Intersectional Violence against Women Candidates U.S. State Legislative Office

• In Event: Intersectionality and Violence in Politics

Abstract

What role does age play in the forms, impacts, and outcomes of political violence and harassment? Research on Violence Against Women in Politics argues that women experience political violence in ways that are different from men and that this is a result of women being targeted with the goal of eliminating their presence in politics (Krook 2021). This research has also demonstrated that the forms of political violence experienced by women are intersectional (Kuperberg 2018)--especially with regards to race/ethnicity, religious background, and partisan identity. And despite Kuperberg (2018) and others’ (Inter-Parliamentary Union 2020) finding that young women often experience greater degrees of political violence and harassment, little research has investigated age as an intersectional category of political marginalization. In this article, I focus the intersectional political violence experienced by women political candidates for U.S. state legislatures and governorships in the 2022 election cycle. I argue that age interacts with race and gender leading to cross-cutting experiences of political violence and harassment while having different impacts on ambition (Anlar 2022) and coping mechanisms (Mügge and Özvatan 2022). I combine candidate register data from the United States for state legislative office and gubernatorial races in 2022, with Twitter data and interviews with female candidates to demonstrate the forms and impacts of political violence against female politicians paying special attention to the ways that these women view age as a factor in their experiences. The paper aims demonstrate that women’s intersecting identities lead to different experiences of political violence and different outcomes on future ambition and coping mechanisms.

Author

• Brit Anlar, Rutgers University