A look at how Hillary Clinton, Donald Trump, and American voters invoked ideas of gender and race in the fiercely contested 2016 US presidential election Gender and racial politics were at the center of the 2016 US presidential contest between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump. The election was historic because Clinton was the first woman nominated by a major political party for thepresidency. Yet it was also historic in its generation of sustained reflection on the past. Clinton's campaign linked her with suffragist struggles--represented perhaps most poignantly by the parade of visitors to Susan B. Anthony's grave on Election Day--while Trump harnessed nostalgia through his promise to Make America Great Again. This collection of essays looks at the often vitriolic rhetoric that characterized the election: "nasty women" vs. "deplorables"; "bad hombres" and "Crooked Hillary"; analyzing the struggle and its result through the lenses of gender, race, and their intersections, and with particular attention to the roles of memory, performance, narrative, and social media. Contributors examine the ways that gender and racial hierarchies intersected and reinforced one another throughout the campaign season. Trump's association of Mexican immigrants with crime, and specifically with rape, for example, drew upon a long history of fearmongering that stereotypes Mexican men--and men of other immigrant and minority groups--as sexual aggressors against white women. At the same time, in response to both Trump'smisogynistic rhetoric and the iconic power of Clinton's candidacy, feminist consciousness grew steadily across the nation. Analyzing these phenomena, the volume's authors--both journalists and academics--engage with prominent debates in their diverse fields, while an epilogue by the editors considers recent ongoing developments like the #metoo movement. CHRISTINE A. KRAY is Associate Professor of Anthropology, TAMAR W. CARROLL is Associate Professor of History, and HINDA MANDELL is Associate Professor in the School of Communication, all at Rochester Institute of Technology.
Reviews
Might take on the mantle of opening salvo in what is likely to be a fruitful and troubling subfield of presidential history: Trump Studies. * HISTORY *
Christine A. Kray, Tamar W. Carroll, and Hinda Mandell have assembled a superb interdisciplinary group of authors to analyze a recent political history in which the politics of identity played a large, as yet barely analyzed role. A must-read for organizers, scholars, politicians, and students of politics who are trying to reverse the effects of Trumpism on our national political culture. -- -- Claire Potter, The New School
Nasty Women and Bad Hombres does it right. In this volume, an interdisciplinary group of scholars and writers comes together to think through how Donald Trump, a reality-TV star with no political experience, could pull off an electoral upset against Hillary Clinton, an intelligent, highly qualified candidate with years of experience in public service. Among other things, contributors illuminate the functionings of widespread internalized antifeminism among women, hashtag feminism, and slut-shaming; recognize African American women as torchbearers; and consider the use of misogynist and feminist popular cultural artifacts then and now. Simultaneously broad-based and focused, Nasty Women and Bad Hombres does an excellent job of laying out how we got here and pondering what to do next. -- -- Micaela di Leonardo, Northwestern University
Accessible and timely, this collection demonstrates the strength of interdisciplinary collaboration, with strong contributions from historians to political scientists, philosophers to communications scholars, with the added perspective of contemporary feminist activists. The focus on the gendered and racialized rhetoric of the 2016 campaign, and how it mobilized voters, both women and men, makes the collection a valuable contribution to intersectional scholarship of the American presidency. --Aidan Smith, Tulane University -- Aidan Smith, Tulane University



Book Information
ISBN 9781580469364
Author Christine A. Kray
Format Hardback
Page Count 390
Imprint University of Rochester Press
Publisher Boydell & Brewer Ltd
Weight(grams) 774g