Her Body, Her Choice: Tough Girl Affect, Trump Support, and the 2020 Pandemic Free

Abstract

When anti-lockdown protests erupted in the United States during the 2020 onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, many right-wing women crudely appropriated the feminist slogan “my body, my choice” in defiance of liberal fears and in support of Donald Trump. Looking at the widely shared image of a young woman holding a sign with the phrase at a rally in Texas, I discuss the communal charge of what I call tough girl affect—a politically saturated vibe, touting a notably youthful, right-wing femininity that is deliberately feisty, fun, and provocative, yet compliant with the hetero-patriarchal agenda of Trump’s neoliberal macho politics. I am interested in the way body and choice evoke white femininity as affective strategy, negotiating a public feeling of privileged belonging to the nation. The article works through the tenets of body, border, and nation as central to this investment, suggesting that the tough girl image mobilizes femininity to affectively strengthen conservatism, whiteness, and homeland in the face of the pandemic. Staging a fantasy of impunity, the tough girl intimates the invincible conservative body in opposition to the porous emotionality of feeble liberals. At the same time, the spectacle of white femininity necessarily fuels national fears of permeability and hence charges negative (even fatal) attachments to fantasmatic sovereignty. While mobilizing vulnerability to energize femininity, whiteness, and borders, the image ultimately exposes the compromised bargains of living and dying in (Trump’s) America.

She faces the camera nonchalantly. Her nose is pierced, her eyebrows raised ever so slightly—a casual dare; her brown hair falls loosely down the shoulder. It's partly hidden under the baseball cap she casually flipped backward and complemented by the white bandana offhandedly wrapped around her neck. The hat is rugged and too big, as if belonging to a man; so are the shaded aviator glasses that hide her eyes from scrutiny. She captures me with her laissez-faire coolness and bizarre tough girl aesthetic that feels borrowed from that action movie I once saw and can't quite remember. Her pouting lips indicate a smile, not friendly, more mocking. I feel annoyed. She is an image, an affect, a genre: a tomboy with beauty credentials, self-assured, fierce, and blunt—a futuristic vision of the frontier apocalypse (I remember now: Mila Kunis, The Book of Eli!). I roll my eyes. Marjorie Jolles writes that “style is primarily a resource for displaying both self-invention and self-regulation and is thus an inherently ethical domain, as well as an aesthetic one.”¹ The woman in the photograph expresses this entrenchment to complement a political provocation: standing out in a crowd outside the Texas State Capitol building, she flaunts an American flag and a big white poster with a crossed-out surgical mask. “My Body, My Choice,” the sign reads: “Trump 2020.”

The image I am describing went viral in April 2020 during the COVID-19 pandemic. It documents the anti-lockdown protests that erupted in response to statewide stay-at-home orders in the United States. Emblazoned by conservative ideologies and unwavering support for Donald Trump, these protests were sustained by only a small percentage of Americans at the time, but they are indicative of a widely recognizable right-wing sensibility, which is indebted to Trump and simultaneously outweighs him. The visual and visceral impact of these protests is deeply entrenched in the iconography and emotive resonance of the 2020 pandemic's onset. Incensed by a perceived loss of freedom, erratically attached to anything from access to hairdressers and canoeing to concerns about free speech and Second Amendment liberties, these gatherings started in Ohio and gained broad media attention in Michigan when “Operation Gridlock,” organized by the Michigan Conservative Coalition and Michigan Freedom Fund, targeted the state's capitol with outbursts of patriotic fury. Attracting between a few hundred and several thousand participants, the protests quickly spread throughout the country, all the way to Texas, where the picture was taken at the “You Can't Close America” rally organized by InfoWars’ Alex Jones. Symptomatic of this set up, the image illustrates the ways in which a conservative lobby seized the emotive uncertainty emerging in the context of COVID-19 to (re)produce a specific “structure of feeling” in support of Donald Trump and the long-lasting gendered and racialized politics he has come to stand for.²

Unpacking this sticky entanglement between affect, virus, and politics, the New York Times soon identified a range of nebulous connections between the protests and conservative donators (including the DeVos family), far-right-wing groups, persistent residues of the Tea Party movement, and ultimately, the White House. Propelled by Fox News and conservative pundits on social media, the protests were, in other words, largely sustained by interest groups with obvious investment in Trump's reelection at the end of the year.³ Cheered on by the president's own Twitter demands to “LIBERATE MINNESOTA,” “LIBERATE MICHIGAN,” and “LIBERATE VIRGINIA,” (all happened to be swing states with Democratic governors), the conservative energies of these protests not only highlighted libertarian ideologies opposing state-wide restrictions, but, as journalist Jim Rutenberg has pointed out, also worked as an affective substitute for the president's notorious rallies, temporarily made impossible by the pandemic.⁴ Mixing anti-government outrage with pro-Trump sentiments, the anti-lockdown protests thereby affectively repositioned the pandemic in the service of conservative agendas, reviving the Trumpian “Emotion Machine” apt at delivering feelings of affective transgression and fantasies of invincibility to a largely white constituency.⁵

Notably, the 2020 lockdown protests expanded this familiar setting by highlighting a conspicuous presence of young white women, eager to discard liberal sensibilities in response to the global health crisis. Widely recycling the “my body, my choice” slogan and holding up signs stating, “Freedom is essential” or “I prefer dangerous freedom over peaceful slavery,” these women performed a kind of feisty patriotism, reliant on disciplining the emotions of their liberal opponents, markedly by advancing the rhetoric of choice feminism to put into relief quick-witted comebacks in support of conservative liberty. From the outset, this strategy was aided by twisted appropriations of liberal feminist iconography mixed with a youthful action girl aesthetic, yet here promoting right-wing empowerment. For example, Rosie the Riveter images suddenly sported the slogan “Yes I'm a Trump Girl Get Over It,” as they appeared on T-shirts, cups, and posters. Semi-nude Instagram influencers in shorts and patriotic garb increasingly proliferated the sexy female gunslinging Trump supporter on social media, and teenaged Trump girls on TikTok (already) hailed in the 2024 campaign—notably by reproducing the same affective and stylistic strategies as the protester (with the shaded aviator glasses and rugged baseball cap appearing as indispensable accessories in most of their videos).

