The Trouble with "SUFFS"
Hillary Rodham Clinton's Feminism and Why It Won't Save Democracy
Last night, Hillary Rodham Clinton and Lin-Manuel Miranda presented a performance of “SUFFS: The Musical,” which Clinton co-produced with Malala Yousafzai. Ticket prices for last night ranged from $500 to $5,000 for the evening of theater that was described as helping “save democracy.”
Introducing the show Lin-Manuel Miranda said to the cast and audience, “You’re doing good and helping save American democracy while you’re doing that. Thanks for being a part of tonight, and now I get to introduce another chapter in this story: Hillary Rodham Clinton.” When Clinton took to the stage, she reiterated the message, saying “So thank you all for being here. Thank you for supporting this amazing show. Thank you, as Lin said, for supporting our democracy.”
As I’ve been writing here this week, the musical is mediocre at best and it uses colorblind casting to disguise the whiteness of the partial story it tells. Despite this, “SUFFS” aspires to be the white feminist “Hamilton,” by narrating an especially myopic version of history. The show disrespects the Black feminist icons, Ida B. Wells-Barnett and Mary Church Terrell, by configuring them as feminist killjoys for bringing down the vibe of the white suffragists, and it further diminishes Wells-Barnett by never using her married name and referring to her as a “lynching rights activist,” (more lynching rights! hashtag keep fighting, I guess). Rather than saving democracy, “SUFFS” is doing real harm as a revanchist project meant to reclaim white feminism after the uprisings of 2020. In 2024, in the midst of a livestreamed genocide funded by the Biden administration, this musical will no more “save democracy” than the Daughters of the Confederacy saved the south after the Civil War. However, the musical is trying to do something similar by trying to reclaim a narrative about white, liberal feminism and by extension, Western imperialism.
White Feminism for the Carceral State
“SUFFS” is another variation on the fantasies we tell ourselves about what it means to be a white woman and a white feminist. In this way, it’s like so many other creations, such as the long-running “Law & Order” franchise that features white women as detectives and Assistant District Attorneys, doing the work of the carceral state. By “the carceral state,” I mean the whole apparatus of policing, courts, jails and prisons that Michelle Alexander called The New Jim Crow. This system was conceived, championed and built by white liberals, many of them white feminists.
In 1994, the Bill Clinton administration passed the Violent Crime and Law Enforcement Act, which is the single piece of legislation that fed the mass incarceration crisis. In a 1996 speech defending the bill at Keene College in New Hamsphire, Hillary Rodham Clinton said that it was needed because these are:
“no longer gangs of kids, these are super-predators with no conscience, no empathy and we can talk about how they ended up that way but first we have to bring them to heel.”
This myth of the “super-predator” - akin to the tropes about Black men used to justify lynching that Ida B. Wells-Barnett called out as “thread-bare lies” — did irreparable harm to a generation of young people, most of them Black and Brown, and established the U.S. as the world’s leader in locking people up. This is what Hillary’s white feminism looks like as a matter of policy:
The reality is that most white people are fine with this. Indeed, telling white people that the prison system is racist simply makes us like it more. So it is not surprising that few white people have ever confronted Hillary about these policies and that her record on this wasn’t considered disqualifying for a presidential bid, but young people racialized as Black and thus subject to these policies recognize them for what they are and have called her out.
During Clinton’s 2016 run for the presidency, Ashley Williams, a young, Black activist from Charleston, South Carolina, confronted her at a campaign event, and said, “I'm not a ‘super-predator,’ Hillary Clinton. Can you apologize to Black people for mass incarceration?” Williams also held a sign that read, “We have to bring them to heel.”
For her part, Clinton did later say she regretted her 1996 remarks but did not disavow the legislation nor did she take any responsibility for the decades of harm created by the 1994 Crime Bill. This is part of her legacy in U.S. domestic policy.
White Feminism is a War Machine
After her husband left office, Hillary Rodham Clinton was briefly the Democratic Senator from New York, then ran for president in 2008, when she lost to Barack Obama. From 2009 to 2013, she served as Secretary of State in the Obama administration. In that office, she created the Office of Global Women’s Issues, touted as part of her legacy as Secretary of State, which established a “new security paradigm.” Presumably, Clinton left the world more stable because she added women's force as indispensable to "smart power." In other words, those in the world of public policy have long advocated for an emphasis on the soft power of diplomacy rather than the hard power of things like war, Clinton’s contribution is to deploy women as the solution through “smart power,” i.e., the soft power of women in political office. It’s another way of saying, “If women ran things, we’d have fewer wars,” a favorite trope of white feminists.
Her tenure as Secretary of State was fictionalized in the television drama Madam Secretary (2014-2019), in which the blonde, angular Téa Leoni plays a woman managing geopolitics with the demands of being a wife and mother. Through the show, we learn that even though her job as Secretary of State requires that she order drone strikes to kill Brown people on the other side of the world, and she explains how conflicted and upset she is about this. She wears attractive pantsuits, engages in playful banter with her kind and handsome husband, and loves her kids. Despite the drones, she can’t be that bad. Téa Leoni’s character is, of course, an avatar for Hillary Rodham Clinton who was the secretary of state. Both the fictional character and the actual politician are part of a state apparatus that engages in necropolitics.
Necropolitics is literally the power to decide who will live and who will die. The term comes from theorist Achille Mbembe, a philosopher and political theorist from Cameroon who uses the idea of the “war machine” to characterize contemporary militias, both the kind sponsored by the state and those created in opposition to it. All contemporary political sovereignty is necropolitical, Mbembe argues; sometimes this is accomplished actively, through drone strikes or military invasion. Other times, it is done through a deadly level of neglect: people left to drown in New Orleans or die without protection from COVID-19 or children left in cages along the U.S. border.
