Queer Politics – Gay Thoughts

Rest From Cruel Dominion: Embracing Mercy on the Sabbath Day

A Sermon Based On Deuteronomy 5:12-15 and Mark 2:23-3:6

I.

We rule the land. We rule the air. We rule the seas. Human animals have dominion over the earth.

I completely agree with Matthew Scully, a Republican, when we argues in his eloquent and moving book, Dominion: The Power of Man, the Suffering of Animals, and the Call to Mercy—I entirely agree with his argument that “[t]he term dominion carries no insult to our fellow [,non-human animal] creatures. We are all set forth into the world with different gifts and attributes. Their gifts, the ones their Creator intended for them, are good for many things—governing just isn’t one of them. Someone has to assume dominion, and looking around the earth we seem to be the best candidates. . . “ (12).

That truth doesn’t make us better or more valuable or less animal than, say, pigs, octopuses, cows, elephants or batts. Our dominion merely reflects our difference, our unique—yet completely animal—place in the world.

So the question we face today—and every day—is not whether we have dominion over the earth—we manifestly do—the question we face is a much more difficult one: What kind of sovereigns are we?

Are we merciful, compassionate, filled with wonder at the sheer diversity of life all around us and so are sovereigns committed to respecting and protecting the inherent dignity of all animal life?

Or, Are we cruel sovereigns, rulers who thwart access to justice and to restoration.

II.

We are so very often cruel sovereigns of the earth.

Our cruel reign is sometimes expressed through our faith in what Martha Nussbaum, in her powerful and life-changing book, Justice for Animals: Our Collective Responsibility—identifies as a Romantic view of nature.

We enjoy Romantic thoughts of “Natural” spaces—and of “Natural” people, too. We love to imagine that there are, out there somewhere, pristine, self-regulated, balanced places and self-sufficient, rural people.

The Romantic idea of “Nature” intoxicates us, but when we sober up and actually observe nature, I think we start to agree with the 19th-century philosopher John Stuart Mill: “Nature is cruel and thoughtless.”

When we sober up, when we are truly in nature, I think we begin to learn what ecologists teach us: “balance of nature” is a nice slogan for fruit and veggie supplements, but no such thing exists in nature.

And rural poverty and isolation from needed resources, like quality healthcare, may be, from the Romantic point of view, the “Natural” order of things, but that is just another reason for us to sober up.

Our faith in “Nature” makes us neglectful; it enables us to ignore the suffering of our fellow creatures.

But we are not always neglectful, are we? Sensing that our fellow creatures, including our own species, can serve the needs of some dominant group, we force them to serve the free market.

Consider the slaughterhouses throughout our county. Who works there? What do they do all day? And what creatures are killed there? How many are killed there? And how are they killed there? For some answers, read a book like Steven Wise’s An American Trilogy: Death, Slavery, and Dominio on the Banks of the Cape Fear River.

The cries for mercy rise up from those allegedly pristine Natural places and from farms and slaughterhouses all over our country, and they summon us to rest from our cruel dominion.

III.

We heard God, in the 4th Commandment we read earlier, asking us to take a break from our cruel dominion. We are asked to rest from cruel dominion on the Sabbath and to remember that God liberated us from the regime of cruelty.

That sounds nice—but carefully consider the logic of the Sabbath Commandment: Liberation from slavery in Egypt is the justification for pausing the institution of slavery among those liberated from it. You heard the text: Let your male and female slaves rest on the Sabbath day. I guess you can take the slaves out of Egypt but you can’t take the Egypt out of the liberated slaves—except, maybe, on the Sabbath Day.

But cruel dominion is the policy of the Sabbath Day, too.

The story we read from Mark teaches us that cruelty has become a Sabbath Day tradition. Consider this story, another version of the policy of pious cruelty Mark is critiquing:

All of 17-years-old, I attended a winter church retreat in McCall, Idaho. I managed to get very sick while at the retreat.

I will spare you the details of all the ways my body was trying to expel the sickness.

