What Christine Blasey Ford reveals about womanhood
Extraordinarily competent but also modest, polite and visibly nervous in the face of male authority: Dr Ford was a palatable vision of being a woman
Dr Christine Blasey Ford’s testimony before the Senate judiciary committee was emotional. Her voice cracked, and more than once she seemed to be holding back tears. Wearing a blue suit, as Anita Hill did when she testified before that same committee in 1991 – before three of the same male Republican senators – her eyes were magnified by a pair of large glasses. She looked terrified even before she said she was.
In a tellingly feminine posture, she seemed eager to accommodate and to please, even before the Republican senators whose objective at the hearing was to discredit her. She repeatedly stated that she wanted to be helpful, offered to do whatever would be helpful, expressed wishes that she could be more helpful. She repeatedly apologized for not being able to provide pieces of information to the committee – information that often could have been provided by Mark Judge, or any of the other witnesses that Republicans refuse to allow to testify. At the beginning of the hearing, in an apparent attempt to ease the mood, she made a small joke about needing a cup of coffee. She laughed nervously when Senator Chuck Grassley, the Republican chair of the committee, replied that no one made his coffee right.
Ford’s vulnerability was contrasted with her competence. She calmly responded to repetitive factual queries, even when the lines of questioning by Rachel Mitchell, the female prosecutor hired by Republicans to put a gentle, feminine sheen on their skepticism toward Ford, veered into the insulting and preposterous.
Ford answered questions about whether she had been sufficiently traumatized by her assault, about who paid for the polygraph test that she passed and about whether she was really afraid of flying. Ford, who holds a psychology PhD, effectively served as an expert witness on the psychological impact of her own assault, and provided a remedial education to the senators on the committee in brain chemistry, memory formation and trauma response.
It would be reasonable for her to yell – and it speaks volumes that she didn’t
She dispatched with a bizarre theory posited by Republicans that it was not Brett Kavanaugh who assaulted her, but some sort of evil twin or doppelganger who Ford had mistaken for the judge. She was “100%” sure of who attacked her, she said, and it was Brett Kavanaugh. It was hard not to believe her. Many speculated that while the public in 1991 came to dislike professor Hill, Ford’s testimony would be met with sympathy.
Crucially, Ford is white. As the preliminary comparisons to Hill’s testimony emerged, many commented on how Ford’s nervous vulnerability contrasted with Hill’s self-possession, poise and palpable irritation at the condescending and contemptuous treatment that she received from members of the judiciary committee. Ford does not face the double bind that Hill did of navigating the racist and sexist attitudes of her interrogators and the public at the same time.
As a white woman, Ford has access to wells of public sympathy that Hill did not. Ours is still a world, as it was in 1991, in which black women’s vulnerability is read as a sign not of credibility but of a lack of intelligence; where their competence is read not as a mark of professional achievement but as coldness or pretension; and where they are met, from the time they are very young girls, with a culture that assumes them to be hypersexual and undeserving of protection. It is yet to be seen whether Ford’s testimony will be more politically impactful than Hill’s was. If it is, the specific forms of racist misogyny that punish black women will be part of why.
Before Ford’s testimony was even over, reports emerged that conservatives were distressed by how credible and sympathetic she appeared. The Fox News host Chris Wallace declared her testimony a “disaster” for the Republicans. Part of why Ford seemed so credible and so empathetic was that she seemed to embody a very popular performance of femininity. Extraordinarily competent but also modest, deferential, solicitous, polite and visibly nervous in the face of male authority, Ford was a vision of womanhood that our culture finds more palatable than the angry, strident or frustrated affect that the #MeToo movement has sometimes been characterized as having.
It is crucial that Ford never seemed angry. Even when the questions that Mitchell parlayed to her from the Republican senators were convoluted, condescending or ridiculous, she expressed at most a kind of accommodating confusion – never irritation, exhaustion or impatience. This was strategically smart: women’s anger is still frequently punished, ridiculed or taken as a sign of their lack of credibility.
But political wisdom of this stance undercuts the fact that rage, for Ford, would be an entirely justified emotion. The man she says assaulted her is poised to become one of the most powerful people in the nation, poised to gain the power that Republicans hope he will use to take a different kind of bodily autonomy from millions of women. In hopes that it won’t be he who does this, she has had to make a spectacle of her pain for national consumption, with the full understanding that many of the senators witnessing her pain would vote to confirm Kavanaugh anyway. It would be reasonable for her to yell – and it speaks volumes that she didn’t.
Moira Donegan is a writer living in New York. Her work has appeared in n+1, the London Review of Books, Bookforum and the Paris Review
