[Gutsy, Hillary and Chelsea Clinton’s new TV series, showcases
courageous women from an array of fields. But the show’s narrow lens
suggests approval of women who show spunk, but not those who challenge
abusive state power or capitalism.]
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PORTSIDE CULTURE

HILLARY CLINTON’S TV SHOW, GUTSY, IS OBNOXIOUSLY INFANTILIZING AND
CUTESY  
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Liza Featherstone
September 13, 2022
Jacobin
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_ Gutsy, Hillary and Chelsea Clinton’s new TV series, showcases
courageous women from an array of fields. But the show’s narrow lens
suggests approval of women who show spunk, but not those who challenge
abusive state power or capitalism. _

Hillary Clinton and Chelsea Clinton at the Gutsy premiere held at the
Times Center Theatre on September 8, 2022 in New York City., (Kristina
Bumphrey / Variety via Getty Images)

 

To be fair, _Gutsy_, a new Apple TV original series starring Hillary
and Chelsea Clinton, is not as horrible as I expected. Given Hillary
Clinton’s awful decades-long record as a conservative force within
the already-moribund Democratic Party, I expected that watching her
talk to allegedly “gutsy” women for hours on end would be
unmitigated torture.

And let’s be clear: some of it is.

First, let’s talk about the gruesome framing. _Gutsy_? The word, I
would argue, is infantilizing and cutesy, even a bit sexist in its
hyperfeminization of its subjects. It could be an okay, perhaps even
endearing, adjective to describe a little girl defying a schoolyard
bully, but falls so awkwardly short of honoring the impressive women
featured: scholars, writers, activists, performers, supermodels, all
of whom deserve better.

But this brings me to the genuine pleasures of _Gutsy_: the people
are genuinely fascinating. The show allows us to follow the Clintons
as they eat moose soup with indigenous activist and supermodel Quannah
Chasinghorse and her mother, Jody Potts-Joseph; walk through a Met
exhibition on Seneca Village and Afrofuturism with theorist Kimberlé
Crenshaw; go bowling with comedian Wanda Sykes; crochet with two women
whose adult children were murdered by racists; and party with Symone,
a winner of _RuPaul’s Drag Race_, in Little Rock, Arkansas.

On _Gutsy _we also meet the women who, as children, stood up to the
segregationists to integrate Little Rock Central High School; trans
YouTuber Natalie Wynn; a whiskey-drinking eighty-eight-year-old Jane
Goodall; a couple of former white supremacists who are now
anti-fascist activists — and many more brave and brilliant
individuals. All this happens partly due to the Clintons’
extraordinary access — people want to talk with Hillary Clinton and
are flattered by her regard.

 

But to her greater credit, Clinton is a solid interviewer, asking
questions that prompt people to tell engaging stories and reveal
themselves. She is also willing to share her own feelings and
experiences; when interviewee Reverend Whittney Ijanaten says that
leaving her own marriage was the gutsiest thing she ever did, and asks
why Hillary stayed with Bill, the two have a remarkably candid and
provocative conversation about love and relationships, and even
whether partners should always reveal infidelity.

Chelsea, by contrast, is an embarrassment, interjecting comments that
don’t advance the conversation but merely show off how conscious she
is, especially on matters of race. When comedian Amber Ruffin mentions
being the first black woman on _Saturday Night Live_, for example,
Chelsea eagerly interrupts her: “What year was that?” It was 2014.
“Not that long ago!” she crows righteously, relishing the callout
and the opportunity to enlighten. She seems to exist as a constant
reminder of our culture’s veneration of unearned privilege. Not that
we need any reminders (viz., the past week of mourning for a worthless
foreign monarch).

Much of the content of _Gutsy_ sits uneasily with Hillary
Clinton’s own well-documented politics and record in ways that are
rarely acknowledged. In the criminal justice segment, for example,
interviewees repeatedly lament that our system focuses on punishment,
rather than on providing people who have made mistakes with
rehabilitation and community support. No one, of course, mentions
Clinton’s own role in advocating for crime legislation that
lengthened sentences and greatly increased mass incarceration.

