The Immovable Masculinity of the American Presidency

Historically a site for the cultural navigation of American manhood (Katz, 2016, 1), the American presidency is a gendered and racialised institution, and resistant to deviation from Connell's concept of hegemonic masculinity (2005). In the case of the 2024 U.S. Presidential Election, contrasting representations of candidates reveal the tension between the hegemonic masculinity embedded in American political expectations, and the disruptive threat to the prevailing gender order posed by the prospect of a female president. Exploring gendered representations of Kamala Harris and Donald Trump, my analysis uncovers the ways in which, in the American presidency, masculinity is ‘invisible’, assumed, and rarely scrutinised, whereas femininity is an offensive political target of the opposition.  

In political discourse, electoral campaigns are asymmetrical: each candidate is asked different questions, and asked to prove different capabilities, depending on their perceived weaknesses (Bai, 2024). In the case of the U.S. Election, Matt Bai identifies these questions as “Are you going to destroy the country?“, for Trump, and “Are you actually up for the job?”, for Harris (2024). The scrutiny of competence faced by Harris is a treatment rarely given to male politicians competing in a political system that privileges masculinity and whiteness (Carroll, Fox, and Dittmar, 2021, 19). Harris, however, bore both the ‘burden of doubt’, under which her competence must be proved, and the ‘burden of representation’, as, knowing “the most minor of mistakes could be taken as evidence of incompetence, women and racialised minorities … are seen to represent the capacities of groups for which they are marked and visible” (Puwar, 2004, 59). Harris’ delegitimisation in media was amplified by her situation at the intersection of race- and gender-based discriminations. Despite the centrality of these discriminations in electoral discourse, Harris’ campaign did not play upon her gender, as she “only sparingly mention[ed] her own status as potentially the first woman, first Asian American and first Black woman to hold the presidency” (LaFraniere and Barnes, 2024). In a symbolic gesture that suggests resistance to focusing on her barrier-breaking potential, she also notably did not wear white—the colour of the suffragettes of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and the colour almost ritualistically worn by female Democratic politicians at major political events (Sherman, 2024)—for the Democratic National Convention.  

Where Harris encountered gendered stereotypes involuntarily, rather than strategically incorporating them into her campaign, Trump’s campaign actively centred a hypermasculine self-representation. As Jackson Katz comments, presidential races function as a site of the cultural navigation of the meanings of American manhood (Katz, 2016, 1). Trump’s electoral brand of hypermasculinity (Lerer and Glueck, 2024), seen in his consistent use of masculine rhetoric and imagery—such as in the featuring of professional wrestlers stripping off their shirts at his rallies—attempted to harness and reinforce the “institutionalised masculinity” (Connell, 1993, 602) of American politics. The campaign also mobilised the linked concepts of hegemonic masculinity and emphasised femininity: a subordinated expression of femininity that accommodates the interests of, and exists in support of, men (Connell and Messerschmidt, 2005). In his vowing “to [protect women] whether the women like it or not” (quoted in Nehamas and Green, 2024), for example, Trump exhibited an exaggerated masculine protector logic (Cockburn, 2013), under which patriarchalism is legitimised by positing the protection of women as a masculine duty. This claim, and his attempt to win female voters through a patriarchal framework, is all the more ironic following his having being found liable for sexual assault the year before (Weiser, Fadulu and Christobek, 2023), and his continued “expressions of pride in his role in overturning Roe v. Wade, having appointed three of the Supreme Court justices who voted in the majority” (Lerer and Glueck, 2024).  

The competitive political masculinity that underpinned Trump’s campaign was protected through the emasculation of the opposition. Gendered perceptions of leadership capability are consistent with prevailing associations of Democrats and femininity and Republicans and masculinity (Winter, 2010, as cited in Carroll, Fox, and Dittmar, 2021, 21). Democratic vice presidential candidate Tim Walz, for example, was feminised by Trump supporters as “Tampon Tim” for supporting the availability of free menstrual products in school bathrooms (Lerer and Glueck, 2024). Trump’s self-representation as hypermasculine, and use of emasculation as an offensive tactic, reflects a misogyny in which association with women’s issues is cause for derision. The dominance-based masculinity of Trump’s campaign distills the contemporary American anxiety that masculinity itself, and the power with which it is associated, is becoming too fragile (Cox and Jones, 2016, as cited in Carroll et al., 2021, 21). In 2019, the American Values Survey found that 65% of Republicans, and 26% of Democrats, believed society was becoming too “soft” and “feminine” (Public Religion Research Institute, 2019, as cited in Carroll et al., 2021, 21). For Trump, the defence of normative masculinity, and the use of feminisation as a political weapon, attempted to, and arguably succeeded in, preserving the masculinity embedded in the institution of American presidency. 

Overall, gendered representations were central to the campaigns and media coverage of the 2024 U.S. Election. The hypermasculine branding of Trump’s campaign exploited cultural anxieties surrounding the fragility of American masculinity, in a strategy that proved successful as the prospect of a female president surfaced into, and then disappeared from, the realm of political possibility. By reinforcing dominant, hegemonic masculinity, Trump’s campaign, empowered by the biases of the media, played on the seemingly immovable, embedded masculinity of American politics. In the success of Trump’s hypermasculine brand, and Harris’ resistance to her own gendered representation, we see masculinity to be fundamental to the American presidency, and femininity—as a threat to the masculinised institution—becomes an offensive target of the opposition.  

Works Cited 

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Carroll, S.J., Fox, R.L. and Dittmar, K. (2021). Gender and Electoral Politics in the Twenty-First Century. In: S.J. Carroll, R.L. Fox and K. Dittmar, eds., Gender and Elections. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp.1–16. 

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Katz, J. (2016). Man Enough?: Donald Trump, Hillary Clinton, and the Politics of Presidential Masculinity. Northampton, Massachusetts: Interlink Books. 

LaFraniere, S. and Barnes, J.E. (2024). Harris Has Targeted Racism and Sexism While in Office. She Doesn’t Broadcast It. The New York Times. [online] 25 Oct. Available at: https://www.nytimes.com/2024/10/25/us/politics/harris-racism-sexism-policies.html [Accessed 25 Oct. 2024]. 

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Author Bio:

When this piece was written, Anna Jefferies was a second-year MA English Literature student at the University of Edinburgh. Inspired by courses taken across the university’s Literature, Philosophy, and Politics departments, her work primarily explores the ways in which sociopolitical issues find expression in, and can be analysed through the lens of, contemporary culture.