50 Years of Gender, Power & the American Presidency
This new, fully revised update of our 2020 film The Man Card arrives just in time to make sense of the explosive gender politics shaping the 2024 presidential contest between Kamala Harris and Donald Trump. The Man Card: 50 Years of Gender, Power & the American Presidency takes account of Harris’s unexpected entry into the race and explores the deeply gendered cultural and political forces she’s up against.
Ranging across five decades of presidential campaigns, the film shows how public perceptions of presidential leadership, and of the office of the presidency itself, have come to be linked in the American imagination with traditional ideas about manhood. It also shows how the Right has weaponized regressive ideas about manhood for decades to cast their opponents as “soft” and appeal to working-class white male voters at the level of identity rather than policy.
The Man Card is required viewing for anyone who wants to understand why it’s been so hard for a woman to be elected president, and why outmoded ideas about masculinity and power have become central features of American presidential politics.
The Man Card was created, co-produced, and co-written by acclaimed author, educator, and political analyst Jackson Katz, and was directed and produced by award-winning filmmakers Peter Hutchison and Lucas Sabean.