The photo in question epitomizes this performance of conservative youthful femininity as resilient, clever, and self-satisfied, appropriating (and dismissing) liberal feminist affect in the service of Trumpian virality and firmly positioning this aesthetic in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic. The image of the protester promotes a fantasy of affective empowerment, whereby individual liberty and choice are repositioned as right-wing impunity and simultaneously projected onto corporeal and national boundaries in an effort to revitalize white Americanness as transgressive privilege. In other words, the sign proposes a female identification with sovereign power, defying the limits of death politics by stylizing the Trump girl as sturdy, impervious, and self-assured. The sign posits a rhetorical gridlock, coopting a key slogan of second-wave feminism and using the terminology against itself. However, it also appropriates and fetishizes a vibe: a tough girl feel, otherwise celebrated by liberal feminists and here decidedly reimagined as their post-Trumpian antidote. The feminist vintage of Gloria Steinem's aviator chic, the androgynous cool of activist style, troubling versions of Mila—the very icons of tough girl politics are aesthetically weaponized against the female empowerment they once brought to life and into the liberal imagination. The protester blatantly appropriates these popular “feminist attachments” to propel her right-wing agenda. In doing so she infuriates the liberal heart—and she knows it.⁶

Peddling the messy postfeminist currents of American politics under Trump and linking them to the competing desires and fantasies crystallizing in the affective grid of a global pandemic, the image attests to the transgressive sensibility of a new conservative femininity that is deliberately subversive, ironic, and fun, yet firmly linked to the affective settings of neoliberal macho politics. The tough girl thereby provides insight into the psycho-affective scripts sustaining racialized and gendered capitalism under Trump, and, in appropriating a catchphrase of America's abortion debate, negotiates the (female) body as a central tenet of nation-formation. Employing a cultural gaze that sentimentalizes and eroticizes youthful femininity as transgressive thrill while capitalizing on the vulnerability it exudes, the image exerts a conservative agenda complicit with the libertarian antiestablishment principles of Trumpism and simultaneously aligns itself with the callous demands of bruised profitability in the face of COVID-19. It also wields (female) embodiment as a particular politicized claim to futurity in the process of (re)producing American whiteness as a form of national belonging. “My body, my choice” thereby attests to the transgressive performances of the right kind of Americanness, in the sense of disciplining national boundaries according to conservative agendas and reflecting deeply ingrained political and economic privileges, clearly not invented, but broadly made palpable by the dramatics of the Trump presidency.

Distinguishing herself from the permeable emotionality that opens the nation to whimsical intrusion (by lefties, non-white others, and viruses alike) the conservative tough girl affectively limits body and homeland. At the same time, she embodies familiar porosity and softness that is both untouchable as a powerful cultural image and inviting touch in the hetero-patriarchal imaginary, thereby mitigating an ongoing necessity to reproduce and defend the boundaries she projects. In what follows, I examine these dynamics of the tough girl politics enacted by the protester. I discuss the ways in which her filial rendition of conservative femininity seeks to debase an assumed emotional liability of the liberal other in an effort to protect her privileged position. The tough girl utilizes her body as an imaginary counterpoint to viral infringement, appropriating choice as the affective catalyst of national belonging under patriarchal capitalism and mobilizing a fantasized sovereignty as the grounds of her (American) freedom to do so. In lampooning the affective language and stylistic chic of liberal feminism, the protester further exposes the permutation of whiteness within progressive movements, which she in turn, and with intended irony, activates to symbolically shore up the nation against the intrusive threats of liberals and/as viruses. The performance hence serves as a lens to the gendered and racialized affects invigorating Trump's 2020 reelection campaign in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic.

My analysis is greatly indebted to Lauren Berlant and Sara Ahmed, whose thoughtful works have illuminated emotion and fantasy as social phenomena, highlighting the affective textures of political investments. As Ahmed puts it, “emotions are a form of cultural politics,”⁷ producing attachments to “affect worlds,” or to public spheres to which people are bound through a negotiation of shared emotional investments, as Berlant would add.⁸ Both authors provide insight into the psycho-affective formations that mobilize attentive relations to a world in crisis “without necessarily being represented coherently or directly.”⁹ Such attachments are driven by fantasies of the good life (and how to achieve or retain it), producing “uneven practices” that, according to Berlant, function as both “an opening and a defense.”¹⁰ I take this opening as a starting point to engage with the affective regimes that undergird the performance of conservative tough girl politics in the United States. I explore how the tough girl draws attention to affective processes of shielding the nation and the body within, as if negotiating a shift between sensation and shelter that attests to conservative anxieties about social, economic, political, and (newly confronted) epidemiological vulnerability. At the same time, this conservative girlishness functions to intensify Trump affect as defiant kick, reinvigorating whiteness at the center of conservative death politics. Reproduced in numerous outlets, the image spilled the affective charge of this claim far beyond the site of the protest, participating in what Ahmed calls an “affective economy,” or a critical emotionality that produces modes of contact and simultaneously redraws the boundaries between the conservative body and its imagined other(s).¹¹

