#Sarah palin | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

justinspoliticalcorner · 5 months ago

Text

Rebecca Traister at NY Mag's Intelligencer:

Can you provide a definition for the word woman?” Tennessee senator Marsha Blackburn lobbed this query at Ketanji Brown Jackson during her 2022 Supreme Court confirmation hearings. Blackburn was doing her bit for her party’s effort to enforce transphobic gender conformity, positioning herself as a defender of womanhood as something fixed and narrow. When Jackson declined to provide Blackburn with a definition, noting that she was not a biologist, the senator took the opportunity to dial it up a notch. “The fact that you can’t give me a straight answer about something as fundamental as what a woman is underscores the dangers of the kind of progressive education that we are hearing about,” Blackburn said with lip-smacking satisfaction.

Two years later, Republicans remain cruelly closed to the realities of gender fluidity and trans existence. But how the party understands — and represents — womanhood more broadly? Well … that’s getting weird. As we cruise toward November with two ancient white men on the presidential ticket and the rights of millions of people who are not white men in the balance, the public performance of Republican womanhood has become fractured, frenzied, and far less coherent than ever.

“A true conservative woman,” Valentina Gomez, one of several Republican candidates vying to be Missouri’s next secretary of state, told me in an email this spring, “speaks the truth, works hard, loves and knows how to use guns of multiple calibers, cares for the wellbeing of children and her family, doesn’t sleep with multiple men and most important, does not murder babies.” The 25-year-old Gomez made a viral ad in February in which she took a flamethrower to a pile of sex-education and LGBTQ+ books from the public library. In May, she filmed herself running through St. Louis wearing a weighted vest and advising, “Don’t be weak and gay; stay fucking hard.” The day before, she had embraced her softer side, posting a photo of herself on X in a pale-pink pantsuit and pumps, with a winning smile and her eyes cast heavenward, under a caption restating Blackburn’s question: “What is a woman?” Gomez told me feminists “have made men the enemy,” adding, “they end up alone with three dogs at the age of 50 with no kids or husband” — a time-honored Republican sentiment that liberal women, unlike conservatives, are sexless, unmarriageable spinsters. But even that rusty rhetorical frame is wobbly: In April, 31-year-old far-right activist Laura Loomer, standing outside Donald Trump’s criminal trial in New York, told the New York Times, “You think I have a dating life? You think I’m married? You think I have kids? Do you think I go out and do fun things? No. Because I’m always putting every extra bit of time that I have into supporting President Trump.” Loomer told the paper she would not be at the courthouse the next week because she had to return home to Florida to take care of her dogs.

Contradictions abound among conservative women in Washington. In response to Jackson’s testimony, Georgia representative Marjorie Taylor Greene attempted to be authoritative on the matter. “I’m going to tell you right now what is a woman,” she said. “We came from Adam’s rib. God created us with his hands. We may be the weaker sex — we are the weaker sex — but we are our partner’s, our husband’s, wife.” But Greene, who has since divorced, regularly refers to men, including Speaker Mike Johnson and President Biden, as “weak” and is not shy about showing off her own brawn. In May, in the wake of a dustup with Democratic Texas representative Jasmine Crockett in which the two traded barbs about each other’s appearance, Greene posted a video of herself lifting heavy weights to a song by Sia: “I’m unstoppable / I’m a Porsche with no brakes / I’m invincible / Yeah, I win every single game.”

“Under the surface, subcutaneously, there is a tug-of-war,” said Nancy Mace, a 46-year-old second-term Republican congresswoman from South Carolina. Mace was reflecting on the tension between presenting as traditionally feminine and deploying emasculating language that can make her sound more like Andrew Tate and his overheated manosphere buddies than Republican foremothers such as Margaret Chase Smith or even Michele Bachmann. Mace regularly declares that her male enemies, including former House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, with whom she has a bitter rivalry, and Hunter Biden, the president’s son, have “no balls.”

“There are the traditional roles of women in society, some biological. We’re meant to nurture; we’re meant to breastfeed our kids,” Mace told me over Zoom. “But my mom worked. I’ve worked my entire life since I was 15. It’s a balance between what’s your feminine side and your Main Character Energy.” Mace was explicit: “I do have Main Character Energy. I am an alpha dog, and so is my little six-pound dog, Libby.”

