Julia Banks and Jacinda Ardern show that the destiny of women must be diminished and objectified | Van Badham | Opinion

TThe photograph that best sums up the feminist political moment is the portrait of the Australian Julia Banks politician by Alex Ellinghausen.

She is in the navy and sits in the pale green room of the Australian House of Representatives. There are five men in the photo positioned around her, standing, walking, talking. They do not know the banks, they are white, they wear costumes, they are indistinguishable.

That day, Banks announced that she was leaving the Liberals to become independent.

It was an understandable progression – and the member for Chisholm herself detailed it with some ferocity. In August, Banks was one of many women among the already meager ranks of liberal female representation: "intimidated, pressured and intimidated" by a bunch of male MPs in the last coup d'etat to the leadership of his party. In her resignation speech this week, she told a familiar story of what had happened.

"Often, when good women call or are prone to bad behavior, retaliation, retaliation and comments describe them as bad – the liar, the troublemaker, the emotionally unstable or weak, or somebody else. one that should be silenced, "said Banks. limited characters available for frank political women. Hillary Crooked, indeed.

By giving up the Liberals to sit on the dock, Banks further reduced the status of the Liberals with a minority government. One wonders if his announcement would have received the same attention if it had been only a moral condemnation, instead of a mallet struck in the pillars of institutional power.

A bitter and tiring campaign of several decades led by feminist members of the Labor Party led to women's quota systems that the Liberals resisted.

But as the last few weeks have shown, there is still a need to reduce, stereotype and objectify the fate of women in the shared public discourse of politics.

These are not norms reserved for right, left, present moment or simply our local politics. To understand their persistence, the cultural critic Lili Loofbourow may have explained the role she plays in the distribution of artistic fame. As part of this publication, Loofbourow explored the terminology of film theory to determine why women's creative achievements remain underestimated.

"The male gaze is the opposite of the male gaze," she wrote in March, "Rather than lingering lovingly on the parts that he wants to most penetrate, it seems, badumes and badumes keep on going. It is above all fast. Under his influence, we rejoice in our speed of diagnosis. This feeds a rudimentary, almost erotic hunger for knowledge without attending – to reject it without worrying about the work of badysis. "

If the inherited and rooted cultural habit is to consider women as objects of erotic consumption, or to reject and reject their value on this basis, it would be naive to believe that the application of this judgment is in somehow removed from the political arena. Without any ambiguity, women do not enter politics to play a traditional erotic role and their visibly deseroticized presence in the power tribunals represents a challenge to the dominant order that displaced people most certainly perceive. as hostile. The cultural logic based on gender stems from the fact that women in power will be "scrutinized", objectified, evaluated negatively and devalued accordingly.

Why would not there be such an unnatural obsession with the teeth of New Zealand premier Jacinda Ardern? The powerful and influential leader of our Pacific neighbor, ridden to the government through negotiation and know-how, could not return from a high-level diplomatic dinner to discuss steel tariffs with vice -President Mike Pence without being noticed. The Australian Nick Cater considers them "ostentatious", as if his opinion was supposed to have any importance. Ten thousand people dropped this woman into a dedicated Facebook group before it closed.

Also think about the terrifying fascination with the clothes of choice of the new US Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the stalkerish photos taken behind her at her workplace, apparently to shame the price of her tastes. "If I went back to Congress with a bag, they would laugh and take a picture of my back," she said. observed the media storm. "If I come home with my best selling clothes, they will laugh and take a picture of my back."

Even the warmongering conservative heroine Margaret Thatcher has not been spared stereotypes and objectification. She was the "Iron Lady" and something less than human, even at home. When she died, her enemies rang "Ding dong, the witch is dead".

While Julia Banks was pictured in the arms of the center-right independent women she joined, her former Liberal colleague, Julie Bishop, donated the red shoes she wore on her last day as Minister Foreign Affairs, a position from Once the aspirant-PM resigned in the days of coup d'etat.

Bishop has never been a fan of feminism, but it's hard not to look at her "work boots" and think she may be above theory.