Anyway, I ended up in hospital, stayed the night on an IV, and returned to the retreat in the morning, in time for breakfast. I walked into the cafeteria and nearly vomited at the sight and smells of sausages and bacon. I consigned myself to hunger.

Later that morning, we gathered for worship and for communion. The chunk of communion bread I ate was so satisfying that, after the service, I went back to the communion table, and I started to chow down on the huge loaf of leftover bread.

It felt so good.

As I was being restored, clergy So-And-So walked over to me and calmly, but with a tone, reminded me that I was eating the body of Christ—and he suggested I stop eating it like a wild animal, by which he meant I should just stop eating it altogether; communion was over.

Being a good teenager, I just completely ignored him. I was not going to be blocked from what I needed to heal.

I hope we have the courage to teach our youth that lesson: sometimes holy trouble will look like totally ignoring religious people. Sometimes, even as your hand is being swatted away by church folks, you just have to keep reaching out your hand and ripping off huge chunks of bread, of justice, of healing.

Cruel dominion, all the ways, through inaction and action, we block animals from justice and restoration—cruel dominion is so often a Sunday tradition. But tradition is not destiny. We can do something different, if only for one day a week. We can rest from our cruel dominion.

IV.

Some of you have may noticed a story about the Hurricanes a few weeks ago. I know we have Canes fans in here today. Maybe you saw a story about them entitled, in part, “Hurricanes Use Rest As A Weapon.”

What they did was refuse to practice early in the morning on game day. They went out of their way to get on the ice the day before the game, choosing to rest on the morning of the game. The Canes know what we all know: rest impacts how we perform.

Rest makes us smarter. Rest makes us stronger. Rest makes us patient. Rest makes us merciful and compassionate. Rest makes us woke.

Woke just means that cruel dominion exhausts us. If we’re woke, that just means we want a break from all forms of cruel dominion; woke means we want to rest from cruel human dominion.

Rested, we may forsake all forms of slavery, all forms of cruel dominion.

Rested, we may even begin to hear that part of the 4th Commandment that asks us to give animals a rest. Rested, we may start to consider animals as something other than property to be used and as something other than food to be eaten. Rested, we may find it in ourselves to liberate animals from slavery.

V.

Philosopher Jeremy Bentham was right when he compared our treatment of animals to slavery. Our cruel dominion over animals can even be hidden in practices that are actually good from our fellow creatures. Think about some of the reasons we stop eating meat:

We stop eating meat to save rainforests, as our meat eating habits require more and more land to raise all those cattle.

We stop eating meat because cows produce methane gases, more than all the cars in the world, changing our environment.

We stop eating meat because it is not healthy for us.

We may even stop eating meat because we oppose cruelty to animals, and industrial farming is terribly cruel to animals. We have an intuitive sense that if we are cruel to animals, that if we support such cruelty, we will also be cruel to one another.

But notice: all that concern, it’s all about us.

Rested, we may realize what Aristotle did: animals like pigs, cows, and chickens “are self-maintaining systems who pursue a good and matter to themselves.” Rested, we may grasp that most animals, including all the ones we like to eat, are sentient creatures.

Sentience is about a lot more than feeling pleasure and pain. It also means that you have an opinion of yourself; you see yourself in a certain way, and you see others in your group, and other objects in the world, in a certain way. And you move accordingly, you move in a way that aligns with your sense of yourself and your sense of how the objects in your world conform to your understanding of what is good and what is bad for you.

Rested, we may grasp that the sow is sentient; she was not created to be food for us; she was created to pursue her goods: a long, satisfying life, and friendship, intimacy, family, nutrition, play, secure housing; rested, we may now understand that the sow desires to pursue her projects and to accomplish her goals.

Rested, the smell of sausages and bacon on the Sabbath may make us want to vomit.

Rested, we may come to this table and reach out our hands, not to kill and eat our fellow creatures, but to be restored by the taste of bread and of grapes.

VI.

Now, I understand if you were with me until that last bit about not eating sentient animals, like pigs. I get it.

I became a vegetarian just last November after I read Nussbaum’s book—and by the reactions of many family and friends, you would think being a vegetarian is the most weirdest thing to be in the world!

