Contained Empowerment and the Liminal Nature of Feminisms and Activisms [1 ed.] 9781793612502, 9781793612519

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Contained Empowerment and the Liminal Nature of Feminisms and Activisms

GENDER AND ACTIVISM

Series Editors: Loubna H. Skalli and Kathalene Razzano ‌‌Gender and Activism represents the best scholarship that advances our understanding of the intersections between gender and activism. It calls for theoretically sophisticated and empirically rigorous analysis of the different ways gender plays out in social and political movements for change. This series looks at the relationship between gender and activism and the various levels at which they intersect. We call this the gender-activism nexus. While books in this series focus primarily on gender and activism, it is important to underline that this nexus inevitably intersects with race, class, age, ethnicity, and geographic locations. In this sense, the series encourages intersectionality in ways that allow the analysis of gender and activism from multiple dimensions. Advisory Board Debarati Sen, Kennesaw State University; Rosemarie Buikema, Utrecht University; Sarah Mitcho, George Mason University; Pia Moller, Refugees Helping Refugees; Wang Zheng, University of Michigan Titles in the Series Contained Empowerment and the Liminal Nature of Feminisms and Activisms By Victoria A. Newsom

Contained Empowerment and the Liminal Nature of Feminisms and Activisms By Victoria A. Newsom

Foreword by Sahar Khamis

LEXINGTON BOOKS

Lanham • Boulder • New York • London

Published by Lexington Books An imprint of The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. 4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200, Lanham, Maryland 20706 www​.rowman​.com 86-90 Paul Street, London EC2A 4NE Copyright © 2023 by The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages in a review. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Newsom, Victoria A., author.   Title: Contained empowerment and the liminal nature of feminisms and activisms / by Victoria A. Newsom ; foreword by Sahar Khamis.   Description: Lanham : Lexington Books, [2023] | Series: Gender and activism | Includes bibliographical references and index.  Identifiers: LCCN 2022038580 (print) | LCCN 2022038581 (ebook) | ISBN 9781793612502 (cloth ; alk. paper) | ISBN 9781793612519 (epub)   Subjects: LCSH: Feminism. | Social action.  Classification: LCC HQ1155 .N495 2023  (print) | LCC HQ1155  (ebook) | DDC 305.42--dc23/eng/20220927  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022038580 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022038581 The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992.

This book is dedicated to the memory of Dr. John T. Warren, cherished dissertation advisor, colleague, mentor, and friend.

Contents

Foreword ix Sahar Khamis Acknowledgments xi Introduction

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SECTION I: THEORIZING CONTAINED EMPOWERMENT

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Chapter 1: Contained Empowerment: Negotiating In/Visibility and 15 Action Chapter 2: The Contained Embodiment of Feminist Activism Chapter 3: The Liminality of Feminist Waves



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SECTION II: THE CONTAINED NATURE OF US THIRD WAVE FEMINISMS Chapter 4: Metaphors of Containment

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Chapter 5: Digital Activism as an Echo Chamber

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Chapter 6: In/Visible Activism: The Contained Nature of Feminist NGOization 171 SECTION III: CONTEMPORARY ACTIVISMS, POLARIZATIONS, AND PROBLEMATIC CONTAINMENTS

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Chapter 7: The Containment of Digital Celebrity and Fan Activisms

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Chapter 8: Backlash and Mimicry as Carnivalesque Liminality

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Chapter 9: Activism to Breach Containment Bibliography Index



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About the Author



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Foreword Sahar Khamis1

The concept of empowerment has always been, and remains to be, highly contested and controversial, for a variety of reasons. For some, it is not defined clearly enough, leaving a lot of room for ambiguity, speculation, or possibly misinterpretation. For others, it is criticized for potentially depriving the actors of their own agency, as is often the case in discourses around “empowering Muslim women,” for example, which opens the floodgates for the dangerously ethnocentric so-called “save the Muslim woman syndrome,” and similar Western-centric, Male-Centric, and White-centric discourses. In this thought-provoking manuscript, Victoria Newsom undertakes the intellectually-challenging task of unpacking and revisiting the notion of empowerment, as it plays out across various cultural, ethnic, racial, and gendered parameters, crosscutting temporal, spatial, historical, and mediated boundaries. She complicates this concept and challenges its ethnocentric underpinnings and cultural limitations, by accounting for myriad factors, including its intersections and overlaps with, and sometimes divergences from, multiple forms of feminisms and activisms, cross-culturally and internationally. In doing so, she adopts a culturally-sensitive and gender-sensitive postcolonial, postmodernist, and feminist approach, which pays close attention not just to myriad political, socio-economic, cultural, and even linguistic variables, but also to their specific contextualization, across different moments and amid varied global influences. One clear, and compelling, example is her close attention to some of the most important contemporary influences and emerging forces, which have been shaping, and reshaping, the intertwined phenomena of empowerment, activisms, and feminisms, and their complex manifestations, such as the rise of international populism, as exemplified in the latest wave of Trumpism in ix

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America, for example, and the grave global implications of the COVID-19 pandemic, with its myriad lingering effects. Steering away from taken-for-granted hegemonic influences and bottom-up political, cultural, and gendered power structures and control mechanisms, and in some cases their crippling monopolies, the author uses a plethora of intellectual tools to help readers see beyond the existing hierarchies of influence, which overshadow various forms of activism, including digital activism, politically, socially, and culturally. Some of the goals of this concerted effort are unpacking the invisibilities and obscurities of marginalized identities and subaltern voices, through shedding light on their various forms of activisms and feminisms, and amplifying their voices to reach a diverse global audience. This book succeeds in achieving all of these goals, and much more, with depth, rigor, insight, and style. NOTE 1. Associate Professor of Communication, Affiliate Professor of Women’s Studies, and Affiliate Professor in the Consortium on Race, Gender and Ethnicity. University of Maryland.

Acknowledgments

After participating in a number of different activist events in recent years, including events highlighting women’s and gender rights, Black Lives Matter, immigration and migration rights, food and housing insecurities, pro-science and climate change, and responsible gun control, I noticed a pattern of conflicts in the ideal of empowerment. This pattern echoes a theory of identity construction I had first identified when working with several diverse groups of enthusiasts in the late 1990s, ones self-identifying as third wave feminists, others as historical reenactors and anachronists, and still others as queer sci-fi fans. Through my interactions with each of these communities I witnessed how individuals within these collectives negotiated personal narratives with a focus on self-empowerment within the community rather than as collective action to change systemic norms. The resulting identities were limited in their expressive abilities, confined and contained to their associations with their collective organizational limits, and limited to the spaces wherein their power was recognized. These communities performed a type of individualized empowerment that was reliant on rhetorical constructions of influence and status tied to and limited within those collectives. Their defined empowerment was not acknowledged outside of their unique spheres of influence, and not translatable as mechanisms for systemic change. Theirs were realities of choice, but realities that might not be accepted outside of their own communities of practice. Through these interactions I developed the theory of contained empowerment. The activist initiatives within which I participated more recently have taken on a different tone: they are much more aggressively aimed at systemic and sustainable change and require more open public visibility than the communities for whom I originally developed the theory of contained empowerment almost two decades earlier. But these efforts also illustrate forms of containment, liminality, and limited success in their efforts to empower collective identities or generate true and lasting change. xi

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Acknowledgments

That is why I sought to reinvestigate my theory and take a new look at how activisms function within and as forms of contained, liminal empowerment. This endeavor is, however, an undertaking for which I needed help, support, and encouragement, and for that I wish to give thanks to those individuals who helped me empower my voice and theoretical development. First, I thank my two colleagues, Lara Martin Lengel and Desiree Ann Montenegro, without whose tireless efforts and encouragement this book would not have been completed. I also wish to thank the encouragement and guidance of Loubna Skalli, who, with her colleague Kathalene Razzano, welcomed this work into their scholarly series. Other colleagues who have provided ongoing support and guidance to this volume include Wenshu Lee, Anita Taylor, Val Torrens, Philip Wander, and Michelle Yeung. I am also forever indebted to the mentoring of Ellen Berry, Linda Dixon, Paige Edley, the aforementioned Lara Lengel, and the late and beloved John T. Warren, who collectively served on my doctoral dissertation committee when I undertook the original incarnation of this work. I am grateful to Judith Lamkemper for the opportunity to publish this work, and for her patience as I navigated this project through the ravages of the COVID-19 pandemic. I also give utmost thanks to my mother and brothers, and to my department colleagues Laura Bourmatnov, Seville Hering, Michael Prince; as well as Beccie Seaman, Dean of Social Sciences and Humanities, who supported my efforts and the time required to complete this project. Finally, I am most grateful to the feminists and activists whose work brings this volume to life.

