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Prof. Dr. Greta Olson: Kamala Harris’ Rupture and Continuation of U.S. American Vice-Presidential Traditions

As the first woman, the first Black person, and the first Asian American to serve as Vice President of the United States, Kamala Harris’s person breaks with traditions and normative gender relationships in and of itself. Most importantly, Harris could be thrust into the role of the President in the case of President Biden’s not being able to exercise presidential powers, as she briefly was when Biden was undergoing a routine physical and colonoscopy in November 2021. Further, serving as Vice President is traditionally a frequent pre-requisite for running successfully for the office of President of the United States. 
Yet as the first woman and person of colour to act as Vice President, Harris is subject to the extreme scrutiny that befalls women politicians in general, which is, however, further heightened by her exceptional status as a woman of colour. Minute attention is paid to her footwear, Converse Chuck Taylor All-Star sneakers, which are alternatively interpreted as a signification of her willingness to roll up her symbolic sleeves and work for the interests of the lower middle and working classes, like Obama before her, or as a sign of her cool progressiveness and pragmatism. Further, her hair is commented on obsessively, since Black women’s hair is always political and has been subject to forms of legal prohibitions and restrictions in a manner that white women’s hair has never been. (See CROWN Act legislation.) Third, the status of Harris’s husband as the first Second Gentleman and the first Jewish spouse of a U.S. president or vice president has been interpreted as a symbol of an embodied counter response to new forms of anti-Semitism and as a new hallmark of enlightened gender relations. 
Beyond visual significations, Harris’s role within the struggling Biden White House has received critical scrutiny. She cannot win by championing divisive issues such as voting rights or migration policies. It remains to be seen if she can become associated with the one winning issue that might help her to carry the Democratic Party in the future. This talk reads Harris’s insignias of power on the grid of the particular gendered and raced history of the United States. She cannot win, I argue, given the conjoined burden of the United States’s racial and gendered history and the polarization of current American politics. In her highly symbolic failure, however, Harris can establish a new grid of visual power relations for the women and women of color who will hopefully follow her example in the future.