My Feminism, Your Choice: Affect-Worlds and Negative Attachments

Although conservatives have long expressed fears of liberal infiltration into government, home, and nation, right-wing pundits increasingly utilize the rebel aesthetics and slogans cultivated by the left in order to promote Trumpism as a transgressive agenda. Indeed, the liberal affect of snotty nonconformity has run up against an impasse, as Angela Nagle notes, revealing “the ideologically flexible, politically fungible, morally neutral nature of transgression as a style.”¹² As a result, the youthful invigoration of conservative femininity under Trump transpires as savvy co-optation of left-wing sensibility, adopting the sub-reddit in-joke style of the internet and mocking the tired liberal intellectualism of formal politics. The meme-ification of progressive slogans exploits unstable semiotics that champion autonomy and choice, making a thinly veiled attempt at discarding left-wing investments in protest nostalgia. The liberal feminist movement, hence, provides a prolific archive of trollable cultural materials, delivering ready-made catchphrases and imagery that can be repurposed to reject masks, vaccinations, and lockdown measures. In other words, the “my body, my choice” slogan serves to parody left-wing feminist sentimentality while enforcing a new sensitivity for the gendered and racialized tenets of conservative aspirations under Trump.

While feminism has never been immune to hierarchized proliferations of gender, class, and race, the feminist project has been increasingly and notably usurped by neoliberal agendas and right-wing politics since Sarah Palin hailed the arrival of the conservative Mama Grizzlies in 2010.¹³ Proclaiming a depoliticized, feisty self-reliance deeply rooted in American frontier fantasies, Palin took what Katie L. Gibson and Amy L. Heyse have referred to as her “faux ownership of feminism” to a partisan stage, popularizing a new face and phase of conservative feminism.¹⁴ Reworking feminist history while appropriating its key symbols, Palin and other right-wing pundits claimed to be “the real feminists”¹⁵ and embraced a free market, anti-victim, “choice feminism” as rightened conservative script.¹⁶ As such, these conservative women aligned themselves with a depoliticized, palpable right-wing women's movement, anxious about the impending loss of class and racial privilege since Phyllis Schlafly took on the ERA in the 1970s, and ultimately paving the way for Donald Trump's election victory in 2016.¹⁷ As Gibson and Heyse explain, “conservative women have recognized the opportunity to play with the meanings of feminism for quite some time,” and they are skillful at deploying feminist rhetoric of women's autonomy to accomplish conservative ambitions.¹⁸

This growing trend is reflected in the gendered discourse that saturated the anti-lockdown protests in the United States, using the language of choice as a blowback against liberal feminism and in an effort to bolster Trump's reelection campaign. “My body, my choice” exemplifies hostile appropriation of feminist affect; at the same time, the slogan highlights a balloting decision for conservative America. While these two objectives may not seem obviously linked at first glance, Emma Blackett has shown that contempt for liberal feminism is at the core of Trump-loving.¹⁹ The sign hence operates as a partisan script, in which the rhetoric of choice is mobilized for its cavalier conflation with a hazy, unspecified feminism, producing what Virginia McCarver calls a “rhetorically paralyzing discourse.”²⁰ The protester borrows from the immunity of choice feminism, comprising “an untouchable argumentative force field that is highly effective in defeating interrogation and criticism.”²¹ In this instance, autonomy over one's own body draws from a self-mocking “postfeminist sensibility,” which enmeshes, willy-nilly, activist language with right-wing principles.²² Exculpating what Rosalind Gill calls “a kind of gendered neoliberalism,” a complicity with the white patriarchal capitalism embodied by Trump while transgressing feminist struggles, the protester revels in the depoliticized arrangements of privileged femininity and the affective bargains it facilitates.²³

The postfeminist script contextualizing such right-wing transgression animates affective and psychic investments, which operate in and through the fantasies, feelings, and subjectivities of those who subscribe to its economy of regulation. As Gill explains, postfeminism aligns with affective and cultural narratives, producing normative boundaries of sense-making and self-representation. Gill maintains that postfeminism “increasingly sets up norms and polices the kinds of feelings and emotions that are permissible, indeed intelligible,” by favoring emotional states that neatly align with neoliberal ideals of individualism, positivity, and self-reliance.²⁴ Defining an emotive force field or “mood economy,”²⁵ this “postfeminist sensibility,” according to Gill, formats the particular psycho-affective registers “built around the ‘right’ kinds of dispositions for surviving in neoliberal society.”²⁶ While Gill draws attention to a regulatory setup, a correct way of being, thinking, and feeling under hetero-patriarchal capitalism, I am interested in expanding her analysis by also considering the partisan connotations of “right” in this context—or the right/conservative kinds of feelings and dispositions for living (and dying) in Trump's America. While the protester is more interested in subverting what she perceives as oppressive normativity, she, similarly, participates in this regulatory structure of appropriate feelings, opposing the victim feminism of liberal women while championing right-wing resilience.²⁷ Such affect policing is evident in many of the signs pitching the inappropriate feelings of liberals against the unalienable rights of conservatives (examples to follow), and, as I will show, it also appears as the regulatory force of successfully achieving proper Americanness.²⁸ Rather than misreading the slogan or not seeing the irony produced by the co-optation of this language, the protester hence knowingly taps into a range of affects and moods, whose contestation appeals to conservative fancies of feisty right-wing preeminence.

