Sympathy for a #FreeMelania

In many ways, the nation's newly christened First Lady is best represented by the gif of her visage that went viral following the inauguration–an infinite oscillation between smile and grimace, an ambiguous crack in an already ambiguous facade. Her split-second expression change is difficult to interpret given the lack of access the public has to Melania's thoughts and opinions, but it nonetheless invited a flurry of pop-psychoanalysis from bloggers and netizens of all kinds.

https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2017/01/on-pitying-melania/514409/

Body language experts weighed in and gave conflicting accounts of Donald and Melania's level of intimacy–one emphasizing her lack of warmth and evident exclusion from her husband's journey, and the other reading her accommodating behavior as a perfect counterweight to his ego. Tweets, posts, and memes spawned across the Internet with the hashtags #FreeMelania and #SadMelania, spreading what was essentially a presidential fan-fiction: that Melania Trump is the blameless victim of a gold-digging fairytale gone wrong.

But why should Melania's apparent discomfort warrant the public's pity? The ongoing jokes play on the sides of both sympathy and ironic mockery, but ultimately assume the first lady's powerlessness over her own life. On the contrary, Melania Trump has exercised her agency over and over in order to shape her husband's narrative even before the election: she publicly defended his blatantly racist birtherism in 2011 touting her "credibility" as an immigrant, and has granted damage-control interviews to talk shows in order to recoup his image following PR gaffes. The tension between her active support in the making of a successful, openly misogynist presidential campaign and the liberal fan-fiction of her "matrimonial Stockholm Syndrome" exemplifies the contradictions maintained by female celebrities. Her persona has become a site for the projections of liberal, feminist fantasies that form an uncomfortable, anti-feminist juxtaposition with her personal history.