ABSTRACT
A growing body of critical scholarship studies the strategic rhetorical mechanisms used by White men to maintain White supremacy (Cabrera 2018; Kelly 2016, 2020b; Kimmel 2017; Noel 2018). Casey Ryan Kelly (2020) asserts a “powerful script of white male victimization” was catalyzed by the 2016 election (2) where men were “aggrieved by feminism, multiculturalism, secularism, and demands for structural equality” (3). Such discourse indexes White men as the casualties of the multicultural movement and identity politics. White masculine victimhood uses the threat historically marginalized groups pose to White hegemony to activate political and ideological formations (Abrajano et al., 2017; Jardina, 2019). It would be incorrect, however, to presume that this masculine rhetoric is embodied, performed, and espoused only by White men; such notions reenforce hegemonic masculinity and falsely link masculinity to only cis men. Although scholars have considered how White women perform a good White girl identity (Moon, 1999), a scholarly opening remains around how White cis women also evoke masculine rhetoric while supporting White supremacy. In studying the connections between masculinity, White supremacy, power, and cis women orators, this chapter begins to fill the gap.