The Republican women seeking to steer their party into the future are finding themselves in a series of constrictive binds: between upholding a conservative white patriarchy that has outlawed abortion and asserting their value as women; between projecting traditional notions of compliant, cheerful femininity and channeling the testosterone-driven rage of the conservative infotainment complex; and, above all, between trying to build independent political identities and slavishly following Donald Trump. That devotion has come at the cost of alienating suburban white women, who have been crucial to Republicans for decades but, since 2016, have been peeling away in response to Trump’s pussy-grabbing malevolence and his party’s ruthless campaign against reproductive rights.

It’s surely a nasty tangle for them, but for those of us watching at home, Republican women’s efforts to bridge these impossible chasms have a stupefying quality: What to make of these women? As the Alabama political columnist Kyle Whitmire wrote after Katie Britt, his state’s U.S. senator, delivered the response to Joe Biden’s State of the Union address from her kitchen in a demonic whisper, “Katie Britt glitched out on national television and left millions of Americans asking what the heck they just watched.” Weeks later, South Dakota governor Kristi Noem’s strenuous efforts to show off her casually cruel streak to Trump derailed her own vice-presidential audition when it emerged that her book contained a story about how she once shot her puppy and left the body to rot in a gravel pit.

Then there are the duck-lipped, smoky-eyed stylings of Donald Trump Jr.’s fiancée, Kimberly Guilfoyle, who danced to “Gloria” shortly before insurrectionists tore through the Capitol on January 6, 2021, and this spring announced a children’s book called The Princess & Her Pup. The former president’s daughter-in-law, RNC co-chair Lara Trump, recently promised “four years of scorched earth when Donald Trump retakes the White House” and posted a video of herself in sequined pants and stilettos as she played “Let It Be” on piano. The gun-toting congresswoman Lauren Boebert has railed against “teaching kids how to have and enjoy sex, even same-sex sex, how to pleasure themselves,” yet last fall was ejected from a theater for lewd behavior that included grabbing her date’s crotch during the performance. Mace made headlines in 2023 for joking about her sex life to a roomful of Christian conservatives at a prayer breakfast.

Some of this is surely just old-fashioned political hypocrisy, particularly unpleasant coming from a right that has for generations sought to police all sorts of things that it itself engages in: Do as I legislate, not as I do. But in a post-Dobbs political climate in which Republicans have grown only more aggressive on issues of gender identity, contraception, and sex education, the ways in which the party’s women have been comporting themselves loom large.

On the cusp of an election season that could further reshape this democracy and women’s place within it, the questions facing the women of the American right are tricky. Are they supposed to be cutthroat or cute? Cold enough to kill a dog or warm enough to bake an apple pie? To whom is their devotion chiefly addressed: country, husband, God, or Trump? And how might their womanhood complicate their responses to the closing of obstetrics wards or the fact that their party’s leader was convicted of falsifying business records to cover up an extramarital affair with an adult-film actress? The challenge of navigating these thorny questions has left many of them caroming from high-pitched rancor, to contorted eroticism, to the seemingly snug comforts of trad-wife chic. The spectacle can provoke amusement, fury, and a frisson of horror-movie unease. For if the women of today’s Republican Party are upending gender conventions in unprecedented fashion, they’re doing it in service of a party that has never been more openly hostile to women and their rights.

In both parties, women have never had it easy; this is a business that remains, 235 years in, overwhelmingly run by men. And for a time, it was Democratic women who encountered the gnarlier complexities. As members of the party that at least theoretically represented the gains of the women’s movement that were so disruptive to the old gendered order, they could not themselves present as too aggressive for fear of being seen as radical, nor could they be too vulnerable, feminine, or even conventionally beautiful lest they be dismissed as unserious. Jennifer Granholm, a former pageant contestant and the first woman to govern Michigan, has described cutting her hair short and trying to add gray streaks when she ran her first campaign in 1998. “You had to look completely asexual,” she once said. “The first thing they think about is how you are shaped, what you are wearing. You have to be as neutral as possible so that people will pay attention to the words coming out of your mouth.”

