At the 2024 US Democratic Convention, Kamala Harris presented her approach to the military in her speech accepting her historic nomination as the party’s candidate for the US presidency. In this essay, I reflect on the question: what would it mean if a woman of color led the American empire? I argue that scholars of gender, politics, and representation must turn their attention toward evaluating not just how gender conditions how politicians legislate, run their campaigns, or face barriers to winning office — but whether and to what extent politicians of any gender use their identities to combat the material suffering wrought by American imperialism. I echo calls for greater attention to power structures in the study of gender and representation (Brown et al. Reference Brown, Clark, Mahoney, Siow and Strawbridge2024) and argue that we must decenter “imperial feminism” and recenter tenets from Black and Third World feminism (Amos and Parmar Reference Amos and Parmar1984; Johnson-Odim Reference Mohanty, Russo and Torres1991; Taylor Reference Taylor2017). To this end, I theorize a new type of representative that bridges these concerns: identity representatives.
Gender Stereotypes and Strength on the Military
As Harris took the stage on the last night of the Democratic Convention in 2024, she described how she would lead the United States military: “As Commander-in-Chief, I will ensure America always has the strongest, most lethal fighting force in the world” (Sarnoff Reference Sarnoff2024). Scholarship on gender stereotypes in campaign politics helps us understand the strategy behind her comments. Political scientists have long known that when women run for office, they face pressure to behave like men to be perceived as competent (e.g., Huddy and Terkildsen Reference Huddy and Terkildsen1993). Like Hillary Clinton in 2016, Harris would have been the first woman president and faced an opponent who has come to represent white heteropatriarchy (Strolovitch, Wong, and Proctor Reference Strolovitch, Wong and Proctor2017). As a Democratic woman, Harris also needed to overcome partisan stereotypes that she would be weak compared to her Republican opponent on security issues (Swers Reference Swers2007). Despite the increase in the number of women elected to office in recent years (Center for American Women and Politics 2025), the American electoral environment is still fundamentally one that favors masculine traits (Bauer and Santia Reference Bauer and Santia2023). Yet, even when women candidates try to present themselves as more masculine, the media weaponizes their efforts against them as women pay a penalty for being “unlikable” (Winfrey and Carlin Reference Winfrey and Carlin2023, 135). This repercussion is especially acute when Black women politicians use language associated with dominance (Dupree Reference Dupree2024).
Harris tried to combat gender stereotypes by presenting herself as an exceptionally strong future Commander-in-Chief. As a scholar, I understood why Harris said this. As a person living in the United States, though, I thought, “Why do we have to have the most lethal military in the world? Why can’t we just have upgraded indoor air cleaning systems so I can stop wearing this N95 mask everywhere I go trying to avoid Long COVID?” While Harris descriptively represented many people — Black Americans, South Asian Americans, women, and the children of immigrants — her comments suggested that those same people, who make up a disproportionate share of American soldiers and/or come from parts of the world where the impact of US imperialism is particularly acute, would potentially also suffer the greatest negative effects of investing even more resources into the US military.
The tension I felt was the conflict between the politics of difference and the politics of the American empire. The politics of difference prompts us to recognize that while all individuals in a liberal democracy are legally equal, dominated groups have specific interests that must be addressed through policy (Baumeister Reference Baumeister2000; Young Reference Young1990, 175). The value of descriptive representation, or the presence of individuals from those marginalized groups in policymaking positions, lies in its potential to deliver better outcomes for those groups than individuals from dominant groups (Mansbridge Reference Mansbridge1999; Pitkin Reference Pitkin1967). The evidence bears this out — for the most part, descriptive representatives by race, gender, and race and gender deliver favorable outcomes for the groups they represent (e.g., Brown Reference Brown2025; Dietrich and Hayes Reference Dietrich and Hayes2023; Stout, Tate, and Wilson Reference Stout, Tate and Wilson2021; Strawbridge et al. Reference Strawbridge, Masuoka, Brown and Hanson2024).
Yet for many, Harris’s record as a politician — especially as San Francisco District Attorney when she supported a law that negatively affected Black and Indigenous families by charging parents with crimes if their children had too many school absences (Demby Reference Demby2020) — has prompted sometimes difficult conversations about the apparent disconnect between what the public expects of politicians who descriptively represent them and how these politicians can harm those same communities while in office (see Bose Reference Bose2020; Jackson Reference Jackson2020; Lemi, Hayes, and Osorio Reference Lemi, Hayes, Osorio, Brown and Gershon2023). Harris’s comments on the military invite another difficult conversation: what would it mean if a woman of color led the American empire that violently oppresses women of the Global South?
