Gender will be foremost issue in US election says feminist scholar

We spoke to Roxane Gay, a feminist scholar, social commentator and author, whose latest eBook is ‘Stand Your Ground – a Black Feminist Reckoning with America’s Gun Problem’.

Matt Frei: Tell me, to what extent do you think this election is about gender?

Roxane Gay: We are not single issue people who live single issue lives. And so voters are going to be contending with a range of issues, but gender is going to be one of the foremost issues, because women and people with uteruses in this country want to have bodily autonomy. We want to be able to make our own private healthcare decisions without the state intervening. And the Republicans under Trump have decided that they know best for what women want, which there are so many reasons why they don’t. And so women are going to be voting with that in mind this year.

Matt Frei: Sure. And what really struck me about the Republican National Convention a few weeks ago in Milwaukee was that Trump made no bones about the sort of, what some people describe ‘toxic masculinity’. It was all about men, men who felt left behind, men who felt pushed into a corner. It’s astonishing that they would have gone for that when they know that really just appeals to half the country.

Roxane Gay: It is astonishing, particularly because not all men feel that way. And it’s really interesting that they can only seem to legislate from a place of grievance, rather than considering potential and possibility. And that makes for a very restrictive politic, and it doesn’t really serve anyone, but they seem to be doubling and tripling down on this idea that if they appeal to male grievance, that somehow everything’s going to be okay when literally half of this country, half of our world is comprised of women and our rights and our decisions and our needs matter. And women are also dealing with economic challenges. We’re also dealing with wondering about the value of our college degrees, etc. These are not issues that are strictly the purview of men.

Matt Frei: America was in its infancy, a country founded on an idea, on a revolutionary idea. And you could argue that ideas have sort of got lost in the kind of forest of politics in recent years. Do you see ideas coming back here? Is there imagination in this particular election campaign?

Roxane Gay: There is and I actually recently wrote about how I think Kamala Harris is bringing back political imagination. This country was founded on political imagination, and granted that imagination was fairly limited because it was only for a certain group of people. But for the first time in this very long election cycle, we’re starting to talk about ideas. We’re starting to talk about policy instead of just Biden’s age or Trump’s dementia. And so it’s really great and it’s important. We should not be just slinging mud and talking about human characteristics. We should be talking about how these leaders plan to actually lead and how their leadership decisions are going to affect our lives.

Matt Frei: Whenever I travel outside big cities or even in some big cities, I speak to Republicans, I hear this thing over and over again. They feel that when Democrats talk about imagination, when they talk about their ideas, they’re talking down to Republicans. Do you think that’s true? And what can be done about that?

Roxane Gay: I don’t think that’s true. I think they really have to sit with why they feel that way, why they think talking about equity and equality is talking down, because we’re actually just talking about how we can lift everyone up. And a lot of times, what Republicans are talking about is how they can hoard whatever resources they have and gain more. Now, there are all kinds of Republicans. They are as diverse as any other political group. And I do think we would have a better political climate if we could figure out how to have productive conversations across the proverbial aisle.

But under Trump, the Republican Party has warped into something unrecognisable. And I think a lot of real, sort of authentic Republicans would agree that this does not represent what they believe in. And I think they need to look within themselves first and figure out how to clean up their own house before they worry about how Democrats talk to them. I mean, look how their own leader is talking to them.