Scholars emphasize importance of gender, race and religion in 2024 election

Gender, race and religion shape and reflect contemporary American politics, scholars emphasized at a Wednesday event. Five experts in history, gender studies and government offered their perspective on recent U.S. elections, underscoring the idea that “the personal is political,” a phrase coined by activist Carol Hanisch in her 1969 essay of the same name.

The event came several months after President Donald Trump’s victory in the 2024 presidential election and the defeat of former-Vice President Kamala Harris, the nation’s second female presidential candidate from a major political party. Commentators observed a surge of support for Trump among young men.

Stanford’s feminist, gender and sexualities department sponsored the talk in Margaret Jacks Hall, titled “Gender and the 2024 U.S. Elections: Post-Inaugural Perspectives.”

Jennifer Burns, history professor, traced the development of the “manosphere” – websites, blogs and forums concerned with masculinity and men’s issues – and its impact on politics. She said these alternative intellectual spaces have always existed but are growing in importance as places to trade ideas and develop political stances, often explicitly anti-feminist.

“They’re not really alternative spaces anymore,” she said. “They are the spaces where politics is happening now.”

Burns highlighted how, in the 2024 presidential race, Donald Trump was able to reach young male audiences through conservative podcasts, while analysts viewed Kamala Harris’s decision not to participate in these radio talk shows as highly consequential.

Gaddini also said there was a growth in the “Mama Bear” movement – an effort by right-wing Christian mothers to “protect” their children from progressive agendas. The conservative group is growing in size and funding, and is gaining electoral representation, especially on school boards, Gaddini said.

The modern “Mama Bear” developed during the pandemic, she explained, when mothers banded together to protest school closures, mask mandates and mandatory vaccinations. As COVID-19 waned, they shifted their activism to oppose transgender issues, critical race theory and abortion.

“With Trump in power… the ‘Mama Bears’ are more emboldened than ever,” Gaddini said. “They really give us a glimpse into how motherhood, gender and religion intersect in America today.”

According to Moira Donegan, a writer in residence at Stanford’s Clayman Institute for Gender Research and columnist at The Guardian, abortion rights played a much smaller role in the 2024 presidential election than predicted.

In the past election, ten states had abortion measures on their ballot. Seven of the ten voted to legalize abortion. And yet, in four states where pro-abortion measures passed, voters also elected Trump, who has boasted about his role in the Supreme Court’s overturning of Roe v. Wade. Donegan said she believed Americans did not see Trump as a real threat to abortion access, and that their priorities lay elsewhere.

Julien Fischer, a lecturer in feminist, gender and sexuality studies, also talked about how transgender issues have become a scapegoat for political aggression.

“Trans persons’ gender and sexual border crossings become a convenient vehicle for anxieties over the crossings of other kinds of borders – national borders, racial borders, religious borders,” he said.

Fischer called sex panics, or moral panics centered around sexuality, “diversions” – attacks on a vulnerable group that isn’t the real target. However, he said the culture war pertaining to transgender rights inflicts real damage and carries implications extending beyond the trans community.

Veda Pothuri, an eighth grader at The Nueva School, attended the panel with her peers from the League of Creative Minds, an academic program for middle and high school students focused on government and diplomacy.

“The queer experience is very underrepresented in a lot of panels like this… so I felt like it was a really great opportunity to hear from someone in that community,” she said. 

Gender wasn’t the only topic of conversation at Wednesday’s event – the panel also discussed the role of race in the changing political climate. 

Eric McDaniel, a professor in the department of government at the University of Texas at Austin, warned about the political consequences of Black male disillusionment.

“[Black men] see the advancements of women, the advancements of the LGBTQ community, coming at their expense, and feel like they’ve been left behind,” he said in an interview with The Daily prior to the event.

According to McDaniel, Trump gained traction with the Black male electorate because his campaign embraced masculinity – a key value for this demographic.

McDaniel argued that the Democratic party’s “wealthy white agenda” has often excluded Black men. He called on white progressives to engage more with the Black community and talk with them, not at them, and predicted the party would continue to lose Black voters otherwise.

One recurring theme throughout the event was how higher education has become politically polarizing.

Burns pointed to declining numbers of men in educational institutions as one reason for the growth of the “manosphere.” Formal education is becoming increasingly associated with the Democratic Party and feminism, she said.

McDaniels said the educational gender gap also undermines the masculinity of Black men and makes them feel “less than.”

As a whole, the panel called attention to the loss of empathy and hope in the political arena.

“There is this lack of empathy, because people don’t feel fulfilled in their lives,” McDaniel said. “You’re seeing the failure of the American dream, and there’s this false hope that one man can fix it.”