No abstract

Presidential candidates’ gendered self-presentations may help secure political support, but a ‘gendered self’ is a construct grounded in an audience’s interpretation as much as it is in a politician’s performance. The 2016 U.S. presidential election provides a unique opportunity to investigate how voters construct politicians as gendered. Based on pre-election interviews, we analyze how Trump supporters accounted for their allegiance by constructing and valorizing Trump’s masculine self—a cultural construct centered on exerting or resisting control. Interviewees (A) praised his politically incorrect spirit, (B) glorified his entrepreneurial spirit, and (C) celebrated his fighting spirit. We argue that understanding how people construct others’ gendered selves is important for scholars of both politics and manhood.

Based on fieldwork and interviews during the run-up to the 2016 election, we examine how Trump supporters vilified Hillary Clinton as a bitch. We first analyze how Trump rally attendees collaborated to bitchify Clinton (e.g., through displays, chants, speaker–audience exchanges) in ways that fostered emotional bonding, a politically incorrect situational definition, and shared identities as Trump supporters. We then examine how interviewees constructed narratives that more subtly rooted her alleged posturing for power, profiteering, and evading justice in her bitch-like personality. To distinguish between explicit bitchifying—which was common at the rallies—and implicit characterization—which was common during the formal interviews—we develop the concept of “bitch-whistling,” which frames but not names women as bitches. We conclude by exploring how this study contributes to understanding Trump’s 2016 victory, research on gender and politics, and political narratives more generally.

Real estate developer and reality TV star Donald Trump’s election to the presidency of the U.S. was a departure from politics as usual in many ways. Most notably, Trump received more white working-class support than any Republican presidential candidate since 1980. Using data from 44 Trump campaign rallies, we analyze Trump’s emotional messages encoded in his working class appeals. We find that Trump’s language (1) temporarily oriented audiences towards feeling shame or fear as a nation, (2) reoriented them towards feeling anger at the elites he blamed, and (3) ultimately promised they would feel safe and proud if he was elected. Trump’s emotional scripting seemed crafted to resonate with working class audiences feeling left behind from decades of bipartisan neoliberalism. We conclude by discussing limitations and potential avenues for future research.

Based on 29 in-depth interviews during the run-up to the 2016 U.S. presidential election, we examine how Trump supporters engaged in a form of identity work that we call signifying aggrieved white selves. Taking an interactionist approach, we demonstrate how they used racial discourse and emotional communication to engage in three distinct forms of racial identity work: (1) othering racialized freeloaders, (2) criminalizing racialized others, and (3) discrediting racialized dissenters. Our study contributes to research on racial discourse and emotions and research on race and the 2016 presidential election, which emphasize linguistic or cultural frames and/or subjectivity rather than the dramatization of racial selfhood. We propose that signifying aggrieved white selfhood is a generic process and that racial identity work is a useful lens for analyzing how a foundational concept of critical race theory—namely, that race is a social construct—is reproduced in everyday life.