Pop Culture and the Evolving Politics of the Right: The Potential of Interpretive Methods for Studying Gender, Race, and Politics

Scholars of gender have long realized that questions regarding gender, women, and politics require a multi-method, nuanced approach. When a plurality of white women voted for Donald Trump over Hillary Clinton in the 2016 presidential election, social scientists increasingly began to recognize the urgency of undertaking new approaches to understanding gender, race, and voting behavior in the United States.1 Since then, researchers have helped us understand why so many white women support right-wing candidates and policies that aim to suppress their autonomy, offering explanations such as the influence of belief in traditional gender roles (Christley 2022), “possessive investments in white heteropatriarchy” (Strolovitch, Wong, and Proctor 2017, 354), and “gendered nationalism” in American politics (Deckman and Cassese 2021, 278). In more recent years — as election results and polling suggest growing numbers of men of color have shifted rightward — there has been increased interest in employing an intersectional approach to analyze the gulf between men and women of color.