‘It’s what Emmeline Pankhurst would have wanted’: Celebrity Big Brother: Year of the Woman (2018, UK) and negotiations of popular feminism(s)

Feminist scholarship has invested attention in popular culture as a terrain upon which understandings of feminism are circulated, contested and explored. This is particularly so in the contemporary moment in which feminism appears to have achieved a new ascendency. But whilst popular culture and feminism are recognised as inextricably enmeshed, there remains the implicit or explicit assumption in feminist scholarship that popular media culture could do ‘better’, and that there is a more ‘authentic’ form of feminism waiting to find representation. In response to this context, this article undertakes an analysis of Twitter responses to Celebrity Big Brother: Year of the Woman (2018) in order to explore the ways in which a popular media text provides an arena for the negotiation of popular feminism. Rather than positioning reality TV and celebrity culture as a site of ‘ideological ruin’ for feminism, this article explores how CBB is discussed in relation to feminism as popular television, and the ways in which this may offer affordances and limitations. The article concludes that feminist media scholars need to give due attention to the complexities of popular feminism as articulated by popular media culture.     

Cindy Sherman in a New Millennium: Fashion,Feminism, Art and Ageing

ABSTRACT

If feminism and the fashion industry were once seen as adversaries, given how the strictures of Simone de Beauvoir in The Second Sex (1949) permeated so much of second wave feminism, a consideration of ‘fashion’ is now central to contemporary feminist scholarship. But just as the earlier critique of fashion seemed finally to have been supplanted, certain basic arguments around dress and makeup nevertheless resurfaced within contemporary feminism. The current neoliberal climate has led to the ever-increasing consumption of ‘fashionable’ goods, provoking unease and encouraging the contested ‘protectionist discourse’ within feminism to shield young women from just such excesses. Meanwhile, the fashion world itself, arguably more powerful than ever, has across the last twenty years continued a process of legitimising itself through its various modes of alliance with the art world; it has even hijacked elements of feminist practice in the pursuit of publicity. This article suggests that the fashion industry and contemporary feminism are nonetheless alike in one significant respect: neither have properly engaged with the needs of an ageing population. It is an omission that this article will seek to examine through a discussion of the recent ‘portraits‘ of Cindy Sherman, an artist of great interest to feminist scholars, in whose earlier work there was a discernible ‘anti-fashion’ element. Now ‘fashionable’ herself, a leading figure in the global art world, she has collaborated with the fashion industry in rather different ways. Her ‘portraits’ of 2012, in which she reconfigured herself as imaginary Manhattan socialites in or beyond middle age, and a later series, exhibited in 2016, where she appears as a series of ageing, anonymous ‘movie stars’, reveal more general ideological tensions surrounding the representation of women, the ageing process and the fashionable ideal. It is the dissection of these tensions that underpin this article, for while Sherman’s work has been the subject of academic debate across a forty year period, her use and critique of the ‘fashionable ‘ image has not been examined alongside an exploration of the expanding activities of the fashion industry itself; nor have her recent images of ageing women been examined within this more general context.     

Belly Casts and Placenta Pills: Refiguring Postmaternal Entrepreneurialism

ABSTRACT

This article takes at its starting point the idea that maternalism and entrepreneurialism are necessarily antithetical as Julie Stephens argues in Confronting Postmaternal Thinking: Feminism, Memory, and Care [2012. New York: Columbia University Press]. Building on scholarship which shows how motherhood has become commercialised and commodified in contemporary culture, we extend this field by investigating how mothers who are providers of services to other mothers and pregnant women are negotiating neoliberalism and entrepreneurialism. Through an empirical investigation of birth and parenting entrepreneurs – including hypnobirthing classes and placenta pill businesses – in Bristol, UK we argue that our self-employed participants were building community and care economies within neoliberal modes of self-production, thus suggesting a more complex and ambivalent relationship between entrepreneurialism and postmaternalism. We suggest that the experiences of women entrepreneurs or ‘mumpreneurs’ offer insights into how the spaces of work might be, counter to Stephens’ characterisation, places of negotiation and struggle for the politics of feminism, rather than sites of ‘anti-maternalism’ or the ‘forgetting’ of maternalism. Moreover, our participants’ accounts were strongly shaped by feminist ethics of care thus challenging the representation of such services as therapeutic postfeminist technologies of self-work.     

