Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez takes up space: on magazine covers, on cable news, and on social media, where her followers number in the millions across multiple platforms. Her Twitter account alone, with 12 million followers, is not just an order of magnitude larger than most junior politicians’, but over twice as large as the followings of the other three members of her “Squad” combined. Her influence is inestimable. She is a giant in the eyes of her fans, and an enormous rent-free presence in the heads of people who hate her.
This is, of course, part of her cachet. “Take up space” has become a feminist war-cry, a clapback at the offensive old mores that say women should be small and slender and quiet. Feminist indictments of diet culture and beauty standards will frequently note this: that women are too often given the goal of shrinking themselves. In politics, the phrase has begun to be invoked alongside old-school notions of shattering the glass ceiling. To be unapologetically large, to let yourself sprawl, is a radical act.
It is to this war-cry, presumably, that Take Up Space: The Unprecedented AOC refers. But the title of the new biography of our youngest ever congresswoman works on multiple levels. For one thing, it’s a good description of the book itself, printed on luxuriously heavy stock so that it bears the heft of a pint-sized coffee table tome. It’s also a fitting description of its subject, who is so ubiquitous as to be inescapable.
And yet, for all the mental and media real estate occupied by Ocasio-Cortez, she’s far more famous for being who she is than for what she’s accomplished. Which brings us to the double entendre: before it became something that brave and iconic women do, taking up space was primarily the purview of useless objects.
This layer of meaning is almost certainly an accident. Perhaps it was the opinion of the New York magazine editors who commissioned Take Up Space that by the time of publication, AOC would surely have accomplished enough to avoid the book’s title being received as an awkward joke about her relative inefficacy as a politician. But as it turns out, Ocasio-Cortez is a lot better at getting attention than she is at passing laws. In a nonpartisan report issued last spring, she was rated one of the least effective members of Congress. (Among New York state legislators, she came in dead last.)
Given the limited scope of its subject’s accomplishments in her short career as a public servant, Take Up Space feels premature as a political biography — and in that category, it’s also a little weird. For instance, almost dead centre in the book is a two-page, full colour, high-definition spread depicting AOC’s open mouth, like a Playboy centrefold for oratory fetishists.
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