Michelle Obama

In 2010, First Lady Michelle Obama launched the Let’s Move! campaign to drastically reduce childhood obesity within one generation. Concurrently, President Barack Obama formed the first White House Task Force on Childhood Obesity. Obesity is an urgent health issue for many Americans but is particularly problematic for American Indian/Native Alaskan, Black, and Hispanic children. Let’s Move! and the Task Force share five goals: encourage healthy pregnancies and early childhood, empower parents and caregivers to make healthy choices, provide healthy food in schools, improve access to healthy affordable foods in communities, and increase physical activity. This chapter analyzes Let’s Move! literature, Michelle Obama’s speeches and writing, media coverage of the initiative and Task Force reports to assess the initiative’s success in meeting these goals.

The article discusses the role of the photo illustrations in the performance of racial visibility in Michelle Obama's autobi.ography. In African American autobiographies, illustrations were traditionally used to authenticate the story of social ascent and make racialized bodies visible. The article argues that parallel to the book's main narrative of finding one's voice and becoming audible, the illustrations perform the project of changing the female African American narrator's social visibility for the American gaze from a stereotypical racially biased version to a more personalized one closely connected to issues of education and self-help. The article claims that if the story of finding one's voice in the book is read along with the narrative on visibility the pictures tell, then the racial politics of book cannot be so easily criticized as some of its early reviews would suggest.

This essay theorizes how black feminist comedic performance queers white supremacist and heteronormative notions of time by centering Wanda Sykes's performance in her comedy special I'ma Be Me and her performance at the White House Correspondents' Dinner-both in 2009. Sykes's jokes articulate how queer bodies of color experience temporal-ities that are in constant tension with dominant narrations of "coming out," national heritage, and white nostalgia. I argue that Sykes uses comedic performance to: (1) reveal the limits of "progressive" coming out narratives for black queer women, (2) reinstate black subjectivity into US collective memory, (3) debunk myths of the United States as "post-" identity politics, and (4) challenge broader publics to think beyond linear and binary constructions of identity/ies, space, and time. Black feminist comedic performances provide unique platforms to reshape, dislocate , and reclaim temporalities that marginalize and silence black queer women. Therefore, black feminist comedic performance (BFCP) operates "as a provocation to move past the boundaries of alienation,"  and toward oppositional knowledge, resistance, and empowerment. Centering Wanda Sykes's comedic material, I theorize how black feminist comedy functions as critical historiography, the resistant act of interrogating dominant historical narratives as truth, thus "crack-ing up" chrononormativity. Chrononormativity, as defined by Elizabeth Freeman in Time Binds, conceptualizes how time is used to organize individual bodies in abidance with the institutional rhythms of capitalism, white supremacy, heteropatriarchy, and cisgender normativity.  More specifically, I argue that Sykes uses BFCP to: () reveal the limits of "progressive" coming out narratives for black queer women, () reinstate black subjectivity into US collective memory, () debunk myths of the United States as "post-" identity politics, and () challenge broader publics to think beyond linear and binary constructions of identity/ies, space, and time.

interests include late 19th-century proto-modern fiction, conversions of literary modernism and postmodernism, popular fiction genres, contemporary multicultural American fiction, theories of narrative, and methods of American Studies. Her current research into travel writing involves re-mapping travel texts by Edith Wharton. She has published two books, The Function of the Imagination in the Writings of Henry James (Mellen, Abstract: Michelle Obama's Becoming has become the best known memoir by an ex-First Lady ever. Traditional as the First Lady's role and the First Lady's memoir genre are, Becoming has shifted the terms through which to define both. Instead of the insider's story about the public husband by the domestic wife it represents the basic American story of a self-made strong woman invested in the life of the community. This paper reads Becoming and charts its statements about finding one's voice, opting to work for the community, and choosing hope over despair as not so much a personal but rather as a communal story of a not so well definable group. To get a better glimpse of the actual appeal of the story, the paper investigates where this project comes from, what its modes of existence are, how it is circulated, what subject positions it determines. Becoming can be read as political commentary in the sense of antebellum autobiographical slave narratives that had aimed to trigger political change by personal testimony. Another intertextual influence can be African American women's fiction and autobiography where the theme of finding one's voice in the context of double oppression is vital. The story defines the subject position of an 'empowered' black feminine subject. Michelle Obama's Becoming represents an ultimate dream: the story of a working class African American girl who becomes the rst lady of the US. Although the book develops a special American rags to riches plot, the story covers not only the journey of becoming the First Lady, but also that of becoming a person with a voice and a project. In Becoming this project means a focus on change on many levels. I argue that 'change' in the text has both personal and political implications: I want to focus on how the personal and political senses of the term are represented in the autobiographical narrative. In order to look into the