Feminism and the Third Way

This article argues that the ‘Third Way’, as the ideological rationale for the New Labour Government in the UK, attempts to resolve the tensions around women and social policy confronted by the present Government. The Third Way addresses ‘women’ without ‘feminism’, in particular those floating women voters for whom feminism holds little attraction. But affluent, middle England, corporate women, though central to the popular imagination of the Daily Mail, and thus to Tony Blair, are in practice a tiny minority. New Labour in office thus finds itself committed to reconciling the irreconcilable. It wants to see women as a social group move more fully into employment, and on this many feminists would agree. At the same time it wants to see through further transformations of the welfare state, along the lines set in motion by Mrs Thatcher. Inevitably this involves further cuts in spending and privatization of social insurance. The former principle is made more difficult by the latter policy. Recent feminist analysis indicates the scale of the needs of women to allow full and equal participation in work and in society.     

Feminism,imperialism and orientalism: the challenge of the ‘Indian woman’

Abstract

This article examines the content and process of imperialist discourse on the ‘Indian woman’ in the writings of two North American women, one writing at the time of ‘first wave’ feminism, the other a key exponent of the ‘second wave’ of the movement. By analysing these writings, it demonstrates how the content of the discourse was reproduced over time ith different but parallel effects in the changed political circumstances, in the first case producing the Western imperial powers as superior on the scale of civilisation, and in the second case producing Western women as the leaders of global feminism. It also identifies how the process of creating written images occurred within the context of each author's social relations with the subject, the reader and the other authors, showing how an orientalist discourse can be produced through the author's representation of the human subjects of whom she writes; how this discourse can be reproduced through the author's uncritical use of earlier writers; and how the discourse can be activated in the audience through the author's failure to challenge established cognitive structures in the reader.     

‘Atheism is not the problem. The problem is being a woman’. Atheist women and reasonable feminism

While the percentage of religiously unaffiliated women is growing in the West, little is known about the relationship between atheism and feminism. This article redresses the gap by exploring women’s identification with atheism and feminism. The central argument draws on qualitative interview data from the UK, Australia, the US and Poland and emphasizes the role of atheism as a background identity marker through which female subjectivity is enacted in everyday life. The findings are two-fold: first, atheism and feminism are both devalued identities when embraced by women; and second, identifying as an atheist affords the participants an impetus to invent a new vocabulary to account for their identity. In conclusion, I argue that atheism provides a catalyst for the post-feminist discourse of independence, empowerment and freedom of choice as the participants construct narratives of ‘reasonable feminism’.     

Beyond Repudiation: The Affective Instrumentalisation of Feminism in Girlfriendly Spaces

As a mediated sensibility, Gill, McRobbie and Angela have argued that postfeminism is held together by an incorporation of feminist ideas, in order to position feminism as ‘past’, a positioning which contributes to the production of highly individualised subjectivities. This article highlights an emerging modality of feminine subjectivity in which feminism is affectively incorporated, but, rather than being repudiated, it is deconstructed and instrumentalised to fit within norms of girlfriendship. To draw attention to how this discussion may open a more nuanced understanding of the relations between feminist and postfeminist subjectivity, I explore a set of blogs hosted on Tumblr that are situated within ‘girlfriend’ culture. In these blogs, young women articulate humorous reactions to everyday situations based on assumptions of common, feminine experience. I suggest that girlfriendliness, as an emerging normative condition of youthful femininity, constructs an instrumental relation to feminism requiring the discerning, selective performance of traits suggesting an acceptance of certain feminist ideas. Rather than proceeding to a repudiation of feminism per a classically postfeminist sensibility, feminism is dismantled into an affective plasticity that is flexibly incorporated to show individual value, creating ‘likeable’ and resilient femininities. This article draws attention to shifts in the regulation of femininity that occurs on the plane of the affective, calling for an expanded analytical approach that more broadly problematises the instrumentalisation of feminism as a technology of subjectivity.     

‘The Message Is in the Book’: What Virago's Sale in 1995 Means for Feminist Publishing

This article examines the UK publisher Virago, the world's largest women's imprint and the best known of the second-wave feminist publishing houses that sprang up during the 1970s and 1980s. Feminist publishing remains a peculiarly unacknowledged and underexamined aspect of feminist history, but one that had real influence and effect. This article gives a historical account of Virago, noting its intention to enact feminist politicking through the act of publishing books. The author looks at the effect Virago had on the industry more widely, on literary culture and on attitudes to women. The author also examines changing formulations of feminism and how these were reflected—or not—through Virago's published output. The author then moves on to her central proposition: that Virago's sale in 1995, rather than marking the death of feminist publishing (as was stated in media comment at the time), was in fact the point at which it was saved. Virago's move into Little, Brown, coinciding with the rise of an increasingly commodified consumer culture, the conglomeration of the book industry and more pluralized expressions of feminism, allowed it to continue to work as a publisher of women's writing while none of its contemporaries survived. The author looks in detail at the changes post-1995 within the book industry, within feminism and in wider culture, as well as at Virago. The author asks whether Virago still has value as a ‘feminist’ imprint and how it has sought to remain vital and relevant.     

