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Gender in the 2016 U.S. Presidential Election Trump, Clinton, and Media Discourse
Dustin Harp
Global Gender Series London: Routledge, 2019 Paperback. xi + 179p. ISBN
978-1138052239. £35
Reviewed by Francine Banner University of
Michigan-Dearborn
This monograph provides a comprehensive
analysis of “gender moments,” the many times in which gender became a subject of
debate and contestation during the 2016 U.S. Presidential election. At the
inception of a new and historic U.S. Presidential administration, and in the
wake of the global #MeToo movement, Harp’s book provides a much-needed
opportunity to reflect on the road we have traveled so far and to evaluate how
past conversations inform the present. The question the book strives to
answer is ambitious: “[W]hat does public mediated discourse during the 2016
presidential campaign say about gender, the cultural struggle to define the
roles of women and men, and women’s relationship to power?” [147]. Harp
addresses the question by engaging in textual analysis, using “semiotic,
narrative, thematic, or rhetorical approaches” to explore “how gender made its
way into mediated campaign discourse” and “to illustrate how divergent ideologies clashed” during the period leading up to
the election of Donald Trump as the forty-fifth President of the United States
[17]. Drawing heavily on the work of Stuart Hall, Harp emphasizes the power of
the “moment,” a conjuncture during which “a raw event becomes a communicative
event” and when media become “layered with a hierarchy of social meanings and
relations” [18]. Particularly valuable is the author’s analysis of how messages
are “coded” and “decoded,” exploring the unexpected moments during the Trump
and Clinton campaigns when the receiver’s responses did “not necessarily mirror
the encoder’s intended message,” allowing spaces to open up for discursive
reframing [157]. The book’s first chapter provides an overview of theory and
methods, then the following seven chapters of the book explore in nuanced ways what
the author deems “gender moments.” Chapter 2 engages the work of
sociologist R.W. Connell to explore how hegemonic masculinity impacted media discourse
during Election 2016 [26]. Offering a robust picture of Trump’s performance of
hyper masculinity, Harp explores how vulgar jokes, such as those about penis
size, revealed the toxic masculinity that pervaded U.S. political discourse at
the time. Although there is an abundant focus on conservative outlets such as
Breitbart and Fox News, Harp does not let liberal voters off the hook, suggesting
that oft-circulated memes mocking the candidate for his “small hands” were
situated in a larger culture of body shaming and symptomatic of a general lack
of civility [28-29, 38]. The chapter thoroughly explores the rhetorical
strategies engaged by the Trump campaign, which built on the “Marlboro man” image
cultivated by politicians like George W. Bush and Ronald Reagan but was even more
overt in its displays of misogyny and toxic masculinity [42]. Embedded within
this hyper-masculine rhetoric, Harp identifies a nascent “white male fragility,”
bringing to mind Hannah Arendt’s admonition that overt shows of violence may be
grounded not in power but rather in fear of the loss of power, a theme that reoccurs
throughout the text [38]. In Chapter 3, Harp shifts the lens from
Trump to Hillary Clinton, particularly focusing on Donald Trump’s comment that
the only thing Clinton had “going [was] the woman’s card” [47]. Of interest to
Harp is less the comment itself but Clinton’s decision to not only respond
directly to Trump’s insult but to make the “woman card” an element of her
campaign [47]. Harp explores how this and other gendered references, such as
statements about breaking the “glass ceiling,” were exploited by conservative
media, who posited that Clinton might receive special treatment based on gender
as standing in contrast to the American ideal of meritocracy [55]. Harp also
examines how Clinton’s statements were perceived in more politically liberal
sectors, highlighting, for example, how Bernie Sanders’ supporters viewed
Clinton’s “brand” of feminism as “old fashioned,” signaling a willingness to
work within rather than to reform oppressive systems [52, 55]. As with
discussions of hegemonic masculinity, Harp not only traces the emergence of woman
card and glass ceiling in discourse but engages the many “layered meanings” that
grew out of public conversations about these tropes [51]. Chapter 4 shifts the focus to the
body, interrogating the question of what it means to “look presidential” [76]. Here,
Harp engages the copious media discussions about Clinton’s clothing and health
to analyze the myriad ways in which coverage of Clinton subtly and unsubtly
served to signal her lack of fitness for the highest office in the U.S. [82,
98, 99]. Harp chronicles the challenges Clinton faced in disrupting the
expected narrative of the (usually white) male president, but she also
describes successful moments of “symbolic messaging” during the campaign, for
example the candidate’s choice to don a white pantsuit—a contemporary evocation
of the women’s suffrage movement—when she accepted the presidential nomination [87].
