Shortly before the presidential election, the Washington Post released a videotape from 2005 in which Donald Trump described “grabbing [women] by the pussy.” Trump dismissed the exchange as “locker-room banter,” meaning a non-serious, not necessarily truthful and thus essentially harmless exchange of a kind that is common when men talk among themselves. This chapter analyzes this type of “banter,” among (presumptively) heterosexual men talking about sex, as a ritualized social practice which helps to maintain and reproduce a “fratriarchal” form of structural male dominance. The chapter also considers what the videotape adds to our understanding of Trump’s communication style and his speaking persona, along lines of class and masculinity. Vulgarity and “lewdness” are among the linguistic resources the wealthy Trump has deployed in his bid to be seen by less privileged Americans, especially disaffected White working-class men, as a “man of the people.” While the language he used on the tape may have damaged his prospects with some voters, it made him seem more appealing to others.

Chapter 7 examines the prominence of speech in the student revolts of the 1960s. The experience of speaking was extremely important to the students, a marker of a subjective transformation. However, speech was not always emancipatory. Practices of speech followed three modes: desacralisation, the demand for debate and provocation. Protest speech was characterised by vulgarity, jargon, informalisation and opacity. The deployment of speech occurred in unequal and gendered forms. Student assemblies were simultaneously democratic forums and arenas of intimidation and exclusion. The model of rational public debate with which the student movements often began failed and gave way to a model of provocation.

In the 1880s, the New York-based Century Magazine was a regular home for Henry James’s fiction and criticism. His first major intervention on the theory of fiction in the magazine is his July 1883 essay on Anthony Trollope (published over a year before Century printed his now canonical consideration ‘The Art of Fiction’). The essay represents, perhaps unsurprisingly, a highly nuanced view of the literary scene in which allegiances circle and return and reputations are diminished and then rebuilt. Trollope’s posthumously-published autobiography appeared three months after James’s essay and seemed to confirm many of the latter’s anxieties about the business of writing. This chapter explores James’s contorted reading of Trollope as a literary precursor who is both criticised for his immoderate, promiscuous productivity and, at the same time, recuperated as a moderate sensibility standing opposed to the scientific avant-gardism of the French naturalist tradition. By exploring the complex national allegiances of an American author writing in a proudly American journal about a recently-deceased, and highly popular, English novelist, I consider the ways in which James attempts to carve out for himself a transatlantic space where the metaphoric possibilities of moderation and its antonyms find a restless purchase.