TY - JOUR
AU - Shugart, Helene, A
AB - Abstract In this article, I argue that, as materialized in the figures of current U.S. President Donald Trump and immediate past New Jersey Governor Chris Christie, a culturally resonant variant of political authenticity has become aligned with the corporeally abject. In a climate in which conventional cornerstones of political comportment have become suspect, the corporeal abject has become a marker of authenticity, material evidence of resistance to perceived “politics as usual.” Moreover, mediated coverage of Trump and Christie that turns on their corporeal abjection to the end of critique augments and sediments this effect; fetishizing the grotesque corporeal features of Trump and Christie effectively serves to secure their relative “realness” and their concomitant distance from the artifice and deceit against which a disaffected public draws itself. This analysis prompts a theoretical reconsideration of relationships between abjection, subjectivity, and relative privilege and the role and relevance of the body in mediating those relationships. Addressing the turbulence of the 1960s, Berman (1970) cited authenticity as “the most politically explosive of human impulses” (p. 216) in the United States for decades to come. To this point, Parry-Giles (2014) has argued that “political authenticity” is a “preoccupation” of contemporary national politics. I concur; in this article, I assert that political authenticity has assumed a distinctive shape in current political context in the United States, reflective of heightened public cynicism regarding political and media establishments that are broadly construed as “out of touch” with “real” Americans. I contend that, as materialized in the figures of current U.S. President Donald Trump and immediate past New Jersey Governor Chris Christie, a culturally resonant variant of political authenticity has become aligned with the corporeally abject. In a climate in which refinement, civility, diplomacy, and careful rhetoric—conventional cornerstones of political comportment—have been rendered suspect, the corporeal abject has become a marker of authenticity, material evidence of resistance to perceived “politics as usual.” Moreover, I assert that mediated coverage of Trump and Christie that turns on their corporeal abjection to the end of critique augments and sediments this effect. To the extent that, in a post-fact, post-truth world, any symbolic representation—and in particular mediated representation—is at least as suspect as “politics,” fetishizing the grotesque corporeal features of Trump and Christie effectively serves to secure their relative “realness” and their concomitant distance from the artifice and deceit against which a disaffected public draws itself. Disturbing realities If the veneration of authenticity is not new, it has gained enormous cultural cachet in the last several decades, which have been marked by increasing transience, ephemerality, and superficiality; the attraction to that which is coherent, stable, and “real” is understandable. While authenticity can be articulated with material places and things, its articulation with a core individual self has been culturally salient since the late 18th century. Although early essentialist underpinnings of the concept have been challenged, the notion of an authentic subject drawn against society has generally been retained, taken up in recent decades as a problem of modernity (Ferrara, 1993; Heidegger, [1953] 1966). The contemporary revival of the concept can be traced to Heidegger’s notion of Dasein, or “being-in-the world,” a state marked by presence and affect; if the world and others in it are not inherently threatening to Dasein, modernity in general and the modern state in particular are. Dasein is deprived, Hardt (1993) argues, “in an anonymous society where individuals are guided and protected in their pursuit of secure and unchallenged lives by the power of others (…) anonymous forces which confer status, measure accomplishments, and deny individuals a choice within the limits of their own finiteness (pp. 50–51). For Heidegger, chief among these impeding forces is Gerede, superficial “idle talk” that “results in an existential ambiguity clothed in the certainties of chatter and curiosity” (Hardt, 1993, p. 50). In contemporary context, media are primary agents of Gerede, “stimulating and perpetuating the art of chatter (…) solidify[ing] the ambiguity of chatter and curiosity, and therefore, entrench[ing] media controlled forms of social and political authority” (p. 51). The contemporary resonance of an authentic self is apparent in proliferate cultural imperatives and sensibilities around self-actualization. In this paradigm, authenticity is secured and underwritten by unfettered expression of the self; modification or repression of any sort is anathema. This deployment of authenticity is apparent in exhortations to express one’s “true” self, to “be real,” “be yourself,” and “tell it like it is.” The role of the body in this imaginary is as a reflection of the spiritual self; for instance, one’s race/ethnicity is understood to be “authenticated” by embracing and expressing it (Jackson, 2004); similarly, one’s physical health is optimized via self-actualization, as when excess weight “melts away” upon acknowledging the “true” self (Shugart, 2016). Scholars have noted the neoliberal sensibilities that underwrite this imaginary, wherein the body and the self are subject to the will of the individual even as authenticity is contingent upon conformity and consumption (e.g., Illouz, 2008). Political authenticity is similarly predicated on qualities of truth, sincerity, and integrity, and it is further mobilized as honesty, transparency, and resistance to corruption; if always a desirable trait in a politician, it has achieved heightened poignancy in recent decades. “Politically tumultuous events” marked by “presidential abuses of power and deceit” dating back to the 1950s left Americans feeling “fearful over an inability to discern what is real from that which is fake” (Parry-Giles, 2014, pp. 1–2). Boorstin, in 1961, noted that “what we believe to be real” had become a central political question for Americans (p. 265); 30 years later, Mitchell observed Americans’ “nostalgia for a lost authenticity” in the nation’s political leaders (1994, p. 423). Widespread contemporary cynicism regarding the