Introduction

The 100-year anniversary of the first silhouette animated film, Das Ornament des Verliebten Herzens [Ornament of a Lovestruck Heart] passed in relative obscurity in 2019 to those outside of the animation industry. Film historians, industry insiders, and feminist scholars attribute the obscurity of the film to the fact that its German-born creator, Lotte Reiniger, was a woman. Her genius, artistic creations, and even her technological inventions within the film industry are associated with the avant-garde rather than popular film; her milestones often mistakenly attributed to Walt Disney, further obscuring her name and impact.1 Yet her influence on animation and the film industry is immense, and it is a full century after her work was originally produced that films, upon entering the public domain, are easily available to the average consumer. Reiniger was the creator of the first known feature-length animated film: the 1926, silent Die Abenteuer des Prinzen Achmed [The Adventures of Prince Achmed].2 The film utilized Reiniger’s revolutionary silhouette animation technique invented by Reiniger herself. The story is told through cutout silhouettes, which required the invention of the first multiplane camera, by Reiniger herself in 1923, to capture layers of images. Based on the compilation of Middle Eastern folktales by the eighteenth century, Syrian storyteller, Antun Yusuf Hannă Diyab, in One Thousand and One Nights,3 the film tells the story of the titular Prince Achmed, who travels from Baghdad to Africa to rescue the Caliph’s daughter from an African sorcerer who, at the time, happened to be considered the least physically attractive person in the world. However, both the creation of the first feature-length animated film and the multiplane camera are attributed to Walt Disney and his 1939 Snow White, and Reiniger’s contributions obscured.4 Die Abenteuer des Prinzen Achmed, along with much of the rest of the work in Reiniger’s prolific, sixty-year career, would influence not only Disney, but Tim Burton, Francis Ford Coppola, and adaptations of her animation style have been seen in animated and live action films from Disney’s Snow White and Fantasia, to the Harry Potter film series. In her obituary the New York Times proclaimed Reiniger’s filmmaking will be “overlooked 1

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no more,”5 yet her name remains obscured due to her lack of prominence in Hollywood’s patriarchy. Reiniger was a woman empowered, by nature and nurture and by the men in positions of power with whom she was associated. Yet, as awareness of the appeal of her work to mass audiences increased, her creations and value was conscripted by patriarchy, Hollywood masculinity, and Disneyfication. As such, Reiniger’s life and work are an example of contained empowerment. Contained empowerment is power associated with an individual that is limited to liminal, temporal spaces structured to enhance that individual and their personal narrative. It is systemically allotted power, rooted in the self-sustaining drive that underlies hegemony, seeks to limit potential change in order to maintain the overall structure. Such power includes authority and individual choice, but is limited by its marginalized status within greater institutional structures and norms, whether that power is located at the margins or the center. Reiniger’s story illustrates the multiple marginalization applied to a woman and foreign citizen in contrast to the narratives of Disney and Hollywood’s patriarchal storytelling mechanisms. Her story echoes that of French filmmaker Alice Guy-Blaché, who made the first known fiction film at a time when the male-dominated industry was primarily using film technology to create documentaries and visual studies of real life. The film was only about 90 seconds long, and like Reiniger’s is a fairy tale, a genre associated with women and children, who were also seen as the likely audience for fictionalized storytelling in these early films.6 It was her idea to tell a story through film, and, after her success, the head of her Parisian studio, Leon Gaumont, placed her in charge of the fiction production arm of the studio. She directed over four hundred films for the studio before starting her own company in New York, Solax, eventually producing more than six hundred films in her career.7 Similarly, after World War II, Reiniger and her husband, Carl Koch, relocated to London and began their own studio, Primrose Productions. During the 1950s she created multiple fairy-tale, short film adaptations, often presented on UK and US television. Her 1954 The Gallant Little Tailor earned her a Silver Dolphin award at the Venice Film Festival. Her works enjoyed a revival in the 1960s and 1970s in Germany, earning her the Filmband in Gold in 1972 and the Bundesverdienstkreuz [Federal Cross of Merit] from the Federal Republic of Germany in 1979. Reiniger’s and Guy-Blaché’s stories were complicated by the impacts of the Great Depression, the Second World War, and the dominance of US popular culture in the mid-twentieth century. Both women were leaders, producers, and had the potential to be visible icons of female empowerment. These are not the only stories of women overshadowed by male colleagues and competitors in the film industry. US silent film star Mary Pickford helmed a studio during the 1920s and early 1930s, yet

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after the Hollywood Production Code was introduced in 1934, and due to male-dominated unionization within the industry, the goal of producing for women and children, a filmmaking style deemed ideal for women filmmakers, was replaced by goals appealing to a dominant white, male, US-based audience.8 Thus, their stories and identities were obscured: their empowerment contained to their positions of authority, restricted to their roles in their own studios, and limited by a lack of access to Hollywood’s authority, reach, and financial generators. Their power was also limited to their associations with other figures of authority, including their own husbands, and not easily translated to other women seeking to rise up even within their industry. Guy-Blaché and Reiniger remain unknown to most audiences; their works mostly overlooked and forgotten. Pickford, as an American Hollywood star, is remembered mostly for her acting. All three are known at least in part for their relationships with their filmmaker and producer husbands. After making more than sixty animated films in her lifetime, Reiniger remains obscure outside of feminist and film enthusiasts, especially in comparison to the visibility of Disney. Reiniger’s films are viewed as representing German expressionism meant to reveal the darkness that lurks within humanity—in many ways the opposite of Disney’s more popular, formulaic, fairy tales,9 further obfuscating her work. Efforts to heighten awareness of Reiniger and her films have been somewhat visible in recent years, however, many of these efforts reveal the ongoing and multiple layers of invisibility of the female filmmaker. Die Abenteuer des Prinzen Achmed was restored and rereleased in 2018 with an English language voiceover added, as part of an effort to restore and bring attention to little-known films that had a significant impact on the industry.10 The rerelease simultaneously highlights both her significance and her invisibility within film industry history and for worldwide film audiences. The contained nature of feminine-of-center empowerment is certainly not limited to the film industry. Women have always performed in powerful roles, yet these roles have often been obscured or hidden by patriarchal efforts similar to the stories of Reiniger, Guy-Blaché, and Pickford. Because this book focuses primarily on third and fourth wave feminist activism and engagement in the United States, a detailed analysis of early feminist activism and engagement through second wave feminism is beyond its scope. That is not to suggest that there was a lack of women’s activist efforts prior to the twentieth century in the United States and elsewhere. There is a wealth of scholarship in cultural, social, political, and women’s history that illuminates activist efforts in the US early republic that foregrounded early interactional awareness and efforts.11 In a more contemporary example, consider how the efforts of Dolores Clara Fernandez Huerta12 working for the rights of migrant farm workers, women, and children have long been overshadowed by the efforts of her male

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counterpart, Cesar Chavez, in the labor and civil rights movements. Both cofounded the National Farm Workers’ Association that later merged with the Agricultural Workers’ Organizing Committee to become the United Farm Workers Labor Union. Yet, it is Chavez who is legitimized and celebrated with a California State holiday, and is legitimized with multiple buildings, schools, and memorials named after him, with few knowing the name, much less the work, of Huerta. The lack of women in visible positions of authority and leadership has long been seen as contributing to wage gaps, failings in representation on both political and cultural stages, and a failure for women to find the means to self-empower within the cultural-industrial complex. This lack of visible feminine-of-center authority continues, and has been exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic, particularly in relation to conflicts in women’s roles as caregivers, mothers, and earners. In essence, the very call to provide women “a seat at the table” both empowers those who gain their seats, but simultaneously reinforces patriarchal and systematic forms of legitimized authority. After all, who is it that must answer the call but those already empowered by the system, and who can allot the number of seats available to women and other minorities. Consider, for example, the representation of women within political institutions. Victoria Claflin Woodhull, the first woman to run for US president on a political party ticket, did so a century after the founding of the nation in 1872.13 The first woman to win the nomination by a major political party to run for president, Hillary Rodham Clinton, occurred almost 150 years after that, in 2016.14 In 2018, only 84 of the 435 members of the US House of Representatives and 22 of 100 US Senators were women. As of the 117th United States Congress (January 2021–January 2023), there are 24 women senators and 119 serving in the House of Representatives. We can see that gains have been made, still disproportionate to their male counterparts. Further, four states have never elected a woman to the House of Representatives, and seventeen never a female senator, suggesting a lack of equality still exists, along with a glass ceiling or box containing female potential power and leadership. In comparison to other “Western” nations, female representation in national legislative and executive offices is markedly low and increasing at a very slow rate. In 2014, for example, 45 percent of Sweden’s lower house legislature were women, and 40 percent for Iceland, Spain, and Norway. Most of the increases in female representatives in the US Congress have happened since 1985, when only two US Senators and twenty-two members of the House of Representatives were women.15 This gender disparity illustrates the invisibility and intentional exclusion of women in US history and politics.16 A similar invisibility exists for lesbians in public and legal discussions

Introduction

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of homosexuality.17 In many ways this can all be traced to the hysterization of the female body in religious, medicinal, psychological, and public discourse.18 This creates a type of invisibility for half of the population within political processes, and an intentional removal from the change impetus needed to alter positions of systemic empowerment. In this book, I discuss the contained empowerment that results from personal action or repositioning as activism that is focused on empowering the individual or changing an individual’s status within the system regardless of the potential to directly influence systemic change. Contained empowerment exists within liminal spaces where negotiation occurs between deconstructive and reconstructive attempts to alter institutions and systems. Empowering an individual does not necessarily move them from the margins, nor does it change the status of others who carry similar identity statuses. In fact, because empowerment for marginalized individuals is often focused on their marginalized status, for example, the vice presidency of Kamala Harris as the first Black and South Asian and woman in her role,19 the need or impetus to relocate or shift power is not evident in status alone. Therefore, a perception of power within marginalized spaces themselves is created that may or may not be able to interact with other systemic power norms. Thus, the limited nature of activism utilizing contained empowerment is its biggest challenge. Advocating focus on individual agency must be carefully balanced with the need to ensure a potential for systemic change. There are dangers to focusing on personal empowerment. One danger is the delicate line between instilling a sense of empowerment and generating a sense of self-importance. Another danger is that a personal sense of power is important, a sense of responsibility to the collective must be maintained. Further still is the danger that a sense of individual empowerment is too individualized; that the individual’s power will not be recognized by anyone beyond herself. Thus, as illustrated in this book, contained empowerment can be dangerous because it is as likely to lead to disillusionment or abuse as to actual, systemic empowerment. Finally, personalized empowerment can also lead to abuse by the empowered individual; it can instill a sense of superiority, a belief that one is literally outside of and not confined in any way to the system leading to a manipulation of the self and others. Because contained empowerment is a problematic consequence of activist practice, particularly those engaged within marginalized bodies and communities, this book seeks to provide clarity and direction for understanding how embodied activisms20 can be limited to temporal, liminal, ephemeral forms of change agency. To thoroughly investigate the ephemerality of embodied activisms as social and political change agents, this book breaks down a historical analysis of femnist activisms, particularly in the United States, through three foci. First is a theory-based section where contained empowerment is