Yes, of course vegetarianism is weird, especially if the reason you are a vegetarian is rooted in animal studies, in the fact that most animals, including all of the ones we just love to eat, are sentient in the most expansive sense of the word.

Of course vegetarianism is weird; from day one we have been taught that justice is not a thing for non-human animals to enjoy. Humans creatures are above animality, above the body and endowed with heavenly reason—we deserve justice; animals deserve ketchup.

Again, I completely agree with Matthew Scully. He writes, “I am betting that in the Book of Life ‘[They] had mercy on the creatures’ is going to count for more than ‘[They] ate well” (45).

Rested, we may even learn that it’s possible to forsake cruelty and to eat well!

VII.

On the sabbath day, just for one day, let’s rest from our cruel dominion; let’s eat more bread and drink more wine (I mean, grape juice).

Today, let’s embrace the deepest truth of our faith: God liberated us from cruel dominion.

Today, let it be heard and believed that God gave the middle finger to cruel dominion: God delivered the Messiah Jesus, crucified, dead, and buried, from the grave.

So today, let us really rest from cruel dominion; it’s just done day; it’s just one small act—but tomorrow, rested, you may wake up woke, ready to play the game of dominion differently, ready to become the human animals God created us to become: kind and merciful sovereigns of the earth.

May it be so.

Amen.

The Figuring of Former Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot

*

Lori Lightfoot is, according Gregory Pratt, a political failure.

“Some of Chicago’s problems can be explained by forces greater than the mayor. . . ,” Pratt contends in his recent book, The City Is Up For Grabs: How Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot Led And Lost A City In Crisis, “[b]ut some are the result of [Mayor Lightfoot’s] poor leadership at City Hall, a story that hasn’t been told in full until now. . . ” (xii). Pratt continues, “In some ways, the past four years of Lightfoot’s tenure as mayor are a model for how not to lead a big city. Her failures weakened the office . . . ” (xv).

I was born and raised in Idaho, but I consider Chicago to be my birthplace. In 2002, a twentysomething, I moved to the city with a bar on every corner and bridges that (until weed was legalized in 2020) smelled like chocolate.¹ I grew up in Chicago during the Daley regime. I moved to the East Coast during the first few years of the Emanuel regime. I entirely missed Lightfoot’s surprising rise to power, her 4 year reign, and her just as surprising fall from grace.

Why do I care about Lightfoot?

I care about women in politics. More specifically, I am interested in how women in politics get figured, how they (actual women politicians) get defined/portrayed in art (literature, film, etc.). What I care about is Pratt’s artistic rendering of the former Chicago mayor.

Pratt would likely reject the idea that his book is an artistic rendering of Lightfoot. Yet, the real Lightfoot refused to participate in his project (xv). So, whatever Pratt’s book is about, it is not about the real her. Nonetheless, and this is important to grasp, Pratt’s rendering of Lightfoot does tell us something true and accurate about how she is perceived as a political figure, a figure of what Chicagoans want and what they can do about it.

How is Lightfoot figured by Pratt? What is true about it? Why does it matter?

**

What follows is a description of Pratt’s picture of Lightfoot. The quotes below are numbered to indicate groupings of interrelated texts that, when taken together, constitute Pratt’s figuring of the mayor. In the ensuing analysis of these texts, I refer to each grouping as a set (e.g., Set 1 = quotes 1[a-d]).

1(a): “Noticing a couple of ornate chess sets hand carved by members of a church in the Back of the Yards neighborhood, I asked Lightfoot if she played. She chuckled and responded that she’s more of a checkers player. Her brother tried to teach her, Lightfoot said, but she wasn’t able to get into the game. It showed over the next four years of chaos” (ix-x).

1(b): “[Mayor] Emanuel came out of the meeting boasting to staffers that [Lightfoot] said [she would not run against him for mayor]. Weeks later, she bought campaign websites . . . . It’s one of the top points Emanuel’s people make when they say she isn’t trustworthy. For her part, Lightfoot says she wasn’t running for mayor but wanted to keep her options open. It’s a level of hairsplitting that makes someone hard to trust” (28).