Meeting ridiculous gendered expectations could mean ridiculous micro-humiliations: When Hillary Clinton told reporters in 1992 that she had chosen to pursue a paid profession rather than stay home to bake cookies, she was pressured to participate in a “First-Lady Bake-Off” to prove her wifely chops. Fifteen years later, during her first presidential run, the presence of a body that was not male was such an anomaly on the campaign trail that the Washington Post published a fashion feature about how she was choosing to handle her cleavage. Clinton was perhaps the most acute example of an assertive Democratic woman whose efforts to satisfy a ravening press and public intolerant of female complexity left her so twisted and poll-tested that she became largely illegible as human, let alone female.

Meanwhile, Republican women faced limitations of their own but for a long time appeared at ease with them. Many came off as maternal and content, conservatively coiffed and shoulder-padded, a comfortable match for a party that wanted to offer reassurance to a nation jittery about women’s liberation. Think Elizabeth Dole, a Reagan Cabinet member, future senator, and presidential candidate whose chatty, Oprah-style stroll through the crowd on the night of her husband’s 1996 presidential nomination was the (sole) highlight of that convention. But they could also be tough and mean — Barbara Bush once called Geraldine Ferraro a bitch!

The Republican Party, through the 1990s and into the new millennium, included quite a few “moderate” women, such as Kay Bailey Hutchison of Texas and Olympia Snowe and Susan Collins of Maine, who believed in fiscal conservatism but also held positions on so-called social issues that were comparatively liberal. They were, like many in their party before its sharp anti-abortion turn, “pro-choice.” They worked with Democrats to reach compromises, and the women on both sides of the aisle appeared to be friendly with one another: Collins partnered with Kirsten Gillibrand on the repeal of “don’t ask, don’t tell,” and Gillibrand helped then-Senator Clinton throw Collins a bridal shower.

A turning point in the evolution of conservative womanhood came when John McCain selected a little-known governor of Alaska to be his running mate in his presidential race against Barack Obama in 2008. Sarah Palin was in her mid-40s, young enough not to be collared by the pearls and propriety that inhibited many of her forerunners in both parties. She was charismatic and uninterested in conforming to outdated gender stereotypes. Or rather, she conformed to a bunch of them simultaneously: She had a sexy-librarian beauty and no qualms about playing it up; a macho snow-machine-racing husband who had taken a leave from his job on the oil fields to be the primary parent to their five kids; and she used her youngest child, Trig, born with Down syndrome, as proof of her hard-core anti-abortion bona fides. She had white-nationalist instincts that led her to counter Obama with language about “real Americans,” and she pioneered a Mama Grizzly persona that was both sporty and menacing (fuck your dead puppy; this lady wanted wolves to be shot from helicopters). She was unafraid to stake her own claim to women’s equality, advocating for a “new, conservative feminism.”

[...] There is surely a perverse pride in emerging victorious near the top of a power structure built to exclude you. These are the dynamics that have long rewarded white women for acting as foot soldiers within a white patriarchy, willing to take one another out to get closer to power, their positions adjacent to the brutes at the top a signal of their uncommon tenacity. But there is a difference between the status granted those willing to do whatever unhinged thing it takes to get ahead in contemporary right-wing politics and the political autonomy these women might yearn for just as much as the classical feminists they wage war against. [...]

In the past, it was easier for Republican women to get away with inconsistency and self-contradiction. Phyllis Schlafly, the brilliant, diabolical political strategist, could inveigh against the masculinized ambitions of women working outside the home from pulpits well outside her own home because her professional efforts paid lip service to restoring certain comforting hierarchical expectations about men’s and women’s spheres. That paradigm has been subverted. What Schlafly and her generation feared most — that the expanded opportunities and protections for women would become their own kind of traditional expectation — has come to pass. This is why the overturn of Roe was not greeted as some welcome restoration of a bygone order but as a threatening attack on the protections that plenty of American women, especially white middle-class women of all political persuasions, had come to count on as an established norm during the 49 years Roe stood. Every one of these Republican women relies on the gains of women’s liberation, and well they should. This was, in fact, what the women’s movement was for: not just so those who agreed with it might enjoy more opportunities but so those who did not agree with it also could. As an early political ballbuster, former New York congresswoman Bella Abzug famously said, “We don’t want so much to see a female Einstein become an assistant professor. We want a woman schlemielto get promoted as quickly as a male schlemiel.” Welcome, ladies.