Identity Representatives
To reconcile this tension between celebrations of descriptive representation and the impact of American imperialism, I theorize a specific type of politician I call identity representatives. This concept draws from the notion of identity politics in the Combahee River Collective’s Black Feminist Statement and how scholars of intersectionality conceive of the role of identity in politics (Collins and Bilge Reference Collins and Bilge2016; Crenshaw Reference Crenshaw1991; Hancock Reference Hancock2007; Taylor Reference Taylor2017). An identity representative explicitly politicizes their identity and acts in solidarity with oppressed groups to end oppression. Their inclusion into an identity group, such as an ethnoracial group, is not defined by appearance (Mansbridge Reference Mansbridge1999), nor must they have some specific shared group experience to be a member of the group (Collins Reference Collins2000; Young Reference Young1990).
Instead, what matters most is how they explicitly draw on experiences derived from their own identities to act for others substantively. Identity representatives do not necessarily need to share experiences with the oppressed groups they advocate for; instead, they see the connections between their experiences of oppression and others’ experiences of oppression (Taylor Reference Taylor2017, 53–6; Xydias Reference Xydias2023). This concept, which I developed from my research on mixed-race representatives, is distinct from descriptive representation, which hinges on essentialized physical appearances — what you look like (Mansbridge Reference Mansbridge1999) — and substantive representation (Pitkin Reference Pitkin1967), which is not necessarily tied to the politicization of identity.
Contemporary examples of identity representatives include Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib (D-MI; Palestinian American), former Congresswoman Cori Bush (D-MO; Black American), and former Congressman Jamaal Bowman (D-NY; Black American), who have drawn explicit parallels between the experiences of Black Americans with the United States and Palestinians with the state of Israel (Turner and Tlaib Reference Turner and Tlaib2024; Sullivan and Wootson Jr. Reference Sullivan and Wootson2021). Tlaib does not need to be a Black American to see this parallel; Bush and Bowman do not need to be Palestinians to see this parallel — all three draw on these parallels to advocate against state violence. This concept bridges the value of descriptive representation with the reality that sometimes descriptive representatives do not leverage their identities to serve their own racialized communities or other racialized communities.
Recentering the Empire and the Problem of Imperial Feminism
Although empirical scholarship on women candidates tells us why Harris tried to showcase strength on the military, we must look to theoretical frameworks that highlight settler colonialism and the American empire to understand the normative complications of a descriptive representative like Harris taking a hard line on the American military. Imperialism is “a total system of foreign power in which another culture, people, and way of life penetrate, transform, and come to define the colonized society” (Trask Reference Trask1999, 41). The United States is an empire that persists in settler colonialism and owes its diversity to the displacement of people it causes through its foreign policy (Glenn Reference Glenn2015; King Reference King2019; Nicholls Reference Nicholls2022; Wolfe Reference Wolfe2006). The United States military, its installations around the globe, and the threat of its strength are, of course, the enforcers of the empire.
Feminist thinkers such as Angela Davis (Reference Angela, Mohanty, Riley and Pratt2008) have critiqued women’s contemporary role in the military, highlighting how feminism requires thinking beyond the legal rights of individual women to participate in the military and toward thinking about how American militarism and war inflict suffering and injustices around the world. Others like Zillah Eisenstein (Reference Eisenstein, Mohanty, Riley and Pratt2008, 30) question celebrations of women’s equality in the military, underlining how capitalism coerces women to enlist, as doing so provides immense, life-changing economic benefits to working-class women. And yet, as Elizabeth Mesok (Reference Mesok2016, 55) has argued, women’s integration into the military, particularly in combat positions during the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, was itself an effort by the United States to use women as “softer” soldiers to subdue and extract information from Iraqi and Afghan civilian women — not because women could fight just as well as men. This context of the American empire and women’s role in the military often recedes to the background in empirical analyses of gender and descriptive representation in American politics.