Of course, the language of abortion provides a ready-made pool of cultural affects—an “identity machine,” as Berlant would say, which does not simply articulate the US partisan divide, but which is crucial to a fantasmatic “logic of American personhood” and thereby registers important contestations over what defines Americanness in the first place.²⁹ Indeed, the abortion debate functions as a “site of cultural fantasy” according to which patriotic templates for a gendered and racialized national sentimentality are projected and rejuvenated.³⁰ Not unlike the aesthetic statement of combining bandana, aviator glasses, and baseball cap into a sexy postmodern frontier look, the abortion debate is a hot token of US nation-building, particularly around election time. Knowingly (or not) Trump has made use of this playbook during his tenure, significantly rolling back women's rights, including an attempt to defund Planned Parenthood and nominating no less than three Supreme Court justices—Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett —all said to be put in position as key players in the conservative attempt to demote Roe v. Wade (eventually succeeding in June 2022). Yet the abortion debate is more than a well-worn point of reference to right/left contestations over female agency. Abortion as a political (t)issue engulfs a whole range of (public) feelings about national identity, citizenship, embodiment, freedom, (self)sovereignty, futurity, and death—an archive comprising a range of (highly explosive) cultural fuses that are remarkably easily transferred onto the political battles inflaming COVID-19 lockdowns. Rather than simply claiming the very agency routinely denied to women by antiabortionists to benefit the conservative anti-lockdown protester (although this double standard is readily absorbed by the sign and even intended), the “my body, my choice” poster, in this context, transpires as stylistic transgression, which draws on a catalogue of cultural affects in order to cross-fertilize a female conservatism as youthful counterculture with anti-lockdown sentiments and Trump support, while simultaneously reconditioning the imperatives of right and wrong/left practices of Americanness through the performance of gendered affect—all in one slick move.

In other words, the co-optation of feminist slogans by right-wing women exceeds the sarcastic punchline or rhetorical payback that was routinely attributed to the sign.³¹ Rather the image of the smug lockdown protester exclaiming that her body is subject to her choice constitutes what Berlant identifies as “the aesthetic of the affectsphere”—a visual articulation of the political atmosphere, which, in this case, intimates a particular feel or vibe of youthful conservatism.³² The image thereby also recalls what Berlant calls an “intimate public” in which communal anxieties and interests are negotiated through affective projection, precisely because such a public “senses that matters of survival are at stake and that collective mediation through narration and audition might provide some routes out of the impasse and the struggle of the present.”³³ In other words, the woman in the image is herself caught up in a contagious moment that brings people together in an effort to boost affective conservatism in defiance of the uncertainties, fears, and vulnerabilities, neither strictly invented nor simply reflected (but certainly exacerbated) by the political consequences of COVID-19. The image hence functions as an affective trigger reworking (and redistributing) a story about the nation and the body's place within, acknowledging that “emotions are a form of world-making,” in Ahmed's words, and contouring the bodies of conservatives and liberals within a matrix of competing emotionalities while establishing boundaries between the two.³⁴

The Skins of Our Bodies: Leaky Liberals and Conservative Tough Girls

The co-optation of feminist choice lends a particular emphasis to the role of the body as cartography of power, mapping the delicate wimpy liberal as susceptible to government dependence and epidemiological surrender in opposition to the vigorous, self-sufficient conservative, who is defying the threat of political and viral invasion. Toughness, here, suggests a particular form of impermeability, in the emotional and physical sense, that connects the fantasy of an impervious (healthy) conservative body to the wish for an impenetrable (sovereign) right kind of nation. Resonating with what Pansy Duncan, in her analysis of “the crying liberal” as conservative spectacle, calls “the leaky liberal body,” conservative articulations of liberal fragility hence treat the liberal body as “a site of physical abjection and political derision.”³⁵ The tough girl stages the Trumpian convolution of transgression versus defense with recourse to this fantasy, mobilizing conservative and liberal positionings as means of gendered affect.

Equating emotionality with leakiness and permeability, the liberal body, in the conservative imagination, epitomizes a condition of physical and political contamination, and therefore its choices are not to be trusted. Put simply, by illustrating fleshly and intellectual feebleness, the liberal body evokes a corporeal disposition to catch the disease, simultaneously exposing the liberal position as disease (or as sickening the nation). By contrast, the conservative protester imagines herself as tough, impervious, and exceptional, providing the antidote to liberal leakiness and protecting the economic, political, and hierarchical boundaries of Trump's America. The (thick) skin of her body reiterates and strengthens these boundaries, defying progressive intrusion, viral infection, and institutional overstepping all at once.

It is unsurprising that these political investments in corporeal and national strength play out through anxieties about (female) bodily permeability. As Duncan points out, the drippy liberal body is “predictably visualized as female” from the outset (517). “Sloppy, gushy, messy [and] prone,” it reeks of “emotional incontinence” and moral disintegration (517). Yet, it is crucial that its conservative counterpart here is equally imagined as female, precisely because right-wing women are instrumental in reestablishing the limits of gender, politics, and nation. After all, it is the conservative woman who provides the obnoxious alternative to promiscuous liberal autonomy by resituating her (leaky female) body as tough, impenetrable, and proper. This rightened femininity appears to contain liberal abjection. At the same time, this performance, too, necessarily presents as precious, pervious, and ultimately unstable, hence reinviting (and legitimizing) masculine guardianship. Producing an iconography of unbent patriotic femininity (decisively framed by stone-faced armed men—remember the hostile dress-up vigilantes inside the Michigan State Capitol), many of the women at lockdown protests across the United States were holding signs that aimed at reinstating their unshakable, physical, and moral integrity in direct opposition to an assumed frail (and feminized) liberal sensibility. Women for Trump, Women for America First, Girls for Trump, as well as their various doubles on social media and Fox television, occupied the front line of the protest's visual mediation, holding up signs, waving flags, demanding freedom, and yelling at hospital and police personnel. Exalting the unfazed conservative woman in the face of crisis, slogans such as “My Rights Don't End Where Your Feelings Begin,” “Facts not Fear,” or “Fear is the Real Virus” were prominent sights at the protests. Reducing lockdown orders to the whimsical arbitrariness of soft and feely liberals, these women were eager to delimit improper/proper affective protocols in response to COVID-19.

