ABSTRACT
Two thousand eight was a banner year for women in politics. The presidential elections featured Hillary Clinton, whom President Obama narrowly defeated during the Democratic primaries, and Sarah Palin, the Republican nominee for Vice President. Before 2008, no woman had come as close as Clinton did to becoming a major political party’s presidential nominee and only once before had a woman been the vice presidential nominee. While 2008 marked significant progress in women’s political prominence, it
also illuminated gender scripting’s lingering effects on American democracy. For example, members of the media treated Palin’s motherhood and Clinton’s tears as liabilities because they were associated with scripts for femininity. Meanwhile, parts of the media condemned John Edward’s expensive haircuts as breaches of masculinity. Legal commentators have typically focused on explicating gender scripts’
harmful effects on individuals or on women as a class. In this chapter, I take a different tack, exploring gender scripts’ harms to deliberative democracy. Gender scripts stifle deliberative democracy in at least three ways. First, they create barriers to participation in democratic deliberation. For example, only women who negotiate femininity in particular ways manage to mount the political stage. By unduly limiting the scope of individuals who successfully mount the political stage, gender scripts undermine the collective ideal of democratic governance. Second, pressures to negotiate gender scripts distort deliberative conversations among political actors because script negotiation often entails self-censorship. Third, deliberation is further impaired because identity scripts distort the way communications are received among political actors. In the remainder of this chapter, I begin by elaborating on gender scripts and
how they impair deliberative democracy in the three regards just highlighted. I then draw from that discussion to suggest directions for feminist theory. Examining gender scripts’ effects on deliberative democracy suggests that grouporiented approaches to feminist analysis obscure some problematic power inequalities. As was the case in the 2008 elections, power and disadvantage often
are not neatly tethered to group identities-such as one’s biological sex-but are associated with one’s ability and willingness to negotiate identity scripts. This chapter invites feminist legal scholars to focus more attention on these inequalities that do not map neatly onto group demarcations. In the last part of this chapter, I examine how gender scripts’ effects on democracy should inform the debate on same-sex marriage. Specifically, I argue that gender scripts’ effects on democracy buttress existing arguments for same-sex marriage.
