For years, conservatives have been accusing the left of using identity politics to pit the American people against one another based on race, gender, and sexuality. The new documentary The Man Card: White Male Identity Politics from Nixon to Trump, based on the work of cultural theorist Jackson Katz and directed by Peter Hutchison and Lucas Sabean, tells a very different story, one too often ignored in mainstream media coverage.
Click here to purchase this film from the Media Education Foundation.
Read an interview with Jackson Katz below ↓
What was the genesis of this film?
In the late ‘80s, I became fascinated by the ways in which the Republican Party was attracting a growing share of the white working-class male vote. I began looking at how campaign strategists – especially on the right – were using techniques of narrative and mythmaking to present conservative white male presidential candidates as the embodiment of manly stature and strength while demeaning the manhood of their Democratic opponents. In 2016, I published Man Enough? Donald Trump, Hillary Clinton & the Politics of Presidential Masculinity. That book became the basis for The Man Card.
What does it mean to “play the man card”?
It refers to the use of narrow and sometimes caricatured beliefs about manhood, especially white manhood, to win votes. The “man card” is usually but not exclusively deployed by conservative political strategists promoting Republican and/or conservative male candidates as the only ones capable of strong leadership in a dangerous world.
You argue that Trump’s tough-guy rhetoric on issues like “law and order” was the culmination of a political strategy decades in the making. Can you say more about the history of this trope, and how the clear racial subtext embedded in it links up with gender politics?
For me, one of the highlights of The Man Card is the incredible historical footage the production team dug up of George Wallace, Richard Nixon, and Ronald Reagan exploiting white anxiety through calls for law and order in a way that positioned the GOP as the “masculine” party that’s “tough on crime,” a tactic Trump clearly copied in both 2016 and 2020.
This trope, and a range of other hypermasculine rhetorical strategies, have been employed by right-wing political leaders since the 1960s not only to tap into white anxiety in the wake of the Civil Rights Act but also to appeal to white men unsettled by the diminution of their identity as head of the household in an era of women’s increasing equality.
As much as anything else, this is about the Republican Party working over decades to brand itself as the party of “real men” while casting Democrats as soft, overly intellectual “elites” who are too weak – and too “feminine” – to lead.
The Man Card is ideal for courses exploring gender studies, political science, and American history.
To order The Man Card, please click here to purchase.
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