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explored as a concept rooted in the juxtaposition of deconstructionist and reconstructionist activism, how it is connected to the history of feminist engagement, and how it has played out in recent decades of feminist activisms. Analysis in the second section of this book is located in the evolution of US-based feminisms in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. This section provides a discussion of third wave feminism as a unique era of feminist activism in the United States, highlighting developing methods of action that were more digital than physical in location, and more personal in focus than systemic change oriented. The final section of the book focuses on contemporary feminist and activist engagement that functions within spaces of contained empowerment, and how those activities seek to relocate embodied empowerment within both deconstructive and reconstructive change agencies. In the first section of this book, I investigate how empowerment functions as a type of agency within hegemonic systems, and how that agency is limited or contained by classifications of systemic power. Chapter 1 is centered around a discussion of how privileging personal choice and voice function differently within and outside of systems, and how limited forms of empowerment often result in activists and agency restricted to an echo chamber. In chapter 2 the notion of the echo chamber of activist empowerment is discussed as a continually present element in historical forms of feminism, particularly in relation to the failed ratification of the US Equal Rights Amendment (ERA). Finally, in chapter 3, I interrogate how waves of feminism, and particularly the third wave in North America, are limited by their definitions, contained by the nature of the advocacies espoused from within their frameworks, and by their oppositional stances toward each other and the lack of community and sisterhood that encourages. The function of contained empowerment becomes evident through my analyses of third wave feminist forms of activism in the 1990s and early 2000s. This era of feminism focused on youth and young women, an age-based focus that sought to empower youthful femininity while reinforcing the improbability that a youthful, feminine-oriented power could directly impact patriarchy.21 The hyperfeminine characteristics of this type of feminism are self-limiting, and reflect the same failings of earlier forms and understandings of feminist and feminine-of-center advocacy and activism. The nature of contained, feminist empowerment is further explored in Section 2 of the book. My focus on mediated examples of “girl power” in chapter 4 highlights how the most popular and visible form of third wave feminism only functions in fictional settings designed for it to flourish. In chapter 5, I highlight the contained empowerment of digital third wave by a textual reading of Sexing the Political through the journal’s focus on specific youth-oriented topical issues associated with third wave feminism. The

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journal’s empowering potential was contained by restricting the knowledge produced within the journal to young feminine-of-center voices previously exposed to third wave ideals, and therefore also restricting the journal’s audience appeal. The discussion in chapter 6 highlights how the Third Wave Foundation’s containment resided in its focus on providing grant opportunities for young women as one of its tools for empowering individuals. The foundation illustrated a lack of focus that was problematic because it encouraged the voicing of opinions rather than directing energies directly toward systemic change. The foundation was, nevertheless, able to encourage a variety of voices and respond to a variety of concerns and needs without thematic restrictions. Further, the foundation would evolve and adapt to the changing needs and inclusions associated with intersectional identities within feminisms. Therefore, the board and members of what is now the Third Wave Fund NGO can, in fact, choose who to fund or aid on a situational basis without being limited to a set of systemic standards. In the final section, I analyze how contemporary activisms continue to generate echo chambers that restrict the potential for personal and political empowerment and change. In chapter 7, I question how celebrity and mediated examples of activism serve to promote a sort of hypervisible form of activism that can reach a broad audience, but often limit participation to donations and social media propaganda and marketing mechanisms. This process generates containment as it often generates a form of self-promotion masked as advocacy. Next, in chapter 8, I investigate the contrasts in feminist and antifeminist activisms, particularly in relation to abortion ideology and politics, ever more critical after the overturn of Roe v. Wade on June 24, 2022.22 Here I also consider the role of antifeminism and pro-woman backlash as mechanisms of feminist containment. Finally, I question how we can negotiate within the limits of contained empowerment in activism in chapter 9. In order for the hopes that underlie different forms of activism utilizing contained empowerment to fully be realized, the confines to which contained empowerment spaces restrict themselves must be minimized. The analyses provided in this book illustrate that as activists engage with power, they need to learn to empower themselves outside of both the patriarchal system and the spaces of contained empowerment from which they base their self-empowerment. In this way, persons limited by contained empowerment must reorient their empowerable “selves” to hegemonic systems as otherwise their existing, contained empowerment cannot exist on its own terms outside of welcoming, liminal spaces. By acknowledging and identifying how we navigate in spaces of contained empowerment, activists can be self-reflective and more intentional in our activist practices toward long-lasting and effective change.

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NOTES 1. For more on Lotte Reiniger (1899–1981), please see Lilith Acadia, “‘Lover of Shadows’: Lotte Reiniger’s Innovation, Orientalism, and Progressivism.” Oxford German Studies 50, no. 2 (June 2021): 150–68; Peter Horan, “From Lotte Reiniger to Nguyễn Trinh Thi: Examining the Evolution of Non-Western Representation in Artists’ Film and Video.” Film Matters 12, no. 1 (2021): 17–28. doi:10.1386/ fm_00129_1; Fitzner, Frauke, “Lotte Reinigers Musikfilm Papageno: Zur Rolle Der Musik in Der Produktion.” Kieler Beiträge Zur Filmmusikforschung 8 (2012): 7–19; Rachel Palfreyman, “Life and Death in the Shadows: Lotte Reiniger’s Die Abenteuer des Prinzen Ahmed.” German Life and Letters 64, no. 1 (2011): 6–18; Tomasz Małyszek, “Grimms Volksmärchen in Lotte Reinigers Filmkünstlerischer Arbeit.” Fabula 61, no. 1/2 (2020): 58–83. doi:10.1515/fabula-2020-0004; Christiane Schönfeld, “Lotte Reiniger and the Art of Animation.” Practicing Modernity: Female Creativity in the Weimar Republic, ed Christiane Schönfeld (Würzburg, Germany: Königshausen & Neumann, 2006), 171–90; David Sterritt, “The Animated Adventures of Lotte Reiniger.” Quarterly Review of Film & Video 37, no. 4 (2020): 398–401. doi:10.1080/10509208.2020.1732144. 2. Die Abenteuer des Prinzen Achmed [The Adventures of Prince Achmed]. Directed by Lotte Reiniger, Comenius-Film GmbH, 1926. 3. The 1709 French translation of the tales by Syrian storyteller Antun Yusuf Hannă Diyab (1688–1763), is believed to be the first to have added the stories of Aladdin and Ali Baba. 4. K. Vivian Taylor, “Nationality, Gender, and Genre: The Multiple Marginalization of Lotte Reiniger and The Adventures of Prince Achmed (1926)” (Doctoral Dissertation: ProQuest Dissertations Publishing [3450708], 2011). 5. Devi Lockwood, “Overlooked No More: Lotte Reiniger.” New York Times, 21 October 2019. www​.nytimes​.com​/2019​/10​/16​/obituaries​/lotte​-reiniger​-overlooked​ .html. 6. Linda Seger, When Women Call the Shots: The Developing Power and Influence of Women in Television and Film (New York: Henry Holt, 1996). See, also, Anthony Slide, The Silent Feminists: America’s First Women Directors (Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 1996). 7. Alison McMahan, Alice Guy Blaché: Lost Visionary of the Cinema (New York: Continuum, 2002). 8. Mary G. Hurd, Women Directors and Their Films (New York: Praeger, 2007). 9. Siegfried Kracauer, From Caligari to Hitler: A Psychological History of the German Film (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1947). 10. David Sterritt, “The Animated Adventures of Lotte Reiniger.” 11. See, for instance, Carol Lasser’s work on Lethia Cousins Fleming (1876–1963), a Cleveland, Ohio-based organizer working with twentieth-century suffragists of African American descent. Lasser argues that Fleming shifted her career trajectory and spearheaded what would soon be empowering political careers and civic engagement. This further illustrates the impact of digression from social justice focus to race-based discrimination, impositions of color lines, covert segregation can have on

