Emo-Truth Trump: Thinking Trump’s Misogyny and Masculinity Conjuncturally

• In Event: Seeing Through Trump

Abstract

Trump is rightly critiqued as both misogynous and post-truth. I argue that Trump’s aggressive masculinity can be understood as performing and reproducing a kind of aggressive emotional truth (emo-truth), which manifests especially through insults, intimidation, humiliation, aggressive and incessant bragging (self-promotion). It is the content and form of his expressions. Despite claims that it is unprecedented, one can point to a cultural growth of these kinds of normalized cultural and political expressions, which have roots in the professionalization (especially strategic emotionalization) of political communication, and in the emotional and affective components of fact-based programming, such as reality TV and talk shows. While causation has no “view from nowhere,” these two developments are often treated separately, resulting in causal blind spots, which this presentation modestly remedies, while pointing out that a series of parallel cultural backlashes with regard to gender and sexuality help us better understand Trump’s current conjunctural appeal.

Author

• Jayson Harsin, The American U of Paris