Donald Trump and the performance of female gender. (Hi. I'm a troll.)
Let's have some fun this morning.
Gender is such a slippery concept. No, I'm not just trolling Trump. I'm trolling everyone.
Gender is such a slippery concept. No, I'm not just trolling Trump. I'm trolling everyone.
I am motivated by our modern-day source of wisdom and truth, The Onion. This week, they had one of their typically brilliant pieces, "GOP Leaders Begin Search For Prissy, Miserable Shithead Who Can Compete With Trump In 2024." Notice that word, "prissy." Yes, Donald Trump is prissy. Also, a miserable shithead, but let's focus for a moment on his prissiness. Prissiness is not, generally speaking, a trait that one would associate with "masculinity." Perhaps you see where I am going with this.
Time to define our terms, because if I'm going to be a troll, I am going to be a scholarly troll. Sex is the biological/physiological. As I use the term, "gender," for the purposes of this post, I am referencing Candace West & Don Zimmerman, "Doing Gender," from Gender & Society Vol. 1 No. 2, (1987). Foundational article. In modern usage, the term "gender" has come to refer to an internal sense of self, but that was not exactly how West & Zimmerman used the term. West & Zimmerman used the term to refer to a set of social expectations about men and women, creating a set of roles that people perform based on the signals they wish to send. Men are expected, by social norms, to have one set of traits, and women are expected to have another. If you wish to be perceived a certain way, you perform gender by adopting the traits socially expected of men or women.
You can see how this relates to transgender people, and add a few steps, and a few years, and that eventually morphs into gender as internal sense of self, but I will be using the term, "gender," in something closer to the West & Zimmerman definition because I don't have another word, and that's the concept I need for the purposes of the observations I am going to make.
I'm a positive theorist. Our approach to definitional issues is as follows: don't get bogged down by them. Define your terms, and move on. That's-a what I'm-a doin'.
Anyway, what are the social expectations of male or female gender, in the West & Zimmerman sense? Well, that's tricky, ain't it? Let's do this with fiction. 'Cuz I like fiction. I'll circle 'round to science fiction, of course, but let's start with something a little more accessible.
Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul. One could see Mike Ehrmantraut as a character intended to convey masculinity. Of a certain kind, anyway. (And that conditional is part of the point.)
Mike is quiet competence, lack of ego, and total badassery personified. Show him a tweet in which you say a mean thing about him, and do you think he'll care?
No. He will stare at you blankly, and make that blank stare convey all of the disdain of someone so far above it that he is simultaneously calculating how long it will be before he can walk away and forget you ever existed while demonstrating to you that you only live at his sufferance, like a bug that isn't worth squashing.
But he's not going to squash you because he just doesn't care. Unless you make yourself a physical threat, or something like that. Then... "no half measures."
I could have picked some action hero uber-man, but part of the point of using Ehrmantraut is that he isn't a hero. He isn't even a good guy. Sympathetic? Perhaps. Villainous? That's debatable, particularly in context of Gus Fring or Walter White, but calling Mike a "good guy" would be quite a stretch. Nevertheless, one could make a case that he is a, like, "man's man," or... something.
Now, though, let's consider a female character. Let's turn to science fiction. In fact, let's turn to Octavia Butler! Let's go feminist icon today.
Better yet, let's go with the Lilith's Brood trilogy, just to up the stakes. Like Mike says, no half measures!
If you haven't read the Lilith's Brood trilogy, here's the basic setup. Humanity wipes itself out with nuclear war, and then an alien species called the Oankali shows up. They scoop up the few survivors, but... their plans are a little weird.
First, they have no intention of just re-terraforming the planet, and sending the survivors on their way. Why not? The Oankali say, in part, that humans would just wipe themselves out all over again. What'd be the point?
But it goes beyond that. The Oankali have their own agenda. They travel around the galaxy, find species and form "deals." (The Oankali have weird views of "consent.") Basically, they cross-breed. They find a species, cross-breed with it, and develop new traits that they deem beneficial, and want for the future of the Oankali.