1(c): Jeanette Taylor, “heart and soul of Chicago’s left-wing City Council slate,” describing Lightfoot: “The difference is, Toni [Preckwinkle, President of the Cook County Board of Commissioners] will say, ‘Bend over, I’m about to fuck you.’ With Lori, you look up, and your ass is sore’” (86).

1(d): “Though the conversation [with Karen Lewis of the Chicago Teachers Union] was amicable, the aftermath worsened the dynamic between the mercurial mayor and street-fighting union” (108).

2(a): “Originally from small town Massillon, Ohio, Lori Lightfoot grew up working class” (4).

2(b): “But she made a big splash at the University of Chicago when she wrote an article about a Baker McKenzie law firm partner asking racist questions to prospective hires” (4).

2(c): “Contemporaries recall Lightfoot as a hard-charging prosecutor with a mean streak, in the courtroom and at the office. Everyone respected her intellect, but she was considered controversial for how she treated people” (5).

2(d): More aptly, she’s a corporate lawyer who appreciates the status quo for what it is while trying to change things around the margins. She appreciates order” (32).

3(a): “In one interview, Lightfoot promised not to be ‘window dressing,’ according to a Chicago Defender profile that praised her as ‘petite, apparently feisty and scheduled to take the reins [of the Chicago Police Department’s Office of Professional Standards]” (7).

3(b): “In truth, Lightfoot ran the agency in a way geared at protecting the system’s legitimacy and promoting the bad-apple theory of policing that most problems are isolated” (8).

4(a): “Like her denunciation of the Baker McKenzie racist interview, Lightfoot’s handling of the reform efforts after being appointed to the task force [publicly criticizing Emanuel’s ‘memorandum of agreement’ with the Department of Justice] was arguably her at her best (23).

4(b): “But it also highlighted a certain opportunism from Lightfoot, who was angry with Emanuel and lashed out. Channeled effectively, that sense of grievance and clarity of purpose could do a lot of good for the city” (23).

4(c): “Nothing really came from Lightfoot’s [negative] public comments [about the Chicago Police Superintendent], which meant the incident didn’t do anything other than piss people off and illustrate that her tough talk is often just bluster” (96).

5(a): “Years later, she gleefully recalled her relationship with Emanuel in a New York Times interview. ‘He supposedly once said to somebody about me, “I gave her a platform and a microphone, and she took it and shoved it up my ass” (31).

5(b): “While she attempted to portray herself as a progressive alternative to Emanuel, she didn’t embrace particularly left-wing policies . . . (32).

5(c): “Lightfoot spoke a big game about equity and underdogs, but it never jibed with her conservative views on spending and taxes, or her history as a corporate lawyer. ‘Frankly, you take the rhetoric about equity and racial justice out of what Lori Lightfoot says, and she’s a pretty neoliberal politician,’ Sharkey [a leader of the Chicago Teacher’s Union (CTU)] told me” (43).

6(a): “Depending on perspective, the story [a situation when Lightfoot was a prosecutor, being confronted by a bank robber in court] highlights Lightfoot’s loyalty to a friend [a fellow prosecutor, harassed by the bank robber for being a Jew] and her decency in the face of nastiness—or her tendency to suddenly wind up in a fight [Lightfoot responded to the robber, “That’s about enough, Mr. White]” (8).

6(b): “The confrontation [a press conference interruption by state representative Robert Martwick] has taken legendary status. . . . [I]t helped show people the best of her, standing up for herself and diagnosing a problem . . . .The only downside was the lesson it internalized for the candidate: that slapping rivals works. . . . [T]he occasional beatdown is fine, particularly when someone else starts it, but nobody wants to be around someone who’s in a daily brawl with a new opponent” (56).

6(c): Critics weren’t able to get anything to stick against Lightfoot, who kept the worst elements of her personality under control, though she showed flashes of it off camera” (61).

7(a): “[After she won the election] [h]er treatment of people started to change. There was a growing sense among some in her circle that she didn’t think she needed anyone. . . . The victory went to her head” (69).

