In 2010s Citizens United, the Supreme Court held that corporations do indeed have a right to freedom of speech, just as regular citizens do, and that the government could not restrict expenditures based on an entity’s corporate identity. Citizens United thereby allowed corporate donations to flood into elections. In her feminist judgement, Carliss Chatman breaks with the original opinion and refuses to extend the political speech rights of individuals to corporations. She grounds her analysis in the injustice of affording full personhood rights to corporations – which are artificial persons – even as natural persons like women and minorities have historically not enjoyed such rights and continue to suffer inequality. Amy Sepinwall’s commentary situates and contextualizes the feminist judgment, and then questions a key premise. She suggests an alternate feminist approach focusing on the right of the listener to hear from all perspectives, rather than having one side use spending to dominate – and drown out – other voices.

In this second set of case study I examine the performances and representation of Julia Gillard (Australian Prime Minister 2010–2013) and Hillary Clinton (democratic presidential candidate, 2016 US election). I start by analysing adversarial language and sexism in Julia Gillard’s parliamentary performances in the Australian House of Representatives. These highly adversarial exchanges with Tony Abbott are extremely confrontational and adversarial. As with Theresa May, this discussion is developed into an analysis of a critical gendered moments when Gillard delivered her famous ‘sexism and misogyny speech’, which was followed by gendered media representations of the performance, and accusations that she ‘played the gender card’. Secondly, the case study of Hillary Clinton analyses critical gendered moments in the US televised debates against Donald Trump in 2016. Clinton is found to have performed well against Trump, given that she is positioned in gendered ways in relation to his sexist discourses. However, her political success is identified as resting on her ability to negotiate a tightrope of double binds – for example emotionality vs toughness – which mean that she is constantly attending to and negotiating her femininity in terms of both her appearance and her behaviour.