Gender, Place & Culture, 2017

VOL. 24, NO. 5, 628–644

https://doi.org/10.1080/0966369X.2017.1343284

Intersectional feminism beyond U.S. flag hijab and pussy

hats in Trump’s America
Banu Gökarıksel and Sara Smith
Department of Geography, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, NC, USA

ABSTRACT ARTICLE HISTORY

Since Trump came to power, he has undertaken a series of Received 16 March 2017
executive actions meant to threaten and terrorize a multitude Accepted 4 May 2017
of ‘others’: immigrants, Muslims, women, African Americans, KEYWORDS
Native Americans, transgender people. The defensively Intersectionality; feminism;
aggressive strategies of deportation, walls, and internal women’s marches; political
violence aim to define who belongs within the U.S. national symbols; Trump; white
territory and protect a threatened white masculinity which is masculinity
portrayed as both victim and victor. Women and allies have
been at the forefront of voicing opposition to Trumpism by
organizing one of the largest marches in U.S. history on the
day after inauguration and continue to resist through strikes,
demonstrations, and other actions. They are raising their
voices against the walls, hatred, and deportations embedded
in the global turn to the right and attempting to embrace
an intersectional feminism that recognizes racial, ethnic,
religious, class, and other differences. Yet, in the protest signs
and the embodied experience of the 21 January march itself,
there were also spiraling redefinitions of what it means to be
woman, what it means to be ‘American,’ and whether that is an
aspirational goal or the terms of nationalist exclusion, settler
colonialism, and imperial feminism. Intersectional feminism
does not come easily and its challenges are manifest in some
of the iconic symbols of the women’s movement – from the
Muslim Woman in the U.S. flag hijab to pink pussy hats. We find
spaces of protest fraught but crucial sites of for forging forms
of solidarity that are radical in their feminist formulations.

Introduction
‘Something is happening …’ reads the title of a news article about how the Women’s
March on Washington has inspired a new era of resistance across the U.S. in The
Guardian (Cochrane 2017). Indeed, there is a flurry of activity to make sense of and
develop strategies to resist the recent turn to the right. Feminists are leading this
resistance and contributing to the emergence of new spaces for building alliances
and undertaking collective action. The spaces for feminist resistance range from

CONTACT Banu Gökarıksel [email protected]

© 2017 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group
 GENDER, PLACE & CULTURE  629

intimate strategy meetings between friends, neighbors, coworkers, and acquaint-

ances to coordinated protest marches, public demonstrations, and strikes where
thousands participate all across the country (see https://www.indivisibleguide.
com/act-locally/). If there is one thing to be optimistic about now, it is the energized
grassroots resistance movement that is reaching out to all ‘Others’ of the white
masculinity that the current administration is enshrining as the essence of ‘America.’
Rather than ‘making America great again’ by going back to a past in which white
men dominated, the emergent feminist resistance movement has the potential to
completely redefine what it means to live together in the U.S. This redefinition of
Americanness is not an easy task; it requires coming face to face with the tensions
of inclusivity, difference, and pluralism. Resorting to existing nationalist symbols or
pasts to purport inclusivity is insufficient or even dangerous. So is a Hillary Clinton
style pantsuit feminism. Rather than shy away from tensions or see them as dis-
tracting or destructive, we locate crucial political potential in the distraughtness
of the newly emergent spaces, symbols, and conversations and argue that they
are productive for charting a feminism that takes intersectionality seriously. In
this article, we examine the political potential of intersectional feminism to enact
resistance and to generate new spaces of living together. At the same time, we
amplify the voices of those who have been critical of some of the most popular
symbols of feminist resistance, such as the U.S. flag hijab and pink pussy hats,
because they alert us to the ruptures between intentions of activists, designers,
and organizers and the perceptions of those from marginalized groups. It is in the
ruptures instead of zones of comfort that we find ways to move forward.

Intersectional feminism against white masculinist body politics

Intersectional feminism has become more crucial than ever in the era of Trumpism.
Donald Trump has made his own and others’ bodies a focal point of his 2016 pres-
idential campaign and centered his own masculinity in a defensive vision of what
it means to be a white American man (Gökarıksel and Smith 2016). This outlandish
masculinity – easily lampooned but viciously dangerous – is only meaningful in
reference to what it is not: female, Brown, Muslim, migrant, Black, Native, queer. His
politics relied on a narrative of threat and fear that suggested that only he could
protect America from what it must not be or become. The work of feminist scholars
on intersectionality and embodiment provide us with tools to theorize and work
against these exclusionary politics (e.g. Crenshaw 1991; hooks 1992; Longhurst
2001; Moss and Dyck 2003). While theories of intersectionality have questioned
homogenous identity categories and instead drawn attention to subject positions
differentially situated in relation to multiple axes of power (Crenshaw 1991; hooks
1992; Kobayashi and Peake 1994; Valentine 2007), feminist scholarship on embod-
iment has trained our eye towards how political ideologies are expressed and
enacted through and by bodies (Clark 2016; Fluri 2011; Gökariksel 2016; Longhurst
630  B. GÖKARIKSEL AND S. SMITH

