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Our First Unisex President?: Black Masculinity And Obama's Feminine Side, Frank Rudy Cooper

Scholarly Works

People often talk about the significance of Barack Obama's status as our first black President. During the 2008 Presidential campaign, however, a newspaper columnist declared, "If Bill Clinton was once considered America's first black president, Obama may one day be viewed as our first woman president." That statement epitomized a large media discourse on Obama's femininity. In this essay, Professor Frank Rudy Cooper thus asks how Obama will influence people's understandings of the implications of both race and gender.

To do so, he explicates and applies insights from the fields of identity performance theory, critical race theory, and masculinities studies. …