ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the scandal involving Pennsylvania Republican Congressman Patrick Meehan, paying particular care to the gendered nature of scandal through the deconstruction of a letter that Meehan sent to a female aide working for him in his office. The roots of American political sex scandals run deep, and can be dug up all the way back to the founding of the Republic. The public has been eager to consume news coverage of political sex scandals, which generates a moral discourse about sex, gender, and power. Any casual observer of American politics knows that there has historically been a plethora of male politicians, and a lack of female politicians, who are at the center of political sex scandals in the US The 1959 foundational text, Studies in Social Power, offers a multitude of definitions of power that remain relevant to the power structures at play in the Meehan scandal.
