And Roxie–great point. I must admit that I didn’t give a second thought to posting photos of the t-shirts and bumper sticker. I wanted to show some examples of the ugly discourse, but because they were mostly done with langugage rather than graphic imagery, they didn’t trip my wire the way the lynching image of Michelle Obama did. Also, the graphic use and display of lynched bodies and photos of lynching victims has an especially ugly recent history in the late 19th and 20th centuries. If the t-shirts and other anti-Hillary products had shown her tied up in lingerie, or hung up by a meat hook, I likely would have made a different call.

However, it’s interesting to me that as ugly as the nutcracker and these t-shirts and other products are in their Hillary hatred, they don’t depict her body being subjected to sexual exploitation and/or lethal violence. (There are no images of Hillary strung up or being victimized by a killer, for example.) For the most part, even these ugly depictions of Hillary focus on her face alone (although there may be some exceptions I’m unaware of). But, no such deference or restraint (if that’s what it is) is shown when depicting an African American woman’s body. And of course, there’s an even longer history of white people and the white-dominated media depicting African and African American bodies in ways that they never would show European or Euro-American bodies.

You’re giving me an idea for a new post, Roxie, about the different rules for depicting black bodies versus white bodies in the colonial American and early national U.S. media…

What I’m not sure I understand is the connection between, on the one hand, rhetoric/statements in the media/T-Shirts, and, on the other, the workplace bullying. These would seem to function in different ways in very different contexts. I’m thinking here of the physical presence of the bully but also other dynamics. I would even venture that the type of academic bullying you have described is different than how that might emerge in other workplace scenarios.

She’s an extremely intelligent, independent, successful, strong woman who is completely at home in the public sphere. If this were Early Modern Europe, she would have been burned at the stake long ago. After all, we can’t have all our women acting this way. The nutcracker is actually a warning to other women that such behaviour isn’t acceptable by society.

My take on the 1968 reference is that it’s one she’s made before, so the outrage now seems particularly hollow and manufactured. Now that it’s almost June, she probably should have been more thoughtful, but as you point out, Bobby Kennedy Jr. has come out in her defense. (Actually, the RFK side of the family has endorsed her–RFK Jr., Kathleen Kennedy Townsend. it’s the EMK and Caroline Schlossberg side that has gone for Obama.)