Trump’s Gender Trouble

Shell-Shocked: Feminist Criticism After Trump features all the qualities that distinguish Bonnie Honig’s writing – sharp, rich analysis, served up with an immense helping of biting humor. Her texts nourish the imagination, reorient our thinking, and enable us to see anew what has been hiding in plain sight. This is a collection of “forensic and fabulistic work,” of close readings, scrutinizing minor details, and creatively forging “wild connections.” While the essays cover a diverse range of topics, each reflects back on the mechanisms and repercussions of “disaster patriarchy,” Honig’s feminist refinement of Naomi Klein’s account of “disaster capitalism” in The Shock Doctrine; its neglected misogynistic twin, if you will. Working in tandem, both serve to depoliticize through a double move of saturation and desensitization, a process akin to George W. Bush’s “shock and awe” approach to warfare. To further clarify the dynamics of disaster patriarchy, Honig employs domestic violence as an exemplar and a metaphor. The stages of DARVO (Deny, Attack, Reverse the positions of Victim and Offender) elucidate how the disorientation that Trump deployed (as abusive leader/man/husband/father) served to silence criticism, evade accountability, and thwart political action. Where Hannah Arendt insisted we must “think what we are doing,”Honig revises this imperative for our current moment: we must first understand what has been done to us. The essays in this volume delineate what we’ve endured, and then illuminate the sensory adjustments and collective paths to undoing it. Inspired by Honig’s intervention, and following her practice of feminist criticism, this essay endeavors to extend her insights by pulling on three entangled threads from Shell-Shocked on the themes of “ambigendering,” the gendered politics of vulnerability, and maternal politics.