Freethought,Free Love and Feminism: secularist debates on marriage and sexual morality,England c. 1850–1885

This article examines the previously unexplored current of Freethinking feminism in the second half of the nineteenth century. Active in the women’s movement of this period, Freethinking feminists were nonetheless viewed as a liability—an attitude that contributed to their exclusion from much of the subsequent historiography. Such marginalisation was due not only to their vocal opposition to all forms of religion, but also their openness to discussing new ways of organising heterosexual relationships. This article focuses on Freethinking feminist critiques of marriage and support for free unions. It demonstrates that these issues continued to be debated in the Secularist movement at a time when many other radical organisations—including much of the women’s movement—kept silent on such topics. In this way, Freethinking feminists kept alive the more radical and libertarian critiques of traditional sexual morality developed by Owenite feminists in the 1830s and 40s. The author argues that the ideology of Freethought propelled its adherents to readdress questions of sex within a new ‘Secularist’ ethical framework. Fierce debate ensued, yet commitment to freedom of discussion ensured that ‘unrespectable’, libertarian voices were never entirely silenced. Freethinking feminism might, then, be viewed as the ‘missing link’ between early nineteenth‐century feminist visions of greater sexual freedom and the more radical discussions of sexuality and free love that began to emerge at the fin de siècle.     

Whales and minnows: Some sexual theorists and their followers and how they contribute to making feminism invisible

Past feminism was made to vanish, so that only now are we beginning to realise the full extent of our history. The same process is already beginning to happen to present feminism—we too are being made invisible. One instance of this process is examined in the work of some ‘radical’ male academics. They use the work of various sexual theorists (Lacan, Gagnon and Simon, Foucault) to construct a particular and de-politicized version of ‘sexual politics’; and in doing so they recognize only an equally partial version of ‘feminism’. It seems that ‘our friends’, ‘radical’ men, are at least as dangerous as the rest, for they increasingly claim the right to ‘name’ feminism and sexual politics for us.     

Sisters in a Fashion: Martha Ansara and Elaine Welteroth

ABSTRACT

This article discusses Martha Ansara and Elaine Welteroth, two US born feminists who came to Australia during two key moments in feminist history, as a way of thinking about the relationship between feminists and fashion. Ansara arrived in Sydney in 1969 carrying women’s liberation literature in her suitcase; she became an important generative figure in the Australia’s women’s liberation movement, particularly as an independent filmmaker and proponent of consciousness raising. Welteroth arrived in 2017 to speak at the Sydney Writers’ Festival during a period of international resurgence of feminist activism. She brought with her images of women of colour she had featured in Teen Vogue and she invoked second wave consciousness raising, albeit in a remodelled, corporate-led form when she talked about the title’s plans to bring young girls around kitchen tables to ‘solve’ political problems. The article uses comments both women have made in relation to fashion and beauty, close readings of their works, and a discussion of their respective feminist milieus to suggest a trajectory of feminism’s relationship to the fashion industry that appears to have changed from a position of opposition to one of open embrace. It also complicates this reading by pointing to the resonances between these women of different feminist eras.     

WHERE ARE THE WOMEN IN MULTICULTURALISM?

Abstract This article discusses the need to re-imagine multiculturalism and feminism in order to better accommodate women in minority cultures who are religious. It begins and ends with comments about multiculturalism and ‘difference feminism’ in Australia. In the body of the paper I use anthropological field-work in Indonesia, first to show that culture and religion are not separate and immutable, and secondly to show how Muslim women in the women's movement in Indonesia are using Islam to build a multicultural discourse. Finally I apply my findings about Muslim women activists in multicultural discourse in Indonesia to multiculturalism in Australia.     

