On Hillary Clinton's Beautiful Refusal to "Go Away" [View all]

[ehrnst]

I have heard them from random people responding to any news item about her; from commenters responding to my writing about her; from political pundits, especially but not exclusively of the male persuasion. I have even heard them from some of her supporters, who couch the admonishment in a heaving sigh of regret: "I just think it's time for her to go away."

It functions not unlike the ubiquitous scolding to "get over it"—and often in tandem: Get your grief and your anger and all your other stupid feelings out of public view, and take your loser candidate with you.

It's not entirely clear (to me) what Hillary "going away" would actually look like. I suppose that's because it depends on who is saying it. For some people, it would be an assurance she will never, ever, run again for public office. For others, seemingly nothing short of curling up in a ball and dying would suffice.
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This is a thing we culturally do to women who fail—with the very definition of "failure" itself a constantly moving target, to suit our misogynist disdains. It can be a quantifiable fuck-up, which costs people their safety or jobs or other measurable assets, or something decidedly less so: A young female pop star who "fails" to be sufficiently aware that she is "annoying," or a fat woman who "fails" to project at all times an apologetic nature, indicative of her everlasting remorse for having wrought her monstrous self upon the world.

The latter examples are not actual failures, but subjective "failures" to hew to impossible standards around female visibility. Impossible, because a pop star who frankly addresses overexposure is summarily told to "go away" for her intolerant navel-gazing, and a fat woman who does not walk with her head held high is told, in so many words, to "go away" for not carrying herself with pride.

Women of color, and women of other marginalized classes, have less room to fail, and more exacting and unforgiving definitions of failure, than straight, white, thin, able-bodied, wealthy, cis women. There is no wiggle room—and there are precious few people invested in redemption narratives for marginalized women.

They are further burdened, much more so than privileged women, with representing the whole class of people who share their identities. A failure—legitimate or invented—is not just a personal one, but one inevitably used to underwrite bigoted commentary about the entirety of their communities.

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Men's failures and redemption narratives, however, go together like chocolate and peanut butter. There is an entire cottage industry dedicated to rehabilitating the images of men who have had real, significant, often criminal failures—athletes, pop stars, actors, politicians welcomed back to public acclaim with boilerplate profiles telling us all about their newfound gratitude, hard-won humility, and the love of a good woman, filed under headlines like "The Comeback Kid."

Hillary Clinton has not been—and won't be—granted any such generous reprieve, despite the fact that her "failure" was spending 18 months campaigning, day after exhausting day, keeping up a ruthless schedule that would drive most people half her age to collapse after three weeks, giving up time with her family, sacrificing anything resembling free time or privacy, making countless sacrifices on behalf of this country in order to prevent the exact outcome we now call her failure, sniffing that she was a weak candidate, even though she was derailed by foreign interference, breathtaking unprofessionalism from the intelligence community, and a tsunami of misogyny, yet still managed to win the popular vote by three million votes.

No, Hillary is told to "go away."

http://www.shakesville.com/2017/04/on-hillary-clintons-beautiful-refusal.html