Aligning with these efforts of affect policing, the young woman insisting on choice in the context of a pandemic reworks the trope of patriotic defiance with postmillennial splendor; however, similar to the actions of her compatriots, this act of rebellion is safely confined within the sanctioned boundaries of patriarchal compliance. Contesting the emotional, political, and moral dissolution projected onto the pro-choice activist, the protester enacts girlish sturdiness to challenge government overreach, yet she does not question the paternalistic power embodied by Trump. Prepared to pick a fight over choice and secure Trump's reelection, she is not a reincarnation of the archetypal Republican mother³⁶ or Palin's Mama Grizzly, but reminiscent of the female action hero or a prototype of what Rikke Schubart calls the archetypical daughter (of the nation).³⁷ Reformed into proper agency, this daughter figure utilizes her body as spectacle and weapon in order to reproduce acceptable gender identities. Performing femininity as toughness, the haughty conservative daughter reimagines the female body as a site of executed self-reliance and chosen immunity. Careful not to compromise her feminine allure in the process (remember: pouting lips, laissez-faire coolness, glimpses of Mila), she flaunts transgression as the quintessential requirement of Trump-affect, while crafting (bodily) integrity as gendered accord.

This kind of conservative girlishness must be read both in resonance with and as distinct from the leggy blonde women ordinarily associated with Trump (think: Kellyanne Conway, Kayleigh McEnany, or even Ivanka Trump)—the type that generically populates conservative news outlets (from Megyn Kelly to Laura Ingraham), claiming that feminism is pointless yet blatantly benefitting from its achievements. Not unlike the tough girl, these Trump women use a particular look (in their case: blonde long locks, spray tans, classic wardrobe, high heels, and waxlike facial makeup) in order to forge a strategic (media) presence in support of Trump. According to Barbara Spindel, this well-polished type of conservative woman emerges as early as the 1990s, capitalizing on what she calls an “irresistible hook for the media” and proliferating the “public-relations savvy conservative activists” heralding “a fresh and sexy conservatism,” which (even then) implicitly reworked “the left-wing counterculture of the 1960s and 1970s” into a new right-wing chic.³⁸ Despite sporting a different kind of class aesthetic and media aspiration, it is obvious that the tough girl can be read in line with this heritage. What I want to draw attention to, however, is the way in which the tough girl uses style not simply to sustain and protect Trump or to defend her position in the patriarchy, but to intensify a particular kind of Trump affect—and even revel in it.³⁹

Delighting in the transgressive energies of Trumpism without threatening the privileged pleasures of a free ra(n)ging conservative masculinity, the tough girl's media presence differs from the proper appearance of other Trump women. As Misha Kavka and Emma Blackett astutely note, Trump's media women are characterized by a conspicuously “empty affect” that produces femininity as disciplined or, more precisely, situates “femininity as discipline” in order to make room for Trump's own transgressive antics and to bargain power through visibility.⁴⁰ While adhering to the ideal of the composed, immutable conservative, these women hence amplify Trump's media affect by rising above the offensive stand-up routine of the man himself. The tough girl is not interested in forging a political career; nor does she participate in this kind of gendered discipline. On the contrary, her role is precisely to reproduce Trump affect—the transgressive thrill Trump invokes—as the right kind of intensification. This sort of media presence demands a different style altogether or a decidedly mischievous undisciplined girlishness that nevertheless works to uphold conservative paternalism with the promise of female compliance. The appeal of the tough girl is then entirely reliant on a cultural gaze that looks to young women as the quintessential daddy's girl in order to personify nostalgic ideas of transgressive and rambunctious girlishness, permitting a play with male signifiers (bandana, aviators, baseball cap, toughness, and sometimes even guns) while enacting a simultaneously controllable and allegiant version of conservative femininity (long hair, pretty makeup, cute smile) sanctioned by the not-quite-accomplished (yet highly anticipated) proper womanhood following an already deliberately failed tomboy masquerade. In fact, this is the preferable frame within which transgressive femininity is sanctioned and even desirable as the fantasmatic stimulus for conservative pleasures.

Enacting hetero-patriarchal ideas of tongue-in-cheek girlhood and physical attractiveness as seemingly empowered, the tough girl's particular appeal to a conservative audience lies in her snotty repudiation of liberal feminism without compromising her own (perceived) strength and privilege. Yet, while conservative toughness reproduces the norms of a racialized, classed, and gendered America under Trump, it also attests to its perceived disavowal. In this sense, the lockdown protests were not simply defying stay-at-home orders and government overreach, but, similar to the Trump rally, these demonstrations also functioned as affective catalysts blasting the resentment and fears that drive conservative anger. Getting under someone else's skin as a way of retracting from one's own vulnerability is part and parcel of these communal outbursts. Notably a lot of Trump voters are steeped in a feeling of proximity to precarity they previously felt impervious to.⁴¹ Fearing an economic convergence with minorities, they impersonate toughness as a way to reestablish boundaries between the self and other(s). Hence, while she eagerly distinguishes herself from the frail liberal body, the tough girl's protest, too, signifies agony (in this case about freedom, the country, the economy, the other, etc.), engaging a kind of aggressive vulnerability and even sentimentality reflective of the Trumpian conundrum of positioning America as simultaneously all-powerful and under threat. Of course, this double bind of conservative nationalism has widely been read as thinly veiled anxiety about the waning of white privilege.⁴² Accordingly, the protests staged the white tomboy girl as defiant affect, a stubbornly entrenched, manifest conviction, a visceral social practice or set of seditious tactics, illustrating the entanglement between individual and communal affect as an ongoing process of boundary-making.