motives of politicians and the business of politics has sharpened rather than dispelled desire for political authenticity, and it is frequently conflated with disestablishment when invoked by political figures today; claims to “rogue” authenticity—for example, by John McCain, Sarah Palin, and Chris Christie—or to authenticity afforded by “outsider” status—like Ross Perot, Carly Fiorina, and Donald Trump—have become proliferate in recent years (Drury, 2014). The role of media in political authenticity cannot be overstated. The political scandals Parry-Giles (2014) references had profound effects precisely because they “invited intense media scrutiny and accustomed American people to political scandal” (p. 2). The “rise of the image,” wherein political candidates came to be marketed like a household product, exacerbated a “crisis” of political authenticity (Greenberg, 2003, p. xx). Reflective of persistent public yearnings for “authentic” political figures, Parry-Giles asserts that, as political figures publicly work to assert their own authenticity and the inauthenticity of their opponents, the news media have effectively become arbiters of political authenticity in this “image-making struggle.” If this point remains salient, the exponentially increasing (and increasingly disparate) proliferation, scope, and speed of both political “image making” and mediated coverage of politics has contributed to increased cynicism about both political authenticity as well as reportage thereof. Both endeavors are understood by an increasingly media-savvy populace as “spin” borne of selectivity, bias, artifice, and deception. Indeed, any and all representation has become suspect in this context, extending to any sort of refinement: not only political discourse but even its governing sensibilities of civility and diplomacy are rendered dubious. News media reports, journalists, and outlets, conventional arbiters of political authenticity, are at least as likely to be called out as politicians—often by politicians—for disseminating “fake news”; even media efforts to fact check are met with hostility and mistrust on the part of politicians and publics, making for a troubling, intractable double bind. Currently, purported “truth” and “facts” are in great contention, inherently suspect by default, leading to characterizations of our current world as “post fact” and/or “post truth” (Calcutt, 2016; Fukuyama, 2017). Accordingly, news media’s role in arbitrating political authenticity has altered in this political moment; in an interesting twist, media are rendered not only agents but subjects of Heidegger’s Gerede; if they continue to “solidify the ambiguity of chatter and curiosity” (Hardt, 1993, p. 51), they are themselves ambiguous chatter against which authenticity might be drawn—no longer arbiters of others’ authenticity, just as likely to be foils for it. Concomitantly, the current national political context is marked by cited failures of the political and the media establishments to acknowledge “real” populations in the US, ranging from immigrant labor to the urban poor to “Main Street” to the “99%” to the white, especially male rural working class. Notably, although each of these populations entails unique contexts and considerations, each turns on class, classic tropes of abjection against which considerations of refinement and civility are drawn. This may explain a predilection for authenticity that turns on tangibility—a distrust of representation coupled with prioritization of visibility and the “real” world—and on the crude and vulgar, as conventionally construed, in reaction to the refinements that have entailed the erasure of “the real.” Revulsion revised Kristeva (1982) describes the abject as that which “disrupts identity, system, order” (p. 4), against which subjects draw themselves to sustain a fiction of the self as autonomous, continent, and stable. If abjection is a concept, it is typically articulated as corporeal—bodies or bodily functions that terrorize subjects with their own frailties, fluidities, liminalities, and permeabilities. Bile, urine, feces, and blood are such functions, as is the “transitional matter” of a corpse, which is why they evoke powerful feelings of nausea, fear, and adrenalin (p. 109). Repudiation of the abject is imperative to the constitution and comportment of the “clean and proper” subject/body, entailing political ordering of abjected bodies against which the subject draws itself. As Kristeva and others (Butler, 1998; Russo, 1994) have noted, those are often and easily “leaky” female or otherwise primitivized bodies in the cultural imaginary, like those of color and of the crude lower classes. Abjection is typically accomplished via grotesque language and imagery. If the grotesque originated in the carnivalesque, deployed as the fantastic and bizarre, Russo (1994) notes that around the time of the Enlightenment, the grotesque came to be associated with the compromised interiority of the body—especially the malformed, oozing, leaking, protruding body—thereby giving shape to the abject body. Accordingly, the grotesque body that Bakhtin (1984) describes is abject—he conjures it as a pregnant “hag,” underscoring the logical facility by which the feminine is abjected—insofar as it is “open, protruding, irregular, secreting, multiple, and changing” (p. 19), in sharp contrast to “the classic images of the finished, completed man, cleansed as it were of all the scoriae of birth and development” (p. 25). While Bakhtin (1984) and others (Butler, 1998; Harold & DeLuca, 2005; Russo, 1994) have noted the resistive potential of the abject to subvert order, they and others have cautioned against facile binarism in this regard. Harold (2000) speaks to the complex hegemonic relationship inhering between the abject and the privileged subject, writing that, rather than existing outside or against the subject, “the abject constitutes an integral part of the vital subject (…) integral to the pulsing (…) on which subjectivity depends” (p. 870). Similarly, in her analysis of the film Fight Club, King (2009) argues that “masculinity is itself an abject ‘body’ whose perpetuation and expansion depend upon its ability to open up, double itself, and transgress its own boundaries” (p. 367); in this way, the abject underwrites rather than undermines hegemonic imperatives. I assess how the abject functions both resistively and hegemonically in