Judith Butler argues that gender is performative: We act out our understandings of what is or is not “feminine” or “masculine.” I have been intrigued with gender performance for sometime now, but was shocked when I began viewing coverage of the 2008 Presidential campaign.

With the presence of both a female (gasp) and Black (double gasp) candidate, this years election was destined to be an interesting one. What I thought was just going to be an assault on Hilary Rodham Clinton’s gender, turned out to be an exploration of all of the candidates sexualities. To put it simply, the media began performing gender and sexuality FOR the candidates. The media used sexuality and gender as a way to debunk, discredit, and devalue each candidate.

Clinton, especially within independent media like You-Tube, is both hyper-sexualized and masculinized. Her nickname, “Hitlary,” led to artists creating computer generated pictures of her dressed as Hitler. Additionally, online videos paint her as being “too harsh” and “too masculine.” But it does not stop with Hilary. After being caught “fixing his hair” for too long before an interview, Senator John Edwards was dubbed “The First Female President,” and Ann Coulter called him a “faggot.” The media went crazy over pictures of the Republican candidate Rudy Giuliani dressed up in drag. And Barack Obama finds himself over-sexualized and heterosexualized at every turn...a common story in the media’s construction of Black male identity and masculinity.

In order to make this video I collected media clips and photographs (some altered, others not) to show the ways in which the media is presenting the candidates and their sexuality. I gathered these clips for places like YouTube. Then I put them together to show the progression of the performance.