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Ralina Joseph discusses Michelle Obama's Post-identity Performance and Resistance

On May 18, Ralina Joseph, Assistant Professor in the Department of Communication, will give a colloquium, "The First Lady Speaks Back: Reading Michelle Obama's Post-identity Performance and Resistance." The colloquium takes place in CMU 126 from 3:30 to 5 p.m.

In February 2008, Michelle Obama made a comment at two campaign rallies about how the Obama campaign had helped inspire her own faith in the U.S. This comment, excerpted as, “for the first time in my adult lifetime, I’m really proud of my country,” was replayed, dissected and attacked over the 24-hour-a-day news-media cycle. The future First Lady was described as unpatriotic, bitter, angry, and emasculating.

In these mediated attacks, Obama’s race and gender, although featured prominently, were almost never explicitly named. Hence, in responding within this post-identity ethos, the assumed “after” moments of racism and sexism, Obama could not, in turn, name the racism and sexism at play. However, she did not remain silent. To speak back Obama negotiated the landscape of post-identity by performing a brand of resistant post-identity four months later on the daytime talk show The View. 

Joseph will discuss how this event illustrates how minoritized subjects, much like the First Lady, deploy the codes of post-identity to fight against the very tenets of post-identity.