Glenn Close or Rocky - which one is Hillary Clinton?

In the lecture on feminism and media studies, I suggested it might be a good idea to look at some of the press coverage of Hillary Clinton's current campaign to win the nomination as the Democratic candidate in this year's US Presidential election.

You may not like Clinton or approve of some of the dodgy moves she, Bill and her campaign team have pulled in the campaign. Even so, it's hard to disagree with those who suggest that she gets a certain level of criticism/vitriol from some press commentators merely because she is a woman running for high office.

As I said in the class, the general assumption behind some of this coverage is that it's ok for a man to be ambitious, to want power, but when a woman wants the same thing then there must be something wrong with her - she must be scheming, untrustworthy, unnatural...

A monster even - that's what an aide in the Obama team called her a while back and it's the line taken by Andrew Sullivan, a political pundit/blogger and long time critic of the Clintons, in a piece he wrote for The Times in early March.

Sullivan compares the Clintons to a horror movie monster you can't kill, to zombies, to Glenn Close at the end of 'Fatal Attraction'. Remember that, for some media theorists, that film and its representation of a career woman as unbalanced and dangerous is a key part of an argument about attempts to roll back the gains made by feminism in the seventies.

Initially, Hillary Clinton's campaign against Barack Obama stressed policy. She was all about the nitty gritty details of politics, about experience, whereas he was about mythical imagery (inspiring speeches, first black man to run for President etc).

But over the last month, Clinton's campaign has gone symbolic too - first she started to play the feminist card, perhaps spying an opportunity in some of the sexist stereotyping flung her way by press pundits.

More recently, she compared herself to Rocky Balboa from the Rocky films. Not sure if that latter is that good an idea. Perhaps she should have tried to refer to a Hollywood film that portrayed a battling woman in a positive, sympathetic way. But are there any, besides those that show heroic mums?