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‘This is not who we are’: Gendered bordering practices, ontological insecurity, and lines of continuity under the Trump presidency

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  04 November 2021

Christine Agius Open the ORCID record for Christine Agius [Opens in a new window]
Christine Agius*
Affiliation:
Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, School of Social Sciences, Media, Film and Education, Swinburne University of Technology, Hawthorn, Melbourne, Australia
*
*Corresponding author. Email: cagius@swin.edu.au
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Abstract

The Trump presidency ushered in a heightened sense of ontological insecurity in the US, based on a national self-narrative that portrayed an emasculated America. Trump promised to return the US to primacy by pursuing policies and practices that focused on border protection, militarisation, and the vilification of external others, while amplifying racial tensions within the country. From caging immigrant children at the border, to an enabling of white supremacy and the Capitol riots, Trump's presidency was broadly seen as aberration in the self-narrative of America as a tolerant, democratic nation. In this article, I am interested in how gendered bordering practices inform ontological (in)security in Trump's narrative of the nation, domestic and external policy, and discourses. While Trump's electoral loss to Biden in 2020 has been described as a ‘return to normal’, this article instead considers how Trump's presidency exhibited lines of continuity when examined through a gender lens. Understanding how masculinism informs ideas of ontological security reveals how notions of gendered bordering, hierarchy, and ordering have been persistent threads in US politics, rather than simply an anomaly under Trump. This suggests greater potential to read ontological security in more complex terms through gendered bordering practices.

Keywords

Ontological SecurityGenderBorderingTrumpGenderSecurity/War Studies
Type
Research Article
Information
Review of International Studies , Volume 48 , Issue 2 , April 2022 , pp. 385 - 402
Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s), 2021. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of the British International Studies Association

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Footnotes

†

The online version of this article has been updated since original publication. A notice detailing the change has been published at https://doi.org/10.1017/S026021052100067X.

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105 Grevette, ‘Politics, time, space, and attitudes toward US–Mexico border security’, pp. 107–09.

106 It was this agreement that Trump argued he was continuing from the Obama administration when he was criticised for his ‘zero tolerance’ policy. But his claim that Obama deported more immigrants and detained children is somewhat untrue. Under Obama, voluntary as well as involuntary removals were counted together. While detentions existed under the Obama administration, Trump's ‘zero tolerance’ policy saw anyone crossing the border without inspection charged with a criminal offence and taken to criminal detention facilities where children were not permitted. While detentions continued under Obama with the Secure Communities programme (2008–14), criminality was reserved for serious crimes that threatened national security. See Perez, ‘How U.S. policy has failed immigrant children’.

107 deGooyer, ‘Why Trump's denaturalization task force matters’.

108 Alison Rourke, ‘“Putin's poodle”: Newspapers declare Trump a traitor after Helsinki summit’, The Guardian (2018), available at: {https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2018/jul/17/putins-poodle-newspapers-declare-trump-a-traitor-after-helsinki-summit}.

109 ‘Captain America: Donald Trump is “Putin's puppet”’, BBC (2018), available at: {https://www.bbc.com/news/newsbeat-44856717}; Anushay Hossain, ‘Hillary Clinton was exactly right about Trump being Putin's puppet’, CNN (2018), available at: {https://edition.cnn.com/2018/07/16/opinions/clinton-trump-puppet-opinion-hossain/index.html}; Dartunorro Clark, ‘“Shameful”, “treasonous”, “disgraceful”: Trump slammed from all sides for news conference with Putin’, NBC News (2018), available at: {https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/donald-trump/shameful-treasonous-disgrace-lawmakers-pundits-react-trump-s-joint-news-n891736}.

110 Ruth Ben-Ghiat, ‘Trump and Putin: The pictures tell the story’, CNN (2018), available at: {https://edition.cnn.com/2018/07/18/opinions/these-pictures-tell-story-of-trump-and-putin-ben-ghiat/index.html}.

111 Wiedlack, Katharina, ‘Enemy number one or gay clown? The Russian president, masculinity and populism in US media’, NORMA, 15:1 (2020), pp. 59–75CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

112 Steve Holland, ‘Obama, Clinton in new flap, over nuclear weapons’, Reuters (2016), available at: {https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-politics-obama-idUSN0238110020070803}.

113 Delehanty and Steele, ‘Engaging the narrative in ontological (in)security theory’; Cynthia Enloe, The Big Push: Exposing and Challenging the Persistence of Patriarchy (Oxford, UK: Myriad, 2017).

114 Cited in Gökarıksel and Smith, ‘“Making America great again”?’, p. 80.

115 Eklundh, Emmy, ‘Excluding emotions: The performative function of populism’, Partecipazione e conflitto, 13:1 (2020), pp. 107–31Google Scholar.

116 Amanda Gorman, ‘The Hill We Climb: The Amanda Gorman poem that stole the inauguration show’, The Guardian (2021), available at: {https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/jan/20/amanda-gorman-poem-biden-inauguration-transcript}.

117 Carol Cohn, ‘The perils of mixing masculinity and missiles’, New York Times (2018), available at: {https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/05/opinion/security-masculinity-nuclear-weapons.html}.

118 Jon Herbert, Trevor McCrisken, and Andrew Wroe, The Ordinary Presidency of Donald J. Trump (Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019).

119 Gorkariksel and Smith in Philip E. Steinberg, Sam Page, Jason Dittmer, Banu Gökariksel, Sara B. Smith, Alan Ingram, and Natalie Koch, ‘Reassessing the Trump presidency, one year on’, Political Geography, 62 (2018), pp. 207–15 (p. 210).