The celebration of women rising to military leadership positions, like the Commander-in-Chief of the United States military, reifies imperial feminism. “Imperial feminism” is the brand of feminism that celebrates white women leading Western empires and ignoring, and even patronizing, the experiences of Black women and women outside of the West (Amos and Parmar Reference Amos and Parmar1984). Imperial feminism originated in Britain in the late 19th century from anti-slavery and women’s suffrage movements and drew on Orientalism to depict women in Africa and India, the idea being that “having won their own freedom, [British women] would lead their victimised non-European sisters out of patriarchal oppression under the mantle of empire” (Midgley Reference Midgley and Midgley1998, 173–6). In imperial feminism, struggles against Western colonialism are neglected, and racism is used to justify policies that harm Black women and women of the Global South, such as the pathologization of Black and Asian British families (Amos and Parmar Reference Amos and Parmar1984, 11). Imperial feminism is the same feminism that advocates only against rape against American women within the military, but not against the raping of women in the countries the American military occupies (Mesok Reference Mesok2016, 65).
For example, in the Pacific, a region that has long been geopolitically valuable to the United States military (see Gonzalez Reference Gonzalez2013), violence against Southeast Asian women in particular is characterized by the distinct intersectionality of colonialism, sexism, and Orientalism, resulting in white men seeking sexual power over Asian women from formerly colonized countries — or the phenomenon of “white sexual imperialism” (Woan Reference Woan2008, also see Crenshaw Reference Crenshaw1991; Said Reference Said1977). In 2014, a white United States Marine, Lance Cpl. Joseph Scott Pemberton was stationed in the Philippines for military exercises when he met 26-year-old Jennifer Laude, a transwoman (Lendon Reference Lendon2020). The two met at a bar in Olangapo City, and shortly after checking into a motel together, Pemberton left, and a hotel worker found Laude dead (Tango and Artiaga Reference Tango and Artiaga2020, 755). During his trial, Pemberton used the “panic” argument (Tango and Artiaga Reference Tango and Artiaga2020), in which the defendant essentially makes the case that they were so overcome with panic, often related to sexual acts with the victim, that they had to defend themselves against a gay or trans person (Andresen Reference Andresen2022, 233). In 2015, Pemberton was convicted of homicide by a Philippine court; while he was sentenced to serve 10 years in prison, he was ultimately pardoned by former President Duterte in 2020 (Lendon Reference Lendon2020). Even with all the atrocities the military has committed beyond the one mentioned here, Harris’s acceptance speech identified a need to make our military even more lethal.
Of course, Harris is likely not the woman white imperial feminists imagine when they advocate for women winning office. She is a Black and South Asian woman and the child of two immigrants whose immigration statuses as students would likely be precarious today. She was the first Black and Asian American woman to be the California Attorney General and only the second Black woman elected to the US Senate. As a presidential candidate, she was highly qualified, having held two statewide positions as the California Attorney General and US Senator in addition to her service as vice president (Bauer Reference Bauer2020). Despite her qualifications, she experienced blatant misogynoir (Bailey Reference Bailey2021), or the distinct combination of racism and sexism directed at Black women. For instance, right-wing pundits accused her of “sleeping her way to the top” (Goldberg Reference Goldberg2024), activating the Jezebel stereotype that depicts Black women as hypersexualized (Collins Reference Collins2000, 81). Her opponent also accused Harris of “switching” her identity to be Black when it was politically convenient (Lemi 2024) — an invocation of the tragic mulatto stereotype in which a mixed-race Black woman struggles with her place in the world, another stereotype closely related to the Jezebel stereotype (Joseph Reference Joseph2012, 12). Harris had to overcome significant barriers to even make it to the national political stage. As a presidential candidate, however, Harris stood to inherit the power of an institution that represents oppression worldwide. Harris represented both progress for many Americans and the upholding of the violent status quo. My point is not new. Others have made similar critiques regarding Hillary Clinton’s brand of feminism and Barack Obama’s “kinder, gentler, empire” (Eisenstein Reference Eisenstein2016; Weiss Reference Weiss2010-11). Both were historical firsts and descriptive representatives who ultimately chose positions that required loyalty to the empire and active participation in the suffering of the Global South. Scholars of gender and representation should address this tension with nuance, for all the reasons I have outlined above.
The Path Forward
In closing, there are a few research questions that scholars of gender and representation might consider moving forward. For example, when do legislators act as identity representatives? Are certain genders more likely to act as identity representatives than others (Murib Reference Murib2024)? Which groups are more likely to act in solidarity with decolonizing movements? How do identity representatives express solidarity with colonized peoples around the world? By engaging these questions, scholars can push the study of gender and representation forward and thoughtfully interrogate what it would mean if a woman of color led the American empire.