7(b): Describing an incident with the aforementioned Alderperson Taylor at a City Council meeting: “To me, the scene highlighted how Lightfoot didn’t fully understand her power. The mayor presides over City Council from an elevated dais. To speak with her, alderpersons must get permission to walk past security. It is, simply, a throne. And the king [Lightfoot reportedly claimed ‘to have the biggest dick in Chicago’] or queen never vacates the throne for a fight, particularly not one they then lose” (164).

8(a): “Lightfoot staff would tell [Gilbert] Villegas [floor leader of Chicago’s City Council], ‘She isn’t a politician.’ [Villegas] would respond, ‘When you become mayor of the third largest city, you’d better become a politician.’ It was a common refrain for Lightfoot and a recurring theme worsened by staffers who indulged her feelings rather than explaining that she was, in fact, a politician the moment she put her name on the ballot and won” (78).

8(b): “[Inspector General Joe] Ferguson had been optimistic about her potential to be a great mayor but was worried she had ‘completed the transformation’ into ‘politician who cares about things politicians care about” (100).

9(a): “Lightfoot felt like she was on higher ground due to her popularity and landslide victory. Lightfoot’s team would defend her to people who didn’t like her approach, saying she won the election by being demanding and prosecutorial. It fundamentally misunderstood the nature of the election win and the elusiveness of political popularity” (109).

9(b): “He [Lightfoot aide Michael Fassnacht] took a lesson from the memes [of Lightfoot during the Covid pandemic]: people liked Lightfoot and wanted to see her in authentic situations” (125).

9(c): Heading into more forums, Lightfoot faced a tough balance: Be tough, but not off-putting” (198).

10(a): “She made a decision [to shut down the lakefront] and stuck with it, even after it became clear that the [COVID] virus was less likely spread outdoors. Leadership requires resolution, but unwillingness to adapt to new facts is death” (125).

10(b): “Her early waffling about shutdowns and false threats to close businesses if cases spread in the fall highlight the indecision and lack of vision that plagued her administration” (129).

11(a): “Lightfoot can’t acknowledge fault” (155).

11(b): “Lightfoot addressed her broken promise to reopen Chicago’s mental health clinics shuttered by Emanuel in a rare example of successfully taking a change of mind head-on” (197).

That’s Pratt’s artistic rendering of Lightfoot.

***

We now stand before Pratt’s figure of Lightfoot, but what are we to make of it?

Set 1 defines Lightfoot as lacking any interest in a game that requires strategy to win. At the same time, she is portrayed as a very strategic person: Taylor didn’t know she was being fucked by Lightfoot until it was too late. Lightfoot is not always blunt, but “mercurial,” assessing her opponent’s strategy. Like all political operatives, she does not wear her plans on her sleeve, refusing to give her opponents an opportunity to move against her objectives. According to Pratt, Lightfoot is (un)strategic.

Set 2 situates Lightfoot in an unremarkable social position. She is from small town Ohio, and she grew up working class. Her hard work also earns her a spot at the University of Chicago Law School where she is said to make a “big splash,” calling out racism at a prestigious law firm. She is also a status-quo loving, wealthy corporate lawyer who doesn’t give a damn about people or meaningful change. According to Pratt, Lightfoot is (anti-)elitist.

Set 3 paints Lightfoot as a true reformer. She is not “window dressing.” She is also, “in truth”, just that: a facade, another Chicago politician that gives cover to corruption. According Pratt, Lightfoot is (in)authentic.

Set 4 gives us a Lightfoot who speaks truth to power. At the very same time her words are self-serving. Her truth is also just “bluster.” According to Pratt, Lightfoot is (un)trustworthy.

Set 5 describes Lightfoot as the progressive alternative to moderate Democratic mayor, Emanuel. She is also a moderate politician in sheep’s clothing. According to Pratt, Lightfoot is (im)moderate

Set 6 defines Lightfoot as either friendly or prone to picking fights. It is always unclear which Lightfoot one will meet: Dr. Jekyll or Mr. Hyde. According to Pratt, Lightfoot is (un)predictable.

