9781626569768

political service while excusing gender discrimination by using outdated,
disparaging tropes about female intelligence, ability, and acumen as
justification for that bias. Naomi Wolfe, journalist and author of The Beauty
Myth, writes, “A culture fixated on female thinness is not an obsession
about female beauty but an obsession about female obedience. Dieting is
the most potent political sedative in history. A quietly mad population is a
tractable one.” 31
Wolfe strategically illustrates how body-shame social messaging is used
as a means of controlling and centralizing political power. We need look no
further than the 2016 U.S. presidential election to see Wolfe’s thesis in
action. Candidate Hillary Clinton was exhaustingly scrutinized about her
aesthetic presentation. Outfits, makeup, hairstyles were all fodder for the
twenty-four-hour news cycle. Even the pro-Hillary, hundred-thousand-plusmember
Facebook group Pantsuit Nation chose her penchant for eschewing
skirts and dresses as the name of their collective, inadvertently directing
public focus to her physical appearance rather than her decades of political
experience.
At every corner, women’s political access hinges on society’s ability to
see them in alignment with the default ideals of women first and then
politicians. But political gatekeeping based on bodies exists beyond the
realm of sex and gender binaries. In workshops, I often ask participants to
consider the thirty-six women who have been governors throughout the
country’s history and to take guesses at what those numbers might be if we
were to break them down by various identities. How many people of color
have been governor? What about the number of openly gay or lesbian
people? How about people with disabilities? Or transgender folks?
Undoubtedly people begin to see how those numbers winnow down to
fewer and fewer diverse bodies being represented in our “representative”
government. But we do not have to guess. The numbers speak for
themselves:
• Twenty-four governors have been people of color. 32
• Six governors have been disabled. 33
• Two governors have been openly gay or lesbian. 34
• Zero have been openly transgender.