In/visibly different: Melania Trump and the othering of Eastern European women in US culture

Abstract

This article offers a “feminist critical discourse analysis” of the Saturday Night Live sketch “Melanianade.” It argues that the comical video reinforces and essentializes negative stereotypes of Eastern European women to depict Melania Trump, seeking to delegitimize white hegemonic masculinity and female complicity. The fictitious Melania Trump’s appearance needs to be understood in her co-construction with her white hegemonic husband and otherwise racialized women in the comedy sketch. These women are the African-American women of Beyoncé’s video “Sorry,” which “Melanianade” copies/satirizes. “Sorry” represents Black female US-American experience, and was broadly understood as Black feminist art/activism. Taking Beyoncé’s place in the video, the fictitious Melania Trump is co-constructed to the absent black feminist bodies as white non-feminist Eastern European Other. Using Beyoncé’s video as a template, “Melanianade” re-affirms a discourse of Otherness that re-establishes the enlightened and emancipated educated (white) feminist American non-immigrant woman as norm, while it also whitewashes the Black American experience, which “Sorry” stands for.