2001; Mayer 2000; Mott and Roberts 2014; Puar 2007; Silvey 2005; Smith 2012;
Spillers 2003; Wynter 2003).
When we approach the current U.S. political context from a perspective informed
by these approaches, we see that in the President’s embodied and rhetorical flour-
ishes, his white masculinity stands against a multitude of Others that would destroy
‘us.’ In his first days in office, he undertook a series of executive actions meant to
threaten and terrorize each threat that he himself had called into being: a ‘global
gag rule’ that restricts U.S. funded nongovernmental organizations working abroad
from discussing abortion as a family planning option (23 January), an approval of
the expansion of oil pipelines contested by Native American nations, environmen-
talist groups, and many others (24 January), steps toward a concrete wall along
U.S.-Mexico border and the immediate detainment and deportation of ‘illegal’
immigrants (25 January), threatening to cut federal funding for ‘sanctuary cities’
who do not cooperate with federal agencies in detaining and deporting immi-
grants (25 January), and a chaotic ‘Muslim ban’ that attempted to bar or suspend
travel and immigration from Muslim-majority countries, including an indefinite ban
on Syrian refugees (27 January and 6 March). By 6 March 2017, he had signed 34
executive orders, presidential memoranda, or proclamations that restrict the rights
of women, immigrants, Muslims, and Native Americans while relaxing regulations
on manufacturing companies, increasing support for law enforcement and the
military, and moving towards dismantling the ‘administrative state.’ Thereby, the
Trump administration invests in strengthening masculinist state institutions like
law enforcement and the military, while divesting from feminized state institutions
that are associated with the care, well-being, and education of the population and
the soft power of diplomacy.
Each of these signals and moves has only intensified our original assessment of
the links between a threatened white masculinity and the defensively aggressive
strategies of deportation, walls, and internal violence that is meant to define who
belongs within national territory (marked as white, male, and at least nominally
Christian), and within whose body sovereignty lies (Gökarıksel and Smith 2016).
Furthermore, as feared, we have witnessed a rise in hate crimes targeting Muslims
and people who are mistaken for Muslims, including the shooting of two Indian
men in Kansas (Eligon, Najar, and Blinder 2017), as well as attacks on transgen-
der people, threats to Jewish Community Centers, and the vandalizing of Jewish
cemeteries since the elections of November 2016 (Jenkins 2017; Kuruvilla 2017).
Implicit in the rhetoric of making America great again is a sleight of hand, through
which vulnerable groups (refugees, undocumented immigrants, queer and trans
people) are portrayed as threat, the nation as in need of rescue. Rural and small
town places are the focus of this rescue mission, and the workers of these places
(particularly those in masculine industries such as coal or automobiles) are cen-
tered as the real America with coded language distinguishing their struggles from
those of the urban working class. White workers here are portrayed as unwilling
victims, victims out of place, whose real roles as victor, breadwinner, patriarch,
 GENDER, PLACE & CULTURE  631

has been usurped or stolen. Thus, the struggles of working people of color and
women, and the pressing questions about the contradictions of capitalism and
the lack of a safety net for the middle class and the working poor are sublimated
into this rhetoric. How do we effectively mobilize against the political strategy
demonstrated here, which centers white masculinity both as victor (the president)
and as victim (the voters in the deindustrializing Midwest and South)?

