"She's Such a Nasty Woman": Nice and Nasty as Gendered Tropes

• In Event: 34.047 - Mapping the Contours of Niceness in Education

Abstract

During the final debate in the 2016 election for US President, Donald Trump famously referred to his opponent, Hillary Clinton, as “such a nasty woman.” Secretary Clinton was answering the commentator’s question concerning taxes when Mr. Trump muttered the phrase into his microphone. His “nasty woman” comment immediately went viral on social media, and became a hash tag and a slogan emblazoned across t-shirts and protest placards. The phrase was reclaimed in a poem read at the 2017 Women’s March on Washington, and in Nasty Woman Project: Voices from the Resistance, a compilation of women’s stories written in response to Donald Trump’s Presidential election win. Nasty Woman has a Wikipedia entry. People magazine (Quinn, 2016) asserted that Trump’s reproach became “a battle cry,” and the Huffington Post (Gray, 2016) called Nasty Woman a “badge of honor.” As one of the Post’s interviewees explained, “If she’s nasty, I want to be a nasty woman too.”

Both the Nasty Woman reprimand and the coopted meme provide an opportune entry to a discussion about the gendered tropes of nasty and nice. After all, everyone knew what Mr. Trump was suggesting. “A nasty woman” runs counter to Western beliefs about gender norms. The English folk song tells us little girls are made of “sugar and spice and everything nice.” If anyone is nasty, it will be boys, who are made of “snips and snails and puppy-dogs’ tails.”

The paper examines the ways Niceness and the antipodal Mean Girl and Nasty Woman tropes are gendered and racialized. Drawing on empirical studies, cultural analyses, and literary sources, and employing a feminist lens, this critical cultural analysis queries the gendered nature of Niceness discourse and practices as enacted across race, class, sexuality, and culture. It traces a feminist analysis of Niceness, arguing that Niceness is a Western form of control over the social behavior of women, requiring women to be “chaste, gentle, gracious, ingenuous, good, clean, kind, virtuous, noncontroversial, and above suspicion and reproach,” to quote anthropologist G.L. Fox (1977). Informed by work on intersectionality (Collins 1990; Crenshaw 1991), I consider Niceness as a set of gendered and racialized, as well as classed (and even age-based) practices. Relating Niceness to teaching and other gendered professions, the paper concludes with an analysis of recent efforts to reclaim nastiness, as groups like the Badass Teachers Association (BTA), position themselves on the frontline in the neoliberal attack against public education (Gutstein & Lipman 2013, Uetricht 2014).

Author

• Frances Julia Riemer, Northern Arizona University