FAR in the future, long after today’s partisan passions have cooled, some enterprising women’s studies doctoral student will be able to write a fascinating dissertation on the rhetoric and iconography surrounding gender in Barack Obama’s 2012 campaign.

Such a dissertation might start with the Obama campaign’s striking “Life of Julia” slide show, which portrayed an American woman protected from toddler-hood by the “steps President Obama has taken,” and menaced at every turn by Mitt Romney’s reactionary policies.

From there, it could touch on the campaign’s unusual suggestion that Obama supporters use their wedding registries to solicit donations to the president’s re-election effort. It might linger over the White House’s elevation of Sandra Fluke, a progressive activist and Georgetown University law student, as a kind of martyr for free contraception after she was insulted by Rush Limbaugh. And it would probably conclude with the Obama campaign’s release last week of a winking video from “Girls” creator Lena Dunham, urging young women to make sure their “first time” is with a “great guy” like President Obama. (Their first time voting — what do you think she meant?)

To today’s Obama supporters, these forays — like the campaign’s broader “war on women” framing, and its recent attempts to make the election a referendum on abortion in cases of rape — just emphasize that the president is on the side of female empowerment, sexual, professional and otherwise.