Democratic presidential hopeful, Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, D-N.Y., wipes her eye as she listens to a disabled U.S. veteran in the audience tell his story during a campaign stop at The City of Lewiston Memorial Armory in Lewiston, Maine., Saturday, Feb. 9, 2008.
[satire] Hillary Clinton Auctions Tears on eBay
So what role do tears play in politics? Why is Hillary Clinton crying so much? Does America really want a crying president?
Maybe they do.
Orchestration of Tears: The Politics of Crying and Reclaiming Women’s Public Sphere
But one of the most distinctive characteristics of classical Japanese cinema is that woman’s tears were anything but her own. Moreover, the act of crying, especially women’s crying, has been an essential experience allowing the male subject to construct and reconstruct a national identity in times of social crisis – first in the process of modernisation in the 1920s and ’30s, and later that of post-war democratisation in the mid ’50s. In the former period, tears were shed as symbols of sacrifice, shed in forgiveness of a beloved man who chose worldly success over a woman’s love, as in the case of many shimpa melodramas. In the latter period, tears were shed to reconcile the irreconcilable, such as the collective war guilt, healing the wound of male subjectivity, in many dramas, melodramas and even comedies.