unique ways in current national political context as relevant to mediated coverage of Chris Christie, across the last five years, and Donald Trump across the last two, when their respective political coverage has been most prominent. I argue that coverage of Christie and Trump, which relies upon conventional tropes of abjection to inauthenticate them, inadvertently secures their authenticity, especially to the extent that Christie’s and Trump’s abject bodies are drawn into alignment with those of, in Butler’s (1998) words, “deauthorized subjects, presubjects, figures of abjection, populations erased from view” (p. 65)—in this political moment, “real” Americans. To this end, classically abjecting tropes of primitivism abound in this coverage, including as they have historically been attached to female bodies, bodies of color, and lower-class bodies. It is the latter of these—in particular, white male lower-class bodies articulated with coarseness, crudeness, and vulgarity—that is the axis on which the instantiation of political authenticity that I wish to explore turns. Importantly, the fact that Christie and Trump are white men is inescapable, and a hegemonic effect is arguably inevitable, as I will discuss. For the same reasons, the deployments of abjection that I will trace here would not—could not—function as political authentication for women and/or people of color. But it is precisely because Christie and Trump are white men that abjection serves to authenticate them in this historical moment; precisely because they are articulated against their refined, polished, and civil establishment peers and with degradation, decadence, and impulsivity that they can be apprehended as defiant and resistive—as “real.” Dirty boys Christopher James Christie, who served two terms as the 55th Governor of the state of New Jersey, has been the subject of considerable controversy throughout his career. If characterized early in that career as a dedicated public servant, noted for exposing corruption across party lines, he has also been consistently characterized as corrupt and manipulative. For instance, his reported actions around “Bridgegate” described him as having a hand in if not directing a shutdown of traffic lanes that caused a massive five-day traffic jam; coverage of this story speculated Christie was motivated by retribution against a political detractor. Christie’s bid for the White House in 2016 was marked by, as reported, alternately aggressive and sycophantic actions; he initially lambasted contender Donald Trump and then, following Christie’s withdrawal from the race, not only endorsed Trump but jockeyed for various posts in his administration. Toward the end of his governorship, “Beachgate” depicted Christie and his family lounging on a public state beach that had been closed due to a New Jersey state government shutdown. Donald John Trump, the 45th President of the United States, is at least as volatile a political figure as Christie. Despite or because of his utter lack of political experience and losing the popular vote, he was elected via the Electoral College, and his tenure to date has been extremely contentious. Trump’s actions and behaviors are regularly called into public question, variously relevant to racism and sexism; sexual scandals; corruption, ranging from nepotism to treason; blatant lying; temperament; competence; and sanity: indeed, individual instances are far too many to chronicle here. Media coverage of Trump is incessant and inevitably spectacular, due to the spectacle that his presidency entails. For the same reason, much of that coverage is critical, questioning the wisdom and implications of Trump’s actions because they are unconventional, ethically or legally troubling, or treacherous. Christie and Trump have the distinction of featuring consistently record low approval ratings in their respective offices: Christie’s lowest at 15% (Segarra, 2017) and Trump thus far averaging around 37% (“How Popular is Donald Trump,” 2018). But notably, both were elected in a context of extensive public discussion calling into question their ethics, integrity, and temperamental fitness—that is, in a context of disapproval—and both enjoy the fervent support of a significant core of constituents despite troubling reports. Moreover, they are lauded for their authenticity: Christie is admired for being “straight shooting, action-oriented, takes no guff, less interested in the score than the results” (Erickson, 2013); and “what you see is what you get” (Falcao de Campos, 2015). Likewise, Trump is cited for being “unwavering: he is unchanging, he does not jump on the fads, and isn’t a panderer for votes. He could care less who likes him and has never kissed anyone’s butt” (Fasenmayer, 2016); “he’s not PC, he’s genuine (…) honest about people’s thoughts and feelings” (Pilrose, 2016); “What you see is what you see, all the cards are on the table, the words are non-rehearsed, flowing forth and engendering a sense of trust” (Friedendorf, 2015). Even those who have reservations about Trump, including regarding his character, register their support in terms of authenticity: “They may not admire the man, but he’s on their side, he vents their frustration, he afflicts the people who think so little of them [Democrats and the liberal media]—and that’s good enough” (Crook, 2017). While perceptions may be ideologically imbued, intriguing about these characterizations of Christie and Trump as politically authentic is that they are consistently offered with an acknowledgment and even embracing of each’s ethical shortcomings. I contend that this is reflective of changing metrics for political authenticity in current context; specifically, I assert that political authenticity, as illustrated in the cases of Christie and Trump, is increasingly aligned with the abject, reflective of public distrust of political and media establishments that have been identified as discounting “real” Americans. Moreover, I argue that critical media coverage of Christie and Trump that relies upon conventional tropes of abjection inadvertently secures their authenticity precisely by corporeally abjecting them, drawing them more firmly against refined, civil comportment, understood in current context as artifice and deception. Bodies that bother Christie’s and Trump’s bodies are regularly characterized in the mainstream as abject, drawn especially against containment. In