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a community, and how justice and equality initiatives repair that digression. Carol Lasser, “Celebrating Lethia Cousins Fleming.” Ohio History Connection, 2020, March 12. www​.ohiohistory​.org​/celebrating​-lethia​-cousins​-fleming​/. 12. For more on Dolores Clara Fernández Huerta, see Victoria A. Newsom, Lara Martin Lengel, and Desiree Montenegro, “Centuries of In/Visibility: Origins of Embodied Activism as Theory and Practice.” In Embodied Activisms: Performative Expressions of Political and Social Action, ed. Victoria A. Newsom and Lara Martin Lengel (Lanham, MD: Lexington, 2022), 3–35. 13. For more on Victoria Claflin Woodhull, later Victoria Woodhull Martin (September 23, 1838–June 9, 1927), see Amanda Frisken, “Sex in Politics: Victoria Woodhull as an American Public Woman, 1870–1876.” Journal of Women’s History 12, no. 1 (2000): 89–111; Amanda Frisken, Victoria Woodhull’s Sexual Revolution: Political Theater and the Popular Press in Nineteenth-Century America (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004); Bill Greer, A Dirty Year: Sex Suffrage, and Scandal in Gilded Age New York (Chicago: Chicago Review Press, 2020). 14. For an analysis of Hillary Rodham Clinton’s candidacy for US President, see Elizabeth N. Simas, “But Can She Make America Great Again? Threat, Stability, and Support for Female Candidates in the United States.” Political Behavior 44, no. 1 (2022): 1–21. doi:10.1007/s11109-020-09607-4; Shane Bruce, “Female Excellence and (White) Male Mediocrity: Shadows of American Politics in Primetime TV.” Media Report to Women 50, no. 1 (Winter 2022): 6–22; Erin C. Cassese, and Mirya R. Holman, “Playing the Woman Card: Ambivalent Sexism in the 2016 U.S. Presidential Race.” Political Psychology 40, no. 1 (2018): 55–74. doi.org/10.1111/pops.12492; Laura Cummings and Jenepher Lennox Terrion, “A ‘Nasty Woman’: Assessing the Gendered Mediation of Hillary Clinton’s Nonverbal Immediacy Cues during the 2016 U.S. Presidential Campaign.” Feminist Media Studies 21, no. 3 (May 2021): 427–42. doi:10.1080/14680777.2019.1706604; Rebecca M. L.Curnalia and Dorian L. Mermer, “The ‘Ice Queen’ Melted and It Won Her the Primary: Evidence of Gender Stereotypes and the Double Bind in News Frames of Hillary Clinton’s ‘Emotional Moment.’” Qualitative Research Reports in Communication 15, no. 1 (2014): 26–32. doi:10.1080/17459435.2014.955589; Eliana DuBosar, “Assessing Differences in the Framing of Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump during the 2016 Presidential Election.” Society, January 1–12 (2022). doi:10.1007/s12115-021-00659-8; Laurel Elder, Steven Greene, and Mary-Kate Lizotte, “Feminist and Anti-feminist Identification in the 21st Century United States.” Journal of Women, Politics & Policy, July 8, 2021, 1–17. doi:10.1080/1554477x.2021.1929607; Lorrie Frasure-Yokley, “Choosing the Velvet Glove: Women Voters, Ambivalent Sexism, and Vote Choice in 2016.” Journal of Race, Ethnicity and Politics 3, no. 1 (2018): 3–25. DOI: doi.org/10.1017/rep.2017.35; Brian F. Schaffner, Matthew Macwilliams, and Tatishe Nteta, “Understanding White Polarization in the 2016 Vote for President: The Sobering Role of Racism and Sexism.” Political Science Quarterly 133, no. 1 (2018): 9–34. doi:10.1002/polq.12737; Shaheed Nick Mohammed and Robert C. Trumpbour, “Polls and Elections: ‘The Carnivalesque in the 2016 US Presidential Campaign.’” Presidential Studies Quarterly 51, no. 4 (December 2021): 884–903. doi:10.1111/psq.12658; Stephen M. Utych, “Sexism Predicts Favorability of Women in the 2020 Democratic Primary.. . . and

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Men?” Electoral Studies 71 (June 2021): n.p. doi:10.1016/j.electstud.2020.102184; and Barry Watson, Stephen Law, and Lars Osberg, “Are Populists Insecure about Themselves or about Their Country? Political Attitudes and Economic Perceptions.” Social Indicators Research 159, no. 2 (January 15, 2022): 667–705. doi:10.1007/ s11205-021-02767-8. See, also, Tawfiq Ola Abdullah, “Framing of the U.S.’ 2016 Presidential Election: A Content Analysis of Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton’s Campaign Speeches.” Atlantic Journal of Communication, April 14, 2021, 1–20. doi: 10.1080/15456870.2021.1910949; Nicole M. Bauer, “Emotional, Sensitive, and Unfit for Office? Gender Stereotype Activation and Support Female Candidates.” Political Psychology 36, no. 6 (2015): 691–708. doi:10.1111/popa.12186; Erika Falk, Women for President: Media Bias in Nine Campaigns, 2nd ed. (Urbana: University of Illinois, 2010); Amanda Haraldsson and Lena Wängnerud, “The Effect of Media Sexism on Women’s Political Ambition: Evidence from a Worldwide Study.” Feminist Media Studies 19, no. 4 (2019): 525–41. doi:10.1080/14680777.2018.1468797; Dustin Harp, Gender in the 2016 US Presidential Election: Trump, Clinton, and Media Discourse (New York: Routledge, 2019); Christine A. Kray, Tamar W. Carroll, and Hinda Mandell, eds., Nasty Women and Bad Hombres: Gender and Race in the 2016 US Presidential Election, 8 vols. (Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, 2018); Jennifer L. Lawless, “Women, War, and Winning Elections: Gender Stereotyping in the Post-September 11th Era.” Political Research Quarterly 57, no. 3 (2004): 479–90; Ryan F. Lei and Galen V. Bodenhausen, “Economic Anxieties Undermine Support for Female (but Not Male) Political Candidates.” Analyses of Social Issues and Public Policy 18, no. 1 (2018): 244–64. doi.org/10.1111/asap.12150; Andrea L. Miller and Eugene Borgida, “The Temporal Dimension of System Justification: Gender Ideology Over the Course of the 2016 Election.” Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin 45, no. 7 (2019): 1057–67. doi.org/10.1177/0146167218804547; Marzia Oceno, Nicholas A. Valentino, and Carly Wayne, “The Electoral Costs and Benefits of Feminism in Contemporary American Politics.” Political Behavior, March 5, 2021, 1–21. doi:10.1007/s11109-021-09692-z. 15. Louis Schubert, Thomas R. Dye, and Harmon Zeigler, The Irony of Democracy: An Uncommon Introduction to American Politics (Boston: Wadsworth, Cengage Learning Books, 2016). 16. See Congressional Research Service, “Women in Congress: Statistics and Brief Overview.” Updated January 31, 2022. sgp.fas.org/crs/misc/R43244.pdf; Kira Sanbonmatsu, “Women’s Underrepresentation in the U.S. Congress.” Daedalus (Winter 2020). www​.amacad​.org​/publication​/womens​-underrepresentation​-us​ -congress; Dorothee Wierling, “The History of Everyday Life and Gender Relations: On Historical and Historiographical Relationships.” In The History of Everyday Life: Reconstructing Historical Experiences and Ways of Life, ed. Alf Lüdtke and trans. W. Templer (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995), 149–68. Original work published 1989. 17. Terry Castle, The Apparitional Lesbian: Female Homosexuality and Modern Culture (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993); and Rebekah Ranger and Paul Fedoroff, “Perversions and Sexology.” The International Encyclopedia of Human Sexuality (John Wiley & Sons, 2015), 887–901. doi:10.1002/9781118896877.

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18. Michel Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2008); Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, vol. 1, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Random House/Vintage, 1990). Original work published 1976; Michel Foucault, Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972–1977, ed. Colin Gordon, trans. Colin Gordon, Leo Marshall, John Mepham, and Kate Soper (New York: Pantheon, 1980). See also, Evans, Sexual Citizenship. 19. Thomas Locke and Ralina L. Joseph, “All Intersectionality Is Not the Same: Why Kamala Harris Is Our Vice President and Not Stacey Abrams.” Quarterly Journal of Speech 107, no. 4 (2021): 451–56. doi.org/10.1080/00335630.2021.1983197; Shawn J. Parry-Giles, “The Veeps Audition—Campaign 2020: Disciplining Kamala Harris.” Quarterly Journal of Speech 107, no. 4 (2021): 443–50. doi.org/10.1080/00 335630.2021.1985110. 20. Victoria A. Newsom and Lara Martin Lengel, Embodied Activisms: Performative Expressions of Political and Social Action (Lanham, MD: Lexington, 2022). 21. See Michelle M. Lazar, “Discover the Power of Femininity! Analyzing Global Power Femininity in Local Advertising.” Feminist Media Studies 6, no. 4 (2006): 505–15. 22. Sam Levin and Victoria Bekiempis, “‘It’s Important to Fight’: US Cities Erupt in Protest as Roe v Wade Falls.” Guardian (UK), 2022, June 25. www​.theguardian​ .com​/us​-news​/2022​/jun​/24​/us​-cities​-protest​-roe​-v​-wade​-abortion​-rights; Clash, “Roe v Wade: Can Pop Activism Help Rally for Abortion Rights? Absolutely.” Clash, 2022, June 27. www​.clashmusic​.com​/features​/roe​-v​-wade​-can​-pop​-activism​-help​-rally​-for​ -abortion​-rights​-absolutely​/. For details on reproductive rights activisms outside the US, see, for instance, Jessica Elgot, “Labour MP in Bid to Include Right to Abortion in British Bill of Rights.” Guardian (UK), 2022, June 28. www​.theguardian​ .com​/world​/2022​/jun​/28​/labour​-mp​-in​-bid​-to​-include​-right​-to​-abortion​-in​-british​-bill​ -of​-rights; Megan Clement, “‘If You Love or Are a Woman, Don’t Go to Malta,’ say Couple in Abortion Drama.” Guardian (UK), 2022, June 28. www​.theguardian​.com​ /global​-development​/2022​/jun​/28​/if​-you​-love​-or​-are​-a​-woman​-dont​-go​-to​-malta​-say​ -couple​-in​-abortion​-drama.