OK, so what's the big deal? Here. Have some DNA. Thanks, we're done now, right? Not so fast. They... also sterilize humans, and won't let humans reproduce except through the Oankali cross-breeding thing. So, forced sterilization, miscegenation... Butler goes there. Anyway, that's kind of what the Lilith's Brood trilogy is about. Good stuff. Read it.
Let's fast-forward through Book 1, and skip to Book 2. By Book 2, humans have been allowed to resettle on Earth. Some are settling with the Oankali, consenting to cross-breed because that's the only way to have kids, and they want kids. Others-- the resistors-- are off on their own. But they have been forcibly sterilized. Sometimes, they kidnap human-Oakali hybrid kids, as they look sufficiently human before they go through their metamorphoses.
You get a view of a resistor village that kidnaps human-Oankali hybrid children, but here's a thing about the Oankali. They are covered in tentacles. 'Cuz. The hybrid kids will sometimes have fewer tentacles, and this leads to the metaphor of tentacles as African-American hair.
The resistor village gets a pair of hybrid siblings, and some of them are uncomfortable with the appearance of those... tentacles. One villager in particular is Neci.
Neci is described as being stupid, vicious, racist, nagging, and everyone knows and hates how wretched she is. Yet, she gets people to do what she wants by being persistent. She tells people to do something stupid and vile, and they write her off as just being Neci. They tell her to shut up and go away.
Time to define our terms, because if I'm going to be a troll, I am going to be a scholarly troll. Sex is the biological/physiological. As I use the term, "gender," for the purposes of this post, I am referencing Candace West & Don Zimmerman, "Doing Gender," from Gender & Society Vol. 1 No. 2, (1987). Foundational article. In modern usage, the term "gender" has come to refer to an internal sense of self, but that was not exactly how West & Zimmerman used the term. West & Zimmerman used the term to refer to a set of social expectations about men and women, creating a set of roles that people perform based on the signals they wish to send. Men are expected, by social norms, to have one set of traits, and women are expected to have another. If you wish to be perceived a certain way, you perform gender by adopting the traits socially expected of men or women.
You can see how this relates to transgender people, and add a few steps, and a few years, and that eventually morphs into gender as internal sense of self, but I will be using the term, "gender," in something closer to the West & Zimmerman definition because I don't have another word, and that's the concept I need for the purposes of the observations I am going to make.
I'm a positive theorist. Our approach to definitional issues is as follows: don't get bogged down by them. Define your terms, and move on. That's-a what I'm-a doin'.
Anyway, what are the social expectations of male or female gender, in the West & Zimmerman sense? Well, that's tricky, ain't it? Let's do this with fiction. 'Cuz I like fiction. I'll circle 'round to science fiction, of course, but let's start with something a little more accessible.
Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul. One could see Mike Ehrmantraut as a character intended to convey masculinity. Of a certain kind, anyway. (And that conditional is part of the point.)
Mike is quiet competence, lack of ego, and total badassery personified. Show him a tweet in which you say a mean thing about him, and do you think he'll care?
No. He will stare at you blankly, and make that blank stare convey all of the disdain of someone so far above it that he is simultaneously calculating how long it will be before he can walk away and forget you ever existed while demonstrating to you that you only live at his sufferance, like a bug that isn't worth squashing.
But he's not going to squash you because he just doesn't care. Unless you make yourself a physical threat, or something like that. Then... "no half measures."
I could have picked some action hero uber-man, but part of the point of using Ehrmantraut is that he isn't a hero. He isn't even a good guy. Sympathetic? Perhaps. Villainous? That's debatable, particularly in context of Gus Fring or Walter White, but calling Mike a "good guy" would be quite a stretch. Nevertheless, one could make a case that he is a, like, "man's man," or... something.
Now, though, let's consider a female character. Let's turn to science fiction. In fact, let's turn to Octavia Butler! Let's go feminist icon today.
Better yet, let's go with the Lilith's Brood trilogy, just to up the stakes. Like Mike says, no half measures!
If you haven't read the Lilith's Brood trilogy, here's the basic setup. Humanity wipes itself out with nuclear war, and then an alien species called the Oankali shows up. They scoop up the few survivors, but... their plans are a little weird.