Christie’s case, this is secured primarily via depictions of his obese body as unruly: excessive, protruding, imposing. This characterization is often articulated with his reputation as a bully; his body is articulated as a corporealization of his brutish and impulsive nature, underwriting an articulation of Christie as authentic insofar that he rejects civility and order. This may be, to some extent, an outgrowth of Christie’s established and lauded “rogue” ethos early in his career, but I argue that, especially in recent years, that rogue ethos has become conflated with and mobilized in articulations of Christie’s body as abject. Christie’s excessive size is an inescapable feature of his ethos; he is variously described as “big,” “brawny,” “bearish,” and “fat.” The moral dimensions that characterize contemporary cultural understandings of obesity are referenced in coverage of Christie that questions his “discipline”; in this vein, a 2013 Time magazine cover featured a bust shot of Christie in silhouette accompanied by the text “The Elephant in the Room,” prompting charges of “fat shaming.” Notably, lack of discipline and containment lie at the heart of abject characterizations of large female bodies, and in a classic double bind, those bodies are further abjected insofar as their size renders them unfeminine and thus “unnatural” insofar as they claim space and signify agency to desire and consume (Bordo, 1993). But if the critique of Christie is gendered, he is not female, and moreover, his body is one of raced and classed privilege, so the abjection pivots accordingly. To the extent that lack of discipline is articulated with his excess size, it is presented as unregulated power, a felt force that implies a breaching of borders that, if articulated as vulgar, is characterized as a reflection of his impulsive, irrepressible essence: he is “unfiltered” (Crowley, 2013); has a “feel for the jugular” (Scherer & Miller, 2013); he is “a rush of blood to the head” (Wallace-Wells, 2013). His obesity is key to that force: Christie is “big and brash” (Crowley, p. 28); his is a “barreling style” (Lizza, 2014, p. 41); “he is a small-craft warning of a human being” (Wallace-Wells, 2013). Importantly, that force is connected to political authenticity: MacGillis (2014) writes, “Christie utterly dominates a room—planted center stage, an immovable force. His willingness to get in the face of his critics, his refusal to budge—it all gives the impression of a rare politician who cannot be co-opted or cowed” (p. 22). Similarly, Leibovich (2014) writes, “obscured by the ambition, loose-cannon personality and, frankly, the girth, is the fact that he is an exceptionally gifted and nuanced politician.” If inadvertently, these depictions establish Christie’s authenticity in his excessive, unfettered body by materializing him—making him “more real”—precisely by drawing him against refinement, artifice, containment, and civility. Depictions of Donald Trump’s body as abject similarly underwrite his authenticity, albeit in different ways. Trump, with no political experience and long identified in the mainstream as suspect, comes to (abject) authenticity by way of rupture. That is, his perceived role as a gamechanger rests upon his incorrigibility, his inability to be refined, an impression largely secured via grotesque representations of his body. In some cases, Trump’s abjection is also linked to his size, especially his “big butt.” An unflattering picture that quickly went viral depicts him boarding Air Force One; apparent winds displaced his suit jacket to display his rear end, described variously as “ample,” “mammoth,” “thicc,” and “junk in the trunk,” and prompting the surfacing of pre-presidential pictures of Trump’s buttocks in similarly unflattering lights (e.g., Scovell, 2017; Swearingen, 2017). But unlike Christie, Trump is not considered obese, and the fixation with Trump’s buttocks secures his abjection via their correlation with primitivism around both sexuality and defecation. While the fetishization of Trump’s buttocks sexually primitivizes and arguably emasculates him insofar as it aligns him with the raced, feminine primitive, on his privileged white male body and in context, it is inevitably drawn against the refinement that characterizes appropriate political comportment. The scatological is at least as significant in this regard insofar as buttocks signal the body’s incontinence and waste, but this, too, can be read as authenticity secured via primitivism. Indeed, his buttocks feature into other scatological representations of him, as well; in response to widespread comic speculation in popular discourse that Trump tweets from his toilet—itself an abjection—mainstream media coverage of Trump references extremely popular Trump toilet paper, each sheet featuring a Trump tweet; a Trump toilet seat; and a Trump “butt plug” (Reilly, 2017). If the mediated fetishization of Trump’s buttocks primitivize him per extant tropes of abjection, in the current historical moment of suspicion and distrust of both politics and the media, the fact that it stands in such sharp contrast to typical comportment and coverage of politicians allows it to be feasibly, even readily read as authenticity, even vulnerability, in ways that moreover underscore the inauthenticity of the media exploiting those images. Trump’s corporeal abjection is further secured via primitivization in media coverage of his sexual proclivities. While the sexual actions and habits of political figures is hardly novel media fodder, that associated with Trump is distinctively abject. Trump has been embroiled in multiple sexual scandals since his political career effectively commenced in 2016, the first of which was a publicized 2005 video recording in which Trump noted that “I’m automatically attracted to beautiful [women]—I just start kissing them. It’s like a magnet. Just kiss. I don’t even wait (…) You can do anything (…) grab them by the pussy. You can do anything” (Victor, 2017). Trump’s alleged dalliances with porn stars and prostitutes have been widely reported in news coverage, abjecting insofar as they signal debauchery, and this genre reached a zenith with the much-rumoured “pee tape,” which ostensibly depicts Trump in a Moscow hotel room with two prostitutes whom he paid to urinate on a hotel bed. Vastly extensive news coverage of these respective events characterize Trump as degenerate, “lewd and loutish” (Filipovich, 2017), “a big, horny pig” (Dowd, 2018), and “feral” (Taibbi, 2017b), which serve to secure Trump’s abjection per his carnality. However, on a white male body in current context of distrust of refinement and civility, these qualities are feasibly legible as evidence of authenticity. Trump’s visage also is frequent fodder for grotesque articulations, readily apparent in discourse around the “orangeness” of his skin tone and hair. There is considerable focus upon the “bizarre” qualities of his “Creamsicle skin” and “apricot glow” (“Orange Aid,” 2017): Trump “looks like he ate way too many carrots” (Green, 2016); the Washington Post reported a German drug raid that yielded “deep orange” Ecstasy pills that featured “Trump’s coifed hair and pursed lips” (Wooten, 2017). Citing other colors in Trump’s “clownish” repertoire, Nussbaum (2017) notes, “red tie, yellow hair, ‘the Donald.’ He’s less an icon than he is a retro cartoon (…) flamboyant and vaudevillian” (p. 23). Taibbi (2017b) describes Trump thusly: “same boxy blue suit, same obligatory flag pin and tangerine comb-over, same too-long reddish power tie swinging below his belt line like a locker-room abomination (…) the same old tie-on-bulging-duodenum look.” Trump’s hair, a notorious target of ridicule for both its color and its styling, is abjected to the extent that it is portrayed as an uncontained and ominous protrusion of him, as when Handy (2015) describes it as “the inanimate object that straddles his scalp like a dead, furry lobster.” Ryan (2017) writes: Trump’s locks are art meets disarray, like a drunk Bridget Riley painting, like a performance of Swan Lake if half of the dancers started doing Fosse choreography in the middle of the second act. It zooms in all directions like a follicular spaghetti junction. Penn Jillet described it as “cotton candy made of piss.” Trump’s orange hair is a staple trope for his abjection, especially apparent in abstract visual renderings that articulate him with abjection via decay, deterioration, and dissolution. For instance, Rolling Stone featured an illustrated cover of an orange cyclone, entitled “Trump the Destroyer,” and Time magazine has featured several such covers, including the 22 August 2016 cover, featuring simply a melting orange oblong face with an open orifice, entitled “Meltdown”; followed two months later by a cover featuring a considerably more “melted” orange face with a bigger orifice, entitled “Total Meltdown.” But these very grotesque qualities can be construed in this political moment as evidence of Trump’s authenticity, as compared to his polished political peers. Reeve (2015) concurs: Donald Trump likes to say that he’s “very good looking,” but this is not quite true. He is no handsome square-jawed Marco Rubio, or Rick Perry, or Mitt Romney. His head is huge, his aging skin caked in bronze makeup, his eyes encircled by concealer that is too light. He’s got these distinct round cheeks that he’s passed down to all his kids. Sunlight often catches the powdery dust of his makeup sitting on his blond eyebrows. But he is very good to look at. Because unlike most of the other candidates, Trump shows real emotion. He’s not afraid to make himself look really ugly. Trump’s corporeal abjection is vividly secured via animalization, a favored trope of Matt Taibbi, political reporter for Rolling Stone, who writes, “Trump leans over and pauses to soak in the love, his trademark red tie hanging like the tongue of a sled dog” (2017a). In another, subsequent article, Taibbi observes that “watching Trump lean over a podium on the road to the presidency was like watching a stud boar hump a hole in the wall”; and “frankly, we’re lucky he’s not walking around using a child’s femur as a toothpick (…) America, land of the mad pig president” (2017b). Taibbi is not alone in these characterizations, especially of the pig stripe; Scovell (2017) contributes “Trump’s bloated, porcine face,” MSNBC Morning Joe television news personality Donnie Deutsch called Trump a “vulgar, disgusting (…) pig” (Kasperowicz, 2017), and Dowd posits: “So, with this latest toad jumping from our president’s mouth, is Donald Trump acting like a sexist pig or simply a pig? I proffer, a pig” (2017). Animalizing Trump in these ways serves to abject him by challenging his contained, refined, and civilized body; but a political climate where these very qualities are suspect, the primitive and feral read as refreshingly authentic—raw, unfiltered, unadulterated. Trump’s abjections in media coverage secure his authenticity precisely to the extent that they are invoked to inauthenticate him; they confirm that he is changing the game, rupturing the refinements and civilities of “politics as usual.” That he is articulated as physically crude, repulsive, and degenerate is proof of his authenticity. Eating the odious Brummett observed that “references to what public figures eat [or] drink (…) contribute to [his/her] image or persona (…) reference to what candidates eat are rhetorical attempts to transfer popular connotations about the food to the person who eats it” (1981, p. 138, emphasis in the original). Ronald Reagan’s reported proclivity for jelly beans ostensibly bespoke his “resolutely unpretentious, middle-class” allegiances, whereas Jimmy Carter’s cited preference for “blandness” and “bloodless” fare cultivated a perception that he was “unremarkable” (p. 140). Likewise, references to abject foods feature powerful rhetorical implications; depending on cultural context, foodstuffs ranging from offal to blood to milk can provoke intensely negative reactions that may be projected onto individuals who consume them. Conversely, some scholars have chronicled how abject foods have been invoked in recent years to defiantly valorize white masculinity (Phillipov, 2013; Shugart, 2016). Defiant masculinity is apparent in coverage of Chris Christie’s culinary preferences and habits, and in political context, the abject fare that Christie is associated with serves to reinforce at least his “rogue” and often his “bully” status in ways that, importantly, hinge on class: it is articulated as lowbrow, typically fast food, procured impulsively and often in excess—that is, as abject. Christie’s oft-reported fare of choice—hot dogs, potato chips, bologna sandwiches, ice cream, nachos—as well as where he consumes them—diners, boardwalks, street carts—do much to accomplish his “Everyman” authenticity, underwriting him as “pragmatic,” averse to airs and artifice (Leibovich, 2014; MacGillis, 2014). Notably, however, this lack of pretentiousness around Christie’s foods and food habits is typically—often graphically—further articulated as uncouth and grotesque, as illustrated in a recorded interaction that went viral: It is nighttime, and Christie is eating an ice-cream cone when a heckler walks past and says something to the governor about his war on the school system. At which point the governor, furious, charges down the boardwalk after his antagonist, ice-cream cone in hand, at first baiting the man, then taunting him. “You’re a real big shot, you’re a real big shot shooting your mouth off,” the governor yells, as the heckler eludes him—not all that difficult, given Christie’s sheer mass and the presence of the ice-cream cone. “Keepwalking away,” the governor calls after him. “Really good. Keep walking.” (Wallace-Wells, 2013) This grotesqueness is sharply apparent in Leibovich’s (2014) description of Christie eating …nachos, which were dripping grease and piled prodigiously with three scoops of sour cream and guacamole over melted cheese. Diced tomatoes spilled onto the table…. He surveyed the nachos and grabbed a large deck hewed together by coagulated Cheddar. “We don’t mess around,” he said, bringing the cluster to his lips. “I didn’t have breakfast today,” he added, as if by way of explanation. And then: “I had a little bit of ice cream around lunchtime.” If these depictions articulate Christie with primitivisim and the “common,” they underwrite him as authentic for those very same reasons: in current context, Christie’s food practices are not only read as unpretentious, especially as relevant to class alignments, but their grotesque rendering lends material and physical substance to his Everyman persona. A fitting segue into assessment of coverage of Trump’s foodways is the point at which they intersect with Christie’s: Wolcott (2017) describes how on the campaign trail, Christie, “a plus-size bully at his Tony Soprano worst, fetched McDonald’s meals for Trump.” Indeed, many of the foods associated with Christie—especially “lowbrow” fast foods—are also articulated with Trump: “Trump is a noted lover of fast food: McDonald’s burgers and Kentucky Fried Chicken are staples. “A ‘fish delight,’ sometimes, right?” Trump said in a town hall event about his orders from McDonald’s. ‘The Big Macs are great. The Quarter Pounder. It’s great stuff’” (Marcin, 2017); he “dines regularly on McDonald’s hamburgers and buckets of KFC fried chicken on his private jet” (Zezima & DelReal, 2016). These renderings typically turn on Trump’s uncouth, declassé eating practices, including the incontinence thereof, as apparent in a Newsweek illustrated magazine cover depicting him slouched in a recliner, tie askew, a greasy bag of fast food under one arm and a can of soda in hand, a bright orange bag of cheese puffs resting against his thigh. Cheese puffs, also bright orange, spill across his lap, their crumbs littering his chest and protruding stomach. Similarly, Scovell (2017) writes: “He yawns, wipes some KFC extra-crispy batter from his most northern chin.” However, in political context, these references to culturally abjected foods and base eating habits work to authenticate Trump as they do for Christie, establishing his unpretentiousness. There are notable distinctions in how food references accomplish Trump’s authenticity, however. Trump’s tastes are regularly described as childlike, per descriptions of his predilection for bland, unimaginative food as well as how he is fed by others. His favoring fast food is attributed to his fear of food that is “different” and unpredictable; “President Donald Trump eats like a 6-foot-plus, 240-pound child—if that youngster had the ability to push a button and make a lackey fetch a Coke” (Marcin, 2017). A Time profile of Trump “after hours” confirms this depiction: The waiters know well Trump’s personal preferences. As he settles down, they bring him a Diet Coke, while the rest of us are served water, with the Vice President sitting at one end of the table. With the salad course, Trump is served what appears to be Thousand Island dressing instead of the creamy vinaigrette for his guests. When the chicken arrives, he is the only one given an extra dish of sauce. At the dessert course, he gets two scoops of vanilla ice cream with his chocolate cream pie, instead of the single scoop for everyone else. (Scherer & Miller, 2017) If these descriptions might easily be understood as infantilizing and, in that regard, abjecting—infants, after all, have no control over their bodily functions and desires—they also lend themselves to an apprehension of Trump as authentic, for the same reasons: as guileless, lacking refinement and, especially in the latter example, as different as he could be from the politicians and reporters around him. His childlike food tastes invert the adage but to the same effect: “into the mouths of babes.” Another way in which Trump’s abjected foods and food practices function distinctively is that they are often contextualized by and juxtaposed with allusions to his wealth, status, and privilege—Trump’s tastes are drawn explicitly against the tastes of the wealthy and cultured. For example, the quoted reference above that describes Trump’s predilection for fast food specifically locates his consumption of them “on his private jet” (Zezima & DelReal, 2016). His childish food tastes are similarly situated; one account notes that “he likes his $54-dry-aged steak charred into beef bricks so hard they clank and rattle the plate. A healthy slather of ketchup serves as the finishing touch” (Marcin, 2017); and another describes that when queried by a reporter “about the missile attack on Syria, [Trump] feeds her a self-satisfied description of how he informed his Chinese guests at Mar-a-Lago of the strike over ‘the most beautiful piece of chocolate cake that you’ve ever seen’” (Remnick, 2017, p. 17). If these abjecting articulations are meant to ridicule, in current context, they may cultivate an apprehension of Trump as authentic by dint of guilelessness. His unswerving predilection for bland, childlike, and “common” foods, especially insofar as they flout wealth and refinement, may be construed as a reliable—material—index of his nature. Sordid sitings Finally, articulations of Christie