Intersectional feminist resistance and its challenges

Inauguration weekend was the movie trailer for a dystopian film that we now
inhabit. It began with an awkward day of Trump and his entourage waving to
empty seats, and parodying gender and racial privilege in a series of uneasy
exchanges with Barack and Michelle Obama, and centered a terrifying speech
about ‘American Carnage,’ which revealed Trump’s deeply negative and apocalyptic
view of the U.S. The next day, a sea of pink ‘pussy hats’ converged. In the January
21st Women’s March on Washington, hundreds of thousands filled the Washington
Mall, spilling into the adjacent streets. Women and allies in other cities across the
U.S. and the globe held their own demonstrations in solidarity. Their collective
bodily presence made publicly visible popular dissent to racist, sexist, homophobic,
Islamophobic, and xenophobic white masculine power. Gaining access to a more
exclusive public sphere through widespread national and international media
coverage, a continuing wave of protests has followed since then. Other groups
threatened (or in solidarity with those threatened) by recent actions have been
using similar embodied strategies to insert themselves into the public sphere by
taking to the streets and squares (immigrant marches, ‘I am a Muslim Too’ rally on
19 February in Times Square in New York City, Native Nations Rise march on 10
March in Washington DC), demonstrating at airports (the Muslim and immigrant
ban), and closing down businesses for a day (the Yemeni bodega shutdown in
Brooklyn on 2 February, A Day without Immigrants on 16 February, and A Day
without a Woman on 8 March). Such protests are significant for voicing opposition.
For those of us who participated in the march or in marches closer to home
(for us, Raleigh, North Carolina), the march itself was also a bodily experience, a
felt reaction and a catharsis of shouting together after three months in which an
added layer of anxiety had been layered upon all those that were already exist-
ent from the ordinary doom of the neoliberal state. Taking to the street felt like
a necessary reaction (anger, rage, love) but one which was always inadequate
because of the haunting questions of who was there, who felt safe in that space,
whose concerns were centered, and how. As Staeheli, Mitchell, and Nagel (2009,
641–642) remind us, public events often appeal to social and communal norms
to prove their legitimacy and to seek inclusion and acceptance in a polity. Yet,
these norms are products of historical relations of power and have exclusions
and limitations. Though women and allies were there to raise their voices against
the walls, hatred, and deportations that Trump centers in his quest for American
632  B. GÖKARIKSEL AND S. SMITH

‘great’ness, in the protest signs and the embodied experience of the march itself,
there were spiraling redefinitions of what it means to be woman, what it means to
be ‘American,’ and whether that is an aspirational goal or the terms of nationalist
exclusion, settler colonialism, and imperial feminism. Some signs and messages
were clearly formulated with an intentional and intersectional feminism in mind,
for instance the popular: ‘Love is love/Black Lives Matter/Climate Change is real/
Migrants make America Great/Women’s rights are human rights,’ but the move-
ment also reiterates tensions and struggles within feminism itself, and thus provide
us both with a moment of urgency, and a moment requiring care and consideration
to formulate a politics that begins from and builds on our differences, rather than
claiming an easy sisterhood that obscures divisions.
The website for the Women’s March on Washington (WMW) is itself a docu-
ment that reflects the tensions one can see in the signs marchers carried and the
messages they embodied. In its FAQ, questions include: ‘I’m not a woman, am I
invited?’ and ‘Is the Women’s March on Washington inclusive for women of color?’
alongside questions like ‘Is photography allowed?’ The answers to the FAQ hint
at a complex story:
The WMW is an evolving effort originally founded by white women. Recognizing the
need to be truly inclusive, the National Co-Chair and Organizers were established to
reflect a balanced representation. The team of organizers and volunteers are committed
to ensuring that the march reflects women and femme expressive people of all back-
grounds. (‘Women’s March FAQ’, 2017)
The initial idea for a mass women’s protest was put forward by two separate peo-
ple, Teresa Shook (a retired attorney) and Bob Bland (the fashion designer who
designed ‘Nasty Woman’ t-shirts and donated profits to Planned Parenthood during
the presidential campaign and who created one of the original events through
social media) (Tolentino 2017). Shook called her protest ‘Million Woman March,’
the name originally for the 1997 protests organized by and for black women in
Philadelphia. Then came a storm of criticisms of the appropriation of this name
but not reflecting any racial diversity among organizers. In response to these crit-
icisms, a new name that invoked Black activism was adopted and four co-chairs
were selected to signal intentionally intersectional feminism (Crenshaw 1989,
1991): Palestinian American Muslim political activist Linda Sarsour, Tamika Mallory,
African American activist working in New York City, Carmen Perez, a Latina working
on issues of mass incarceration and gender equality, and Bob Bland. Honorary
co-chairs were also named: Angela Davis, Dolores Huerta, Gloria Steinem, Harry
Belafonte, and LaDonna Harris. Reporting on the event mentions these represent-
ative choices being informed by a conversation between Bob Bland and Vanessa
Wruble, the editor of OkayAfrica who was also involved in the planning (Cusumano
2017). The organizers’ evolving attempts to put intersectional feminism into prac-
tice are not only laudable, but desperately needed at this time. The engagement
and centering of women of color in WMW reflect an ongoing process of carefully
formulating and practicing intersectional feminism, and the important role of
 GENDER, PLACE & CULTURE  633

listening to the criticisms of Black, Muslim, immigrant, LGBTQI feminists in push-