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At the 2024 US Democratic Convention, Kamala Harris presented her approach to the military in her speech accepting her historic nomination as the party’s candidate for the US presidency. In this essay, I reflect on the question: what would it mean if a woman of color led the American empire? I argue that scholars of gender, politics, and representation must turn their attention toward evaluating not just how gender conditions how politicians legislate, run their campaigns, or face barriers to winning office — but whether and to what extent politicians of any gender use their identities to combat the material suffering wrought by American imperialism. I echo calls for greater attention to power structures in the study of gender and representation (Brown et al. Reference Brown, Clark, Mahoney, Siow and Strawbridge2024) and argue that we must decenter “imperial feminism” and recenter tenets from Black and Third World feminism (Amos and Parmar Reference Amos and Parmar1984; Johnson-Odim Reference Mohanty, Russo and Torres1991; Taylor Reference Taylor2017). To this end, I theorize a new type of representative that bridges these concerns: identity representatives.
Gender Stereotypes and Strength on the Military
As Harris took the stage on the last night of the Democratic Convention in 2024, she described how she would lead the United States military: “As Commander-in-Chief, I will ensure America always has the strongest, most lethal fighting force in the world” (Sarnoff Reference Sarnoff2024). Scholarship on gender stereotypes in campaign politics helps us understand the strategy behind her comments. Political scientists have long known that when women run for office, they face pressure to behave like men to be perceived as competent (e.g., Huddy and Terkildsen Reference Huddy and Terkildsen1993). Like Hillary Clinton in 2016, Harris would have been the first woman president and faced an opponent who has come to represent white heteropatriarchy (Strolovitch, Wong, and Proctor Reference Strolovitch, Wong and Proctor2017). As a Democratic woman, Harris also needed to overcome partisan stereotypes that she would be weak compared to her Republican opponent on security issues (Swers Reference Swers2007). Despite the increase in the number of women elected to office in recent years (Center for American Women and Politics 2025), the American electoral environment is still fundamentally one that favors masculine traits (Bauer and Santia Reference Bauer and Santia2023). Yet, even when women candidates try to present themselves as more masculine, the media weaponizes their efforts against them as women pay a penalty for being “unlikable” (Winfrey and Carlin Reference Winfrey and Carlin2023, 135). This repercussion is especially acute when Black women politicians use language associated with dominance (Dupree Reference Dupree2024).
Harris tried to combat gender stereotypes by presenting herself as an exceptionally strong future Commander-in-Chief. As a scholar, I understood why Harris said this. As a person living in the United States, though, I thought, “Why do we have to have the most lethal military in the world? Why can’t we just have upgraded indoor air cleaning systems so I can stop wearing this N95 mask everywhere I go trying to avoid Long COVID?” While Harris descriptively represented many people — Black Americans, South Asian Americans, women, and the children of immigrants — her comments suggested that those same people, who make up a disproportionate share of American soldiers and/or come from parts of the world where the impact of US imperialism is particularly acute, would potentially also suffer the greatest negative effects of investing even more resources into the US military.
The tension I felt was the conflict between the politics of difference and the politics of the American empire. The politics of difference prompts us to recognize that while all individuals in a liberal democracy are legally equal, dominated groups have specific interests that must be addressed through policy (Baumeister Reference Baumeister2000; Young Reference Young1990, 175). The value of descriptive representation, or the presence of individuals from those marginalized groups in policymaking positions, lies in its potential to deliver better outcomes for those groups than individuals from dominant groups (Mansbridge Reference Mansbridge1999; Pitkin Reference Pitkin1967). The evidence bears this out — for the most part, descriptive representatives by race, gender, and race and gender deliver favorable outcomes for the groups they represent (e.g., Brown Reference Brown2025; Dietrich and Hayes Reference Dietrich and Hayes2023; Stout, Tate, and Wilson Reference Stout, Tate and Wilson2021; Strawbridge et al. Reference Strawbridge, Masuoka, Brown and Hanson2024).
Yet for many, Harris’s record as a politician — especially as San Francisco District Attorney when she supported a law that negatively affected Black and Indigenous families by charging parents with crimes if their children had too many school absences (Demby Reference Demby2020) — has prompted sometimes difficult conversations about the apparent disconnect between what the public expects of politicians who descriptively represent them and how these politicians can harm those same communities while in office (see Bose Reference Bose2020; Jackson Reference Jackson2020; Lemi, Hayes, and Osorio Reference Lemi, Hayes, Osorio, Brown and Gershon2023). Harris’s comments on the military invite another difficult conversation: what would it mean if a woman of color led the American empire that violently oppresses women of the Global South?
