Among the most striking but least commented-upon aspects of Donald Trump’s videotaped “apology” following the release of the Access Hollywood footage of him bragging to Billy Bush about sexually assaulting women was the following statement:
Let’s be honest—we’re living in the real world. This is nothing more than a distraction from the important issues we’re facing today. We are losing our jobs, we’re less safe than we were eight years ago, and Washington is totally broken. Footnote 1
That Trump’s characterization of allegations of sexual assault as “a distraction” from “important issues” attracted little attention was due, in part, to the fact that many liberal commentators did not take his stage-managed mea culpa seriously. But I also think that many progressives failed to comment on this portion of his statement because they take as both given and as valid the assumption underlying Trump’s distinction between “real” issues like economy on the one hand and “distracting” issues such as sexual assault on the other hand. Indeed, the distinction between “material” and “post-material” issues at the heart of much political science scholarship is a version of this distinction, Footnote 2 and is related to the more general tendency to dismiss issues having to do with race, gender, and sexuality as “social,” “identity,” or “post-material” issues—ones that allegedly serve to both sidetrack the left from addressing “material” issues such as wages, benefits, and the like and to alienate straight white male voters from the Democratic Party. For example, in an interview that I conducted for my book Affirmative Advocacy, I asked the executive director of a left-leaning economic justice organization about his organization’s activities regarding public funding for reproductive health services. “None,” he responded. Contextualizing this assertion within arguments about strategies to shift the focus of the Democratic Party away from issues such as abortion, affirmative action, and LGBT rights, he explained that “our focus has been on economic questions” because “the only way to defend cultural liberalism is with a strong populist economics” that persuades white men to “vote their pocketbook” Footnote 3 . In spite of its economic consequences for the low-income women who constitute a significant portion of this organization’s constituency, the genderedness of reproductive health services rendered it unrecognizable to him as “an economic issue.”
Aida Hozic and Jacqui True’s important volume Scandalous Economics: Gender and the Politics of Financial Crises makes clear that any attempt to address economic issues without taking into account race, gender, and sexuality is a misguided, misleading, counterproductive, and unsustainable example of massive omitted-variable bias. From the masculinist culture of the finance industry and the racialized and gendered effects of austerity and privatization to the essentializing narratives in which “women’s fiscal responsibility, prudence, and trust-worthiness” is figured as a “potential panacea to the crisis” (p. 198), the topics taken up by the essays in the volume illuminate the many ways in which raced and gendered inequalities, logics, and formations are “always already” bound up in economic institutions, processes, and logics both macro and micro.
But as several essays in the volume—including those by Elisabeth Prügl, Jacqui True, Adrienne Roberts, and Nicola Smith—also make clear, “adding and stirring” women, people of color, and LGBT people into high-powered roles in finance and government is not the answer, as it leaves unquestioned the norms and assumptions of existing political and economic orders. As such, not only will these strategies not resolve these inequalities, but such seemingly liberatory interventions are too easily and often co-opted in ways that serve to renormalize the raced and gendered structural inequalities that are part of the fabric of “ordinary life.” Footnote 4 And as the essay by Peggy Griffin makes clear, it is also true that even “otherwise subversive engagements with global finance, such as the [ballerina atop bull] imagery chosen for the Occupy Wall Street (OWS) campaign” avoid challenging both “the assumed masculinity of global finance” and the “otherness of women’s position in and relationship with economic discourse” (pp. 187–196). Problematizing the “structures and mechanisms of globalized finance and its governance is no mean feat,” she concedes, and may “seem enough for many protest groups.” But advocating allegedly “‘gender-neutral’ alternatives to the current capitalist system” without paying attention to “the gendered patterns of power and reproduction that prop up economic relations” means that efforts such as OWS “further entrench the gendered practices that have enabled gender bias in the policies of both private and public financial institutions” (p. 196).
These are just some of the ways in which this volume makes a crucial contribution to understanding the ways in which “the very notion of economic crisis relies on assumptions and practices that reflect, reproduce, and constitute prevailing attitudes and normative expectations about racialized and gendered labor and economic inequalities” Footnote 5 and the centrality of race, gender, and sexuality to political and economic processes and structures more genrally. We dismiss these connections as “distracting” at our peril, whether they come from a racist and misogynist presidential candidate or from allegedly progressive movements.
