Bad Hombres And Nasty Women

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

The President of the United States said that there are some bad people among us. He courageously took to the pulpit and called a spade a spade saying what was on everybody's mind. So we went out looking for some of these deplorables and boy did we find some.

92 Poets from across the US take to their craft in a rousing collection of poetry published exactly a year after Donald Trump's "victory" - in which he lost by nearly 3 million votes (only in America!)

Pa’l Otro Lado, a prequel to Mariguano, spans five generations of violence and tragedy in the Cortina family while narrating their forced migration to the United States from Northern Mexico. It is the tale of every working-class family who has come to realize that “you just can’t win.” Hunger and poverty drive the characters in this novel to abandon all hopes of attaining the American Dream and to resign themselves simply to survive. P’al Otro Lado is full of the baddest hombres and the nastiest women we all know, love, and call family.

Examining three interconnected case studies, Tamar Carroll powerfully demonstrates the ability of grassroots community activism to bridge racial and cultural differences and effect social change. Drawing on a rich array of oral histories, archival records, newspapers, films, and photographs from post–World War II New York City, Carroll shows how poor people transformed the antipoverty organization Mobilization for Youth and shaped the subsequent War on Poverty. Highlighting the little-known National Congress of Neighborhood Women, she reveals the significant participation of working-class white ethnic women and women of color in New York City's feminist activism. Finally, Carroll traces the partnership between the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power (ACT UP) and Women's Health Action Mobilization (WHAM!), showing how gay men and feminists collaborated to create a supportive community for those affected by the AIDS epidemic, to improve health care, and to oppose homophobia and misogyny during the culture wars of the 1980s and 1990s. Carroll contends that social policies that encourage the political mobilization of marginalized groups and foster coalitions across identity differences are the most effective means of solving social problems and realizing democracy.

Towards a Philosophy of Protest: Dissent, State Power, and the Spectacle of Everyday Life is an inquiry into the nature of protest, legislative efforts at its criminalization, and the common good. Using the method of montage, Clayton Bohnet juxtaposes definitions, etymologies, journalism on contemporary events, philosophy, sociology, mainstream and social media content to illuminate rather than obscure the contradictions in our contemporary understanding of dissent and state power. By problematizing the identification of the good of a political community with the good of the economy, Bohnet develops a political ontology of a people who find their values subordinated to a good identified with the smooth flow of traffic, the forecasts of capital, and the predictability of everyday life. A text populated more with questions than authoritative answers, this book asks readers to think through particular impasses involving protest and the possibility of egalitarian, participatory politics, such as the risks taken and courage involved in a society that places the expression of political truths above the collective benefits of the well-tempered economy and the dangers of protesting, of dissent, in an era that refers to protesters as economic terrorists.

Using a discourse analysis, Dustin Harp investigates media during the 2016 US presidential election to explore how traditional (patriarchal) and feminist ideas about gender played out during the campaign. The book illustrates how these two ideologies competed for space and struggled for discursive authority. A broad range of media texts is examined, and "gender moments," where gender became a dominant part of the political conversation, are identified. These include the "nasty woman" and "grab them by the pussy" comments of Donald Trump and the "woman card" played by, and against, Hillary Clinton. Furthermore, Harp reveals how binary notions of gender and stereotypical ideas of how men and women should behave, look, and sound structured the ways Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton were talked about in the media. As a counterpoint, the research also shows the ways feminist ideologies worked against the sexism and misogyny and became mainstream in media discourse during the campaign. Students and researchers of Gender Studies will find that the "gender moments" in Gender in the 2016 US Presidential Election tell a broader story about women, gender expectations, and power. They offer important and timely insights about misogyny and sexual harassment in contemporary US culture and feminist resistance in a mediated public sphere.

Should immigrants have to pass a literacy test in order to enter the United States? Progressive-Era Americans debated this question for more than twenty years, and by the time the literacy test became law in 1917, the debate had transformed the way Americans understood immigration, and created the logic that shaped immigration restriction policies throughout the twentieth century. Jeanne Petit argues that the literacy test debate was about much more than reading ability or the virtues of education. It also tapped into broader concerns about the relationship between gender, sexuality, race, and American national identity. The congressmen, reformers, journalists, and pundits who supported the literacy test hoped to stem the tide of southern and eastern European immigration. To make their case, these restrictionists portrayed illiterate immigrant men as dissipated, dependent paupers, immigrant women as brood mares who bore too many children, and both as a eugenic threat to the nation's racial stock. Opponents of the literacy test argued that the new immigrants were muscular, virile workers and nurturing, virtuous mothers who would strengthen the race and nation. Moreover, the debaters did not simply battle about what social reformer Grace Abbott called "the sort of men and women we want." They also defined as normative the men and women they were -- unquestionably white, unquestionably American, and unquestionably fit to shape the nation's future. Jeanne D. Petit is Associate Professor of History at Hope College.