Taking time between g-string changes to educate ourselves: Sinéad O’Connor,Miley Cyrus,and celebrity feminism

This article examines the feminist response to a 2013 online “feud” between singers Miley Cyrus and Sinéad O’Connor that began when Cyrus connected the video for her single “Wrecking Ball” to O’Connor’s video for “Nothing Compares 2 U.” O’Connor’s response criticised Cyrus’ sexualised image, and the exchanges that followed sparked debate among feminists over the limits of sexual “agency,” and the sexual politics of feminism. This took place within a wider media context that has seen an apparent increase in female celebrities explicitly identifying themselves as feminist. Critics of this “celebrity feminism” argue that the sexualised star systems of its proponents are at odds with the aims of feminist politics. This article draws on post-structuralist feminist theory to question the positioning of celebrity feminism as exterior to an imagined “feminist movement.” Using the Cyrus/O’Connor feud, I argue that such a binary potentially reaffirms the structures of power that feminism seeks to oppose, and ignores the ways celebrity culture and contemporary media practice might combine to produce new understandings of the field of feminism.     

Critical feminist hope: the encounter of neoliberalism and popular feminism in WWE 24: Women’s Evolution

Scholarship has pointed to contemporary feminism’s popularity and cultural “luminosity.” While this research has highlighted the limitations of feminist politics in a context of neoliberal individualism, this paper seeks to ask what possibilities for critiques and transformation of gender inequalities might be enabled by feminism’s visibility in neoliberalism. Using a framework of critical feminist hope, we highlight that capitalism’s embrace of feminism inarguably limits its political scope, but it may also open up opportunities for new forms of representation. To illustrate this, the paper analyses WWE 24: Women’s Evolution, a “brandcasting” documentary made to mark the rebrand of the sport entertainment promotion’s women’s division in 2016. While never naming it directly, the documentary draws heavily upon the signifiers of popular feminism. Although this mobilisation is often highly limited, a critically hopeful feminist reading allows us to move beyond dismissing this text as an example of feminism’s “co-optation” by neoliberalism. We highlight the documentary’s scathing critique of past failings in the representation and treatment of women performers, and, more importantly, the way feminism is used to make the case for corporate re-structure and change.     

“Exciting” and “borderline offensive”: bloggers,binaries, and celebrity feminism

Feminism is “cool” like never before in popular culture and celebrity feminism is arguably the most visible manifestation of this currently chic status. Some scholars and commentators see this as evidence of a global feminist resurgence; others critique it as empty and devoid of political traction. The hypervisibility of celebrity feminism makes it an ideal site to explore sense-making of contemporary feminism. Long-standing feminist debates about sexuality, intersectionality, and commodification cohere around the figure of the celebrity feminist, and are debated amongst media commentators, feminists, and celebrities themselves. We analyse blogs and comments sections as a particular site where meanings of celebrity feminism are constructed and contested in the everyday. Our analyses underline the operation of a good/bad binary that constituted celebrity feminism as “other” to an imagined authentic, politically engaged feminism, although consensus about what constitutes an authentic feminist was elusive. However, celebrities were not always positioned as “other,” with the recognition that celebrities share with all women the contradictions and demands of inhabiting a postfeminist media culture. Our findings emphasise the need for a nuanced approach to theorising and understanding celebrity feminism’s relationship with other feminisms and its implications for feminist practices and identifications.     

Riot Grrrls,Bitchsm, and pussy power: interview with Reyhan Şahin/Lady Bitch Ray

Abstract

Dr phil. Reyhan ?ahin—also known as Lady Bitch Ray—earned her M.A. in Linguistics, German Literature, and Education in 2004 and her doctorate in Linguistics in 2012 at the University of Bremen. Her alter ego, Lady Bitch Ray is a rapper, performer, fashion designer, and author. The following interview introduces ?ahin’s work as a performer and as an academic and sheds light on the negotiation of feminist politics in a neoliberal context as well as how the complex politics of difference play out in contemporary, digital feminisms in the German-speaking context. By speaking in two voices, the academic and the performer/artist, the interview emphasizes the playful possibilities of the urgently political.     

The communicative construction of FEMEN: naked protest in self-mediation and German media discourse

Abstract

In this article, we investigate how FEMEN employs female nudity to raise public attention in their mediatized strategies and how this form of naked protest is represented and interpreted in German media discourse. We will show that the significant media presence of FEMEN’s naked protest actions and its self-portrayal as the new feminism of our days have become increasingly ambivalent over time. As this is of great importance with regards to public perceptions of feminism, feminist activists, and feminist agency in general, our analysis provides a detailed investigation of the processes of appreciation and devaluation of FEMEN as an expression of contemporary feminists and feminism. Employing a qualitative discourse analysis, the article highlights the interwoven processes of contextualization and decontextualization in FEMEN’s self-mediation and news coverage in Germany. It is shown that FEMEN’s protests from 2008 to 2013 materialize in “local” actions, but are increasingly constructed and interpreted on a transcultural level. In this analysis, we identify the core interpretative scheme of decontextualization that becomes apparent in three forms of detachments. As we show, these forms of detachment are a core issue in the media’s devaluation and depolitization of FEMEN and feminism in general.     