The Borders We Feel: Nation Building and the Sentiments of Girlish Whiteness

Of course, the female body has long been used to map the conflicts and desires of the nation.⁴³ After all, the conflation of woman and nation produces the homeland as an object of love to be possessed and defended from invasion by others. Read against this gendered imaginary of the nation, the tough girl flaunting her protest sign negotiates a conservative fantasy about how the nation is to appear before and for (the) right America. Firstly, her vigorous appearance in the context of intense conservative rebellion complements the fantasy of a self-determined invincible nation. Strong, bold, and composed, she, the conservative tough girl, the uncompromised nation, weathers what Trump himself has repeatedly designated as a “foreign virus” in order to stand up for her conviction (and to support the president). Invincible by choice, the tough girl's sheer defiance renders the virus (politically) powerless at the same time that the Trump campaign, in its bid to retain the nation, is injected with new virility. Second, if the woman comes to stand in for a national imaginary, the constitution of her body, her choice, and her attitude work to negotiate matters of national belonging. Placating the anti-liberal, anti-foreign virus, anti-government, pro-Trump conservative body, choice exceeds the individual autonomy of the activist. Instead, it postulates a conflict over who constitutes the nation and takes ownership of its boundaries and sovereignty.

The tough girl performs a national aspiration of being untouchable, in the sense of being exempt, unmatched, and indestructible. It is no coincidence that such a desire plays out via the sensibility of the body's boundaries, applying corporeal sense-making to a context of unprecedented national uncertainty. As Wendy Brown puts it, more often than not “the nation-state's vulnerability and unboundedness, permeability and violation, are felt as the subject's own.”⁴⁴ Alluding to a similar logic, Ahmed asserts that “the nation's borders and defenses are like skin, they are soft, weak, porous and easily shaped or even bruised by the proximity of others.”⁴⁵ In such a scenario, survival becomes a matter of having a tough skin resistant to the intrusion of COVID-19 and the labile politics of wimpy liberals. As powerful institutions are slowly eroded, economic certainties increasingly destabilize, and the American Dream no longer appears exclusive, the tough-skinned conservative refuses to be permeated or bruised by otherness. The unspoken desire here is “for a nation that is less emotional, less open, less easily moved, one that is hard and tough.”⁴⁶ Powerfully resonating with the affects that saturate Trump's xenophobic campaign, the threats of viruses, liberals, and foreigners are easily conflated in the attempt to seal off this America.

Vindicating the protective twin logic of closed borders and the right to bear arms, the tough skin (of the nation) is both shield and weapon. In this sense, it is unsurprising that the protests have continuously touted the claim to freedom through an imaginative display of low-level Rambo outfits and assault rifles while applauding the closing of the Unites States borders. Designated as “American Patriot” rallies, the protests reworked anxieties of a nation under siege consistently parading loaded guns and spouting xenophobic affect. Trump, in full support of these displays of militant insolence, urged the protesters to “save your Second Amendment”⁴⁷ while seizing the moment to close down the country's border, curb migration and visa processes, cancel asylum interviews, and delay citizenship ceremonies.⁴⁸ These processes of sealing and seizing the nation are viscerally linked and provide the grounds (at least in fantasy) for a desired homeland, in which libertarian privilege is asserted and the other has no place. The tough girl provides this nation with a fresh face, reimagining her as simultaneously secure, pure, and audacious—a combination of fantasies that necessarily cumulates in her unmistaken whiteness.

A means of perception and protection, skin as a shield and weapon is invariably linked to the interpretation and consequences of its color. As Ahmed explains, the soft-skinned nation/body is always in danger of “becoming ‘less white,’ by allowing those who are recognized as racially other to penetrate the surface of the body,” diluting essentialist ideas about racial privilege, economic access, and cultural purity.⁴⁹ The discourse about COVID-19 is saturated with xenophobic language, with Trump and his supporters variously referring to the foreign virus, the China virus, the Wuhan virus, the Commie virus, and so on. Many commentators have pointed to the presence of white supremacists at the lockdown protests, including notorious far-right militias such as the Proud Boys, the Patriot Movement, and various other far-right extremist and anti-Semitic organizations.⁵⁰ Of course, terminologies of disease have long appealed to racist sensibilities, and the presence of these groups is hence an unsurprising attempt at mainstreaming white pride on the back of the pandemic.⁵¹ The xenophobic terminology not only confirms the virus as other but also imagines the others as virus. Immunity as choice then relates to a racialized discourse in which whiteness is no longer reproduced as an unmarked category; rather, whiteness, in Trump's America, is revitalized as precisely that marker that renders the skin (of individuals and nations) uncontaminated, untouchable, and immune.⁵²

Shielding its violence behind enigmatic charm, whiteness is most effectively/affectively staged as youthful femininity. Reworking the affective fault lines between power and besiegement, white femininity commands national vigor as untouchable/touchable innocence. In this sense, the visual allure of the young white woman conjures up entitlements to safety, well-being, and good fortune while simultaneously invoking the susceptibility of the white nation. In other words, white femininity as a national icon is vetted as untouchable precisely because it emulates a fantasy of touch as possibility. It is the overabundance of tough girl affect that hence makes her/the nation's touchability (in the sense of being touched and having the ability to touch) palpable, present, and threatening. In other words, if whiteness as a regulatory force is softened and legitimized by the image of youthful femininity, then this glossy frame is precisely what fuels the punitive and violent responses to a perceived attack on its cultural, political, and economic significance. In staging herself as impervious, the tough girl spectacularizes the affective permeability by which bodies and nations come to be felt and guarded. She thereby exposes the shared vulnerability of femininity, border, and whiteness as central to their clandestine force. Not reducible to symbolic defenselessness, this vulnerability, in the words of Ahmed, “is an effect that works to secure femininity as a delimitation of movement in the public and over inhabitance in the private.”⁵³ In cultivating the right kind of body and nation, the tough girl negotiates restraint (of the other) as visceral investment in (one's own) freedom and choice.