Set 7 presents Lightfoot as a loner, above the need for help. She is also criticized for not acting like a king or queen, for not understanding her power, improperly leaving her throne to seek help from Alderperson Taylor. According to Pratt, Lightfoot is (un)democratic.

Set 8 offers us a Lightfoot who unwisely rejects the governing style of a politician. Lightfoot is also a politician, a politician who cares only about what politicians care about. According to Pratt, Lightfoot is (a)political.

Set 9 reveals a Lightfoot liked for being herself: tough and demanding, a (grand)mom-like figure for the city. At the very same time, she is disliked for those very same qualities. According to Pratt, Lightfoot is (un)likeable.

Set 10 is a Lightfoot who is decisive and unyielding. She is also “waffling” and without resolve. According to Pratt, Lightfoot is (in)decisive.

Set 11 leaves us with a Lightfoot who is unable/unwilling to adapt to change or to admit the need to change. She is also someone capable of changing course and of explaining the need for such a change. According to Pratt, Lightfoot is (mal)adaptive.

To be fair, Pratt likely intended to portray Lightfoot in a singular way, as a political failure. In his figuring of Lightfoot, he places the emphasis on her negative qualities. In fact, he calls out what he believes are her good qualities only a few times, namely Lightfoot’s toughness, her champion spirit, and her sometimes willingness to take “a change of mind head on.”

Yet, as the final chapter of Pratt’s book, “Breaking Up With The Mayor,” suggests, he was once into Mayor Lightfoot. So, it is not surprising that his portrayal of her exceeds, like Lightfoot’s suits, his intended framing. In fact, I think Pratt’s (un)intended portrayal of Lightfoot as perfectly (ill-)suited to be Chicago’s mayor is compelling, comprehensive, and coherent, all of the qualities that make a body of art pleasing to a viewer.

****

Pratt figures Lightfoot as ill-suited for Chicago politics. But he makes little of her ill-fitting suits.

The City Is Up For Grabs begins with a cute story about four-year-old Idris Lockett dressing up as Mayor Lightfoot for Halloween: “[Idris’s] mother, Catherine, had picked Idris up from her cousin’s home and found him in a jacket that was way too large for his little frame. This visual reminded Catherine of the city’s new mayor, who often wore suits that exceeded the limits of her arms and legs” (vii).²

Pratt uses Lockett’s story to bookend Lightfoot’s single term as mayor, one that begins with her celebrating a cute kid who went viral for dressing like her and ends with her refusing to meet with him after he sat for hours at her last City Council meeting. But he makes nothing of Lightfoot’s fashion style. I don’t fault him for that, as many of us think style is trivial, unimportant, meaningless. But there is a reason Lockett went viral: Lightfoot’s style has social meaning.

And so the question arises: What is the social meaning of Lightfoot’s ill-fitting suits?

Lightfoot’s ill-fitting suits are what set her apart from another female politician who wears a kind of suit and is (in)famous for it: Hillary Clinton. Sketching the social meaning of Hillary’s pantsuits (a decades long topic of popular conversation) will hone our sense of what is relevant in our interpretation of Lightfoot’s suits.

I do not know if the real Lightfoot has shared why she wears ill-fitting suits, but we do know Hillary’s reasoning for wearing pantsuits. Hillary switched out skirts (the typical style of the First Lady) for pantsuits in the 1990s when photographers started taking (or attempting to take) up-the-skirt shots of her. Hillary started wearing suits to prevent these sexist violations of her bodily integrity.

But Hillary’s clothing style(s) did nothing to protect her from the normative male gaze. One cover of Spy Magazine, for example, reveals the gendered politics that framed Hillary as First Lady. According to the cover of Spy Magazine, what Hillary’s dress attempts to hide from public view is her dick.

Throughout the 1990s Hillary was portrayed as “the man.” And when you are a woman, being framed as “the man” is not a compliment. A masculine woman is a man-hating woman, an emasculating woman, a kind of dominatrix eager to stuff a man’s asshole with her cock. She is a monstrosity, at least from a normative male perspective.