ing this process further. Yet questions of multivalence and intent versus audience
perception emerge here as well, and these attempts at inclusion come with risks
of tokenism and assimilatory rhetoric. Here we do not want to downplay the hard
intellectual and emotional labor of those who did the work of organizing WMW.
What we are drawing attention to is the urgent need to engage with the cacophony
and confluence of voices and experiences that emerge among the participants,
and suggest that in the noise as well as silence there is much to be learned for
deepening our engagements with intersectional feminism.
The tensions between embodied unity and multiple differences and inequalities
that are part of WMW are also evident in the symbols that are designed to invoke
and to materialize solidarity at marches and rallies. The poster prints of ‘We the
People’ series created by Shepard Fairey and commissioned by the non-profit The
Amplifier Foundation were very popular at the women’s marches and subsequent
rallies. The series presents a trio of young, strong women signaling different ethnic-
ities, racialized identities, and religious affiliations: a Black woman with dreadlocks
(‘We the People Protect Each Other’), a Muslim woman in a U.S. flag scarf (‘We the
People are Greater than Fear’), and a Latina woman with a red flower in her hair
(‘We the People Defend Dignity’). In his trademark style that became famous with
Hope posters for Obama, Fairey imbues all with the colors and symbols of U.S.
nationalism to ostensibly serve as signs of inclusion and acceptance. However,
the images of minority women in washed in red, white, and blue are multivalent
and complex signifiers. While some who share the identities that Fairey strives to
represent may embrace these images as representations of an inclusive America,
the series is also fraught in its folding of diverse ‘others’ into a national narrative.
Even this careful orchestration of diversity may founder upon the deeply rooted
understandings and categories at play in the national context, and be easily appro-
priated for an imperial feminism that seeks to save helpless minority women not
from black or brown men but from revanchist white men on the right (in a twist
on the formulation provided by Spivak [1988]; Abu-Lughod [2013]). Holding up
the composite images of ‘diverse women’ as symbols of dignity and strength in
an essentializing manner, the series evades the ways that the national colors that
they now bask in are the colors of the nation that forced them to have to be strong,
to have to be dignified to survive. The Muslim woman wearing the U.S. flag as
a headscarf most poignantly embodies the folding of minorities into a national
narrative but also points to its dangers.
Fairey’s rendering of the Muslim woman is based on Ridwan Adhami’s iconic
photograph of a Muslim American woman swathed in the Stars and Stripes. The
headscarf, often misread as a symbol of Muslim women’s oppression, has long
animated imperial feminism’s rescue mission, as well as U.S.-led military invasion
of Afghanistan (Abu-Lughod 2013). Not surprisingly, in his Muslim ban Trump refer-
ences honor killings, ‘… one of the most iconic cultural-legal categories created to
describe the deplorable state of women’s rights in the Muslim world’ (Abu-Lughod
634  B. GÖKARIKSEL AND S. SMITH

2013, 113), but does not do so to mobilize a rescue mission/invasion but to simply
provide proof of Muslim men’s threatening violence and thereby justify the exclu-
sion of all Muslims from the U.S. The image of the flag hijab, thus, invokes a long
history of imperial feminism, as well as more recent casting of Muslims as security
threats. As a nationalist symbol, the flag cannot easily shed its association with
war, with exclusion, with tanks, planes, or drones that bomb loved ones in distant
lands. As Katebi (2017) asks in her stinging criticism of the flag hijab,
How are we able to hold up signs of Muslim women wearing the American flag and
chant slogans of supposed solidarity while drones carrying the same flag killed our
Muslim family in Yemen at the exact same moment and we said nothing?
The flag hijab image welcomes Muslim women ‘into the fold,’ by transforming
a piece of material with deep religious significance into a fundamentally national
narrative, which presumes that these things can easily come together, that dif-
ference is resolvable, that assimilation under a multi-cultural framework is a goal.
As Jamal (2017) puts it:
The Muslim Woman, as depicted and imagined is a defenseless, singular, archetype with
hijab. She now requires more protection, more support, and more help. She is cloaked
in the U.S. flag, signaling mandatory conformity to an ‘American ideal’ which is unartic-
ulated, and simultaneously casting a myth of ‘American’ benevolence and protections
for her rights, even as hate crimes against Muslims, in the name of America, continue
to grow. She remains a victim of ‘Americanness gone Wrong’ and is dependent on an
‘American ideal’ for her survival.
The creation of an archetype of Muslim Woman wearing a hijab also enacts a dif-
ferent kind of violence through its erasure of the diversity among Muslim women
and presents Muslim women as easily identifiable mainly and perhaps only by
their headscarves (Moezzi 2017).
The flag hijab thus takes on the qualities of a holograph (Gökarıksel and Secor
2010): when we glimpse this striking image from one angle, it untangles and
challenges a narrow vision of U.S. history and insists on a richer, more inclusive
future that embraces religious diversity, Muslim women, and immigration from
Muslim-majority regions. But as our gaze shifts, the flag recalls violence, not in the
past, but ongoing, and we see erasure of the religious significance of the headscarf
and an insistence on enveloping difference within the nation rather than the much
more difficult task of challenging exclusionary and violent politics of nation-states
and the legacy of European colonialism since the sixteenth century. Therefore,
the combination of the U.S. flag and hijab at once articulates and performs the
erasure of difference and assimilation. By folding embodied, marked difference
into national narratives, such powerful images may regrettably enable the logics
and violence of white supremacy, heteronormativity, trans-exclusion, and imperial
feminism (Sharp 1996; Collins 1999; Mayer 2000; Puar 2007) to seep into practices,
onto signboards, and be felt within the bodies of those attending or those remain-
ing at home or at work. What are Native Americans and the descendants of people
 GENDER, PLACE & CULTURE  635

