‘The times will suit me’, John Howard proclaimed some months after he won the leadership of the Liberal Party in 1985. He was convinced that Labor’s attempt to reconstruct the economy through an agreement with trade unions was doomed to fail, and expected a mounting crisis of national solvency that would turn voters to a statesman prepared, like Reagan or Thatcher, to apply the same reforming vigour to the labour market. On regaining the Liberal leadership a decade later, Howard played on the hardship inflicted by the recent recession: ‘The Australian people cannot understand why they should have to suffer the indignity, the denial and disappointment of a bare five minutes of economic sunlight’. Over the past decade, as one prime minister after another has had to introduce herself or himself to counterparts at international gatherings, Australia has gained the reputation of ‘the coup capital of the democratic world’. Each change of leadership is dressed up in policy differences that fail to hide the personal nature of the rivalry and the fickle loyalties of parliamentarians who switch their support according to calculations of the best chance of electoral success.

In this second set of case study I examine the performances and representation of Julia Gillard (Australian Prime Minister 2010–2013) and Hillary Clinton (democratic presidential candidate, 2016 US election). I start by analysing adversarial language and sexism in Julia Gillard’s parliamentary performances in the Australian House of Representatives. These highly adversarial exchanges with Tony Abbott are extremely confrontational and adversarial. As with Theresa May, this discussion is developed into an analysis of a critical gendered moments when Gillard delivered her famous ‘sexism and misogyny speech’, which was followed by gendered media representations of the performance, and accusations that she ‘played the gender card’. Secondly, the case study of Hillary Clinton analyses critical gendered moments in the US televised debates against Donald Trump in 2016. Clinton is found to have performed well against Trump, given that she is positioned in gendered ways in relation to his sexist discourses. However, her political success is identified as resting on her ability to negotiate a tightrope of double binds – for example emotionality vs toughness – which mean that she is constantly attending to and negotiating her femininity in terms of both her appearance and her behaviour.