Branding the self as an “authentic feminist”: negotiating feminist values in post-feminist digital cultural production

Freelancers who produce creative content online work in an increasingly precarious neoliberal economy, which requires self-branding, self-promotion, and constant audience engagement to succeed. Creating feminist content in a digital environment thus requires the negotiation of individual self-branding and promotional activities alongside the advancement of collective feminist politics. In this study, interviews with 11 feminist online writers reveal that they reconcile the individualistic undertakings required to succeed in the digital economy and their collective feminist values in three ways. Firstly, they incorporate “authentic feminism” into their personal branding endeavors; secondly, they redefine feminism to more closely match the values of post-feminism; and, thirdly, they advance peripheral collective goals in their creative communities. It is through these strategies that feminist values are negotiated and reworked, enabling producers to succeed as feminists in a digital economy that is more closely aligned with post-feminism.     

“Allow access to location?”: Digital feminist geographies

Abstract

This article looks at the impacts ongoing processes of digitization have on feminist politics of location. It argues that, rather than being borderless by nature, the digital has to be understood as producing different kinds of borders, demanding different kinds of politics of location. New potentialities arise with the challenge of creating a politics fitting to the current mode in which locations become slippery. Discussing the emergence of cyberfeminism in the early 1990s and a more recent example of digital feminism—the #SolitarityIsForWhiteWomen hashtag—this article thinks through the following questions: what does the “cyborg” as a posthuman (and postgender) category have to offer for those who have been (and are) excluded from the notion of the “human”? More specifically, how can we understand and conceptualize the “cyborg” beyond triumphalist narratives of being beyond difference?     

From #aufschrei to hatr.org: digital–material entanglements in the context of German digital feminist activisms

Abstract

This article delivers a snapshot of what digital feminisms can mean today. It argues that a commonality of current digital feminisms is a stance against digital dualism and that it is digital–material assemblages that shape certain forms of digital feminisms. In particular, two relatively recent examples of digital feminist activisms are analyzed, and I suggest ways of understanding the interplay of materialities within them: Germany’s Twitter campaign #aufschrei and the German anti-trolling website hatr.org. Finally, I suggest a typology of digital feminisms with varying degrees of digital–material entanglements.     

Schröder versus Schwarzer?

This article attempts to map the discursive terrain that marks contemporary engagements with feminism in Germany. In particular, the article explores a 2010 interview with Germany's family minister, Kristina Schröder, and its coverage in the media. Based on a discourse analysis, the article traces four discursive themes that characterise contemporary negotiations of feminism: a repudiation of the figure of the “feminist-as-lesbian”; a postfeminist sensibility; an individualist and neoliberal outlook; and a limited engagement with differences amongst women. By theorising these discursive strands, the article places the German context into wider debates. More specifically, it makes contributions to existing research by demonstrating how particular stereotypes—e.g., feminists are against heterosexual sex—attach to feminism through reiteration. In addition, it intervenes in current debates about gender politics by demonstrating how statements about “western” women's emancipation work in tandem with problematic discourses about “other,” allegedly oppressed women, to construct the western, autonomous, feminine subject.     

Living in Freedom and Hope: Editors' Introduction

Have radical discourses about children's sexual liberation/empowerment become normative technologies of neoliberal governmentality? How do we see sexualised representations of girls and what does the sexualised child look like? A contemporary consensus between media narratives and radical cultural critiques about the dangerous intolerance of child sexual abuse (CSA) moral panics suggests that the CSA moral panic discourse is caught up in the neoliberal “regulation of intolerance” (Brown 2006) through the governance of the gaze. Focusing on the 2008 Australian media event that erupted over Bill Henson's “art” photographs of naked girls, this article analyses how a perception that the images sexualised children was governed by experts as a reactionary and perverse CSA moral panic gaze. I argue that this form of governance depends on the exclusion of the political gaze of the survivor, a gaze that has been vital to a feminist critique of hetero-normative paedophilia. Re-claiming an affective feminist gaze involves thinking beyond the upwardly mobile discourse of CSA moral panic and through the occluded question of the sexual politics of paedophilia.     