SECTION I

Theorizing Contained Empowerment

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Chapter 1

Contained Empowerment Negotiating In/Visibility and Action

The years 2020 through 2022 have provided a substantial number of opportunities for present-day activisms in North America and across the globe. The coronavirus pandemic spurred multiple global discussions surrounding preexisting social justice issues, systemic oppressions, care work and health-care inequities, housing and food insecurities, racial, ethnic, and gender disparities, and concerns regarding individual freedoms. Added to this were heightened tensions after the police killings of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor, leading to a tremendous transnational growth in Black Lives Matter activist engagement.1 Still later, heightened tensions regarding voter access during the 2020 presidential election raised the visibility of ongoing concerns about voter restrictions and election stability, and ongoing activist activity in response to those concerns. And the 2020 death of Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg and her unprecedentedly speedy replacement by Amy Coney Barrett,2 as well as the 2022 nomination of and Senate confirmation hearings for Ketanji Brown Jackson to replace outgoing Justice Steven Breyer highlighted continuing struggles and activisms related to reproductive rights, voting rights, education standards, and growing concerns with racism, sexism, and fascism.3 The protest movements and other activisms prevalent in 2020–2022, including the multiple global protests against Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, and up to the protests against the overturning of Roe v. Wade at the time of this writing,4 thus illustrate a mix of traditional ground-based efforts and online organizing that is both directly challenging to systemic structures and illustrates the liminal aspects of contained empowerment. Feminisms comprise a form of embodied activism,5 centered in the analysis and emancipatory action regarding the rhetorical and social construction of rights and privileges assigned to gendered bodies. Feminisms are also grounded in activities and arguments centered on restrictions and limitations assigned to feminine-of-center bodies. Thus, they interrogate empowerment 15

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that is contained by patriarchal institutions and structures, while simultaneously seeking change based on essentialized categories of identity. As such, feminism has long operated as a form of activism striving to generate strategic, directed empowerment and social change for a specified social categorization. Many contemporary activisms similarly operate as forms of contained empowerment: power that exists within limited, liminal spaces both within and outside of dominant hegemonic structures. Identity-based activisms since the 1980s have often focused on personal experience and empowerment rather than an organized attack on hegemonic structures.6 This conflict between individual versus systemic change challenges traditional notions of activism and therefore these activisms are not currently conceived as successful movements. Thus, such activisms are situated in localized spaces, particularly mediated and online spaces where the reach of messaging is complicated by narrative architectural constructs. However, activisms constructed in these spaces reflect belief that localized empowerment would transcend boundaries and become literal empowerment outside of the liminal spaces from which it generates. And, in recent years, particularly since a global rise in authoritarian, autocratic regimes have become highly visible, identity-based and embodied activists have been able to somewhat transcend their containment and take direct action. However, for this process to be effective, such instances must also be projected outside of a limited audience, and only a few, often troubling accounts and those tied to major social concerns are maintained in the public consciousness. Otherwise, the projected power and agency within these arguments can be limited to an echo chamber where the arguments are welcomed, but not fully actualized outside of receptive audiences and consumptive producers of reciprocal messaging. To investigate these processes, this book offers the concept of contained empowerment as a guiding framework for understanding the reconstitutive nature of embodied activisms that attempts to re-create systems of power by making specialized or “contained” spaces within hegemonic structures for nonsystemic power to exist and flourish. Containment through these processes is the result of the localized nature of empowerment for the marginalized, constricted within fixed subject positionalities. This localized nature is problematic because contained empowerment is often limited to changing individual status within the system rather than altering the system itself. For example, while feminist ideologies are designed to resist patriarchy, feminist action often serves to reconstitute patriarchal structures, ultimately reinforcing gender hierarchy. Empowerment is a complicated concept within the context of contemporary feminisms and activisms as it implies choice, freedom, and influence. These terms have all become somewhat interchangeable both in terms of

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community and personal engagement, and within popular culture. “Choice,” “freedom,” and “influence” have been problematically co-opted within neoliberalism, which is “premised on the assumption that the market is the primary producer of cultural logic and value,”7 and neoliberal rhetoric, challenging understandings of each term in association with logics of “the personal” and “the political.”8 Empowerment is therefore, somewhat unfortunately, conflated with consumerist behavior, in a type of conspicuous consumption9 of femininity driven by the market’s awareness of women as primary shoppers for US and other Western households. Home Depot, for example, created a “True Stories Campaign” to tell women’s stories about home improvement, appealing particularly to the do-it-yourself (DIY) crowd.10 In an ABC News article about the marketing growth in pink tools for women, the authors explain the appeal, citing an interview with Ann-Marie Campbell, a Home Depot executive. The author explains Campbell’s claim that “a lot [of] women get tired of waiting for someone else to do the work.”11 Campbell further explains, “As they become more empowered,” she said, “they’re able to come into Home Depot and say, ‘Hey, I can do this myself. I don’t need my husband or my mate to do it for me.’”12 Such marketing illustrates how feminine empowerment is often personalized to an individual’s sense of self-worth and independence. It also illustrates that feminine empowerment comes with a cost: you have to buy the product to fit the feminine label. Empowerment as agency for marginalized groups within hegemonic systems is often limited or contained by reinforcing the marginalizing characteristics associated with that group and amplifying the “differences” between them and those with systemic power. The group can attain a type of empowerment within this contained, limited placement through privileging personal choice and voice. However, the limits placed on the group are maintained outside of the space provided by the system, reinforcing the hegemonic normative roles that signify identification. The result is a type of echo chamber which functions as a space of contained empowerment. Such spaces are most clearly associated with marginalized groups for whom personal agency and privilege outside of the mainstream power structures may be their only means of feeling empowered. For example, achievements and “progress” associated with US LGBTQIA+ rights have come under scrutiny and received substantial pushback with the 2022 passage of Florida’s HB 1557, known to critics as the “Don’t Say Gay” bill.13 In a criticism of this law, reporter Eric Berger explains, “The wave not only includes laws similar to Florida restricting instruction on gender identity and sexual orientation but also ones that criminalize gender-affirming medical care for transgender youth.”14 From this example we can see that while those within and supportive of the LGBTQIA+ community may have experienced personal empowerment in their own lives,

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hegemonic resistance toward the community itself remains prevalent. The challenge, however, for this type of agency is for it to be effective outside of these specific contained spaces. Empowerment, when tied to unique or cataloged identities, must therefore be strategically essentialized for hegemonic recognition, the problematic result of which is strategic containment due to hegemonic resistance. For example, suffragettes needed to define “woman” in order to argue for and promote women’s right to vote, and to gain the legal protections for that right. However, patriarchal resistance has since sought to limit and reduce further advances in women’s legal status and protections, for example, the failure to ratify the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA), which is explored in more detail in the next chapter of this book. Further still, the question of “What is a woman?” then becomes a tool for patriarchal destabilizing of gender rights movements, such as seen in GOP Senator Marsha Blackburn’s questioning of US Supreme Court Nominee Ketanji Brown Jackson, asking “Can you provide a definition for the word ‘woman’?”15 as a means of attacking progressive arguments for LGBTQIA+, and specifically transgender rights. In their study, “Youth Empowerment and High School Gay-Straight Alliances,” Stephen Russell, Anna Muraco, Aarti Subramaniam, and Carolyn Laub question the use of the term “empowerment” in the field of what they name positive youth development programs, noting that the term is “used interchangeably with youth activism, leadership, civic participation and self-efficacy. However, few studies have captured what empowerment means to young people in diverse contexts.”16 Thus, their study explored how adolescents “define and experience empowerment” in US high school student-led Gay-Straight Alliances (GSAs).”17 During focus group interviews, fifteen GSA youth leaders expressed their interpretations of the term “and how they became empowered through their involvement with the GSA.” The GSA leaders described “three inter-related dimensions of empowerment: personal empowerment, relational empowerment, and strategic empowerment through having and using knowledge.” The authors go on to explain, “When these three dimensions are experienced in combination, GSA leaders have the potential for individual and collective empowerment as agents of social change” and social justice in their respective high schools. “By understanding these youth’s perspectives on the meanings of empowerment,” the study clarified “the conceptual arena for future studies of socially marginalized youth and of positive youth development.”18 Identities claimed for personal power within spaces framed for contained empowerment run the risk of essentialization and commodification. The liminal nature of embodied activisms in spaces of contained empowerment is framed within a need to balance strategic essentialism with systemic disruption. Spivak’s strategic essentialism19 ideally allows for the formation of

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19

demographic identity categories to address policy making. However, in both activism and policy making, essentialized categorization plays out as intentionally vague definitions and instructions, and often results in simplified, tokenistic, and limited identity constructions.20 Similarly, feminist activism has been critiqued for utilizing strategic essentialism to highlight shared goals and coalition building, while leaving many intersectional and gender-based needs, values, and ideals only vaguely articulated, when addressed at all. While third wave and other feminisms and activisms since the 1990s have attempted to incorporate intersectionalities, there remain limitations tied to the necessary rhetorical constructions of identities in order to recognize and change political, legal, and other systemic challenges. Identities utilizing the essentialized labels of public discourses regarding empowerment are also contained by their nature as a commodity. Gender labeling is restricted by the binary categorizations established within legal and systemic language structures and, thus, limits engaging multiplicities within identity discourses. The restrictions also apply to narrative constructs meant to raise awareness for larger audience groups. While some popular media alternatives are present, consumer choice and confirmation bias limits audience reception. Digital and social media further complicate the process, adding gatekeeping and narrative control mechanisms, including media targeting and bots, that reproduce confirmation bias. Identities are commodified and promoted for the different target audiences within systemic and resistance narratives. From within spaces of contained empowerment, some feminisms and activisms, such as the US version of third wave feminism, attack the patriarchal system by striving to make femininity itself powerful, regardless of the fact that such aggressions are constrained by the disempowered nature of femininity, itself always defined within the confines of patriarchy. Identity-based activisms focuses on the empowerment of the individual rather than systemic change in order to operate within spaces where feminine empowerment is redefined as possible and encouraged; however, these spaces are always contained by the patriarchal system in which they operate. These activisms include several with “feminist” labelling: postfeminist activism, third wave feminist activism, and celebrity feminist activism, among others. Does such restriction mean all social movement efforts are forms of contained empowerment? There are two key ways that contemporary activisms illustrate the limited agency and potential for change implied by the theory: a deconstructive means and a reconstructive one. Activisms illustrating deconstructive containment are focused on changing structure, such as the Black Lives Matter movement, empowering individuals who lack hegemonic power through direct attempts at systemic change and restructuring. Reconstructive containment, in contrast, is focused on affirming systemic power for people

