Such a nasty woman,” Republican candidate Donald J. Trump muttered under his breath about Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton during the third presidential debate on October 19, 2016. Earlier in the evening, when speaking about his proposal for a wall along the US-Mexico border, he said, “we have some bad hombres here and we are going to get them out.” Within minutes, a #BadHombre Twitter hashtag had been created, and the next day, T-shirts and mugs with “Nasty Woman” and “Bad Hombre” were for sale online. Those two phrases were recognized immediately not only as derogatory terms, but as phrases whose rhetorical force rests upon deep-seated cultural conventions and stereotypes that have aimed to relegate women and Latinos to subordinate positions within the US social body.

Hillary Clinton was a “nasty woman” because she transgressed cultural expectations of submissive femininity. And when Trump spoke of “bad hombres” he invoked stereotypes of Mexican criminality enshrined in Hollywood Westerns from as early as Broncho Billy and the Greaser in 1914. That's why these two phrases form the title of this book: together they illustrate how gender and racial politics were at the center of the 2016 United States presidential contest between Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton. Multiple factors contributed to the outcome of the election, which will be addressed in other scholarship, yet because gender and race electrified campaign rhetoric and behavior from the outset, this book examines how they were invoked and performed throughout the campaign season.

This book is concerned both with history and the historical imagination. Historical chapters trace how certain gendered and racialized policies, behaviors, and ways of speaking relevant to the election developed over time. Yet we are also interested in the “historical imagination,” which refers to how people engage with the past, including the stories they tell about it and intentional actions coordinated around its symbols and artifacts. The election was often called “historic” because it was the first time a woman received the nomination from a major political party for the office of the presidency. Yet the election was also historical in the sense that it stimulated profound national introspection and reflection on the nation's past, as well as its composition and values.