Identity Representatives
To reconcile this tension between celebrations of descriptive representation and the impact of American imperialism, I theorize a specific type of politician I call identity representatives. This concept draws from the notion of identity politics in the Combahee River Collective’s Black Feminist Statement and how scholars of intersectionality conceive of the role of identity in politics (Collins and Bilge Reference Collins and Bilge2016; Crenshaw Reference Crenshaw1991; Hancock Reference Hancock2007; Taylor Reference Taylor2017). An identity representative explicitly politicizes their identity and acts in solidarity with oppressed groups to end oppression. Their inclusion into an identity group, such as an ethnoracial group, is not defined by appearance (Mansbridge Reference Mansbridge1999), nor must they have some specific shared group experience to be a member of the group (Collins Reference Collins2000; Young Reference Young1990).
Instead, what matters most is how they explicitly draw on experiences derived from their own identities to act for others substantively. Identity representatives do not necessarily need to share experiences with the oppressed groups they advocate for; instead, they see the connections between their experiences of oppression and others’ experiences of oppression (Taylor Reference Taylor2017, 53–6; Xydias Reference Xydias2023). This concept, which I developed from my research on mixed-race representatives, is distinct from descriptive representation, which hinges on essentialized physical appearances — what you look like (Mansbridge Reference Mansbridge1999) — and substantive representation (Pitkin Reference Pitkin1967), which is not necessarily tied to the politicization of identity.
Contemporary examples of identity representatives include Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib (D-MI; Palestinian American), former Congresswoman Cori Bush (D-MO; Black American), and former Congressman Jamaal Bowman (D-NY; Black American), who have drawn explicit parallels between the experiences of Black Americans with the United States and Palestinians with the state of Israel (Turner and Tlaib Reference Turner and Tlaib2024; Sullivan and Wootson Jr. Reference Sullivan and Wootson2021). Tlaib does not need to be a Black American to see this parallel; Bush and Bowman do not need to be Palestinians to see this parallel — all three draw on these parallels to advocate against state violence. This concept bridges the value of descriptive representation with the reality that sometimes descriptive representatives do not leverage their identities to serve their own racialized communities or other racialized communities.
Recentering the Empire and the Problem of Imperial Feminism
Although empirical scholarship on women candidates tells us why Harris tried to showcase strength on the military, we must look to theoretical frameworks that highlight settler colonialism and the American empire to understand the normative complications of a descriptive representative like Harris taking a hard line on the American military. Imperialism is “a total system of foreign power in which another culture, people, and way of life penetrate, transform, and come to define the colonized society” (Trask Reference Trask1999, 41). The United States is an empire that persists in settler colonialism and owes its diversity to the displacement of people it causes through its foreign policy (Glenn Reference Glenn2015; King Reference King2019; Nicholls Reference Nicholls2022; Wolfe Reference Wolfe2006). The United States military, its installations around the globe, and the threat of its strength are, of course, the enforcers of the empire.
Feminist thinkers such as Angela Davis (Reference Angela, Mohanty, Riley and Pratt2008) have critiqued women’s contemporary role in the military, highlighting how feminism requires thinking beyond the legal rights of individual women to participate in the military and toward thinking about how American militarism and war inflict suffering and injustices around the world. Others like Zillah Eisenstein (Reference Eisenstein, Mohanty, Riley and Pratt2008, 30) question celebrations of women’s equality in the military, underlining how capitalism coerces women to enlist, as doing so provides immense, life-changing economic benefits to working-class women. And yet, as Elizabeth Mesok (Reference Mesok2016, 55) has argued, women’s integration into the military, particularly in combat positions during the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, was itself an effort by the United States to use women as “softer” soldiers to subdue and extract information from Iraqi and Afghan civilian women — not because women could fight just as well as men. This context of the American empire and women’s role in the military often recedes to the background in empirical analyses of gender and descriptive representation in American politics.