the reinvention of feminism in Pakistan

This article argues that there has been a significant turn in the discourse of feminist politics in the Islamic Republic of Pakistan. The author suggests that the rise of a new feminism – rooted in Islamic discourse, non-confrontational, privatized and personalized, whose objective is to ‘empower’ women within Islam – is not a post-9/11 development but rather a result of unresolved debates on the issue of religion within the progressive women's movement. It has been due to the accommodation of religion-based feminist arguments by the stronger secular feminist movement of the 1980s that paved the way for its own marginalization by giving feminist legitimacy to such voices. The author argues that the second wave of feminism may have become diluted in its effectiveness and support due to discriminatory religious laws, dictatorship, NGO-ization, fragmentation, co-option by the state and political parties in the same way as the global women's movement has. Yet it has been the internal inconsistency of the political strategies as well as the personal, Muslim identities of secular feminists that have allowed Islamic feminists to redefine the feminist agenda in Pakistan. This article voices the larger concern over the rise of a new generation of Islamic revivalist feminists who seek to rationalize all women's rights within the religious framework and render secular feminism irrelevant while framing the debate on women's rights exclusively around Islamic history, culture and tradition. The danger is that a debate such as this will be premised on a polarized ‘good’ vs ‘bad’ Muslim woman, such that women who abide by the liberal interpretation of theology will be pitted against those who follow a strict and literal interpretist mode and associate themselves with male religio-political discourse. This is only likely to produce a new, radicalized, religio-political feminism dominating Pakistan's political future.     

‘Memory Speaks from Today’: analyzing oral histories of female members of the MIR in Chile through the work of Luisa Passerini

This article engages the work of Luisa Passerini in order to analyze the oral histories of women who belonged to the Movimiento de Izquierda Revolucionaria (MIR) in Chile during the 1960s and 1970s. It argues that a theoretical framework that considers the interplay between memory, testimony, and gender as well as a transnational historical perspective can help explain how feminism and ‘new left’ groups emerged from the revolutionary 1968 context. Of primary concern is the manner in which certain gendered aspects of the MIR women's experiences—particularly the brutal sexualized political violence they endured at the hands of the state—have been historically silenced and also how, more recently, women's testimonials have helped to break that silence. Finally, the article proposes that feminism, both as a mode of critical thinking and as a social movement, will allow us to more fully ‘hear’ the testimonies of these women and to understand how their memories are ‘speaking from today.’     

Forging feminism within labor unions and the legacy of democracy movements in South Korea

Abstract

Although most scholarship stresses that ‘male regular worker-centeredness’ is a trait of mainstream Korean labor unions, the specific reasons why feminism has failed to spread within Korean unionism have not been clarified. In order to answer this question, this article focuses on the entangled interrelations of feminism with broader social movements, maintaining that the historical legacy of the victory of the 1987 Great Worker Struggle – led by male workers from the heavy and chemical industries – is still a powerful factor in discouraging the spread of feminism, even though a fundamental transformation in the nature of Korean labor unions from being primarily class conscious to economistic has taken place. This article also highlights that Korean women’s movements have raised little criticism against the gender-blindness of labor unionism largely because Korean labor unions have been positioned as a ‘moral force’ in bringing about democratization. Furthermore, I stress that conflict between old feminists (socialist feminism) and young feminists (radical feminism), who tend to reflect on the dichotomous relations between gender and/or class, has actually been counterproductive to the proliferation of feminism within Korean labor unions.     

Feminism and feminist movements in the middle east,a preliminary exploration: Turkey,Egypt, Algeria,People's Democratic Republic of Yemen

Feminism, including in particular such notions as women's right to equality and their right to control their own lives, is, with respect to the Middle East's current civilization at any rate, an idea that did not arise indigenously, but that came to the Middle Eastern societies from ‘outside’. To predict and direct the future of that idea, and therefore the future of women in the Middle East—if this is indeed at all possible—an understanding of the development of feminism in the Middle East is crucial, including its transformations transplanted to a Middle Eastern, predominantly Islamic environment, and its different interpretations in the locally different cultures of the Middle East. It swiftly becomes apparent, in considering the history of feminism in the Middle East, that two forces in particular within Middle Eastern societies modify—hampering or aiding—the progress of feminism. First there are attitudes within the particular society, and the culture's and the sub-culture's formulations, formal and informal, regarding women. Second and perhaps as important, are the society's attitudes and relationship to feminism's civilization of origin, the Western world. Since the late nineteenth century, when feminist ideas first began to gain currency in the Middle East, a Middle Eastern society's formal stand on the position of women has often been perhaps the most sensitive index of the society's attitude to the West—its openness to, or its rejection of Western civilization. Thus Turkey's attitude of openness to Western civilization at the beginning of this century (with which this study begins) was epitomized by the abolition of the veil. More recently, the veiling of women in Iran has constituted perhaps the chief index and deliberately chosen symbol of Iran's rejection of Western civilization. The present article is the first of a series in which I will be exploring aspects of feminism in the Middle East.     

