Rama Duwaji, the artist-wife of a young man who’s created history, is making many of us nervous. How dare she not play second fiddle to Zohran Mamdani, the first ever Muslim mayor of New York by passively accepting her role as a public wife! That paradoxical pulpit of visibility without authorship. In a country where not baking cookies can cost a woman politician an election. Where the first ladies are expected to be just that, first ladies, and no more. The tension is so high that even a fictional diplomat is seen struggling with her career as an ambassador and the Vice President’s wife, as in The Diplomat. The burden of being a public wife is a unique one. She is seen constantly, spoken about frequently, yet rarely permitted a voice that exceeds or disrupts the role assigned to her. Duwaji is a disruptor without uttering a single word.
The burden of being a public wife can be understood as the relentless demand to perform a socially legible femininity that sustains existing power structures while erasing individual subjectivity. Judith Butler’s theory of gender performativity provides a crucial framework for understanding the public wife as a role that must be repeatedly enacted. For Butler, gender is not an innate identity but a long string of stylized acts that, through repetition, create the illusion of naturalness. So, it’s “natural” that the wife of a public-facing individual is expected to be the latter’s extension. The public wife is required to embody an intensified version of this process.
It never fails to amuse this author how the political discourse in a country like the US is defined by matrimony. The wife’s gestures, clothing, speech, and emotional expressions are all aids to the husband’s political legitimacy. Any deviation from the expected script, too much ambition (Hillary), anger (Michelle), silence (Melania), or independence (Jill), is read as a failure. Performativity of public matrimony is regulated by norms that punish, or at least critique, noncompliance. The public wife thus performs not only her own gender but also the gendered respectability of the man she accompanies. Duwaji decided to change the performance venue. In her nonchalance around Mamdani’s political career, she demands attention as an individual and an artist.
In her rejection of being defined as just Zohran Mamdani’s wife, Rama Duwaji has refused to be a silent object expounded in a phallocentric language. Hélène Cixous argues that woman is traditionally defined in relation to man, deprived of an autonomous voice. The public wife exemplifies this condition: She exists discursively as “wife of” rather than as a self-producing subject. Her public appearances are often mediated through male-centred narratives, where her worth rests solely in support, sacrifice, and silence. Even when she speaks, her speech is frequently framed as an appendage to the husband’s authority, political or moral. The burden on the wife is not merely behavioural. The public wife must inhabit a linguistic space that limits her capacity to signify beyond patriarchal expectations. Cixous’s call for écriture féminine, a writing of the body and self, highlights what the public wife is denied: a mode of expression that resists containment within masculinist structures of meaning. Duwaji’s attitude towards her husband’s authority and celebrity challenges this containment.
The public wife’s role is sustained by a gendered lived and learned paradigm, the habitus, that trains women to internalize expectations of emotional labour. Her performance appears voluntary, even graceful, masking the coercive force of social norms. Pierre Bourdieu’s concept of symbolic power comes in handy there. Symbolic power operates through misrecognition; Social hierarchies persist because they are perceived as legitimate and inevitable. The public wife contributes to her husband’s legitimacy, respectability, and moral authority. Her labor is unpaid yet socially indispensable, reinforcing male dominance while remaining largely invisible.
With her statement boots, coat, and carefully coiffed hair, Duwaji is very visible. Her appearances, however, are controlled by her and not the norms she’s expected to follow. Neither an arm-candy, nor the enfant terrible in the First Ladies club, she’s providing a different lexicon to define the public wife.
Nishtha Gautam is an academician and author. The views expressed are personal