First, they have no intention of just re-terraforming the planet, and sending the survivors on their way. Why not? The Oankali say, in part, that humans would just wipe themselves out all over again. What'd be the point?
But it goes beyond that. The Oankali have their own agenda. They travel around the galaxy, find species and form "deals." (The Oankali have weird views of "consent.") Basically, they cross-breed. They find a species, cross-breed with it, and develop new traits that they deem beneficial, and want for the future of the Oankali.
OK, so what's the big deal? Here. Have some DNA. Thanks, we're done now, right? Not so fast. They... also sterilize humans, and won't let humans reproduce except through the Oankali cross-breeding thing. So, forced sterilization, miscegenation... Butler goes there. Anyway, that's kind of what the Lilith's Brood trilogy is about. Good stuff. Read it.
Let's fast-forward through Book 1, and skip to Book 2. By Book 2, humans have been allowed to resettle on Earth. Some are settling with the Oankali, consenting to cross-breed because that's the only way to have kids, and they want kids. Others-- the resistors-- are off on their own. But they have been forcibly sterilized. Sometimes, they kidnap human-Oakali hybrid kids, as they look sufficiently human before they go through their metamorphoses.
You get a view of a resistor village that kidnaps human-Oankali hybrid children, but here's a thing about the Oankali. They are covered in tentacles. 'Cuz. The hybrid kids will sometimes have fewer tentacles, and this leads to the metaphor of tentacles as African-American hair.
The resistor village gets a pair of hybrid siblings, and some of them are uncomfortable with the appearance of those... tentacles. One villager in particular is Neci.
Neci is described as being stupid, vicious, racist, nagging, and everyone knows and hates how wretched she is. Yet, she gets people to do what she wants by being persistent. She tells people to do something stupid and vile, and they write her off as just being Neci. They tell her to shut up and go away.
But she keeps at it. And at it. And at it.
And eventually, they give in.
And when Neci says that they should cut off those tentacles, which are sensory organs with lots of nerve endings....
Yeah. She won't let up. Because she's fucking Neci. Stupid, psychopathically evil, racist, and everyone knows it... but she... NEVER. SHUTS. THE FUCK. UP. And eventually, people are worn down by the nagging. The nagging. The nagging. The nagging. The nagging. The nagging. The nagging. The nagging. The nagging....
And eventually, they give in.
And when Neci says that they should cut off those tentacles, which are sensory organs with lots of nerve endings....
Yeah. She won't let up. Because she's fucking Neci. Stupid, psychopathically evil, racist, and everyone knows it... but she... NEVER. SHUTS. THE FUCK. UP. And eventually, people are worn down by the nagging. The nagging. The nagging. The nagging. The nagging. The nagging. The nagging. The nagging. The nagging....
I'm just going to stop typing that now, but I think I've made my point because you are probably getting a sense that this sounds like our little Donnie.
Butler was a great writer. The Oankali are constantly talking about how dangerous men are. Yet, the male characters include cool dudes like Joseph and Tino. Sure, there are horrible men in the books, and the first human man the Oankali let Lilith meet tries to rape her.
But amid the Oankali's insistence that it's the men you need to watch, there's Neci. With Butler, you always need to read carefully, because she is far more sophisticated than misandrists masquerading as feminists.
Neci is dangerous. And to use a word, "toxic," but not in any male gender-coded way. She isn't performing male gender. Were you to think about gender in the West & Zimmerman way, you wouldn't read Adulthood Rights and think, wow, Neci is really doing a performance of male gender!
Rather, she is a demonstration of a character being toxic while also being female. This is something Jemisin also does well, when she is on her game. Despite the modern ubiquity of the phrase, "toxic masculinity," there are forms of toxicity that have nothing to do with masculinity. See: Neci. Butler understood that. Jemisin understands that.
If you haven't read the books, this will be a harder question to answer, but here's the important question: is Donald Trump more like Mike Ehrmantraut or Neci?