White Feminist Stories

The last decade has witnessed an increased visibility of grassroots feminist activism in Britain. This article concerns the representation of such activism in the left-leaning newspaper The Guardian, and focuses on issues related to race and whiteness. Drawing on anti-racist critiques of “white feminism,” the article presents a close reading of three articles which have appeared in recent years. Combining a content and narrative analysis, the article unpicks underlying assumptions about British feminism, and identifies three specific narrative techniques which are problematic in relation to race. These construct contemporary feminist activism as: (1) a continuation of a white feminist legacy; (2) a unified movement of “like-minded” individuals; and (3) “diverse” and “happy.” Presented as common sense, these narratives erase power differences between women, as well as a multitude of feminist organising in Britain, including black British feminism. While anti-racist feminists repeatedly challenge such representations, including occasionally on The Guardian's own blog, this appears to have little effect on the dominant constructions of feminism in the more prominent news and feature articles. This resistance to change highlights the continued unequal power relations between white feminists and feminists of colour, and the persistence of whiteness in defining feminism within mainstream liberal media.     

“Come on, […] let’s go find your inner princess”: (post-)feminist generationalism in tween fairy tales

This article draws attention to the expansion of tween popular culture at the beginning of the twenty-first century, and in particular tween fairy tale films. It has two aims: first, to demonstrate how tween popular culture mediates feminism’s history; and second, to highlight the continued relevance of the terms “post-feminism” and “neoliberalism” at a time when confidence in their use is waning in feminist media studies. Importantly, it looks carefully at the relationship between these two discourses, and reveals that the figure of the tween princess emerges at the intersections of the two. By interrogating the dialogue between the onscreen maternal generations of feminism, represented in the female characters of teen princess, mother, step-mother, and grandmother/fairy godmother, this article reveals that the fairy tale narrative and the figure of the princess are employed to straightforwardly present feminism’s complicated history, and to put forward a post-feminist identity as the only “authentic” choice in this reflexive construction of a feminine self. The princesses are presented as neoliberal icons of post-feminist culture, representing the self as project.     

Performing the “quing of berlin”: transnational digital interfaces in queer feminist protest culture

Abstract

This paper employs the figure of the “interface” to explore the work of German feminist rapper and spoken-word performer Sookee (Nora Hantzsch), who constitutes an ideal case-study for examining the interface between digital technologies, transnational feminisms, and local activism. Sookee is an underground hip-hop artist and queer political activist in Berlin, a location which features in her work as a site of subcultural dissent and contested identities. Sookee is also an academic; a youth outreach worker; a significant online presence; and an international creative collaborator. As such, she navigates the interfaces between multiple social groups, media, discourses, and cultural contexts—regional, national, and transnational. This article focuses on the digital circulations of Sookee’s material against the backdrop of her local performative and activist work. Her transnational collaborations with women MCs and poets from South Africa and America, as well as Europe, celebrate cultural, linguistic, racial, and ethnic difference by bringing in a diverse range of feminist voices to the German context.     

“Out of place” bodies and gender: urban exclusion and emplacement as documentary method in My Own City

In this paper, I investigate Indian filmmaking that emerges from the encounter between urban experience and documentary practice to examine how Indian feminist critique responds to neoliberal discourses of urbanism and gender. I consider the analysis of urbanism in Sameera Jain’s documentary My Own City (2011) which depicts how women become “out of place” in neoliberal cities by focusing on the gendering of urban temporality, mobility and belonging, in relation to which women’s subjectivities and performances are mediated in the nation’s capital New Delhi. In the second section, I conceptualize the use of a deliberate strategy of place-specific performance in the film as “emplacement” which enables a visible field of gender performances and observable mutations of both, subject and space. In contrast to documentary staging or re-enactment, conceptualized as emplacement, the audiovisual recording of complex relations of “becoming” allows place-specific ecologies of material, sensory and social environments to be considered together in the construction of gender. Following the film, the paper outlines provocations regarding critical ways of conceptualizing place in how cultural forms like documentary represent gender in relation to geographies and environments.     

Spare Rib,Second-Wave Feminism and the Politics of Consumption

This article examines the significance of representations of both consumer culture and consumption practices in the British feminist magazine Spare Rib during its initial years of publication from 1972 to 1974. The analysis identifies how the magazine combined an established feminist critique of consumer culture with guidance on responsible consumption practices. The dispositions towards consumption that are recommended to readers are shaped by four key values: these are health, the natural, economy and craft production. These values underpin a politics of consumption during a period in which Spare Rib attempted to negotiate a feminist identity. However, once this feminist identity was established, content centred around consumption rapidly diminished as it was apparently not “feminist” enough. The article questions how a “conventional” position was established against both consumer culture and consumption practices within second-wave feminism and raises questions about the impact of this position on feminism's relationship to both consumer culture and consumption practices today.     

