Ann Coulter: A Post-Modern Feminist?

In an interview with Bill O'Reilly, Ann Coulter pronounced, "I'm more of a man than any liberal." Now, I'm sure Coulter would be the last women in the world to claim allegiance to feminist post-modernism, but her pithy statement reflects beautifully a key concept in post-modernist thought. This thought is the idea that gender is a socially constructed concept. What this means, in more simple terms, is that what we think of as "masculine" and "feminine"--as male and female--has as much do with societal norms and values as it does with supposedly fixed biological categories. Ann Coulter is "more of man than any liberal" because, supposedly, she personifies masculine traits: she's aggessive, tough, rational, and so on. She is telling us that women who embrace such traits are, for all intents and purposes, men. On the other hand, men who adopt supposedly feminine traits cease being "true men" and become something else, something less than men.

Note, though, a clear implication of Coulter's statement, which is that maleness is "naturally" superior to femaleness, that feminine traits are essentially undesirable and inferior. So, Coulter, after all, isn't a feminist, nor is she a post-modernist. For she essentializes "maleness": she tells us that maleness can only be defined, understood or interpreted as a binary opposition to femaleness and, that by definition, maleness is superior to femaleness, at least in the world of politics.