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who already have the ability to actualize that power, though they may, themselves, perceive that their access to power is threatened or has been erased. Unlike the activisms illustrating deconstructive containment wherein the narratives are centered on the problems inherent in the system, those seeking reconstruction are rooted in a belief that the system is supposed to provide access and protections that are now missing or perceived as ineffective. Contemporary examples for this in the United States include anti-masking and counter-protests during the COVID-19 pandemic, populist economic and border security issues associated with Trumpism, and protests at school boards against the nonexistent teaching of Critical Race Theory (CRT) in public elementary and secondary schools.21 In the United States, contemporary movements have built on momentum in activisms that had been present since the rise of so-called “tea party” conservatism and multiple related populist initiatives contrasting multicultural and LGBTQIA+ initiatives that gained traction and legal affirmation and legitimacy in the first two decades of the twenty-first century. For example, left-leaning protest movements prior to the spread of the pandemic included multiple youth activisms and protests against systemic oppressions including race-based and gender-based activisms. Two of the most noted included women’s marches and social media campaigns surrounding the global #MeToo effort,22 and responses to rising occurrences of gun violence and extremism. Since the pandemic, global progressive and left-leaning protests have increased in relation to Black Lives Matter, voting rights, reproductive rights, and protests against Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine.23 The nature of progressive activists in contrast with hegemonic obstructionists has historical grounding in differences associated with political party alignment and the resulting political polarization that would come to dominate the 2010s. Political affiliation with conservative movements in the United States, by the end of the 1960s, had shifted to the Republican party with a constituency composed, primarily, of white, middle-class small business owners, suburbanites, professionals, and older individuals. The party and its constituency were primarily focused on economic concerns. In contrast, the Democratic Party and progressive movements began incorporating minorities, persons of color, the LGBTQ+ community, and those with a focus on governmental role in social inequities rather than economic empowerment. Social conservatism was not at the core of either movement, and lost its affiliation with the Democratic Party as the “Southern Democrats”24 became obsolete within that political body. However, social conservative concerns would become incorporated into Republicanism throughout the end of the twentieth century and become prominent in conservative politics by the end of the first decade of the twenty-first century.

Contained Empowerment

21

The refocusing on social conservatism within the Republican party, at least in part as a means of expanding their voter base, meant incorporating a number of politicized arguments that drove voter behaviors. Prominent within the conservative agenda are efforts to criminalize abortion, promote gun ownership rights, protect marriage and “family values,” eliminate Critical Race Theory, protect children from sexual deviance and LGBTQIA+ education, assure “election integrity,” and restrict immigration. Partisan activities reflecting these issues are central in contemporary discourse, echoing conflicting narratives of individualism versus collectivism, and “wokeness” vs. fascism. For example, narratives reflecting a contrast between social and health-based welfare during the pandemic versus economic crises dominated the political forums during the 2020 election cycle; how these narratives reflected multiple intersectionalities are at the core of the resulting arguments. This rhetorical pattern can be traced through other narratives of individual empowerment vs. collective change, reflecting contrasting agendas of personal empowerment within the system, which were enacted as deconstructive contained empowerment, versus actual systemic change efforts illustrating reconstructive attributes. There is, nevertheless, a persistent underlying hope and potential promised by both contained empowerment and contemporary identity-based activisms that should not be ignored. Contained empowerment provides hope because it provides potential for power that is not necessarily subject to hegemonic norms. It allows reconstituted ideals of power to flourish within the contained spaces, and although these spaces themselves are restricted by their hegemonic constructs, the power within them can operate even in a limited fashion in spite of hegemony. For example, feminisms attack the patriarchal system by striving to make women’s voices powerful and heard, regardless of the fact that their efforts were constrained by the disempowered label of “woman,” itself always defined and objectified within the confines of patriarchy. Feminist movements waned, or possibly became less prominent in popular media and discourses at the end of the twentieth and in the early years of the twenty-first century due to a perception that gender equality had, at least partially, been affirmed in the United States and Europe. Yet, political concerns that arose in their stead were most often centered around the aforementioned core issues. Significantly, narratives of individual empowerment promoted in abortion rights and LGBTQIA+ activisms were similar to those espoused by gun rights activists in the first two decades of the twenty-first century. Efforts reflecting both conservative and progressive ideologies would approach individual empowerment through both reconstructive and deconstructive techniques and rhetorics, even to the point of conflating these methods. For example, newly elected right-wing US Congressional Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA), in response to the call for members of the

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House of Representatives to wear masks during the pandemic, tweeted “I proudly told my freshman class that masks are oppressive. In [Georgia] we work out, shop, go to restaurants, go to work, and school without masks. My body, my choice.”25 This language, which directly repurposes pro-choice terminology from more progressive feminist and abortion arguments, is an interesting choice. However, if we contrast that to conservative, patriarchal responses to women arguing “my body, my choice” in regard to their right to obtain an abortion or abortion law, we see intentional blurring of deconstructive and reconstructive accounts of empowerment. The ideal of empowerment is also linked to underprivileged groups in society. The derivation of the term in social and cultural history, particularly in the United States, is most clearly associable with oppressed groups or cultures. The term is currently linked to both feminist and civil rights history. For example, the cover story of the June 14, 1999, Time magazine, “With Voices Raised,” expresses, “Among the eloquent cries for Black empowerment were separatists and rebels, preachers and dreamers, and an opera singer barred from a concert hall [Marian Anderson—barred in 1939].”26 Similarly, the actual term “empowerment” was adopted by the Black Panther movement, in particular Bobby Seale’s doctrine of militant Black empowerment.27 HISTORICIZING “EMPOWERMENT” Historical interpretations of the term “empowerment” reinforce its often limited potential. The earliest known print reference of the term empowerment comes from an 1849 biography of Reverend Jonathon Fisher of Blue Hill, Maine, in reference to his work with phonetics and education: “[Church leadership] followed up this remarkable empowerment . . . by removing the sentences, etc.”28 Here, the term “empowerment” refers to how leadership within the church claims power through their practice of ministry to the poor, in terms easily understood and recognized by their congregations. The term can be read to refer both to Fisher’s groundbreaking alterations to traditional methods of education, and to his desire to improve the social living conditions of the poor and of African Americans. Fisher “empowered” students of the English language by creating a phonetic style of reading, and a series of pictorial readers that standardized education in the United States and simplified the process of learning to read. Fisher also “empowered” the underprivileged members of his community by founding one of the earliest free libraries and a local academy that welcomed students from all social standings in the community.29 His vision of empowerment reinforces the structures that underlie preexistent, systemic notions of success and status.

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In more recent derivations, the meaning associated with the term has not remained fixed. Current incarnations of the term are found in health and medical literature, with the primary focus on patients’ rights and patient access to information.30 Other incarnations include psychological concepts of personal empowerment and self-esteem31 and community empowerment.32 In regard to digital communication, scholarship investigating the potential for online empowerment has been criticized for assuming a top-down hegemonic structure and devaluing individuals’ ability to conceive and construct power within institutionalized space.33 Still others look at identity constructs in relation to hegemonic power, and how these are often narrowly defined within authoritarian political structures as well as strategic counter-narratives to those regimes.34 Thus, the term “empowerment” itself is complex and, when paired with activist ideologies, is problematized by its conceptualizations within hegemonic and structural norms. Feminist or any other identity-based activist “empowerment” should require a rejection of the way the term has been defined and shaped within patriarchy and instead defined by women’s and marginalized voices.35 Several scholars have attempted to define empowerment and the conditions necessary for empowerment to occur. Sociologists Singh and Titi36 explain how empowerment is situated in localities, focusing on self-reliance and autonomy. Defining empowerment in terms of national autonomies, they explain that access to resources, knowledge, and skills are necessary for a nation to gain autonomy. Therefore, empowerment is the ability to gain access to these resources, and to maintain them. Similarly, Shetty37 defines empowerment as strategic and particularistic rather than universalistic and insists that empowerment can only be measured in terms of small successes. Shetty describes empowerment as the process of creating change from the bottom of the power structure, a type of revolutionary action. While Shetty’s description is of power conscripted by the system, a type of contained empowerment within the system: formed in and limited by the system. Contained empowerment can also be formed by forces in direct opposition to and created to deconstruct the notion of a system. In political and social terms, the concept of empowerment has been associated with United Nations and World Bank development discourse, where it is linked to access to information technology and power structures, as well as natural resources and “sustainable development.”38 The term “empowerment” has also been co-opted by the US government for George Herbert Walker Bush’s “Empowerment Task Force” and Clinton’s “Economic Empowerment Act” in the early 1990s, both of which sought to improve economic conditions for underprivileged urban communities.39 The term is also commonly used in development discourse to mean economic advancement and participation in environmental, health, and economic growth efforts by the poor, women, and