Projecting boundaries of unbelonging/belonging, whiteness ensures impermeability or protection on the one hand and seamless passing on the other. While the economic consequences emerging from stay-at-home orders are tangible and understandably frightening, concerns about poverty were not dominating the protests; neither were demands for government support or better crisis management in the form of increased testing or vaccine development.⁵⁴ Instead many of the protest signs reinstated a privilege of being essential, in the form of being able to move freely, work by choice, and live without fear. Of course, African Americans, Native Americans, and migrants, in particular, have long been restricted, in myriad ways, from exercising such freedoms. In this sense, the overwhelming whiteness of the Trump-supporting rallies animating lockdown protest remains as blatant as it was during the 2016 election.⁵⁵ Read through the long-standing untouchability bestowed onto whiteness, the protests’ abrasive cries for freedom, as in the 2016 rallies, expose a resistance to white containment—a defiance to the shrinkage of political, economic, and social white space.

In other words, Trumpian whiteness is reclaimed and defended against the possibility of white restraint, financially, constitutionally, affectively, or otherwise. As Hage reminds us, whiteness does not simply describe a shade of the skin, but also functions as “a fantasy position of cultural dominance.”⁵⁶ While the stay-at-home orders impose boundaries, which, in one way or another, have always been endured by others, whiteness as revitalized at the lockdown protests reinstates a mandate to the borderless world (of capital, goods, and people) for some, so long as others are constrained by carceral landscapes, boundaries, and limited access to social and economic power. As Trump himself makes painfully obvious, the leverage of whiteness attests to the sheer endurance of such one-sided boundaries. His promise to retrieve, and if necessary rebuild, these barriers and walls is “only backed up by the cavalier ease with which he himself repeatedly transgresse[s] them.”⁵⁷ Recouping this thrill of transgression, the tough girl and her fellow protesters reject the limitations imposed by the lockdown and topple the upsetting possibility of white bondage. Whiteness is choice, vaccine, passport, and freedom. Promulgated and enfleshed, whiteness affectively substantiates the fantasy of American choice (as being chosen) under Trump.

My Liberty or Yours: Affective Sovereignty and Death Politics

If whiteness is seized on as the not-so-hidden political and social cure for the calamities of liberal America, liberty is leveraged as remedy to pandemic collapse. Recovering affective attachments to deeply held ideas about the good life in America, liberty safeguards the conservative body as privileged in a social and economic hierarchy that has become dangerously porous. Read against the backdrop of the lockdown protests, the tough girl's choice (of freedom, risk, and Trump) evokes the untouchable/touchable conservative woman as a liberated patriotic icon. Conversely, the stay-at-home orders imposed by the government shift the boundaries of white femininity, mobilizing a “sexist safety net” bent on undermining right-wing aptitude for self-reliance (read: privilege).⁵⁸ Trump's demand (and those of many of his pundits) to “re-open America”⁵⁹ and that the “cure cannot be worse than the problem itself,” anxiously challenged such newly enfolding limits. Indeed, worse than putting hundreds of thousands of people at risk of dying, according to these sentiments, is the prospect of economic, political, or cultural constraint.⁶⁰ The tough girl will hence not be held back by lockdowns or face masks; rather, she salvages her liberty as self-assured immunity, reclaiming her choice to defy disease and orders, to work and to elect her president—all in the same breath.

The conflation highlights the murky points of contact between capitalism, Trumpism, and gendered perceptions of vitality, producing a feeling of sovereignty. Toughness may be at the core of performing rebellious Trumpian selfhoods; however, as outlined before, when national boundaries, traditional hierarchies, and well-worn privileges are receding, communal and individual psyches that feel themselves under attack (conservative or not) tend to recoil to the affective shelters of fantasized sovereignty. “Sovereignty, after all is a fantasy misrecognized as an objective state,” as Berlant explains—one in which “an affective sense of control in relation to the fantasy of that position's offer of security and efficacy” is achieved and collectively performed.⁶¹ The communal sense of affective restoration brought forward by the protests hence revitalizes the waning structures of American sovereignty, repudiating invisible enemies (non-whites, liberals, the virus) with the help of tangible enactments of patriotic passion. Of course, as Berlant further elaborates, such attachments to sovereign control over body and land distort and simultaneously overstate the agency of ordinary subjects. Yet it is precisely the performance of such overinvestments that imbues a deflated sense of political, economic, and cultural sovereignty with new affective charge.

While sovereignty traditionally evokes a concept of governmental authority or supreme reign over clearly demarcated territory, it also (and perhaps more importantly) denotes a public feeling or communal sense of control and invincibility.⁶² Berlant explains that we “borrow the feel of bigness” from sovereignty.⁶³ This feeling of being simultaneously autonomous and powerful, supreme, and larger than life constitutes an extreme form of liberty imagined to uphold collective strength. To be sovereign, in other words, is to reign from above, bestowing a license to take over, transgress, and disparage. Of course, the tough girl does not hold such power in any meaningful way, yet she, too, performs a distinct sense of being above it all, abhorring liberals with self-assured control, scoffing at governments and deriding their orders. Never questioning the real power of Trump's macho politics, she crucially does not claim political potency for herself; rather the tough girl provides glimpses of borrowed agency when transgressing the boundaries of liberal America and ascending beyond the limits of law, disease, and death. Put simply, the tough girl bargains a feeling of immunity: tapping into the glow of patriarchal power, she ensures it is seen, felt, and binding. In turn, affective sovereignty (however volatile) provides a fantasy of individual and national exemption.

The claim to the great American fantasy is the signpost of Trumpian identity politics, fueled, in the context of COVID-19, by the imminence of choice and death or, more precisely, of death as choice. Reopening intimate channels of historic national devotion, many of the protesters echoed Patrick Henry's infamous slogan, “Give me liberty or give me death,” in an effort to besiege the virus with American stoicism and patriotic self-determination. Reverberating with David Harvey's famous assertion that “sickness is defined under capitalism broadly as the inability to work,” such public expressions of grit and glory simultaneously undermine a liberal sense of well-being (or averting death), exposing these efforts as a kind of disease under Trump.⁶⁴ Following the dodgy nationalist footpaths of Martin Heidegger, the protesters’ “being toward death” is then easily embraced as the condition of authentic American liberty: one is free only to the extent that one is able to choose “to die one's own death.”⁶⁵ While death hosts layers of meaning in this context, the performance of this boldness is crucial to experiencing the affective bargains of conservative defiance.