No question. Neci. Trump is Neci. He displays a form of toxicity that is not dramatically different from a character from the Lilith's Brood trilogy who is female, and whose behavior is not coded as anything other than female because toxicity can come in many flavors of gender. Oh, and the whole point of Neci was ugly racism.
Or fine. Let's move away from decades-old science fiction and talk about Heathers. Which... came out around the same time, but you've probably at least seen it. Does Trump remind you of Heather Chandler? Or perhaps even Heather Duke? Leader of a social-bullying clique who just attacks people in the most small and petty ways, while worrying primarily about social status? Updated for the modern era, a Heather would just be a cyber-bully, sending out mean tweets about the unpopular kids. Sound familiar? He's a mega-bitch because he can be. Also, it would take JD for him to use the word, "myriad," in a grammatically and syntactically correct way.
Of course, any mention of Heathers in the context of Donald Trump may also bring to mind Kurt and Ram, after whose murders JD remarks that they had nothing left to offer the school but "date rapes and AIDS jokes." So is Donald a Heather/Neci, or is he Ram? (Ram being clearly the dumber of the two.)
Instead of making a clear, definitive case that Donald is Heather Chandler, or even Neci, my point is merely the fact that the question is a valid one. Trump's history with sexual assault and his affinity for jokes about peoples' medical conditions make JD's Kurt/Ram description seem apt, yet in terms of general personality and disposition, merely pointing out the Heather analogy can make you look at Donald through that lens, and so many other aspects of his gender performance come into view.
And the question isn't even necessarily whether Heather Chandler is a better point of reference than Ram, or vice versa. Instead, is Heather Chandler a better point of reference than Mike Ehrmantraut?
There, I think the answer is indisputably that Heather Chandler is a better point of reference than Mike Ehrmantraut.
Butler was a great writer. The Oankali are constantly talking about how dangerous men are. Yet, the male characters include cool dudes like Joseph and Tino. Sure, there are horrible men in the books, and the first human man the Oankali let Lilith meet tries to rape her.
But amid the Oankali's insistence that it's the men you need to watch, there's Neci. With Butler, you always need to read carefully, because she is far more sophisticated than misandrists masquerading as feminists.
Neci is dangerous. And to use a word, "toxic," but not in any male gender-coded way. She isn't performing male gender. Were you to think about gender in the West & Zimmerman way, you wouldn't read Adulthood Rights and think, wow, Neci is really doing a performance of male gender!
Rather, she is a demonstration of a character being toxic while also being female. This is something Jemisin also does well, when she is on her game. Despite the modern ubiquity of the phrase, "toxic masculinity," there are forms of toxicity that have nothing to do with masculinity. See: Neci. Butler understood that. Jemisin understands that.
If you haven't read the books, this will be a harder question to answer, but here's the important question: is Donald Trump more like Mike Ehrmantraut or Neci?
No question. Neci. Trump is Neci. He displays a form of toxicity that is not dramatically different from a character from the Lilith's Brood trilogy who is female, and whose behavior is not coded as anything other than female because toxicity can come in many flavors of gender. Oh, and the whole point of Neci was ugly racism.
Or fine. Let's move away from decades-old science fiction and talk about Heathers. Which... came out around the same time, but you've probably at least seen it. Does Trump remind you of Heather Chandler? Or perhaps even Heather Duke? Leader of a social-bullying clique who just attacks people in the most small and petty ways, while worrying primarily about social status? Updated for the modern era, a Heather would just be a cyber-bully, sending out mean tweets about the unpopular kids. Sound familiar? He's a mega-bitch because he can be. Also, it would take JD for him to use the word, "myriad," in a grammatically and syntactically correct way.
Of course, any mention of Heathers in the context of Donald Trump may also bring to mind Kurt and Ram, after whose murders JD remarks that they had nothing left to offer the school but "date rapes and AIDS jokes." So is Donald a Heather/Neci, or is he Ram? (Ram being clearly the dumber of the two.)
Instead of making a clear, definitive case that Donald is Heather Chandler, or even Neci, my point is merely the fact that the question is a valid one. Trump's history with sexual assault and his affinity for jokes about peoples' medical conditions make JD's Kurt/Ram description seem apt, yet in terms of general personality and disposition, merely pointing out the Heather analogy can make you look at Donald through that lens, and so many other aspects of his gender performance come into view.