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Indigenous and minority groups.40 These interpretations all seek to determine how empowerment works, yet keep the definition confined by systemic norms, requiring people to be “upwardly mobile” within systemic expectations. However, these usages have also created conflicting interpretations of the term, along with applications that have generated a negative response to the term. Development scholar Anne-Emmanuèle Calvès explains, “From popular psychology to self-help, the infatuation with empowerment in the English-speaking world appears boundless: in 1997 there was even a book published in the United States on ‘self-empowerment’ for dogs.”41 Thus, in response to conflicting understandings of the term “empowerment,” women’s rights activist, scholar, and author Srilatha Batliwala, in her article on “Taking the Power Out of Empowerment” asks, “Should we be troubled by what many may consider the inevitable subversion of an attractive term that can successfully traverse such diverse and even ideologically opposed terrain?”42 Some feminists take a different approach to empowerment, focusing on improving marginalized positions, rather than shifting people into less marginalized roles within hegemonic structures. Postcolonial feminists such as Farida Akhter43 argue that political approaches to empowerment do not address questions of power and how power operates. Further they argue the term often disempowers women as it reinforces marginalizations. Akhter critiques the use of the term in United Nations literature as a means of achieving population control, rather than an alteration of disenfranchised positionalities. Building on similar themes, political scientist and feminist S. Laurel Weldon44 questions whether empowerment can be achieved in separate spheres of influence, suggesting instead that empowerment cannot be stably grounded if all overlapping authoritative systems are not themselves adjusted to accept feminine and female-centered power. Contained empowerment in feminism, and in activism, involves individuals aware of their marginalization, and aware that empowering themselves by re-creating history reinforced what Victor Turner would call the “betwixt and between” nature of their rituals, being both “in and out of” the social structure.45 Knowing this, activists use this awareness as a means of self-empowerment within the confined spaces of their re-created and re-empowered identity constructs. However, the liminal nature of their identity-based activism provides a challenge for practitioners who may find they prefer or can only engage with their empowerment within the localized spaces of contained power constructed to allow them to find power, rather than in negotiating normative structures.

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TRANSCENDING CONTAINMENT? Feminism and identity-based activisms are rooted in narratives of the “Other”:46 anyone who is not a heteronormative (straight) male. In her text, Le Deuxième Sexe [The Second Sex], Simone de Beauvoir explains that such othering leads to definitions of gender and sexuality rooted in difference, and the expectations that go along with the resulting distinctions.47 It is important to realize that these gender constructs are culturally produced, and definitions vary between cultures and have varied within cultures over time. For example, theorists of gender and sexuality often point to the greater acceptance of same-sex relations in ancient cultures. This strengthens structural-style arguments against bio-power limitations and legitimizes historically- and evidence-based arguments in contrast with patriarchal narratives of power. In order to conceptualize empowerment and how it impacts identities and embodiments, an investigation of the rhetorical construction of identities in relationship to power is required. This generally involves a review of cultural categories and how those are codified with power structures. The power structures that ground gender discourses influence the “Othering” of non-heteronormative males. When women communicate their requirements for empowerment, they are using language that was structured and defined by men. Women’s issues must therefore be framed in masculine terms—especially if men are involved in the conversation. Direct confrontation with this structural process leads to conflict and disavows opportunities for power to shift. To avoid this conflict, some feminists have attempted to circumvent direct confrontation and, instead, reposition power through shifts in local knowledge and limited spaces—generating potential for empowerment through spaces of containment. Contained empowerment provides the potential to generate new types and concepts of power transferable into hegemonic spaces. However, contained empowerment is limited temporally, only capable of indirectly impacting hegemonic structures. Given that it allows the opportunity to negotiate tensions created between two binary oppositions, the liminality of contained empowerment allows it to function as a potential means of actualizing change. Thus, while power in these spaces is neither hegemonically limited nor completely removed from hegemony, contained empowerment is itself a power that can only develop because a liminal space exists where feminist non-hegemonic ideals can flourish. While contained empowerment is constrained within established systems of power, it simultaneously offers hope by creating alternative ways of defining the self and the self’s relation to others. This hope is, in many cases, restricted to those with access to the empowered spaces. Thus, contained empowerment

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is subversive as it works within hegemony, and practitioners can negotiate their own awareness of their containment. While some may fail to recognize and illustrate means of translating personalized power beyond the confines to which they are limited, others can use contained empowerment as a space to expand their audience and seek recognition beyond confinement.48 There is a key assumption about empowerment that impacts the construction of contained empowerment: the assumption that true or effective empowerment must be at least partially systemic. This implies marginalized people can be empowered only while maintaining some of the characteristics that marginalize them, as it is those very characteristics which give them their unique identity. Therefore, locating empowerment within a specific marginalized group contains that empowerment to that group. Therefore, the ability to empower a marginalized group of people or a marginalized location is problematic. Further, whether any such empowerment can occur without containment is not clear. Unless we assume that a shift to a poststructural ideal is possible, empowerment is always, in part, responsive to and contained by the system. Efforts to generate feminist or gender-based empowerment are situated in critiques and actions against misogyny, systemic biases, and the disruption or removal of systems of binary gender. If we consider Srilata Batliwala’s definition of women’s or gendered empowerment—“the process of challenging existing power relations, and of gaining greater control over the sources of power”49—then literal change to the system is a preexisting condition for empowerment. Feminist narratives are constrained by a conflict between progressive and conservative frameworks complicated by religious and gender role standards. Such standards tend to either erase women or frame them within specified characterizations of “doting wife behavior” and motherhood.50 Progressive arguments have historically tended to be rational rather than emotional, focusing on economic and social standards rather than religious argument. Conservative arguments mimic rationality through a moralistic approach to understanding gender roles and procreative necessities. The latter constructs a challenge for some women to claim a feminist label when it is consistently placed in opposition to traditions of femininity that they, themselves, choose to inhabit. EMPOWERED OR EMBOLDENED? Activisms that flourish in liminal spaces but have little impact on systemic norms can allow for the building of self-confidence as a form of individual empowerment. These activisms highlight reconstructive containment through their motives and epistemological desires to reinforce hegemonic standards

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rather than change them. The very nature of hegemonic reinforcement encourages conservative action, as reinforcement of hegemony is structural conservatism.51 However this type of containment is not limited to political conservatisms.52 In fact, the labeling of these categories can and often does blur, particularly as reconstructive arguments are often focused on changing the rights or status of an individual through action, rather than changing the system to meet the needs of a category of people. Activists are therefore often placed in a position to choose between direct deconstructive systemic change goals, many of which can have longer-lasting impact but take far longer to achieve, most often through attempts at legislative action; or reconstructive efforts to protect or improve the rights and protections of individuals, which can be sought through court systems and judicial processes rather than through direct political discourse and lobbying. Both choices are problematic, and both illustrate types of containment and liminal-temporal impact. As such, feminists using the court system to impact gender-based social structures have long sought to generate agency that is limited by its connection to other accepted forms of privilege: reconstructive uses of systemic forms of authority. One key example is the placement of contraceptive and abortion rights in relation to judicial interpretations of the right to privacy in the United States. This placement provided freedoms for individuals, but did not guarantee a legislated authority that cannot continue to be challenged on the behalf of other individuals through the court system. In contrast, activisms highlighting deconstructive containment are focused on changing hegemonic structures and replacing those structures with alternative power constructs, for example, changing the law in order to grant women the right to vote. Both constructions of activisms imply progress, but, just as the reconstructive advocacies are not limited to political conservatism, neither are deconstructive activisms limited to those situated in progressive politics. Because of the resistance to gender-based legislation, most US feminist political activism has been enacted as a combination of progressive and conservative goals, and resulting in a combination of deconstructive and reconstructive containment. A historical feminist example of the blurring of what has been understood as liberal and conservative ideologies within the United States can be seen in the advocacy of Emma Goldman. Goldman promoted a type of anarcha-feminism that illustrates many of the characteristics associated with traditions of libertarianism as well as progressive values. Goldman was advocating in an era where gender- and sex-based oppressions were linked to a political movement we know as Comstockery, named for the passage of the Comstock Laws of 1873, which were aimed at the “Suppression of Trade in, and Circulation of, Obscene Literature and Articles of Immoral Use.”53 The law was designed to alter socially accepted mores in relation to sexuality and prohibited the sale of what could be deemed

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“obscene” materials across state lines. Because one of Goldman’s advocacies was focused on pushing back against the Comstock Laws she incorporated libertarian-style arguments against governmental interference in personal liberties. However, she also promoted socialist-style arguments, and was eventually deported by J. Edgar Hoover under the 1918 Alien Act, to her native Lithuania, then part of the newly formed USSR, during the 1919–1920 Red Scare for her outspoken views.54 Gender-rights history also exemplifies how advocacies were tied to libertarian values and, in particular, the judicial interpretation of a right to privacy.55 Significantly, in the United States most gender-based rights have been granted through court decisions, rather than legislative action, the key exception being the right to vote granted in the Nineteenth Amendment. One of the earliest court system appeals to the US Supreme Court based on gender rights was the 1873 case Bradwell v. Illinois. The case centered on the right to practice law in the State of Illinois for Myra Colby Bradwell. An Illinois State law forbade married women from entering that profession. The Supreme Court ruled against Bradwell based on the separate spheres of men and women: [T]he civil law, as well as nature herself, has always recognized a wide difference in the respective spheres and destinies of man and woman. Man is, or should be, woman’s protector and defender. The natural and proper timidity and delicacy which belong to the female sex evidently unfits it for many of the occupations of civil life. The constitution of the family organization, which is founded in the divine ordinance, as well as in the nature of things, indicates the domestic as that which properly belongs to the domain and functions of womanhood. The harmony, not to say identity, of interests and views which belong or should belong to the family institution, is repugnant to the idea of a woman adopting a distinct and independent career from that of her husband.56

