Vice President Kamala Harris on July 17, 2024, in Kalamazoo, Michigan. (Chris duMond / Getty Images) |
BY JACKSON KATZ | Now that Joe Biden has announced his withdrawal from the 2024 presidential race and endorsed Vice President Kamala Harris, the salience of gender as a critical factor in the contest for the presidency will rise quickly to the surface. The surest way to make gender visible in presidential campaigns is to get a woman in the race.
But gender is always present in those campaigns—whether or not it’s visible. Even when two men run against each other, it’s not a “battle of the sexes” between a man and a woman: It’s a contest between two (usually white) men over competing versions of masculinity. That was the case up to the moment of Biden’s withdrawal. The 2024 campaign was gearing up to be a contest between two older white men who represent starkly divergent ideas about the very meaning of manhood.
Many commentators in mainstream and progressive media seem not to understand—or want to discuss—the deeply gendered nature of presidential campaigns or the presidency itself. This glaring deficit in political analysis was on full display in coverage last week of the Republican National Convention (RNC). The GOP put on a four-day, fist-pumping celebration of the manly virtues, culminating yet again in the anointing of a bombastic former real estate mogul, reality TV star and notorious misogynist as the supposed embodiment of those virtues.
The unapologetic celebration of a crude and embarrassingly cartoonish hypermasculinity was so extreme—especially on the penultimate day four—that some TV commentators had trouble mustering anything more thoughtful to say than what CNN’s Chris Wallace said on-air in response to a question from Jake Tapper: When Tapper asked Wallace, “What theme are we seeing at the convention tonight?” Wallace replied, “Testosterone.”
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