Double Edged Sword: Women Politicians and the Strategic Employment of Fashion

• In Event: Gendered Strategies and Political Outcomes

Abstract

Women who enter the public sphere to pursue political careers have had their physical appearance and fashion choices scrutinized. Unlike men, women faced a double-bind. Those who try to establish credibility by eschewing traditionally feminine clothing are accused of being too masculine and unlikable. Those who embrace clothing styles and colors typically associated with women, however, risk being dismissed as frivolous. Nonetheless, many women of late – from Hillary Clinton to Kamala Harris to everyday Americans donning RBG dissent collars—have chosen to use fashion as a political statement. In this paper, we examine fashion as a tool of political messaging and an avenue of political agency. We consider gender to be a process that motivates the actions and opinions of many political actors (Beckwith 2005), and we believe that “the strategic employment of race and gender both shape and are shaped by existing power structures” (Wineinger 2019, 6). Therefore, as politicians and citizens employ fashion as a political statement of values and policies, they construct gender and exert political agency; however, at the same time, existing gender (and race) hierarchies are framing and reconstituting their identities in diverse ways. Fashion studies have begun to research the “unprecedented politicization of fashion in a global political climate” (Gaugele and Titton 2019, 615), and we contribute to the emerging academic discussions by developing a theoretical and methodological framework for political scientists to gauge how gender, power, and politics is constructed by way of fashion. Our approach is based on frame analysis that purports that women themselves –in addition to media and other political actors-- frame their actions regarding fashion as a way to formulate and express their own ideas about gender (Ortbals and Poloni-Staudinger 2016). We apply our framework in two cases of women politicians strategically employing fashion -- one case from the United States and one case from Spain.

Authors

• Candice D. Ortbals, Abilene Christian University

• J. Cherie Strachan, Virginia Commonwealth University

• Karen M. Kedrowski, Iowa State University

• Lori Poloni-Staudinger, Northern Arizona University