The will to command death as a possibility not only identifies the impervious conservative as an index of greatness, but also demonstrates a morbid sense of collective belonging or scripted, right Americanness. Taking this notion to macabre extremes, Dan Patrick, lieutenant governor of Texas, suggested that “senior citizens [should be] willing to take a chance on [their] survival in exchange for keeping the America that all America loves for [their] children and grandchildren” and that if faced with such a chilling choice, the seventy-year-old would be “all in.”⁶⁶ Similarly the proclamation “my body, my choice” entails a fantasy of deathly exposure as the ground of liberty—and hence (paradoxically) a life worth living. Of course, neither the tough girl nor the governor is taking a real risk when performing this fantasy. By virtue of their privilege (as a high-ranking white politician and young, healthy, white woman), both are somewhat shielded from the consequences of this exposure, yet it is precisely this performance of high stakes that highlights the compelling drive of their respective investments in the America they love.

Unlike the measured response enacted by the state government, the would-be performance of control over mortality deploys the conservative body/nation as a manifestation of vigorous power. Such a fantasy projects what Georges Bataille calls “the world in which the limit of death is done away with”⁶⁷ and where the sovereign is not only he who decides “who may live and who must die,” but more insidiously describes “he who is as if death were not”—a notion all too literally reiterated by Trump's own resistance to face masks, testing, and social distancing.⁶⁸ Reproducing a negative attachment to sovereignty, Trump's unwillingness to accept the reality of the pandemic demonstrated a toxic investment in American mobility as a physical, economic, and racial privilege. Sponging from these “big man politics,” the tough girl defiantly negates a divestment of her own, and by extension Trump's, fantasized sovereignty, upholding her costly bargain despite the obvious risks.⁶⁹ “She who is as if death were not” invokes a radical ownership of affective freedom, reimagining the stakes of living and dying in contemporary America.

Conclusion: The ‘Right Kind’ of Choices

Ultimately tough girl politics affectively stage the conservative female body as a privileged site of boundary-making, enacting improper/proper structures of feeling and producing conservative toughness as a form of playful, self-assured invincibility or thick skin. The protester in the picture thereby intimates a transgressive femininity that is cultivated into feisty, yet regulated, agency in the service of the great American fantasy. This right kind of tough girl emblazons personal autonomy in order to sustain fantasies of national sovereignty. Unsurprisingly, she thereby emerges as an ally to the Trump administration and the racialized hetero-patriarchal capitalism it dramatizes. Refusing the stale constraints of liberal intellectualism, the tough girl teases and frustrates her feely opponents from afar, owning the insidious ways in which liberal affect is accessed, devoured, and reappropriated in the service of right-wing agendas and exposing an unsettling proximity between the rhetoric of choice and allegiance to whiteness as an affective boundary marker. The appropriation of the “my body, my choice” slogan thereby intimates a larger problem whereby unresolved commitments to whiteness within feminist movements are easily absorbed into right-wing death politics. The tough girl's co-optation of liberal feminism thereby uncannily mimics the protocols of viral replication, while at the same time, she is decidedly unbothered by such contradictions. Fueled by liberal anger, she stages hostile imperviousness while revealing the myriad ways in which conservative femininity, affect, and borders seep into one another as part of a ceaseless effort to renew conservative attachments to whiteness as sovereignty.

Indeed, tough girl politics mobilize affective immunity as a way to cope with the frightening and messy reality of American deterioration under the auspices of a global virus and its various formations in the form of local intrusions (fantasized or not). The demise of American greatness as the result of a contaminated politics is sensed on the surface of the skin, amounting not so much to fears about impending death(s), but producing a feeling far worse.Besieging conservative liberty with the seal of prohibition, a vicious coup d’état against the promise of greatness so intimately hailed by Trump, the lockdown procures an emotional experience of not living—in the economic, social, and cultural sense. Curtailing affective freedom, the lockdown, in other words, is felt as a kind of living death that is simultaneously collective and deeply personal. Choice then holds, in the words of McCarver, “a position of reverence,” defending conservative fantasies of privileged suitability to a vital body, home, and nation.⁷⁰ Shielding the conservative mind from confronting the mutability of these various shelters, choice outmaneuvers the propensities of untimely death and conservative bereavement. Enticing the autonomies sanctioned by liberal feminism in opposition to the constrictive threats evoked by fatality rates, choice not only propels the American claim to the good life, but with a view to a prospective Trump reelection, it announces the possibility of the long-promised great life.

In this sense, the tough girl does not simply re-conscript the means of female bodily autonomy, but in the course also reworks the meaning of dying and living, reimagining the stakes of affective nation-building in the context of the pandemic. This produces a radically reconstructed emotional regime of belonging—one in which identity and entitlements are not circumscribed by leaky liberal governments, but which reinstates the American promise that robust investments into the (re)production of work and the autonomy of the (white) family will align the social, political, and economic conditions in such a way that the proverbial great life, once again, is made available to the free and brave. Obscuring the lethal gendered and racialized inequities brought forward by capitalism and viruses alike, this project mobilizes the various ways in which American identity more broadly, and conservative femininity in particular, is experienced and imagined by the protest. Feeling invincible, contained, and exempt constitutes a way of participating in the dreamed-up vigorous white nation while defying its present sickly shape. Maintaining an entitled attachment to the disintegrating world, the tough girl revels in the swaggering display of white feminine transgression and thereby aims to render her own overwhelming vulnerability (like the virus she defies) invisible, impermissible, and, hence, by choice, not truly fatal.

Notes