Ivanka Trump is at it again. Since she entered The White House as a senior advisor to her father, President Donald Trump, Ivanka has tried to create an image of herself as an advocate for women’s equality. According to Fortune, Ivanka’s “feminist” resume includes “a World Bank fund to help drive women’s entrepreneurship and advocating for the Women’s Entrepreneurship and Economic Empowerment Act.”
However, these gestures in the name of women’s equality do not earn her any brownie points from her father’s opponents. The anger stoked against Ivanka is rooted in all the things she has not done, which is, namely, speaking out against her father’s sexist remarks and policies. Clouding any seemingly progressive policies Ivanka touts is the question “how can someone call themselves an advocate for equality but remain silent when their own flesh and blood is actively working to undo that progress?”
This issue arose in a recent interview with ABC, where the reporter asked Ivanka about her reaction to her father’s family separation policy. In her response, Ivanka equated her silence with professionalism, saying “my job in this administration is not to share my viewpoints when they diverge.” She went on to shirk any responsibility to speak out on behalf of women, with the excuse “My role in this government is not president of all women’s issues or running all women’s issues across the United States government.”
Ironically and, perhaps unsurprisingly, the new initiative that Ivanka spoke about in her interview with ABC captured a microcosm of the larger dissonance that exists between her and the Trump administration.
This initiative, which Fortune reports is called The Women’s Global Development and Prosperity Initiative, is supposedly a government-wide effort to empower 50 million women in the developing world by 2025. The twist is that funding for the initiative will come from USAID, the agency which the Trump Administration repeatedly tried to cut the funding of.
Photos from “Ivanka Vacuuming,” a 17-day performance art piece by Jennifer Rubell in downtown D.C. https://t.co/d2afg6zmsh pic.twitter.com/qbK71ZgJ5N
— Hunter Schwarz (@hunterschwarz) February 4, 2019
Public frustration with Ivanka has made for some excellent pop culture moments, including one SNL skit which featured Scarlett Johansson as Ivanka hawking a new perfume called ‘complicit.’ More recently an art installation was put up in CulturalDC’s mobile art gallery called ‘Ivanka Vacuuming’ by Jennifer Rubell. CNN reports that the piece features an Ivanka look-alike model vacuuming a pink fuschia carpet while visitors throw crumbs at her feet.
Though the artist’s statement, as reported by Trib Live, calls for participants in the installation to think more critically about the ways Ivanka is viewed in the media and the cultural zeitgeist —as “a figure whose public persona incorporates an almost comically wide range of feminine identities — daughter, wife, mother, sister, model, working woman, blonde” — and to consider how her perfomance of those identities (and others’ performance of critiquing them) affect larger conversations about femininity, feminism and systemic opprression of women.
“Here is what’s complicated: We enjoy throwing the crumbs for Ivanka to vacuum. That is the icky truth at the center of the work. It’s funny, it’s pleasurable, it makes us feel powerful, and we want to do it more,” Rubell said. “Also, we know she’ll keep vacuuming whether we do it or not, so it’s not really our fault, right?”
Ivanka slammed the installation for being “sexist.” And while she may have a point, depending on how you view the piece, I feel like I can say that, in her infinite complicity, she is certainly not one to talk.