The photograph that has best summed up the feminist political moment is Alex Ellinghausen’s portrait of Australian politician Julia Banks.

She’s in navy, and seated in the pale green chamber of the Australian House of Representatives. There are five men in the photograph positioned around her, standing, walking, in the process of conversation. They ignore Banks, they are white, they wear suits, they are indistinguishable.

Alex Ellinghausen (@ellinghausen) Julia Banks is joined by the crossbenchers after standing in the House of Representatives to resign from the Liberal party because of the treatment of women and disunity over energy and climate change pic.twitter.com/hhdiK72wn8

That day, Banks announced she was leaving the Liberals to become an independent.

Play Video 2:26 Julia Banks quits Liberal party to serve as independent – video

It was an understandable progression – and one the member for Chisholm herself has detailed with some ferocity. In August, Banks spoke out as one of several women among the Liberals’ already thin ranks of female representation as “bullied, pressured and intimidated” by a gang of male MPs amid her party’s most recent leadership coup. In her resignation speech this week, she narrated a familiar story of what had followed.

Julie Bishop praises Julia Banks and says parties need 50% female representation Read more

“Often, when good women call out or are subject to bad behaviour, the reprisals, backlash and commentary portrays them as the bad ones – the liar, the troublemaker, the emotionally unstable or weak, or someone who should be silenced,” Banks said of the limited characters available for outspoken political women to play. Crooked Hillary, indeed.

Resigning from the Liberals to sit on the crossbench, Banks has further reduced the embattled Liberals’ status in a minority government. One wonders if her announcement would have received the same attention if it had been merely moral condemnation, rather than a mallet struck into the pillars of institutional power.

A dogged, exhausting, decades-long campaign waged by Labor’s feminist membership has resulted in quota systems for female representation that the Liberals resist.

But as recent weeks have shown, it is yet the ongoing fate of women to be diminished, stereotyped and objectified in the shared public discourse of politics.

They’re not standards reserved to right, to left, to the present moment or to just our local politics. To understand why they persist, cultural critic Lili Loofbourow may have nailed an explanation in her consideration of the role gender plays in apportion of artistic renown. Writing for this publication, Loofbourow explored the terminology of film theory in order to posit why women’s creative achievements remain undervalued.

“The male glance is the opposite of the male gaze,” she wrote in March, “Rather than linger lovingly on the parts it wants most to penetrate, it looks, assumes and moves on. It is, above all else, quick. Under its influence, we rejoice in our distant diagnostic speed. It feeds an inchoate, almost erotic hunger to know without attending – to reject without taking the trouble of analytical labour.”

If the ingrained, inherited cultural habit is to appreciate women as objects for erotic consumption, or reject and dismiss their value on this basis, it would be naive to believe application of this judgment is somehow excised from the political arena. Unambiguously, women do not enter politics to perform anything like a traditional erotic role, and their visibly de-eroticised presence in the halls of power represents a challenge to the prevailing order that those who feel displaced most certainly perceive as hostile. Gendered cultural logic follows that women with power will be “glanced at”, objectified, negatively assessed and devalued as a result.

Why else would there be such an unnatural obsessions with New Zealand prime minister Jacinda Ardern’s teeth? The powerful and influential leader of our Pacific neighbour who ascended to government through negotiation and skill could not return from a high-level diplomatic dinner to discuss steel tariffs with American vice president Mike Pence without attention drawn to her mouth. The Australian’s Nick Cater considers them “ostentatious”, as if his opinion in any way is supposed to matter. Ten thousand people diminished this woman tooth-first in a dedicated Facebook group before it was shut down.

Conservatives are terrified of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. And so they should be | Arwa Mahdawi Read more

Consider also the creepy fascination in newly minted US congressional representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s clothing of choice, the stalkerish photos taken behind her in her place of work, ostensibly to shame the price-tag of her tastes. “If I walked into Congress wearing a sack, they would laugh & take a picture of my backside,” she observed of the media storm. “If I walk in with my best sale-rack clothes, they laugh & take a picture of my backside.”

Even the warmongering conservative heroine, Margaret Thatcher, was not spared stereotypes and objectification. She was the “Iron Lady”, and something less than human even at her most frail. When she died, her enemies sang “Ding dong, the witch is dead”.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Former Liberal deputy leader Julie Bishop donates her red high-heel shoes to the Australian Museum of Democracy at Old Parliament House in Canberra. Photograph: Mick Tsikas/AAP

As Julia Banks was photographed in the embrace of the centre-right female independents she has joined on the crossbench, her former Liberal colleague, Julie Bishop, donated the red shoes she wore on her last day as foreign affairs minister, a position from which the once aspirant-PM resigned in the days of the coup.

Bishop has never been one for admitting to feminism, but it’s hard not to stare at her “work boots” and think she may indeed be on top of the theory.