Ivanka Trump’s Plutocratic (Post)feminism
Recent years have witnessed the emergence of a high-profile plutocratic (post)feminism associated with figures ranging from Sheryl Sandberg to Beyoncé to Ivanka Trump. The new (faux) feminism of privilege dissociates itself from notions of social justice except in the most cursory and rhetorical fashion, cleaving to neoliberal individualism and global capitalism. This intensely market-based form of feminism joins together female affective composure as a hallmark with safe performances of empowerment and displays of family capital; in so doing it works to soothe cultural tensions in regard to race, class and technology.
Ivanka Trump offers an exemplary case study of the nature and functions of this new style of feminism and a means to assess its value to hegemonies of class and capital, particularly the regressive adulation of the wealthy. In the first two years of Donald Trump’s presidency (and in what now read as the peak period of his daughter’s political capital) fantasies and enmities swirled around Ivanka Trump and the question of why she rivets so many people deserves consideration.
An Icon of Cruel Optimism
Ivanka Trump’s paradoxical positioning, her polished, coached and careful affect, and her commercial and political brand building constitute for some an extraordinary provocation. An icon of cruel optimism, she initially seemed adept at rhetoricising postfeminist self-interest as feminist commitment. Trump’s seeming mastery of the balancing act incessantly ascribed to women involving raising children and playing a public role is without doubt one of her signature features.
As her father’s political status accrued in 2016 and into 2017, Ivanka Trump’s performance of moral thoughtfulness indirectly gratified a fantasy that the presidency would compel civility and decency from Donald Trump. The publicised bond between the two served as a key part of his political mythology, helping to repair the president’s amply documented misogyny, his track record of divorce and the public limitations of his current wife, whose use of English as a second language, flagrant plagiarism in her speech to the 2016 Republican National Convention and seeming reticence to inhabit the role of first lady are notable liabilities.
Ivanka Trump’s anodyne positioning as wife (to Jared Kushner) and daughter is bound up with insistent cultural messaging that the (marketised) family is the only safe space for American women. Her composure, serenity and silence became her affective signatures and her relentless poise contrasted with the bloviating, choleric style of Donald Trump and those around him (notably Sean Spicer and Rudy Giuliani) and the disingenuous double-talk of Trump advisor Kellyanne Conway.
Trump helps to secure a retro gender order in which elite femininity holds itself at a composed remove. Her fashion business was highlighted rather than her work for the Trump Organization to signal her association with a non-threatening (yet voracious) “white lady capitalism.”
Trump’s bid for public recognition as a feminist, concretised and commercialised in her book Women Who Work: Rewriting the Rules for Success (2017), marked a break with the earlier discourses of aggressive capitalism showcased in The Trump Card: Playing to Win in Work and Life (2009). The alteration of focus from the family name in the first book to ‘women’ in the second illustrates Trump’s shifting target of identification and affiliation. The ‘women who work’ tag, originated in a 2013 strategy session held by Trump, her husband and several of her employees designed to generate a quasi-feminist motto that could follow the surging popularity of Sheryl Sandberg’s ‘Lean In’.
Marie Antionette
I suggest that the public absorption and fascination with Ivanka Trump is importantly tied to the pressing question of what women’s relationship to crony capitalism is. In an era in which capitalism is increasingly in disrepute, should women be moral counterweights and figures of opposition to it or full and enthusiastic participants, ‘leaning in’ to get their piece of the pie?
Trump, it seems to me, is trying to be both. She personifies on the one hand women’s traditional moral obligation to stand apart from markets – to segregate themselves from the most aggressive forms of capitalism. Simultaneously, though, and with great meticulousness about how she is presented, she also epitomises dynastic privilege and capitalist zeal.
This performance lost credibility and by the latter part of 2017 Trump was increasingly being cast as a Marie Antoinette figure. A year later it had begun to seem that Ivanka Trump could do no right. Her efforts to display her vaunted ties to Chinese culture (a cover, it would seem, for her commercial interests in China) subsided or misfired as when in June 2018 she tweeted a ‘Chinese proverb’ that was quickly exposed as having no Chinese origin.
Press coverage and social media discourse in relation to her turned consistently sceptical and critical; in March of that year on a visit to Iowa in which she donned a lab jacket, goggles, gloves and other accoutrements for a photo op Trump was accused of “cosplaying” as a scientist. A steady series of revelations regarding Trump and Kushner’s accumulation of vast profits from various commercial interests cast doubt on their professed commitment to public service and prompted the most critical press coverage yet.
Moral Bankruptcy
Most recently, as the Trump administration has come to be increasingly understood as a chaotic, corrupt and careening enterprise, Ivanka Trump’s role in it has become even less clear. For many she is situated as a key participant in what Anand Giridharadas has deemed ‘the elite charade of changing the world’. In the current plutonomy important fractures have emerged in Ivanka Trump’s representability re-positioning her as an extraordinarily tone-deaf and privileged figure whose association with status commodities is a sign of her moral bankruptcy.
Trump was excoriated, for instance, for her role in the bizarre tableau on June 1, 2020 in which as the country was wracked with social justice protests, the president and an entourage walked to St. John’s Church for a photo op in which Donald Trump held up a bible extracted from his daughter’s costly Max Mara handbag, the incident seeming to position Ivanka Trump as handmaid to his endeavours. By contrast, in her address to the Democratic National Convention on August 17, 2020 Michelle Obama drew praise for both her remarks and her subtle “Vote” necklace which sparked a rush of orders for the $300 item at the Los Angeles company that produced it (and which touts its pieces as being made sustainably and by hand).
In the closing months of this extraordinarily amoral, lethal administration it is useful to consider the trajectory of its most consistently high-profile female representative. I have charted here the diminished utility of Ivanka Trump in a government seeking to effect a separation from democratic habits, norms and values.
Diane Negra is Professor of Film Studies and Screen Culture at University College Dublin. This article is selectively excerpted from a chapter in Trump’s America: Political Culture and National Identity, ed. Liam Kennedy – it will be published by Edinburgh University Press in August 2020.