who arrived to these shores as enslaved people to make of signs reading, ‘we are
a nation of immigrants’ (Dunbar-Ortiz 2017; Mann 2017)?
Much like the U.S. flag hijab, the pink pussy hat that was to signal an embodied
unity and a refusal of the violent and misogynist core of the recent turn to the right
is also revealing of the challenges of intersectional feminism. The pink pussy hat
is enticing and (almost) irresistible. The Pussyhat Project, the organization behind
this symbol, states its two main goals: ‘provide the people of the Women’s March on
Washington DC a means to make a unique collective visual statement which will
help activists be better heard’ and ‘provide people who cannot physically be on the
National Mall a way to represent themselves and support women’s rights.’ Indeed,
the pink pussy hats accomplish so much: the hat creates a vivid and impossible to
ignore visible signal that embraces and celebrates femininity while it simultane-
ously evokes a cheeky vulgarity through its multiple valences as a sexual symbol
now proudly reclaimed against a violent record of masculine assault in which
Trump unabashedly participates. As Derr (2017) puts it, the project’s ‘idea is that
pink, cat-eared hats worn by a critical mass of march attendees stand to reclaim
the word “pussy” from our president-elect and his crotch-grabbing tiny hands.’ At
the same time, it is an innocuous pink hat that makes the wearer look like a kitten.
Thus, it picks up the visual language of infantilizing femininity (women as children
or playthings) and capitalist branding in the mandatory and cloying pink of the
‘girls’ aisle,’ and inverts or perhaps even weaponizes the color pink into a vivid
language of resistance that is visible from miles away. The hat might be knitted
by your aunt or a stranger on another coast – a feminine task put into practice to
fight against patriarchy and create solidarity among women who have never met.
The pink pussy hat is bright, clever, and beautiful – and yet.
In Derr’s (2017) words,
The infantilizing kitten imagery combined with a stereotypically feminine color feels
too safe and too reductive to be an answer to the complex issues facing women today.
For example, while the March claims intersectionality as central to its platform, and the
Pussyhat Project claims to be speaking for both cis- and transgender individuals, the
latter’s conception of what it means to be a woman is remarkably narrow.
The pink pussy hat fails as a metaphor against sexual violence and still presents
pussy grabbing as an assault on femininity only rather than an assault on humanity.
In a different vein, Nagpal (2017) in The Cambridge Student writes succinctly: ‘The
march conflated womanhood with having a vagina. The march conflated being a
woman with having a pink vagina. Pictures from the various events show seas of
people in bright pink vagina hats. My vagina is not pink.’ Nagpal’s words provide
context and poignancy to the telling photo that appears with her article as well
as other critical sets of commentary. A Black woman standing in a disaffected
manner, gazing out of the frame. She is casually sucking a lollipop, and holding
with one hand a handwritten sign: ‘Don’t forget: White Women Voted for TRUMP,’
and the words on her hat appear to read, ‘Stop killing Black people.’ Behind her,
636  B. GÖKARIKSEL AND S. SMITH

