“She’s Such a Nasty Woman”: A Feminist Analysis of Nice and Nastiness as Tropes. In Angelina Castagno’s The Price of Nice: How Good Intentions Maintain Educational Inequity (University of Minnesota Press)

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I love this chapter.  I was prompted by Donald Trump’s famous critique of his opponent, Hillary Clinton, calling her “such a nasty woman.”  Everyone knew what Mr. Trump was saying.  After all, in the US, little girls are made of “sugar and spice and everything nice.” I draw on empirical studies and literary sources to describe and interrogate the ways niceness and the antipodal Mean Girl and Nasty Woman tropes are gendered and racialized.  Grounded in feminist theories, my analysis situates gender as social construct, organizing principle, and performative practice.  I understand gendered frames of nice and nasty as intersectional, shaped by overlapping constructs of race, class, sexuality, age, and culture.

Published by frankie julia

I’m an educational anthropologist; I’ve worked and traveled in the US, Europe, east and southern Africa, Southeast Asia, and Latin America alone, as part of a team, and as part of a couple, a nuclear, and an extended family. My first big trip was just before I turned ten. I was the oldest grandchild, my grandmother was widowed, and we were good traveling companions. We stayed in the village in southeast Austria where my aunts, uncles, and cousins lived. This was in the 1960s. I followed my older cousin as she took the cows out to the pasture every day. Her world, without indoor plumbing or electricity, was a far cry from my own in the industrial northeast United States. I learned then that people in other places live lives that looked different from my own. I learned then that the differences, and also the similarities, were irresistibly fascinating.

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