the public eye.