three white women in the brightest pink hats smile at their phones, in the midst
– it appears – of documenting their resistance.
As Nagpal’s commentary reminds us resistance to Trump that centers an exclu-
sionary and heroic embodied white femininity as the counterpoint of reference
risks exclusion, both through the unconscious and uninterrogated ‘pinkness’ of the
pussy hat, but also through the symbolism that highlights genitals define inclusion
in the category women and deepen the reification of woman as category in ways
that marginalize genderqueer and trans people. The pink of the hats is symbolic
and not representative, however, it still reinforces the stereotype of women as fem-
inine. The multivalent and risky nature of the pink pussy symbolism is a reminder
of how symbols that seek to challenge gender norms can end up reiterating them.
This is what we have observed in the gendered symbolism of the ‘Arab Spring’ and
Gezi Protests in Turkey, which likewise played with gender (in particular an image
of a young woman in a bright red dress under attack by a police officer and a series
of images of pregnancy), but did so in ways that sometimes reiterated conventional
gendered norms (Gökariksel 2016). Meanwhile, other women’s images challeng-
ing these norms, such as ‘slingshot auntie,’ invited violent threats. Even the most
subversive and disruptive protest imagery might rely on the gendered narratives
at work and can be taken up and repurposed in ways that thwart the intent of the
protestors (Gökariksel 2016). Rather, from our perspective, the political potential
is opening up to voices in the margins.
Recognizing the differential distribution of vulnerability and privilege between
white middle class women and minority, lower paid women, when the WMW team
called for ‘A Day without a Woman’ on 8 March, International Women’s Day, they
‘deliberately offered a menu of ways to participate’ (Chira, Rogers, and Abrams
2017). This menu included skipping work, wearing red, and spending money
only at woman-owned businesses. Angela Davis joined the call for a strike on 8
March, laying out the framework for a ‘feminism for the 99%,’ recalling the Occupy
Movement (Alcoff et al. 2017). Davis criticized ‘lean-in feminism and other vari-
ants of corporate feminism’ for failing the overwhelming majority of women and
pointed out that ‘women’s conditions of life, especially those of women of color
and of working, unemployed and migrant women, have steadily deteriorated over
the last 30 years, thanks to financialization and corporate globalization.’ She called
for a feminism that would not simply oppose Trump but would also ‘target the
ongoing neoliberal attack on social provision and labor rights.’ She identified the
emergence of a new international feminist movement in Argentina, Poland, Italy,
and elsewhere – that is ‘at once anti-racist, anti-imperialist, anti-heterosexist and
anti-neoliberal.’ Indeed, the reclaiming of International Women’s Day as a day of
political protest connected the women and their allies in the U.S. to those across
the globe who also took the streets to march for women’s rights and against tyr-
anny and violence. These demonstrations often made intersectional feminism
central to their demands for justice (e.g. in Turkey, feminist activists have been
linking the oppression of Kurds and women (Al-Ali and Tas 2017) and on 8 March,
 GENDER, PLACE & CULTURE  637

called for women to vote ‘no’ in a referendum that would give even more power to
an already too powerful president (Özkaptan 2017) and following the narrow ‘yes’
result continued to mobilizing against a ‘One-Man Rule’ (Yıldırım 2017).
The activism of ‘A Day without a Woman’ also contributed to the emergence of
new conversations and spaces locally. For example, in Carrboro and Chapel Hill,
North Carolina when public schools closed for the day in response to teachers’
requests, some women offered to take care of the children of others who could
not take the day off from work. However, these gestures and spaces remain lim-
ited as individual rather than communal responses that still rely on conventional
gendered division of labor. More broadly, the menu of action items center on
the economic: women’s worth is to be proved through women’s spending power,
paid and unpaid labor, and entrepreneurship. To what extent can the feminism
for the 99% be achieved if our recognition of women’s power and value is limited
to a neoliberal capitalist framework? How can feminism point out the hypocrisy
in Trump’s claims to represent and care for the working class when he constantly
brags about his wealth and economic success and presents them as his credentials
for governing the nation when feminists do not refuse to participate in the same
neoliberal logic? How can feminism see through his strategic use of cultural nation-
alism to distract from economic struggles of the working class in deindustrializing
areas when feminists focus on only getting a seat for women at the corporate
executive boards?
These questions played out over the course of the presidential campaign last
year, with the image of Hillary Clinton, un-fazed and eye-rolling in her colorful
pantsuits was both easy to identify with (woman facing off against a man with
less experience but limitless confidence) and infuriating in the ways that her
selection as candidate reinforced the Democratic party’s easy embrace of neolib-
eral economic policy and hawkish geopolitical strategy, while wrapping these in
supposedly inclusive, modern, and forward looking packaging. Though there are
distinct and important differences between the two parties and candidates, and
we do not wish to diminish these, the pantsuit feminism of gradual progress and
women succeeding not by challenging neoliberal nationalist logics but by doing
them twice as good as a man, is folded into a narrative that celebrates the nation’s
slow but inevitable inclusivity is in conversation with other forms of feminism –
leaning in, the ‘Fearless Girl’ of Wall Street (Sheffler 2017), even Ivanka Trump’s tone
deaf insistence on ‘having it all,’ (Filipovic 2017) –which ultimately do not pose a
fundamental challenge to the status quo. These challenges are not unique to the
contemporary moment in feminist organizing that deeply feels the need to be
inclusive and far-reaching. Instead, they underline the difficulty of shifting the
terms of access to the public sphere and of gaining legitimacy in public historically
(Staeheli, Mitchell, and Nagel 2009, 643).
Moving forward, it is not enough to fall into easy symbolism, comfortable (for
some) narratives that assume a glitch has occurred on our teleological arc toward
justice. We cannot center an imperial feminism that celebrates its own beneficence
638  B. GÖKARIKSEL AND S. SMITH