Defining Female Subjectivities in Italy: motherhood and abortion in the individual and collective memories of the 1970s women's movement in Bologna

In Italy, women have long been stereotypically marked as either objects of sexual desire or as producers of new life. This changed radically in the 1970s, when second-wave feminism redefined gender relations and experimented with new paths of life not determined by matrimony and maternity. The legalisation of abortion, during the second half of the decade, is now hailed as one of the primary achievements of the women's movement. A theme closely connected to abortion such as motherhood, on the other hand, seems to have been excluded from the public memory of 1970s feminism. Drawing on the outcomes of an oral history project, this article unearths the dominant discourses and individual and collective silences within the public memory of the 1970s women's movement in the Italian city of Bologna, and explores the processes of creating ‘composure’ among women as they remember their experiences of motherhood and abortion.     

Heresies’ Heresies: Collaboration and Dispute in a Feminist Publication on Art and Politics

Abstract

In the 1970s magazines, journals and periodicals constituted an alternative public sphere for second wave feminism. These publications provide an index—and at times the only documentation—of the activities of the women’s art movement as well as its many iterations and divisions. This article addresses this imbalance, arguing that Heresies: A Feminist Publication on Art and Politics (1977–1992) was exemplar of the radical political challenge feminism posed to the art world and culture more broadly. Launched in 1977 by the Heresies mother collective, which included Joan Braderman, Mary Beth Edelson, Lucy R. Lippard, Harmony Hammond and May Stevens among others, the magazine had thematic issues edited by different collectives and was comprised of material from an open call. Content ranged from poetry, to academic essays, to artworks both original and reproduced. This article considers the collaborative process of producing the magazine, which attempted to be inclusive, but in fact came to mirror the divisions—as well as political investments—of the broader women’s movement, alongside the dissensus the publication provoked and attempted to confront.     

Unnecessary bleeding,unnecessary suffering: normalcy and necessity of menstruation in promoting NovaSure®

NovaSure® is an endometrial ablation procedure that destroys the inner lining of uterus to stop heavy bleeding. It is performed mostly on women entering menopause who are experiencing irregular and heavy bleeding. In this article, this biotechnology, promoted for women approaching the end of their reproductive life, is analyzed. The analysis is informed by a feminist science studies and medical anthropology background. The discourse of ‘normal’ menstruation and representations of menstruation in the promotional materials for NovaSure® are explored through a textual analysis of the NovaSure® website and patient brochure. The themes in the materials analyzed include the idea of getting back to life, ‘normal’ bleeding, and having a choice among different medical procedures and interventions. The possibility of getting rid of embarrassment that accompanies heavy bleeding is also emphasized. It will be argued that NovaSure® contributes to the redefinition of what is ‘natural’ and ‘necessary’ by combining the ‘unnecessary period’ idea of pills such as Seasonale®, which is aimed toward women in their reproductive years, with the ‘unnecessary suffering’ idea related to menopausal complaints. While advertising the procedure, NovaSure® promotional materials co-construct the ideal user for the technology and reproduce the taboos and embarrassment that accompany menstruation.     

the new woman and ‘the dusky strand’: the place of feminism and women's literature in early Jamaican nationalism

This essay analyzes the prominent role played by first wave feminism and by women writers between 1898-1903 as the Jamaica Times articulated a broad-based, middle class nationalism and launched a campaign to establish a Jamaican national literature. Largely overlooked, this archival material is significant because it suggests a subtle yet significant modification of anglophone Caribbean feminist, literary and nationalist historiography: first wave feminism was not introduced to Jamaica exclusively through black nationalist organizations in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, but rather, it emerged in a broader phenomenon of respectable, middle class nationalism, encompassing the overlapping projects of Jamaican nationalism and Pan Africanism. Thus, it becomes clear that first wave feminism, including white women writers, played a key but brief role in the formation of the middle class nationalism that would later dominate Jamaica's transition to independence. During the first five years of publication of the Jamaica Times, women wrote a significant proportion of the short stories published. However, they became marginalized as black folk culture became the defining symbol of national authenticity. The marginalization of middle class women writers reflects a broader pattern. In adopting first wave feminism from Britain and the United States, Jamaican nationalists reproduced colonial race and class dynamics that established an unbridgeable divide between middle class women, who served as ‘ladies bountiful,’ and the usually darker-skinned compatriots to whom they ministered. This class division continued to limit feminist activism in Jamaica throughout the first and second waves.