Traister’s treatment of the election is less a detailed autopsy than a focused study of the percolation of women’s indignation, a building toward revolt. American women naïvely assumed that there would be consequences for such actions, only to watch the offender get rewarded with the ultimate prize. Traister makes her readers revisit the revelation of the Access Hollywood tape and Trump’s invitation of Bill Clinton’s accusers to a presidential debate. Good and Mad uses several prisms for revealing the nuances of women’s anger in the second decade of the 21st century: the 2016 election, the women’s marches, and the #MeToo movement. But this all changed with the ascension of Trump, which unleashed an undeniable and cacophonous chorus of female fury. After that radical and tumultuous era, feminism retreated, cloistered away in universities or repackaged into glossy neoliberal manifestos by Silicon Valley execs or female pop stars. According to Traister, the last time the United States witnessed anything similar was in the 1970s, when feminist activists, led by such figures as Flo Kennedy, unapologetically claimed their space in the political sphere and threatened those who got in their way with a kick in the balls. Rebecca Traister’s new book, Good and Mad: The Revolutionary Power of Women’s Anger, brings together these and numerous other public expressions of women’s rage into a constellation that suggests a collective unleashing of emotion not seen in American culture for decades.
Maybe you’ve been paying attention but you didn’t see all of these moments as being connected. You also probably didn’t go to either of the women’s marches, where you would’ve seen protest signs with images of uteri with fallopian tubes shaped into middle fingers and the message: “This machine kills fascists.” This is a people-are-dying story.” You haven’t heard Kirsten Gillibrand stop giving a fuck and start saying “fuck” in public. You didn’t watch Kamala Harris fix her laser focus on Jeff Sessions, or Carmen Yulín Cruz, the mayor of San Juan, Puerto Rico, assert, “Dammit, this is not a good news story. You haven’t heard Maxine Waters reclaim her time or Michelle Wolf deliver her monologue at what may prove to be the last White House Correspondents’ Dinner. You haven’t seen Emma González scream through tears, “We call BS!” at a gun control rally only a few days after surviving a school shooting. IF YOU DON’T KNOW that women are angry, you’re not paying attention.
0 kommentar(er)
