When Michelle Wolf performed at the 2018 White House Correspondents’ Dinner, she was accused of making a “shameful display,” of “bullying,” and even of “killing” the future of the entire enterprise. Similarly, when a Red Hen restaurant in Lexington, Virginia refused to serve Sarah Huckabee Sanders its owners were subsequently protested for “tolerance and civility.”
In the wake of #metoo, attacks on women’s health care, and the scaling back of Title IX protections, the media’s treatment of Huckabee Sanders is particularly interesting when compared to the moments women are attacked with sexist language, undercut by tired stereotypes, and forced into patriarchal ideals. As bell hooks describes it, feminism is an action not a state of being, and in this paper I will to explore how appropriation of liberal ideologies, like feminism, are being perverted in the Barthesian sense of myth and turned “inside out…[emptied] of history…and filled…with nature” (Mythologies, 142). Nature once again meaning, in this case, white supremacist heteropatriarchy.
About the presenterJessica McCall
Dr. Jessica McCall is a Professor of English at Delaware Valley University. She received her Ph.D. in Early Modern Literature from the University of Nevada, Las Vegas under the guidance of Dr. Evelyn Gajowski. Dr. McCall’s research interests involve the functions of myth and its intersections with gender, power, and who gets to be fully human. Her first monograph, “Myths of Warrior Women from the 16th Century to the Present” is forthcoming from De Gruyter.