Fatal Vows: The First Lady between Feminism, Fashion, and Care (Monograph)
Stefanie Schäfer’s book sheds new light at the First Lady of the U.S. and the women who held this role over the centuries through a cultural studies lens. It links the First Ladies to the history of Anglo-Feminism and the evolution of presidential politics, discusses the logics of civil religion and the affective labor FLOTUS is tasked with, and analyzes fashion politics and media discourses around presidential partners have. Fatal Vows draws from fictional and non-fictional (self-) representations of First Ladies from Martha Washington to Melania Trump to show how FLOTUS manifests the normative masculinity of power in the US-American cultural imaginary.
Related publications
Schäfer, S., and Gerund, K.: “Tradwife-in-Chief? The First Lady in Film and Television”. In: Screens of Reaction: American Conservatism in Contemporary Film and Media. Ed. Elena Caodura and Karen Ritzenhoff. In preparation.
Schäfer, S. (2023). “Grief became my friend, my work:” Mary Todd Lincoln’s uneasy union with memory in LeAnne Howe’s Savage Conversations (2019). New American Studies Journal, 2023, 1–17.
Schäfer, S. (2021). The Donald, FLOTUS, and the gendered labors of celebrity politics at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. Amerikastudien: AmST = American Studies, 66, 302–307.
Schäfer, S. (2015). Phenomenal woman : Michelle Obama’s embodied rhetoric and the cultural work of fashion biographies. Amerikastudien : AmST = American Studies, 60, 235–254.