One appreciates the significance of these moments even more while reading the
book in hindsight, having watched Kamala Harris don a similar white pantsuit
for her acceptance speech marking her election as the first woman and first
woman of color U.S. Vice President. In Chapter 5 Harp delves more deeply
into the question of how misogyny pervaded the discourse during the election,
the key gender moment in the chapter being then-candidate Trump’s infamous
speech where he spoke cavalierly about sexual assault [110]. The chapter draws
linkages between the dismissive categorization of the candidate’s confession as
“locker room talk” and the juvenile exchanges among republican candidates about
penis size described earlier in the book, again suggesting that the overt vulgarity
of the discourse may have signaled violence masquerading as power [124]. The
chapter once again emphasizes the uphill battle that Hillary Clinton faced, her
candidacy mired in a “history of gendered linguistic baggage” that was easily deployed
to undermine her qualifications and to delimit her abilities [132]. In chapter 6, body and text coalesce
as Harp discusses Donald Trump’s description of Clinton as a “shrill, nasty
woman” during the final presidential debate in October 2016 [128]. This moment provides
a prime example of Hall’s theory of “coded” messages, showing how the receiver
may interpret a message very differently than intended by the encoder. While many
refrains during the Trump campaign successfully operated to undermine Clinton,
Harp identifies a shift in power that took place as not only Clinton herself
but other women and allies embraced the idea of the “nasty woman,” reshaping a
phrase intended to be derogatory into a statement of feminist power and
strength [131]. The chapter also offers insights regarding the less often
examined “shrill” part of Trump’s comment, exploring how the description of Clinton
as “shrill” and her laugh as a “cackle” were once again used by the Trump
campaign to engaging in “tone policing,” a rhetorical strategy focusing not on
the content of the speech but on the body of the speaker [138]. The final chapter summarizes the key
findings from Harp’s exploration of the cultural conversation during the
election. The conclusion is that 2016 marked a vital historical conjuncture
where gender discourse was contested and, perhaps more importantly, where
significant inroads to change were made [156]. Misogynistic discourse remained
prevalent—and perhaps was even more prevalent than ever before—in U.S. politics.
However, examples like the powerful reframing of Trump’s “nasty woman” comment
show how feminists and social justice advocates were making inroads toward
contesting and redirecting dominant narratives [163, 164]. In many ways, Harp’s work is prescient.
In the wake of Hillary Clinton’s win of the popular vote in 2016 and President
Trump’s loss to Joe Biden in 2020, the monograph provides support for reading
the Trump campaign’s displays of masculinity as a last gasp of a threatened
culture of toxic masculinity [166]. However, because the author chooses to
explore so many moments, there are points at which the author’s analysis would
benefit from a more theoretically grounded, intersectional approach. While
there is a focus on Trump’s potential “white male fragility,” less attention is
paid to how not only gender, but age, race—and especially social class—coalesced
in the “brands” of both candidates, especially Clinton. In categorizing events
as “gender moments” there is a danger that the impact of other factors, such as
class and race, may be obscured or overlooked. Nonetheless, the task of recording
history as it is being made is a challenging one, and Harp has produced an
ambitious book that not only provides a thorough record of the discourse during
the 2016 presidential election but offers insightful conclusions that so far
have stood up to the rigors of hindsight.
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