Man Enough?: Donald Trump, Hillary Clinton, and the Politics of Presidential Masculinity

The big story about gender in the 2016 presidential year was supposed to be about Hillary Clinton's quest to become the first woman president of the United States. Then Donald Trump's candidacy for the Republican nomination took off, and the narrative took an unexpected turn. Gender was still a central force to be reckoned with, but contrary to the popular understanding of "gender" as synonymous with "women," the gender issue at the heart of the Trump phenomenon had less to do with women and more to do with men. Trump understood implicitly that the desire for a strong, virile (white) man in the White House runs deep in the American DNA. His supporters confirmed this every time they opened their mouths: He tells it like it is. He's his own man. He's not politically correct. He's got balls. In other words, it's time to return a "real man" to the White House. In Man Enough? Donald Trump, Hillary Clinton, and the Politics of Presidential Masculinity, Jackson Katz puts forth the original and highly provocative thesis that in recent decades presidential campaigns have become the center stage of an ongoing national debate about manhood, a kind of quadrennial referendum on what type of man-or one day, woman-embodies not only our political beliefs, but our very identity as a nation. Whether he is examining Rush Limbaugh's relentless attacks on President Obama's manhood, how the ISIS attacks on Pans have pushed candidates toward even more extreme tough guy posturing, or the gendered features of Clinton vs. Sanders in 2016, in Man Enough? Katz offers nothing less than a paradigm-shifting way to understand both "identity politics" and the very nature of the American presidency. Book jacket.