An Intersectional Account of Political Misogyny

This paper articulates a theoretical framework for understanding how political misogyny distributes hate burdens to different groups of women. Building on Michael Saward's conception of representation as claim-making, I recommend understanding political misogyny as a way of representing women in politics. In particular, I understand political misogyny as a form of nasty claim-making that is comprised of three core components: 1) political elites advance nasty claims about women in politics, 2) those nasty claims activate conscious and unconscious prejudices regarding women in politics, and 3) the audience receives and accepts the nasty claims as their own. By showing how the nasty claims of elites can infuse the collective political identities of women with repulsive connotations, my framework can account for why the same insult can have a different impact on different groups of women. This intersectional framework aims to generate novel hypotheses, necessitates the collection of new types of data, and offers new directions for future research.