Emasculating Trump: Incredulity, Homophobia, and the Spectacle of White Masculinity

This article examines the artistic campaign to emasculate Donald Trump through an analysis of public art installations and protest art that inverts the president’s avowed gender identity, depicting him as a woman, cross-dresser, eunuch, queer, transgender, and/or castrated male. Central to my argument is that white masculinity is so intertwined with homophobia that even ironic critiques of so-called toxic masculinity insulate more banal expressions of hegemonic masculinity from critique. Although playful and ironic, I argue that emasculating protest art invites the gaze of an incredulous onlooker, or unbelieving skeptic, whose scrutiny helps standardize the white masculine ideal by “outing” its putatively spectacular perversions. This article offers insight into how incredulity, as a response of so-called compensatory or hypermasculinity, draws on a standard of (hetero)normalcy that ultimately exonerates more commonplace but nonetheless harmful expressions of hegemonic white masculinity.