and Trump with abjected places also function to secure their political authenticity. Christie is regularly cited as an incarnation of New Jersey, his home state and site of his political career. In fact, New Jersey has itself long been abject in the popular cultural imaginary. While the state “official nickname” is the Garden State, and it is sometimes aligned in with noble working-class plights and values, these alignments are arguably eclipsed by perceptions of New Jersey as degraded, tawdry, lowbrow, and crude. Importantly, these declassé qualities are proudly, defiantly owned by inhabitants, gleefully celebrated as irrepressible and unpretentious: “We’ve got people named Teresa who put ice cubes in their Chablis and go grocery shopping in velour pants with ‘KISS MY JERSEY ASS’ embroidered on ‘em in sequins” (Infante, 2015). If New Jersey’s abjection in the public imaginary predates Christie, he is often presented as “channeling” the state, to the same effect of unpretentiousness. His quintessential “New Jerseyness,” “brawny New Jersey politics” (Leibovich, 2014, p. 32), and “cultural ventriloquism” (Wallace-Wells, 2013) are frequently noted by reporters; Crowley reports that Christie’s “chief asset may be a candor in the best Jersey tradition of say-what-you-mean bluntness” (2013, p. 28). Directly engaging the spectacular and abject features apparent in the conflation of Christie and his home state, Wallace-Wells (2013) observes that, in the “emotive, combative” Christie, “New Jersey finally has a governor equal to itself” insofar as: (…) in New Jersey, charisma is a blunt instrument. Even in its most lyrical incarnations—in Philip Roth’s perception, or Bruce Springsteen’s—the state is the site of a fevered, haywire sexuality, a place where all of the most full-blooded human instincts run loose: aggression and vanity; a big hearted, desperate romantic yearning; a carnal materialism. While these abject articulations—conflations—of Christie with New Jersey may be understood as critique, they also authenticate him by materializing him as New Jersey incarnate, unapologetically and defiantly abject. Trump’s authenticating emplacement is more complex, manifest across three distinct venues. Perhaps most notoriously, his presidential run and success was discursively located in the Rust Belt. His appeals to “make America great again,” in tandem with his rejection of progressive economic and social policies, connected with disaffected and impoverished populaces in these regions whose identities remain bound to dying industries. While his appeal reached beyond these regions, he was and, in some quarters, still is perceived as a voice and a champion of that “real America” (Scherer, 2016). These regions are articulated in unfailingly abject terms: “grim,” “suffering,” “deteriorating,” rife with “decay”; “impoverished,” with homes lacking clean water or any water (Saul, 2016; Worland, 2017); the “landscape is devastated,” populated with defunct mines, abandoned mining roads, vast “expanses of sludge,” dried-up lakes and streams (Griswold, 2017). To the extent that Trump is articulated with this abjected place, its grime and decay materialize his authenticity. But even as they reported it, mainstream accounts disputed this siting, noting that Trump could not be further removed from the devastating poverty and hardship of these regions; born into vast wealth, Trump never had to work, and his father furnished him with all of the capital for his business ventures. Yet mediated representations that locate Trump in contexts of wealth and ostentation are at least as abject as those that describe Appalachia. For instance, he is often articulated with New York City, more specifically with his namesake Trump Tower, an icon of extreme wealth. Coverage of Trump’s environs, however, invariably depicts them as crass, ostentatious, and decadent. Describing Trump Tower, Scherer (2016) writes: This is, in short, not a natural place to refine the common touch. It’s gilded and gaudy, a dreamscape of faded tapestry, antique clocks and fresco-style ceiling murals of gym-rat Greek gods. The throw pillows carry the Trump shield, and the paper napkins are monogrammed with the family name. His closest neighbors, at least at this altitude, are an international set of billionaire moguls who have decided to stash their money at One 57 and 432 Park, the two newest skyscrapers to remake midtown Manhattan. There is no tight-knit community in the sky, no paperboy or postman, no bowling over brews after work. And yet here Trump resides, under dripping crystal, with diamond cuff links, as the President-elect of the United States of America. Other accounts strike a similar note as they chronicle changes that Trump is making to the White House: Trump says he used his own money to pay for the enormous crystal chandelier that now hangs from the ceiling. “I made a contribution to the White House,” he jokes. But the thing he wants to show is on the opposite wall, above the fireplace, a new 60-plus-inch flat-screen television that he has cued up with clips from the day’s Senate hearing on Russia. Since at least as far back as Richard Nixon, Presidents have kept televisions in this room, usually small ones, no larger than a bread box, tucked away on a sideboard shelf. That’s not the Trump way. (Scherer & Miller, 2017). Trump’s “natural” setting is thus articulated as kitschy, tacky, pretentious, excessive—indeed, grotesque, and in a way that turns on inauthenticity. However, this is consistently countered by how Trump is corporeally emplaced within these settings; depicted within the ostentatious, garish excess of his home settings, his body reads as crude or “common,” juxtaposed with the artifice surrounding him. He is frequently depicted sloppily or decadently arrayed in recliners, on couches, in bed, and on the toilet. Speculation about Trump “tweeting from the toilet” or watching lowbrow television from his lavish bed or sofa abounds in media discourse (Delcic, 2017; Haberman, Thrush, & Baker, 2017; Nussbaum, 2017), often illustratively, like a Newsweek magazine cover depicting him sitting in a well-appointed recliner, aiming a remote control at a presumed television set, covered with fast-food and snack detritus; and a New Republic illustration featuring a tweeting, bathrobed Trump in an opulent bathroom seated in a gold wheelchair. Indeed, bathrooms often crop up in public discourse