You can watch this episode of Right Now With Perry Bacon above or by following this show on YouTube or Substack. You can read a transcript here.
Issues of gender are at the center of Trump-era politics, even though that’s rarely stated directly, according to Meredith Conroy and Danielle Kurtzleben, two experts on gender and politics. Journalists, political operatives, and politicians use nongendered terms such as authenticity, electability, and working-class, but they are often invoking gendered meanings of those terms, Kurtzleben and Conroy say. Female candidates are rarely cast as authentic and constantly face doubts about their electability. The Democratic Party is really looking for candidates who appeal to white men, not Black women who might more accurately fit the definition of working-class, they argue. Conroy is a political scientist at California State University Bernardino and author of a newsletter called Gender Gap. She wrote a recent essay titled, “How ‘feminize your opponent’ emerges in the Trump era.” Kurtzleben is a White House reporter for National Public Radio and author of a newsletter called Very Professional Journalizing. She wrote an essay last year titled, “When ‘authenticity’ means ‘dudes.’”