Whatever the intentions of the real Hillary Clinton, the pantsuits actually called attention to her masculinity, to her dick. Suits are a fashion staple of professional males. Yet, the way she wears them (they are well fitting) and the way they are styled (usually elegant in their own way and/or colorful) help to feminize her masculinity.

Discerning the social meaning of Lightfoot’s ill-fitting suits requires attention to the same kinds of details we identified to make some gendered sense of Hillary’s suits, but those details must always be understood in their own right, in their own context.

To start, Lightfoot is a Black lesbian, and so she is (like Hillary but for different reasons) masculinized from the start, and (unlike Hillary) doubly so. Black women are gendered masculine. Ditto lesbian women. They are women who, according to a racist, homophobic, and sexist logic, depart from the norms of “proper” (i.e., white and straight) women.³

On the one hand, Lightfoot’s suits do not serve to feminize her. They don’t fit well, and they are not flashy. Lightfoot’s suits more closely resemble working-class(?) male fashion. Moreover, Lightfoot seems to enjoy publicly displaying her BIG dick. She reportedly claimed to have the biggest dick in Chicago. Lightfoot does not seem to care about downplaying her phallic prowess. Lightfoot’s suits, quite unlike Hillary’s, seem to masculinize her masculinity. Lightfoot seems to take pride in being “the man.”

On the other hand, Lightfoot’s suits exceed her masculinist presentation, highlighting the petite figure wearing the big suit. Her suits may invite us not to take her big dick too seriously. Lightfoot’s suits may (like Hillary’s but in a different way) ironize her masculinity.

Lightfoot’s ill-fitting suits correspond perfectly well to Pratt’s portrayal of her as ill-suited to lead the City of Chicago. Her suits reveal the social truth about her. And the reason for that is a whole host of social terms are, like Lightfoot’s suit, gendered.

Terms like (in)authenticity, (anti-)elitist, (a)political, and so forth are other ways of getting at what is masculine (and so legitimate) and what is feminine (and so trivial). Authenticity, elitism, and politics are all socially gendered as masculine, as they speak to what is taken socially as real and powerful. And so they speak to what “we” should desire.

Pratt’s figuring of Lightfoot, like the figuring of Hillary, confounds straightforward, normative political desiring. That is what Pratt’s book, perhaps unintentionally, helps us to grasp as the social meaning of Mayor Lightfoot.

*****

Pratt’s figuring of Lightfoot is but one instance of such cultural manufacturing. Each figure of Lightfoot should be understood on its own terms and in its own right. Although, I imagine there will be common themes across the different portrayals of Lightfoot.

But why does Pratt’s figuring of Lightfoot matter?

I think it matters not for what it teaches us about the real Lightfoot. “Feminine” political figures are obviously related to the real women who inspire them, but we should always mind the gap between social perceptions of such women and the women themselves. I think Pratt’s figuring of Lightfoot matters for what it may reveal about the distinctive subjectivity of Chicagoans, their specific way of feeling about the City of Chicago and what is possible in it.

Chicagoans once felt like the figure of Mayor Lightfoot, and might they feel it again?

And what does Pratt’s figure of Lori Lightfoot have to offer the real Mayor Lori Lightfoot? What do feminine political figures offer, if anything, to the women they are based upon?

I don’t have answers to those questions. But I think that if Chicagoans want Chicago to be(come) a uniquely great American city, then it is worth their time and the effort it takes to grasp the social meaning(s) of their first Black lesbian mayor.

END NOTES:

See here, Act 3. ↩︎
The story is cute, but the gendered dynamics of it could be read in less cute ways. For example, Pratt likely does not intend to define Lightfoot as a petulant little boy (especially during her last days in office), as that would be homophobic, sexist, and racist–but as we have already noticed, one’s writing often exceeds one’s conscious intentions. ↩︎
e.g., see https://www.sas.upenn.edu/~cavitch/pdf-library/Spillers_Mamas_Baby.pdf ↩︎