Description
Can something as dry as trade policy ever be seductive? Ever since US President Reagan argued that the United States must learn from the 1930 Smoot-Hawley tariff and never again succumb to the “siren song of protectionism,” pro-free trade US presidents and policymakers have consistently framed tariffs as a “temptation” to be avoided. By contrast, President Trump bashed FTAs by arguing that they had resulted in the economic “rape” of the country. To explain the surprising use of these lurid sexual metaphors in a field as technical as international trade, I examine the ways in which masculinity and historical metaphor operate in trade speeches from the beginning of the 1981-2021. Through a close reading of presidential speeches on trade, I explore two dominant images of masculinity that emerge: one of the disciplined and chaste man determined to stay the course of trade liberalization and another of the authoritative father figure dedicated to protecting the (feminized) nation from threatening outsiders. I situate these findings within the literatures on the “libidinal economy,” gender and international politics, and more mainstream IPE work on the sources of trade policy preferences and suggest that exploring the role that masculinity and gender play in trade debates can enrich existing literatures on the subject.