And the question isn't even necessarily whether Heather Chandler is a better point of reference than Ram, or vice versa. Instead, is Heather Chandler a better point of reference than Mike Ehrmantraut?
There, I think the answer is indisputably that Heather Chandler is a better point of reference than Mike Ehrmantraut.
So why am I bothering with this? Well, it's fun. Obviously. However, I have two general points. I have a point about politics, and a point about.... oooooh, buzzword, "conceptualization."
What's happenin' these days in presidential politics? Donald Trump lost the election. So, he is whining and trying to steal the election. He will probably fail, but he is putting on the most pathetic show of blubbering and whining that the country has ever seen from anyone over the age of 2. You'd think his puppy just died, except that Trump is a sociopath, so if his puppy had died, that would mean that he tortured it to death, and he'd be happy about it like the sick fuck that he is.
Point being, whining. So, let's refer to a famous Trump quote: "I do whine because I want to win and I'm not happy about not winning and I am a whiner and I keep whining and whining until I win."
In literary terms, that quote would have been called "foreshadowing." Or possibly, "fore-bludgeoning." And now, we are being bludgeoned by Trump whining about having lost, because he thinks he can whine until he wins.
So two questions. First, is this in any way masculine, by any conceptualization of masculinity? Second, does this kind of look like Neci?
In answer to my first question, no. This is in no way masculine. This is a "prissy, miserable shithead," who thinks he can whine, and whine, and whine, because he lost.
Is this what Mike Ehrmantraut would do? No. Can we rigorously define masculinity in any coherent way that would include this kind of blubbering and whining? Can we point to examples? No. This is what Neci would do. It's exactly what Neci would do. Beat for beat, line for line. Our prissy, little cyber-bully is nothing but Neci, come to life.
And if that's all he is, and that is all he is, by what reasoning would anyone say that he is performing male gender? None that makes any coherent sense. Instead, if he is giving a performance more akin to Neci (get it? Akin? no? read the book!), and behaving more like Heather Chandler than Mike Ehrmantraut, then is he performing female gender, in West & Zimmerman's terms?
Arguably so.
And that phrasing brings me to my second point. If gender were properly conceptualized, it wouldn't be arguable.
So a couple more observations. Does Donald Trump want to perform female gender, or male gender? He clearly wants to perform male gender, and he thinks he is the manliest man who ever manned at manning. The internal sense of self thing gets into territory that I am not addressing in this post, but it developed out of the West & Zimmerman definition anyway.
The people who get bogged down in this like to blather about how there are oh, so many ways to perform gender, and fine. Mike Ehrmantraut is a different way to perform male gender than James Bond. Trump is neither. His behavior looks to me like toxic female characters from some of my favorite female writers. Moreover, the Heathers perspective calls into question the empirical value of the concept if the person who, at first glance, looks like Ram, becomes more clearly Heather Chandler with a slight change in focus.
If the lens of gender were better conceptualized, I wouldn't be able to do that. If gender-coding of the same behavior were consistent, I'd look at a set of actions and say, the performance, in West & Zimmerman's terminology, of this action is masculine, or feminine, or perhaps even somewhere on a spectrum, but I wouldn't be able to characterize someone as performing both Ram and Heather Chandler at the same time, through the same actions. If I can, the problem is the variable.
Who is Trump: Ram or Heather Chandler? Neither. He's Trump. Actually, he's Neci. No, he's Trump. The point is that there's something wrong with this lens. Note, after all, that I am conducting this analysis through the semi-arbitrary selection of fictional characters. Just... whoever popped into my head, which is a weird place. Obviously. If this lens worked, though, I wouldn't be able to take a person who clearly thinks he is performing male gender, and make a plausible case that he is performing female gender by applying the literature of a black feminist icon and saying that his behavior is "akin" (sorry) to a female villain whose behavior is, to a significant social extent, female coded.
Translation: this is all bullshit.
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