At the same time, both his need for public life and his sometimes confused explanations for his actions drew attention to his vulnerability. Clinton's enemies sensed his weakness, and it aroused them.In Her Way, another book examining Lewinsky's legacy, Paula Kamen argues that Monica fulfilled the new feminist ideal by being "brazen, relentless and self-centered in her quest for sex and power; in other words, she acted like a man." (Recall that Lewinsky, no doubt empowered, managed to convince herself Clinton would leave his wife for her, would fantasize about their subsequent wedding, and would even wait by the phone for him to call.)
After Princeton English professor Elaine Showalter and a couple of dozen of her
students talked with Lewinsky as part of a forthcoming HBO
special on the cultural meaning of her life story, Showalter hinted to
the Chronicle of Higher Education
that Lewinsky did not always seem entirely in tune with her new batch
of academic admirers. "Was the Lewinsky I saw at Cooper Union
aware of this range of cultural nuance and allusive complexity?
Without violating the terms of the confidentiality agreement, I think
I can say that her intellectual journey has not included exposure to
cultural studies."
The Clinton/Lewinsky relationship has itself come under increased scrutiny from academic "queer theorists" for its less obvious transgressive aspects. Tyler Curtain of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill notes the significance of the book Clinton bestowed on Lewinsky as a gift, Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass: "Something about the Clinton-Lewinsky relationship is definitely queer.... Whitman has been used as a shibboleth for nonnormative sexuality since his first writings..."
Ann Cvetkovich, English professor at the University of Texas at Austin, notes that the hallway where the couple engaged in their tryst "is not unlike the bathrooms and parks where gay men have public sex." Cvetkovich also sees the narrow hallway as reminiscent of the crawl space where escaped slaves were obliged to hide while fleeing north, and so "demonstrates the constraints of the presidency." While the "differences between the slave girl and the president are vast," Cvetkovich insists that "in both narratives, spatial confinement makes the impact of the social systems material."