about Trump, including his reported “fondness” for bathrooms and penchant for offering tours of them (Gill, 2017; also, Haberman, Thrush, & Baker, 2017). These abject corporeal characterizations of Trump situated in abject places of ostentatious wealth secures an apprehension of the material, corporeal abject as authentic precisely as it is drawn against the grotesqueness of the symbolically abject trappings of artifice and wealth. If Trump’s unnaturalness in his “natural” settings of wealth are designed to expose him as a pretender, they may accomplish the opposite, positing him as authentic, unmoved and uncorrupted by wealth. Conclusion The power of the abject body to define subjectivity is profound. Classical articulations of the abject continue to have resonance: that which threatens stable, unified, and coherent subjectivity—including death, decay, and bodily incontinence—retains its power to terrorize. As theorizing the abject has evolved, scholars have refined those and ancillary concepts, noting the ways in which the abject may function both resistively and hegemonically. This analysis suggests additional ways to consider the abject’s implications for hegemony and resistance. In particular contexts, abject articulations of materialities of bodies, including their practices and emplacements, may function to authenticate subjects. The current historical moment in US national politics is such a context, I assert, one marked by cynicism regarding political and media establishments insofar as they have become correlated with bias, artifice, and deception, to the point that any and all (re)presented “facts” and “truths” have become suspect. I argue that in this context of suspicion, media coverage of Christie and Trump, which relies upon conventional tropes of abjection to inauthenticate them per the media’s established roles as arbiters of political authenticity, may inadvertently serve to secure that authenticity. Mobilized through and on Christie and Trump’s bodies, their political authenticity is effectively articulated with the corporeal abject, evidence of their imperviousness to perceived “politics as usual.” What this means for political authenticity in this moment is that, while it remains an endeavor located at the nexus of politicians’ image-making and news media arbitration (Parry-Giles, 2014), it is currently drawn precisely against those representations, read against and through the now-suspect symbolic grain for the corporeal abjection on which Christie’s and Trump’s mediated inauthentication is predicated. This is so in part because this historical moment is driven by a set of cultural politics that includes a substantial degree of “white male resentment” (Potts, 2016), attendant to the perception that white men have been and continue to be alienated, displaced, and disenfranchised by social progress of, especially, women and people of color—notably, classically abjected bodies in Western contexts. Importantly, lower-class bodies are also classic mobilizations—materializations—of abjection, and as Potts notes, white male resentment sensibilities are currently resonant in the context of economic and professional deprivation; moreover, those sensibilities converge with perceived erasure—by politicians and be media—of these particular abjected bodies, which serves to conflate them with “the real,” drawn specifically against the represented. In this context, then, only white male bodies could accomplish this inversion of the abject as authentic, and privileged ones at that. In other words, Trump’s and Christie’s abjected bodies paradoxically secure their authenticity because of their gender, race, and class privilege. Even if the projecting onto or claiming of the abject body by bodies of privilege is resistive and reactionary to institutions and presumptions, this inevitably functions hegemonically; after all, their abjection relies upon classic tropes of abject “otherness” to secure itself, inevitably reifying them. This is further accomplished to the extent that, by implication, “other” classically abjected bodies are recalibrated, even as they are invoked in classical ways to accomplish abjection—that is, via feminization and primitivization of Christie’s and Trump’s bodies. On their bodies of privilege, these tropes—especially primitivizing ones—mutate on their bodies and in this moment into unpretentiousness, a lack of refinement. Feminizing tropes around lack of containment, as well, are transformed in context into irrepressibility, further evidence of authenticity. While this does not suggest the lack of relevance of female bodies and bodies of color for the abject—again, they are clearly and reflexively invoked in securing the abject in these contexts—it results in a double bind insofar as to the extent that actual female bodies and bodies of color gain access to social capital and legitimacy, they are rendered inauthentic. This analysis chronicles a conflation of privileged subjectivity and the abject body, at least in political context. Effectively, it is an in-corporation: in these articulations, the privileged authentic subject is predicated upon the abject body, inverting the contemporary imaginary of self-actualization. Theoretically and practically, this is a novel and promising turn, signaling a valorization of the body that has long been apprehended as suspect, antithetical to culture, civility, and subjectivity, and on which manifold, vast, and persistent systems of privilege and oppression have been predicated. But the valorization of the body in this configuration is highly contingent: subsumption of the abject body—actual or as represented—can only be effected for capital gain by conventional bodies of privilege, not least because cultural progress has worked to disarticulate disenfranchised subjects from the body—to “deabjectify” them. If a desperate move, as undertaken or represented, it is not ineffective, evident in the resonance of these newly abject bodies. What remains to be seen are the implications of disembodying the disenfranchised. 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TI - The Ugly Truth: Abject Corporeality as Political Authenticity
JO - Communication Theory
DO - 10.1093/ct/qtz007
DA - 2020-07-13
UR - https://www.deepdyve.com/lp/oxford-university-press/the-ugly-truth-abject-corporeality-as-political-authenticity-kUORuQteGC
SP - 1
VL - Advance Article
IS - 
DP - DeepDyve
ER -