The celebration of women rising to military leadership positions, like the Commander-in-Chief of the United States military, reifies imperial feminism. “Imperial feminism” is the brand of feminism that celebrates white women leading Western empires and ignoring, and even patronizing, the experiences of Black women and women outside of the West (Amos and Parmar Reference Amos and Parmar1984). Imperial feminism originated in Britain in the late 19th century from anti-slavery and women’s suffrage movements and drew on Orientalism to depict women in Africa and India, the idea being that “having won their own freedom, [British women] would lead their victimised non-European sisters out of patriarchal oppression under the mantle of empire” (Midgley Reference Midgley and Midgley1998, 173–6). In imperial feminism, struggles against Western colonialism are neglected, and racism is used to justify policies that harm Black women and women of the Global South, such as the pathologization of Black and Asian British families (Amos and Parmar Reference Amos and Parmar1984, 11). Imperial feminism is the same feminism that advocates only against rape against American women within the military, but not against the raping of women in the countries the American military occupies (Mesok Reference Mesok2016, 65).
For example, in the Pacific, a region that has long been geopolitically valuable to the United States military (see Gonzalez Reference Gonzalez2013), violence against Southeast Asian women in particular is characterized by the distinct intersectionality of colonialism, sexism, and Orientalism, resulting in white men seeking sexual power over Asian women from formerly colonized countries — or the phenomenon of “white sexual imperialism” (Woan Reference Woan2008, also see Crenshaw Reference Crenshaw1991; Said Reference Said1977). In 2014, a white United States Marine, Lance Cpl. Joseph Scott Pemberton was stationed in the Philippines for military exercises when he met 26-year-old Jennifer Laude, a transwoman (Lendon Reference Lendon2020). The two met at a bar in Olangapo City, and shortly after checking into a motel together, Pemberton left, and a hotel worker found Laude dead (Tango and Artiaga Reference Tango and Artiaga2020, 755). During his trial, Pemberton used the “panic” argument (Tango and Artiaga Reference Tango and Artiaga2020), in which the defendant essentially makes the case that they were so overcome with panic, often related to sexual acts with the victim, that they had to defend themselves against a gay or trans person (Andresen Reference Andresen2022, 233). In 2015, Pemberton was convicted of homicide by a Philippine court; while he was sentenced to serve 10 years in prison, he was ultimately pardoned by former President Duterte in 2020 (Lendon Reference Lendon2020). Even with all the atrocities the military has committed beyond the one mentioned here, Harris’s acceptance speech identified a need to make our military even more lethal.
Of course, Harris is likely not the woman white imperial feminists imagine when they advocate for women winning office. She is a Black and South Asian woman and the child of two immigrants whose immigration statuses as students would likely be precarious today. She was the first Black and Asian American woman to be the California Attorney General and only the second Black woman elected to the US Senate. As a presidential candidate, she was highly qualified, having held two statewide positions as the California Attorney General and US Senator in addition to her service as vice president (Bauer Reference Bauer2020). Despite her qualifications, she experienced blatant misogynoir (Bailey Reference Bailey2021), or the distinct combination of racism and sexism directed at Black women. For instance, right-wing pundits accused her of “sleeping her way to the top” (Goldberg Reference Goldberg2024), activating the Jezebel stereotype that depicts Black women as hypersexualized (Collins Reference Collins2000, 81). Her opponent also accused Harris of “switching” her identity to be Black when it was politically convenient (Lemi 2024) — an invocation of the tragic mulatto stereotype in which a mixed-race Black woman struggles with her place in the world, another stereotype closely related to the Jezebel stereotype (Joseph Reference Joseph2012, 12). Harris had to overcome significant barriers to even make it to the national political stage. As a presidential candidate, however, Harris stood to inherit the power of an institution that represents oppression worldwide. Harris represented both progress for many Americans and the upholding of the violent status quo. My point is not new. Others have made similar critiques regarding Hillary Clinton’s brand of feminism and Barack Obama’s “kinder, gentler, empire” (Eisenstein Reference Eisenstein2016; Weiss Reference Weiss2010-11). Both were historical firsts and descriptive representatives who ultimately chose positions that required loyalty to the empire and active participation in the suffering of the Global South. Scholars of gender and representation should address this tension with nuance, for all the reasons I have outlined above.
The Path Forward
In closing, there are a few research questions that scholars of gender and representation might consider moving forward. For example, when do legislators act as identity representatives? Are certain genders more likely to act as identity representatives than others (Murib Reference Murib2024)? Which groups are more likely to act in solidarity with decolonizing movements? How do identity representatives express solidarity with colonized peoples around the world? By engaging these questions, scholars can push the study of gender and representation forward and thoughtfully interrogate what it would mean if a woman of color led the American empire.