" Style liderów. Analiza na podstawie przykładów z polityki, kultury oraz indywidualnych wywiadów pogłębionych " Angelica Pegani Tematem niniejszej pracy stały się style liderów, ich analiza na podstawie wybranych przykładów z polityki, kultury oraz badań własnych. Celem pracy jest udzielenie odpowiedzi na pytania: jakie są cechy charakterystyczne lidera? Które style liderów występują w świecie polityki i kultury? Czy kobieta liderka różni się od mężczyzny lidera? Jakie czynniki wpływają na styl przewodzenia lidera? Kiedy mowa jest o przewodzeniu, a kiedy o zarządzaniu ludźmi? Jak powinien zachować się lider w sytuacji kryzysowej? Czy współpraca lidera z innymi ludźmi jest istotna? Postaram się odpowiedzieć na wyżej wymienione pytania w oparciu o badania własne. Na początku ukazano metodologię badań w świetle teorii, w oparciu o dostępną literaturę przedmiotu. Określono cel i przedmiot badań, problem badawczy oraz hipotezy badawcze, metodę, technikę i narzędzia badawcze oraz miejsce i czas badań własnych. Następnie przytoczono ogólną misję przywództwa w świetle dostępnej literatury. W związku z tym przywołano definicję przywództwa, wymieniono jego style oraz przedstawiono genezę tego zjawiska. Podjęto się analizy kobiet oraz mężczyzn jako liderów. Ukazano zalety i wady lidera, podobieństwa między obiema płciami liderów i różnice między nimi oraz uwzględniono przyszłość funkcji lidera prognozowaną przez naukowców – w oparciu o dostępne wyniki badań własnych przeprowadzonych w wybranych firmach międzynarodowych. Ponadto przybliżony został rozwój pracy lidera: od współpracy z ludźmi, przez style pracy, aż po rodzaje wykonywania zamierzonych przez przywódców celów. Ukazano wizerunek kobiety liderki ze szczególnym uwzględnieniem sylwetki Michelle Obamy, Oprah Winfrey, Księżnej Diany i Margaret Thatcher oraz mężczyzny lidera ze uwzględnieniem Baracka Obamy, Martina Luthera Kinga oraz Nelsona Mandeli w wybranych utworach literackich oraz filmach. Przedstawiona została także postać lidera w indywidualnym wywiadzie pogłębionym. Wymieniono cechy charakterystyczne lidera, określono style liderów na wybranych przykładach, a także przybliżono konkluzje wybranych liderów z badań własnych.

Upon her death in 1994, Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis was repeatedly lauded for her ‘grace, dignity, style, class’, and this has remained the dominant discourse surrounding her public image in the years since. This article will historicize this dignity discourse in its contemporary political context, establishing the cultural contingency of the posthumous biographical accounts and revealing how the intimate public that “Jackie’s” narrative comprises has historically been embedded in, shaped by and reinforced ideologies of race and racialized American femininity. Analysis of the intersection of Onassis’s biographical narrative with those of Joycelyn Elders (Surgeon General of the United States, 1993-1994) and Michelle Obama (First Lady of the United States, 2009-2017) illuminates the ways in which Onassis’s image and the traditional femininity it has come to represent have been used to denigrate and reprimand Black women in the public sphere.

To learn more about the processes by which Michelle Obama uses media exposure to advocate for policy, we generate hypotheses using a sample of the First Lady’s political speeches while exploring the rhetorical artifacts found in two of her major policy initiatives: the “Joining Forces” program for military families, and the “Let’s Move” campaign against childhood obesity. By expanding upon a theoretical framework developed in Kahl (2009), synthesizing ideas from the Obama literature, and making use of the resources provided by the C-SPAN Video Library, we offer much-needed insight into the First Lady’s skill as an orator and agenda setter. Specifically, the “Joining Forces” and “Let’s Move” initiatives provide ideal test cases for making sense of the complex relationship between elite-driven rhetoric and mass-level policy preference. We hope that our study opens a space for other scholars to explore how Michelle Obama uses mom-in-chief rhetoric to counteract--and perhaps transcend--negative stereotypes of African-American women while advancing her political causes.