Remarkably, these dark years have seen women on the left conduct themselves with new ease and assuredness. Democratic women at both the center and the left edge of their party now communicate in a range of styles that appear more authentic and less stilted than those of previous generations of female politicians. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is fluent on social media; Elizabeth Warren lets her professorial freak flag fly; Ayanna Pressley is bald and beautiful. They tell stories of abortion, of assault, of pregnancy and childbirth, of their gay and trans offspring, of their disabilities and military service, weaving the facts of their lives into arguments for civil rights, health-care access, and housing.

Whitmer is perhaps the most prominent Democratic woman to experiment with mixing a traditional white femininity and historically masculine cadences. Though her politics could not be more different, she is perhaps the closest we have yet seen to a natural echo of Palin’s swashbuckling cheek. In May, Whitmer wore a fuchsia wrap dress to pick up an award for a campaign she undertook as “Governor Barbie.” Her five-word acceptance speech was “Wear pink; get shit done.” In the days after Noem’s disastrous book tour, Whitmer took a break from posting about the NFL draft to put up a photograph of her with her two dogs, Kevin and Doug, with the caption, “Post a picture with your dog that doesn’t involve shooting them and throwing them in a gravel pit.” It’s certainly all performed in its own way. But for the first time, it’s the Democratic women who can articulate the mix of football and Barbie and health care and labor without tripping over themselves, who seem more comfortable in their own bodies. The women on the right appear in perpetual confusion and find themselves, like some negative image of Clinton, twisting into something unrecognizable.

[...] But there is no way to understand these varied approaches to gender expression outside the context of their own political aims. These are politicians who regularly refer to gender-affirming health care as “castration” and “mutilation.” Boebert famously campaigned against drag story hours, while Noem wrote to South Dakota’s college board asking it to ban campus drag shows. Republican women longing to attach themselves to the feminist brand leverage transphobia to do it, a riff on the TERF movement currently flourishing in the U.K. Mace has argued that conservatives laboring to keep trans women out of athletic competitions are “the feminists of today,” and Haley has cast anti-trans policymaking as the “women’s issue of our time.” Yet these women express themselves via a dizzying mash-up of gendered conventions: They augment their smiles, bedazzle their pantsuits, and broadcast their bench presses. In their fevered performances of hyperfemininity and hypermasculinity, so many of the GOP’s most visible women are themselves engaging in a form of drag.

Of course, drag in its queer context offers the chance to slip from and send up the constricting bounds of gender norms, to encourage empathy and celebrate diverse forms of identity. The show these Republican politicians are putting on is its cold opposite: asphyxiated, distended, nasty. Theirs is surely drag’s gothic inverse. Still, it is possible to catch a glimpse of pathos beneath the performance because the show covers for something awful and real: The identities of those women are no more valued or recognized by the party for which they labor than gay or trans or feminist identities are. Women fundamentally cannot lead a party that wants to oppress women; they cannot, in fact, even be fully human within it.

This NY Mag piece on Trump-era Republican Womanhood and the tug-of-war between expressing traditional femininity and asserting their value in womanhood, such as opportunistically branding themselves as “feminists” when they stand opposed to trans rights.

Read the full story at NY Mag.

#Women #MAGA Cult #Gender #Conservatism #Marsha Blackburn #Valentina Gomez #Kimberly Guilfoyle #Lauren Boebert #Nancy Mace #Kristi Noem #Lara Trump #Katie Britt #Laura Loomer #Marjorie Taylor Greene #Sarah Palin #Hillary Clinton #Phyllis Schlafly #Gretchen Whitmer #Nikki Haley

5 notes · View notes