The rise of the political she-ro

How today's female politicians became modern heroines

Sen. Kamala Harris has come out swinging against Trump.
(Image credit: Illustration by Lauren Hansen | Images courtesy Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images, iStock)

In the days after President Trump's inauguration, I was thrilled to find a black T-shirt that features Wonder Woman delivering a bone-splintering jab to Trump's jaw. As I've worn this shirt out in public, I've found that it expresses more than just my own punkish rage: Almost every woman I've encountered, however casually, has reacted to it. A barista took a close-up photo of my chest and turned it into her Facebook profile picture. The owner of my local laundromat gave me a vigorous head-nod and a thumb's up. And the little girl in line behind me at Panera told me, in a conspiratorial whisper, that she hates Trump too. All of this suggest that the meme is a kind of convex mirror, reflecting the light of a collective desire back to the world through a very specific set of images — in this case, the (quite literally) empowered woman as champion, delivering the world from ethno-nationalist thuggery with one clean hit.

Though we may pine for Themiscyra, home of the Amazons, we live in the He-Man Woman-Hater's Club that is Trump's America: The indignities of knowing that a self-confessed "pussy grabber" might be able to stack a Supreme Court that could turn this country into an Atwoodian hellscape have eroded women's faith across the nation (a recent Pew report states that only 29 percent of American women have "quite a lot of confidence" in the country's future). So, it is unsurprising, then, that images of the woman hero have become more pervasive, and more personal: Women have cried over Wonder Woman's "No Man's Land" sequence, carried protest signs bearing Princess Leia, and changed their social media avatars to Rosie the Riveter. However, in the Trump era, the iconography of the heroine — defender of truth, justice, and the innocent — doesn't just apply to the fictive warrior. Recently, real-life public figures like Sen. Kamala Harris (D-Calif.), Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), and ousted acting Attorney General Sally Yates, women who have each come out swinging at Trump and Trumpism, have become pop culture demi-goddesses — civil servants in pantsuits and sensible shoes now meme-i-fied, merchandized, and commodified like comic book bad-asses.

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Laura Bogart

Laura Bogart is a featured writer for Salon and a regular contributor to DAME magazine. Her work has appeared in The Atlantic, CityLab, The Guardian, SPIN, Complex, IndieWire, GOOD, and Refinery29, among other publications. Her first novel, Don't You Know That I Love You?, is forthcoming from Dzanc.