Mythological representations have always symbolically embodied human beings' ancestral fears and wishes. Yet today the reading of the languages of new myths can convey the key to an understanding of the historical period we are living in. Nowadays one of the most popular cultural icons is Michelle Obama. First Afro-American FLOTUS, Michelle is still serving as a highly influential role-model, whose recently published autobiography, Becoming, is a record best-selling book. By drawing on the theoretical approach of Appraisal Framework (Martin and White 2007), I intend to investigate how her 'becoming Michelle' was accomplished. The AF explores the way language is used to evaluate and/or adopt stances and to construe textual personas, and how affective involvement can be conveyed through a set of indicators. Accordingly, qualitative examples are analysed to show how, in Michelle's autobiography, the lexico-grammar options are significant in the process of the shaping of her status of a modern cultural icon.

Review: The Obamas and mass media: race, gender, religion, and politics

by Mia Moody-Ramirez and Jannette L. Dates. Palgrave Macmillan, 2013.111p bibl index ISBN 9781137404923 cloth, $67.50


This is a brief case study of how minorities (largely black) have been and are covered in an American mass media dominated by white gatekeepers of news.  Moody-Ramirez (journalism, Baylor Univ.) and Dates  (emer., Howard Univ. School of Journalism) document how coverage of President Barack Obama and his wife, Michelle, has fit into stereotypical images of African Americans presented in US mass media coverage throughout history.  They maintain that images of blacks presented in American media have largely been framed by a dominating white culture, which in turn ignited African American resistance.  Their guiding theory is based on Antonio Gramsci's concept of ideological hegemony in which dominant classes dominate subordinate groups.

This Article traces the evolution of federal family law and policy from 1992-2012 and beyond by considering the legacy of Clintonism, the “Third Way” political philosophy developed by William Jefferson Clinton and the Democratic Leadership Council. Present day economic inequality is spurring reflection on the role of government and on the meaning and form of progressive politics. Clintonism’s centrist, progressive approach linked governmental provision of opportunity to personal responsibility (“working hard and playing by the rules”) and appealed to values of family, community, faith, liberty, and inclusion. By linking family values to family policies, Clintonism’s New Covenant  successfully  challenged the idea that family values were the sole domain of the Republicans. An examination of Democratic platforms in each election year since 1992 reveals both continuity and change  with respect to the family, family values, and family policy. To illustrate, this article traces the trajectory of three statutes enacted during Clinton’s presidency: the Family and Medical Leave Act (1993),  the welfare reform law, the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act (1996), and the Defense of Marriage Act (1996) (DOMA). Family leave and welfare reform featured prominently in Clinton’s New Covenant, which stressed giving people the tools they needed to succeed at home and at  work and to eliminate forced choices, while insisting that welfare should be “a second chance, not a way of life.”  By contrast, DOMA seemed at odds with Clinton’s stated commitment to inclusion and to ending discrimination against gay men and lesbians. The Obama Administration’s approach to family policy and family values has shown significant continuity with basic tenets of Clintonism, stressing unfinished business with the FMLA and with addressing poverty. By contrast, President Obama’s evolved stance on DOMA and his Administration’s robust embrace of marriage equality reflects the sharpest departure from Clintonism.  (Clinton himself has repudiated DOMA as a  relic of an earlier era.) This article identifies several distinctive features of the Obama administration’s approach to work–family policy:  (1) making the personal political by referencing the First Family and First Marriage in supporting responsible fatherhood and marriage education and highlighting the challenge of balancing work and family; (2) focusing on women and girls in designing federal policy even while insisting that a range of economic  and family issues are  “not just women’s issues,” but ones that affect men, families, the economy, and society; and (3) calling for a “new New Deal,” in which the economy, governmental policies, and institutions (such as the workplace) must catch up with the realities and needs of twenty-first century families and workers.

Chicago’s South Side Bronzeville neighborhood, a center of African-American life and culture, hosted the 2019 Obama Foundation Summit at the Illinois Institute of Technology on October 29, 2019. The Advancing Women in Product (AWIP) team was invited to cover the Summit as press, and from the perspective of a female empowerment and advocacy NGO.

I was asked to review Connie Corcoran Wilson’s first volume of her OBAMA’S ODYSSEY. I accepted because it was vastly entering my field of competence and my practice as a university professor teaching US politics, culture and history along with the English language.