and lifts up a pink pussy as a sign of unity or embraces the corporate pantsuit.
Similarly, Trump’s over-the-top anxious and performative masculinity is a comical
foil to Barack Obama’s easygoing coolness, but comfortable laughter is danger-
ous. Since the 2016 election, social media has been awash in memes celebrating
Obama’s hipness. As soon as Obama was photographed on a post-presidency
vacation sections of Twitter took to captioning the photos with Obama in the
role of ‘America’s’ handsome, effortlessly cool ex-boyfriend ‘living his best life’ and
ignoring ‘America’s’ phone calls – an exemplar being a tweet by ‘Cat Daddy,’ from
February 7th, retweeted 23,237 times, with a photo of Obama on the ocean smiling
in sunglasses, captioned, ‘Obama just posed for the “I’m GREAT!” pic you’d petty
post after a breakup’ (a sampling of these social media responses are collected
in Bruner 2017). This swooning harkens back to Obama’s 2009 campaign against
McCain, and recalls McAlister’s (2012, 482) thoughtful analysis of the positioning
of Obama as a ‘Magical Negro to the entire nation; he would rectify the nation’s
many problems, assuage white guilt over racism, and simultaneously recast black
men as reasoned leaders in place of stereotypes of hypersexuality and criminality.’
Yet relying on Obama’s embodied political symbolism has risks and means over-
looking his policies that continued and intensified surveillance, independence of
the press, the use of drone warfare, deportation of immigrants, and other policies
of the previous Bush administration (Wolf et al. 2017). The symbols and tropes of
cool Obama, the pink pussy hat, and U.S. flag headscarf are perhaps too telling of
the political aesthetics of our contemporary moment. These symbols are meant to
unify an opposition: love, not hate, unity, not divisiveness, but they cannot gloss
over the ways that women and their allies are differently positioned in relation to
the state and face different choices that hold different risks. Some risk awkward
political conversations at the Thanksgiving table, while others risk hate crimes,
deportations, or the deaths of their loved ones here in the U.S. or back home in
the Middle East.

Conclusion
In his compelling interrogation of Foucault’s biopolitics, and Agamben’s bare life,
Habeas Viscus, Weheliye (2014) argues that their formulations of sovereignty and
the rule over life and death fail us in part because they allow us to disengage from
the ways that race has been fundamental to the organization of life and death. In
contrast to their abstract assumptions that there is a biological substrata prior to
the biopolitical, they are unable, he argues, to theorize with the political acuity of
Black feminists, in particular Wynter (2003) and Spillers (2003). Wynter and Spillers
speak to lived and embodied experience, and in spite of, or perhaps because of
this, their arguments have been ‘ethnographically detained’ by their own posi-
tionality, and are assumed only to apply to Black women’s experience. Weheliye
argues against this assumption and instead calls for turning to their theorizations
for a more nuanced understanding of how the category of human serves the rule
 GENDER, PLACE & CULTURE  639

over life and death. It is particularly important to grapple with the central thrust
of this argument at this current moment of intersectional feminism: that there is
no means through which we can now untangle the idea of ‘humanity’ from the
racial hierarchy that it has legitimated (and here, we add religious identity, sex-
ual orientation, able-bodiedness, and others). Historically, western imperialism
has used humanity to define some as preeminently human in order to protect
white supremacy, to make others human only in relation to white men, and to
dehumanize many others (Weheliye 2014). If we subsume the complexity of lived
experience that brings people to the streets to protest the policies of the current
administration, and if we ask those who do not wish to subsume their own lived
experiences in a sea of pink pussy hats, then we run the risk of reinscribing this
hierarchy of humanity.
One thing that we must take from the recent events is that (to return to our
question above) effective mobilization against a political strategy centering white
masculinity must take care when it comes to finding new figures to rally around
– be they bright pink or a faded and nostalgic red, white, and blue. We cannot
allow the optics or the scenery to distract or to soothe us in a too comfortable
reaction to recent events. We must remember that Obama was also the ‘deporter
in chief,’ and architect of a program of drone strikes targeting brown bodies abroad
(Wolf et al. 2017). When Trump conjures the figure of the white worker victim to
globalization and ‘China,’ he is oversimplifying and erasing history and difference,
and creating a mirage of promises that he cannot keep. His play-acting as truth-
teller and plainspoken man of the people distracts from his distance and lack of
concern for the working class and for the poor counties that will now face decline
in health coverage as well. It is insufficient and even dangerous to limit resist-
ance to countering the figure of the white male victor/victim with a mash-up of
ahistorical ‘American values,’ in the form of the flag hijab, the pussy hat, and the
‘nation of immigrants.’ We need more than to frame our arguments around the
good immigrants (surprise! they are doctors) who will no longer be allowed in the
country because of the Muslim ban.
Trump’s body politics works by centering an ideal masculine, impenetrable,
normalized and heteronormative white male body, but this cannot be countered
with a similarly normative white, CIS-gendered woman or it becomes an echo of
that which it seeks to critique. Connecting women’s march with immigrant move-
ments, Black Lives Matter, mobilization against the ‘Muslim ban’ and against oil
pipelines is crucial but certainly not easy. How to come together as women (and
men) while advancing an intersectional feminism that recognizes differences in
terms of class, religion, race, ethnicity, sexuality, etc. and in terms of power and
vulnerability? And how to avoid putting up a heteronormative, white, middle class,
non-immigrant, and non-Muslim ‘Woman’ as ideal against Trumpism? Trumpism
is not new but bares painfully naked deep-seated and historically powerful fears
of ‘white decline’ and threatened borders that have animated politics and policies
in the U.S. for as long as its history. If we mourn our cool Black president because
640  B. GÖKARIKSEL AND S. SMITH