This power to decide who lives or dies is a war machine. British sociologist Alison Phipps makes the connection between Mbembe’s necropolitics and white, imperial feminism when she writes that “white feminism is a kind of war machine.”
White feminism functions like a war machine in that it wants to accomplish feminist goals in and through the State. It’s part of why we can so easily see Téa Leoni/Hillary Clinton as a feminist heroine, because we have embraced a version of feminism that fits neatly with state power rather than challenges it. Phipps points out that this is distinct from other political movements, which mobilize against state power, such as Black Lives Matter. For such movements, inclusion by the State is seen clearly for what it is, a concession of the movement’s goals. For white feminism, and particularly white carceral feminism, harnessing the State in the service of (supposedly) feminist goals is a taken-for-granted, rarely questioned assumption. And it results in strange political projects like the proposed “feminist jail,” or for that matter, “SUFFS: The Musical.”
When white women seek mere equality with white men in wielding state power, they are signing up to be part of a war machine that works hand in glove with racial capitalism. It is the state apparatus that produces the genocide of Indigenous peoples, the enslavement of Africans, and drone strikes on Brown people around the globe. It is white, imperial feminism that provides the justification for it in liberal democracies.
In 2019, white women were the CEOs of three of the biggest US defense contractors—Northrop Grumman, Lockheed Martin, and General Dynamics. Do these CEOs think of themselves as feminist? Perhaps, perhaps not. But Phipps asks the more relevant questions here: “Whose bodies are forfeited when white women mobilize punitive state and institutional power to achieve [that power]? Who are the real casualties of the white feminist war machine?”
Shows like Madam Secretary and “SUFFS: The Musical,” try to make us feel better about the brutality of the state by dressing it up in a nice pantsuit or a suffragist’s sash. The costuming helps to reassure the intended audience that white women are only ever feminist heroines. Such performances encourage us to ignore the lives lost from Western imperialism, whether the 300,000 killed in the Iraq war or the 40,000 killed in Gaza.
What is Malala Doing There?
A recent CBS Sunday Morning segment about “SUFFS,” featured Nobel Peace Prize recipient, Malala Yousafzai, the Pakistani education activist who was shot by a religious extremist. Following that attack, she and her family relocated to the UK and she has become a public figure. Malala, known globally by her first name, is listed as a co-producer of the musical.
But why is Malala here on the “SUFFS” Instagram page? Enlisting women of color to endorse white-led campaigns is a reliable strategy to disguise the underlying political agenda. Take for example another white feminist project, Sheryl Sandberg’s initiative to cultivate leadership among young girls through her “Ban Bossy” campaign (now re-branded as “Lean In Girls.”) The images for the promotional campaign when it was launched in 2014 featured Sandberg flanked by Condoleezza Rice (former US secretary of state) and Anna Maria Chávez (CEO of the Girl Scouts of the USA). These successful women of color lend a powerful credibility to Sandberg’s brand of liberal feminism, much like predominantly white colleges and universities make sure to put photographs of the handful of Black or Brown students on the website. It’s a PR stunt meant to distract from the whiteness of the operation.
There is an even more insidious purpose that including Malala serves here, that links the musical back to Hillary Rodham Clinton’s legacy as Secretary of State and the “new security paradigm.” A Pakistani woman in a head scarf who was once attacked by a member of the Taliban, Malala’s story gets used by western feminists to represent all Muslim women.
In western media, Muslim women are represented as the victims of honor killings, disfigurement, and sensational abuse, but rarely as agents of change. The narrative about Muslim women as victims of religious extremism has given rise to a near consensus that Muslim women need to be rescued. This has proven to be catnip for white western feminists.
Anthropolgist Lila Abu-Lughod, who has been writing about Arab women for thirty years, challenges these assumptions in her 2015 book Do Muslim Women Need Saving? Abu-Lughod points out white feminism created the myth that Muslim men are inherently more violent than other men, a trope that rhymes with our national one about Black men.
The strategic inclusion of Malala as co-producer of “SUFFS” is another sleight of hand to distract audiences from the white, western Imperial feminism at the heart of this production.
Last night’s production-as-Democratic-fundraiser was meant to help “save democracy,” a truly naive gambit on the part of the Biden administration. At a moment in which 70% - SEVENTY PERCENT - of young people ages 18 to 34 oppose the Biden administration based on his policy in Gaza. On a stop at one of the late night talk shows to promote “SUFFS” and save democracy, when asked about peoples’ dissatisfaction with Biden and the other guy, Hillary Rodham Clinton said, “Those are the two candidates, get over yourself.”
What “SUFFS,” and Hillary and Malala are really doing is the political work of keeping the left in check. It is part of a larger political effort to squelch criticism of Biden and his funding of genocide, by focusing on white suburban women’s vote.
This is What Democracy Looks Like
When she exited the theater last night, Hillary Rodham Clinton was confronted outside by pro-Palestinian activists, who shouted “You call yourself a feminist? Women are dying in Gaza, you fucking coward!” (See the video on reporter Talia Jane Levin’s timeline.) These are not merely grouchy hecklers but part of a broader political effort to stop the genocide happening now in Gaza, including a heroic 125-day med strike by playwright Victor I. Cazares who was demanding the Theater Workshop call for a ceasefire.
To date, Hillary Rodham Clinton has been more concerned with the movie “Barbie” getting supposedly snubbed by the Oscars than she has about the ongoing genocide in Gaza, rejecting calls for a ceasefire. As a result, Clinton has been confronted, her public events disrupted, and her record challenged. This is what democracy looks like.