Climate activists are benevolently praised on the show for giving us
hope, while the role of a person who held power for years in some of
the institutions that have most spectacularly failed to address the
climate crisis — the White House and the Senate — goes politely
unmentioned.

An interesting exception is gay marriage. LGBTQ relationships play a
prominent role on the show and are treated with open-hearted affection
and warmth by both Clintons. But in a moving conversation with a
lesbian widow on the importance of legal marriage to the bereaved
person, Chelsea observes that in 2008, her mother supported civil
unions but not gay marriage, a position Chelsea found awkward and
inadequate. It was an honest moment — a startling one, given so many
other unacknowledged points of political disconnection.

Most likely though, that (gutsy!) moment of political candor is made
possible by the fact that Clinton, the Democratic establishment, and
the political donor class have reached a comfortable consensus in
support of gay marriage, whereas crime and climate policy remain
contested within the party.

_Gutsy_ also suffers from omissions that are, at their core,
ideological. While George Floyd’s murder and the ensuing period of
national awakening about racism are mentioned often throughout the
show, no activists against police violence are interviewed, even
though many of the most prominent have been women.

Also conspicuously unmentioned are the members of Congress known as
the Squad: Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Rashida Tlaib, and Ilhan Omar.
All of them persist with courage in face of constant racist and
misogynist threats of violence. Yet they also supported, and indeed
were inspired to run for office by, Clinton’s 2016 primary opponent,
Bernie Sanders, against whom Clinton has been waging a ludicrous
years-long smear campaign aimed at painting him as a sexist.

There are many other similar omissions. Indigenous women feature
prominently in _Gutsy_, but the physical risks many indigenous
activists have taken in defying police and the fossil fuel industry to
block pipelines — that is, their actual gutsiness — is not
discussed by the Clintons or their subjects. No women currently
organizing unions or opposing military adventures overseas appear on
the show, despite remarkable examples like Brittany Ramos DeBarros, a
soldier who was threatened with a court martial when she spoke out
against America’s wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, or Catholic nuns who
have chained themselves to military bases demanding peace.

Of course, “gutsiness” is a broad frame, and one can’t possibly
include all the examples in the world. My point is not to pick on the
Clintons for failing to include specific people. It’s simply to
point out that Clinton’s own politics, including her long record as
a warm ally to capital, police, and the military, end up sharply
limiting the scope and range of real female gutsiness in the world
that the series is able to showcase.

The exceptions almost jarringly prove my point. One labor activist
appears on _Gutsy_ — the legendary Dolores Huerta, now ninety-two
— but the interview centers not on her defiance of the agriculture
industry, but the heroics of being an activist while raising eleven
children.

Angela Davis makes a cameo on _Gutsy_, too — not in an interview,
but a photo of her is shown onscreen. You might be surprised to see
the Clintons acknowledging a black communist, but Davis is pretty
gutsy! She was on J. Edgar Hoover’s Most Wanted list, and has been
fired for her politics, jailed in connection with an armed takeover of
a Marin County courtroom, and has written many books calling for the
abolition of the prison industrial complex. All of this is captured in
poignant detail.

 

That’s a joke, of course. In reality, nothing about Davis’s
politics or biography is included in _Gutsy_. She’s only mentioned,
briefly, for one reason: her natural hair.

While it does take a certain kind of guts for black women to defy
white standards of beauty, just as it does for a woman to escape an
abusive marriage, or climb Mount Everest, or for her to be queer, or
try to be funny in public — some examples of courage featured on the
show — the fact is, women are capable of much more. The show’s
narrow political lens tends to reinforce the faintly demeaning pat on
the head implied by the dreadful title, suggesting approval of women
who show spunk, but not those who challenge capitalism or state power.
By the end of the eight episodes, it’s clear that the bravest women
in the world today are too gutsy for _Gutsy._

CONTRIBUTORS

Liza Featherstone is a columnist for _Jacobin_, a freelance
journalist, and the author of _Selling Women Short: The Landmark
Battle for Workers’ Rights at Wal-Mart_.

 

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