This essay will provide the readers with three reviews of books first.
1- Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance, by Barack Hussein Obama;
2- Of Thee I Sing: A Letter to My Daughters, by Barack Hussein Obama
3- Nairobi To Shenzhen: A Novel of Love in the East, byMark Okoth Obama Ndesandjo

Then I included my presentation of November 2009 in Brest, France, later published in Paris: BARACK OBAMA’S VIRTUAL STYLE IN HIS INTERNET MESSAGES TO HIS SUPPORTERS (11/05 – 02/02) by Dr Jacques COULARDEAU, Université Paris 1 Panthéon Sorbonne.

You will then finally find my review of Connie Corcoran Wilson’s book: OBAMA’S ODYSSEY: The 2008 Race for the White House, 2015. You can of jump to it directly, page 27.

The whole collection of articles, presentation and reviews is built along a discourse on history and what a historian can say about a present situation he or she is involved in. I also assess the campaign of Donald Trump so far by the date of March 16, 2016.

That sets Connie Corcoran Wilson’s book in perspective: it is a blog written and published on Yahoo in 2008 but republished in 2016 in a situation where Hillary Clinton severely rejected in 2008 is now the front running candidate of the Democratic Party with the full support of President Barack Obama whose State Secretary she was from 2008 to 2012.

This 2008 rejection is typical of a blog but the reuse of this blog 12 years later is hardly hiding an ideological stance against the establishment of the Democratic Party, no matter what it may stand for in 2016. 

It may also appear as support for the contending candidate against Hillary Clinton in the primaries, but it may also turn out to be objective support for the contending candidate of Hillary Clinton in the presidential election itself. Let’s say that the rather sectarian rejection of Clinton’s attitude at the time of the Lewinsky shady business because she did not asked for divorce is of the same level as the barking Clinton Donald Trump depicts in his March 16 hostile TV ad.

Enjoy the debate and the confrontation of ideas, knowing that if there is no truth in history but only points of view, there is no truth in real life but ideological and political competition that may turn sour at times with the bigotry of some actors.

Women and sexual minorities in the United States continue to experience subordinate status, and the policy gains they have made in areas such as reproductive rights and marriage equality continue to be challenged in political discourse. We conducted a critical discourse analysis of texts from the 2012 Democratic and Republican national conventions in order to examine the extent to which ideological representations of the family were employed to legitimize public policy positions related to gender (e.g., abortion) and sexuality (e.g., same-sex marriage). We analyzed two forms of text (official party platform document, transcripts of speeches) with distinct intended audiences (i.e., party members, general audience). Findings revealed that an ideological representation of the traditional family ideal—featuring a heterosexual couple, their children, and asymmetric gender relations—was present within speeches given by both parties, particularly by the spouses of the presidential candidat...

If you need some fresh Obama, follow this recipe.

Do not share this with anyone else, this is a family tradition. Seriously, my family died to get this recipe. If you share this with anyone, you will die, I promise. It's well known that the penis is the largest organ on the body, but in Mike Pence's case, his largest organ is his left kidney. It's wild, it's larger than your average hentai tentacle. Usually, we do not find kidneys in the human body, but this time we have found Pence's famed kidney bean soup. The beans are the regenerative parts of his right kidney, which is why it is so large. Also, do not call Mike 'Henry', he really hates that. He prefers to be called 'Big Daddy Chungus69'. Thank you for coming to my TED talk.

Thank you for your best wishes,
Obamacare.

By the way, buy my new podcast merchandise, it's on sale for a limited time only at https://www.shop.minecrafthoodies.com/virus.

Several existing studies have examined the feminist rhetorical strategies Michelle Obama used in her public addresses; however, none has analyzed the messages she communicated about one of the terrorist attacks in Nigeria, the abduction of the Nigerian Chibok schoolgirls. The African plight, which gained global attention and generated several discourses, has been credited to Michelle Obama’s involvement in speaking out on the issue. As such, I use the Afrocentric feminist epistemology with models of African feminism to examine some of the rhetorical strategies she employed in her three messages aired during the tragic kidnapping in Nigeria. Since Michelle Obama is an African American rhetor and known for her maternal performances, understanding the strategies employed when communicating about the terrorist incident extends knowledge about the perception of African experiences more broadly, the discourses surrounding the kidnapping, and establishment of the Let Girls Learn initiative. My findings indicate that Michelle Obama’s messages about the Nigerian schoolgirls’ abduction are strategic in that they reveal her ability to be a connector, challenger, and an agent, as well as create an outlook that change is possible. Specifically, her utterances and actions portray her as an African feminist, womanist and motherist, and one who utilized the Afrocentric worldview when communicating about the tragic terrorist incident.