now we have a profoundly unhip easy-to-anger white one, we will have failed. We
will have failed because we will be reinstating and proliferating endless exclusions
and taking the easy choice, to pretend that we come from the same place, to
pretend that we have the same needs and the same struggles. We do not. Those
of us who inhabit this space are on haunted ground. We are here together now,
but to pretend we have a shared vision of history is dangerous. The reality is much
harder: there is perhaps no clear-cut resistance strategy. The easy celebration of
that which is rejected is not enough. Perhaps we can begin from a rejection of
hatred and exclusion, but that is only a starting point and not an end in itself, and a
retreat into smugness will never be enough. Instead, we need the kind of intersec-
tionality described by Crenshaw (1991), and elaborated on by Valentine (2007, 19):
‘intersectionality as spatially constituted and experienced offers feminists a way of
addressing the tension between the fluidity and multiplicity of individual identi-
ties and the continued importance and necessity of group politics.’ However, the
search for intersectionality may too easily become a passive aggressive assertion
on Black women of sentiments, queries, and narratives that do not belong to them.
Manigault-Bryant (2017) eloquently resists such assertions, instead welcoming
white liberal feminists to the deep perpetual angst that she has long lived with.
As Roy (2016) points out it is incumbent on us not to normalize Trumpism, but to
also resist carefully and intentionally.
Here, we want to suggest that all feminists would benefit following the lead of
those who have a critical analysis and a critique – whether in this case it is writers
like Nagpal, the trans women who speak to their exclusion, or the Native women
and Black people who speak back against the ‘nation of immigrants’ rhetoric used
during the airport rallies and anti-Muslim ban strikes. We find in these uncom-
fortable conversations and spaces the possibility of dismantling the structures of
power, willful ignorance, and feigned innocence that brought us to our current
historical moment. While Trumpism embraces a profoundly embodied politics of
exclusion and normative white supremacy, here we also suggest it is a critical time
to remember that protests are also ‘intimately political,’‘not only because they work
through bodies but also because they produce and reconfigure intimacies across
space and between people’ (Gökariksel 2016, 247). This makes spaces of protest
both fraught, and crucial sites of potential to forge new forms of solidarity that
are radical in their feminist formulations.

Acknowledgements
We would like to thank the anonymous reviewers and editor Pamela Moss for their careful
readings and insightful comments.

Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.
 GENDER, PLACE & CULTURE  641

Notes on contributors
Banu Gökarıksel is associate professor of Geography at the University of North Carolina,
Chapel Hill and the co-editor of the Journal of Middle East Women’s Studies (2014–2018). Her
work engages cultural and political geographies, feminist geopolitics, and geographies of reli-
gion with a focus on gender, bodies, and public space. Through the ethnographic and mul-
ti-method fieldwork research she has been conducting in Turkey since 1996, she analyzes the
politics of everyday life and questions of religion, secularism, and pluralism. She is interested in
similar questions about religious, racial, and gender/sexual diversity, shared spaces, and social
justice in the U.S. as well.

Sara Smith is associate professor of Geography at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill.
She is a feminist political geographer interested in the relationship between territory, bod-
ies, and the everyday. Her research seeks to understand how politics and geopolitics are con-
stituted or disrupted through intimate acts of love, friendship, and birth. She has worked on
these questions in the Ladakh region of India’s Jammu and Kashmir State in relation to mar-
riage and family planning, and is now engaged in a project on marginalized Himalayan youth.
She also pursues these issues as they emerge in the national (U.S.) and global context, through
developing work on race, biopolitics, and the future.

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