Pop,Porn, and Rebellious Speech

In Excitable Speech, Judith Butler contends that rebellious speech constitutes a “risk taken in response to being put at risk, a repetition in language that forces change.” With this in mind, this article examines the politics of employing and altering the language and imagery of “porn” in texts and multi-media performances of (post-)feminist (pop-)artists. The discussions about Elfriede Jelinek's novel Lust in the early 1990s exemplify the difficulties associated with transforming the language of pornography into rebellious feminist speech. The text received extensive media attention, but most critics felt ambivalent about Jelinek's attempt to create artificial, repetitious, pornographic speech and questioned the text's ability to foster any kind of “change.” At the beginning of the twenty-first century, the multi-media performances of Charlotte Roche and Reyhan Sahin aka Lady Bitch Ray again triggered discussions about feminism, pornography, body politics, and sexual expression. Their provocative pop-performances use multiple media outlets, TV, music, and electronic media. They are commercially successful and mainstream media understand them as challenging social conventions. This essay critically examines the politics of Jelinek's, Roche's, and Sahin's texts and performances and contextualizes the politics of their rebellious speech within discussions about social roles, gender, and sexuality.     

The quiver is full: metonymy and affiliation in 19 Kids and Counting’s depiction of pregnancy loss in advanced maternal age

Abstract

This investigation into the cultural dynamics of gendered, aging bodies attends to a mediated representation of what contemporary biomedicine defines as pregnancy in “advanced maternal age” (AMA). We offer a feminist rhetorical analysis of an episode of TLC’s 19 Kids and Counting entitled “A Duggar Loss,” where 45-year-old matriarch Michelle Duggar experiences pregnancy loss. In the episode, age is reconfigured in discussions of AMA pregnancy through a metonymic substitution and slippage of risk discourses, pre-natal self-care, and technological interaction. Moreover, “A Duggar Loss” mobilizes strategies of expansive affiliation around and through reproductive choice, which appears to align with feminist principles of reproductive autonomy despite the family’s ties to the Quiverfull Movement. This work contributes to feminist studies of aging bodies by suggesting that representations of advanced maternal age pregnancy remain a central, yet undertheorized subject in formulating powerful trans-ideological affiliations that can undermine progressive reproductive politics.     

“Hope in a hashtag”: the discursive activism of #WhyIStayed

Hashtag feminism, or feminist activism that unfolds through Twitter hashtags, has become a powerful tactic for fighting gender inequities around the world. Feminist media research, however, has yet to grasp the implications of this new form and social movement research has yet to model the conditions under which activists successfully mobilize online. This article builds on research regarding the potential and limitations of hashtag feminism to consider a question that remains understudied: what is the process through which a feminist hashtag develops into a highly visible protest? Through a case study of #WhyIStayed, which arose in response to a 2014 NFL domestic violence controversy, I frame hashtag feminism as an extension of the movement’s historically rooted discursive tactics. Hashtag feminism’s narrative form implies that the conditions for a successful online feminist protest parallel the elements of an effective dramatic performance. Using data collected from Twitter and news media, I identify the dramatic elements that propelled #WhyIStayed tweets from online personal expressions to online collective action.     

Editors' Introduction

For the professional middle class in information industries, “working from home” is an increasingly common feature of the employment landscape, resulting from the affordability and portability of information and communication technologies (ICTs). The phrase invokes a sense of freedom from the banality of the traditional office, offering flexibility in both working hours and location when other commitments prevail. In recent debates in Australian politics, working from home is also offered as an empowered choice for women who seek to combine paid work and childcare duties, thereby consecrating a preferable version of (post)feminist subjectivity suited to neoliberal economics and ideologies. This paper shows how these subjectivities have been represented in recent ICT advertising for two purposes: firstly, to highlight the role of mainstream media in normalising preferred uses of new media technology for work purposes; and secondly, to note how this process contributes to wider discourses limiting the aspirations of middle-class feminist politics to an individual level. In doing so, the paper seeks to question the ethical horizon of new media advertising as well as the feminist and labour politics upon which its appeal relies.     

Kübra Gümüşay,Muslim digital feminism and the politics of visuality in Germany

abstract

Muslim women’s digital activism exists in complexly racialized visual contexts. This is exemplified in the journalism and activism of Kübra Gümü?ay, who first gained public attention as the purportedly first “hijabi columnist” in Germany. This essay draws on her series “50 Thoughts” as an entry point into her digital activism. I suggest that Gümü?ay uses this series to reveal the larger visual dilemmas with which she engages. Her digital activism functions by taking the risk to both expose and reconfigure the very conditions under which she is visible and comprehensible to her publics. In particular, I consider her activism as using digital spaces for self-poiesis (an imaginative remaking of self) as well as teleopoiesis (an imaginative reaching out to the other). This latter move functions both to gesture to an anti-racist community as well as to alliances among multiple feminisms.