Public Affairs

Politics in the Age of Sex Scandals

Author: Apostolidis, Paul; Williams, Juliet A.; Gamson, Joshua; Lowi, Ted
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 9780822332763
eISBN Pdf: 9780822385387
Place of publication: Durham , United States
Year of digital publication: 2004
Month: January
Pages: 288
DDC: 973.92
Language: English

Caption

Public affairs—or sex scandals—involving prominent politicians are as revealing of American culture as they are of individual peccadillos. Implicated in their unfolding are a broad range of institutions, trends, questions, and struggles, including political parties, Hollywood, the Christian right, new communications technologies, the restructuring of corporate media, feminist and civil rights debates, and the meaning of public life in the “society of the spectacle.” The contributors to Public Affairs examine, from a variety of perspectives, how political sex scandals take shape, gain momentum, and alter the U.S. political and cultural landscape.

The essays in Public Affairs reflect on a number of sex scandals while emphasizing the Clinton/Lewinsky affair, certainly the most avidly followed and momentous sex scandal in American political history. Leading scholars situate contemporary public affairs in the context not only of earlier sex scandals in American politics (such as Thomas Jefferson’s and Sally Hemings’s affair), but also of more purely political scandals (including Teapot Dome and Watergate) and sex scandals centered around public figures other than politicians (such as the actor Hugh Grant and the minister Jimmy Swaggart). Some essays consider the Clinton affair in light of feminist and anti-racist politics, while others discuss the dynamics of scandals as major media events. By charting a critical path through the muck of scandal rather than around it, Public Affairs illuminates why sex scandals have become such a prominent feature of American public life.

Contributors. Paul Apostolidis, Jodi Dean, Joshua Gamson, Theodore J. Lowi, Joshua D. Rothman, George Shulman, Anna Marie Smith, Jeremy Varon, Juliet A. Williams

Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction: Sex Scandals and Discourses of Power
1 Sex Scandals in U.S. Politics: Theoretical, Social, and Historical Contexts
- Normal Sins: Sex Scandal Narratives as Institutional Morality Tales
- Power and Corruption: Political Competition and the Scandal Market
- Hardly Sallygate: Thomas Jefferson, Sally Hemings, and the Sex Scandal That Wasn’t
2 Class, Race, and Gender in the Clinton Scandal
- On ‘‘The Dalliances of the Commander in Chief’’: Christian Right Scandal Narratives in Post-Fordist America
- Narrating Clinton’s Impeachment: Race, the Right, and Allegories of the Sixties
- Sexual Risk Management in the Clinton White House
3 Privacy and Publicity, and the Conditions of Democratic Citizenship
- Privacy in the (Too Much) Information Age
- It Was the Spectacle, Stupid: The Clinton-Lewinsky-Starr Affair and the Politics of the Gaze
- Making (It) Public
Notes on Contributors
Index