This case was argued based on the Fourteenth Amendment, created after the Civil War to protect former enslaved persons to provide equal rights, privileges, and protection under the law of all citizens. Instead, an ideological bias regarding married women as subject to their husbands as a type of natural law57 was applied. This same bias has also been tied in feminist criticism to historical justifications of marital rape, many of which have been repeated in an application of discursive amnesia to contemporary political arguments. Attempts to use the court system to revise gender norms also illustrate reconstructive elements, often ones promoting the reinforcement of an accepted right as the basis for expansion of those rights. Beginning in the late nineteenth century, feminist and civil rights arguments were brought against the Comstock Laws via the court system on the

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grounds of the Ninth Amendment, specifically in terms of the right to privacy.58 This type of activism functions within the confines of the contained empowerment faced by gender-rights advocates of that era, as they avoided directly discussing the legalities of procreative topics, focusing instead on medical needs and personal identity choices connected to procreation. This includes early twentieth-century movements that promoted “voluntary motherhood” as a choice for women to make about when to bear a child59 and arguments about disease prevention.60 A key figure in the construction of public rhetoric to counter the Comstock legislation was Margaret Sanger. Sanger’s narrative approach to the public arguments about birth control and family planning helped shift women’s stories from the private sphere to public sphere consumption.61 Personalized stories about venereal disease, and the horror women faced by not knowing enough about the sex act and sexual practice to prevent the spread of disease generated public concern over the need for greater sexual education. Sanger also told stories about children’s curiosity and children who contracted disease unknowingly due to a lack of education, illustrating for audiences a need to protect women and children from sexually transmitted disease.62 Sanger’s choices helped to ground a feminist moral argument that could counter the patriarchal arguments of the Comstock Laws: moral use of contraceptives.63 The US Supreme Court decision to legalize birth control was centered around an argument of a right to privacy, rather than women’s rights in Griswold v. Connecticut.64 Later cases involving sexual behaviors would follow suit. Bowers v. Hardwick was a 1986 case in which the Supreme Court “upheld the constitutionality of a Georgia statute criminalizing certain sex acts under the term ‘sodomy.’”65 Lawrence v. Texas, in 2003, reversed that decision, defining sodomy laws as unconstitutional and legalizing homosexual activity.66 Contemporary arguments regarding abortion and contraception continue to center around the notion of sex as a procreative act, and the continual return to these arguments through the court system illustrates the liminality of women’s rights when tied to the notion of a right to privacy and judicial review, rather than restructuring constitutional authority directly through legislation or the amendment process. Continuing echoes of the same arguments which dominated when Sanger worked to engage the public in contraceptive rights arguments remain present in current political rhetorics. Abortion arguments have a complex history in North America, particularly, as until the late 1800s, the right to an abortion until a baby’s “quickening”67 was openly accepted in much of the culture. Based in English Common Law, this “quickening doctrine” recognized abortion after quickening as murder, and prosecutable by law. Abortion performed prior to quickening was not prosecutable.68 Abortion arguments continue to be fought over differing

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opinions over when autonomous life begins. Consider the words of Justice Amy Coney Barrett during oral arguments regarding Mississippi’s 15-week abortion ban: Insofar as you and many of your amici focus on the ways in which forced parenting, forced motherhood, would hinder women’s access to the workplace and to equal opportunities, it’s also focused on the consequences of parenting and the obligations of motherhood that flow from pregnancy . . . It seems to me that the choice more focused would be between, say, the ability to get an abortion at 23 weeks or the state requiring the women to go 15, 16 weeks more and then terminate parental rights at the conclusion . . . why didn’t you address the safe haven laws and why don’t they matter?69

Barrett’s argument brushes aside the physical demands of pregnancy on a woman and her body, and brushes aside the many complicating factors such as economic status, health-care affordability, personal responsibilities to a woman’s family and community, and the psychological impacts of “forced motherhood” and all it implies. Barrett’s words reinforce the need for complex systemic change that is not limited to a single systemic aspect in order to generate gendered rights rather than a narrowly granted privilege tied to another human right. Her words also evoke conservative rhetorical and historical justifications for marital rape, misogyny, hysteria, and the commodification of the female body through the assignment of procreative vessel identity. Multiple feminist advocates and authors, including late Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg70 and third wave feminist authors Jennifer Baumgardner and Amy Richards,71 have argued that feminist efforts need to move away from legislative and legal challenges in order to impact real lives. Their argument points out the limitations of gender-based change that is restricted to a patriarchal system. Third wave arguments about sex and gender are therefore situated in both progressive and conservative political rhetorics, and in normalized versions of sex and gender identity. They are built by public consumption of, and enjoyment of, personal and politicized pleasure that simultaneously promotes individual freedoms with little to no government restriction, and a shift away from patriarchal hegemonic norms. However, these freedoms remain limited, both by their association with hegemony and by the challenge of framing change for an individual that can be reproduced.

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EMBODIED SCHOLAR-ACTIVISMS Contained empowerment examines the potential for challenging gender and other inequalities through the creation of alternative, empowering spaces and action. Revealing the potential for empowering marginalized groups and persons within such liminality echoes the goals of embodied scholar-activist methodology. This book, like embodied and feminist methodology, promotes the potential social benefits marginalized groups can attain through contained empowerment. Therefore, utilizing embodied methodology is a logical and necessary approach to exploring contained empowerment. Feminist scholars,72 outlining a core embodied theory based in a variety of foundations for gender-based embodied methodology, examine how feminist methodology implies the existence of “female knowledge” or epistemology often centered on emotion as opposed to the rationality associated with hegemonic norms. Sandra Harding, in her introduction to Feminism and Methodology explains, “a methodology is a theory and analysis of how research does and should proceed.”73 Harding argues that feminist methodology cannot be separated from feminist epistemology and should be concerned with how knowledge is constructed. Therefore, what makes feminist methodology “feminist” is that feminist epistemology guides the research process. Harding further defines methodology as deriving from the standpoints and experiences of individuals and their stories. She argues that the relationship between the researcher and their study needs to be examined, illustrating both the perspective of the researcher and that of the framework utilized. Feminist theory has long focused on both body-based and culture-based oppressions. Feminist and intersectional researchers suggest acknowledging that as a researcher one has multiple positionalities and shifting identities in relation to the research. Feminists and intersectional theorists such as Gloria Anzaldúa, Patricia Hill Collins, and Kimberlé Crenshaw argue that there are multiple forms of consciousness among US women of color, and all women.74 They argue that there are multiple ways of knowing for women, built from the multiple ways women’s knowledge is produced. They argue that feminist methodologies need to locate gender and gender formation in the “local knowledge” of women’s experiences and identities. Local knowledge refers to the social, historical, and cultural specifics related to the experiences of a distinct culture.75 Epistemologies are located in such local knowledges.76 Embodied methodology must therefore examine the local knowledge associated with women’s experiences in order to actualize embodied epistemologies. Embodied criticism is therefore the practical application of embodied methodology. Further, embodied criticism is cross-disciplinary, organized around the ideals of multiple standpoints and epistemologies. Embodied

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criticism generally focuses on personal, identity-based subjective experiences and the power negotiations that are experienced in everyday lives. Embodied theorists critique particular texts and discourses that reflect such experiences. These theorists generally illustrate ways that bodies, identities, epistemologies, and experiences are viewed in society, or specific cultures. Embodied critics seek to expose the underlying ideological and epistemological forces behind these representations of female experiences. Ultimately, embodied criticism is a method of critiquing cultural texts from the perspectives of feminist theories. Ideally, embodied methodologies focus on the goal of creating social change, particularly change in the condition of marginalized individuals.77 In relation to my two categorizations of reconstructive activism-from-within and deconstructive activism-from-without, the goal of social change is clear, even though a method for creating change is not always evident. The goal of social change is at the heart of feminist theories, while application of such theory is challenging. Third wave feminists, for example, focus on the goal of generating social change; contained empowerment is a framework for creating change. Thus, it is necessary to actuate embodied methodology as a means of analysis. Because there is no single, clear definition of embodied activism and the fact that many activists argue that such claims to “Truth” need to be avoided in order for activism(s) to address issues related to all marginalized individuals, there cannot and will not be an agreement as to what constitutes “the” embodied theory and practice. However, the ideals that drive embodied realities remain; methods challenging gender, race, class, age, ability status, and other inequalities. Embodied methodology, therefore, focuses on the potential of research to benefit individuals and marginalized groups by furthering identity-centered and nonstructural knowledge.78 Embodied methodology provides a potential basis for empowerment. Author bell hooks argues that feminist methodology is “a commitment to eradicating the ideology of domination that permeates Western culture on various levels—sex, race, and class—and a commitment to reorganizing US society so that the self-development of people can take precedence over imperialism, economic expansion, and material desires.”79 As such, hooks reveals the goal of core embodied critique and scholar-activism: to provide a foundation for and drive to emancipate and change structured systems of reality and oppression. In order to analyze how contained empowerment impacts activism from the perspective of an embodied methodology, I employ multiple forms of analysis, including gender and sexuality-based criticism, intersectionality as method,80 decolonial feminism,81 and feminist and intersectional participatory action in order to determine how contained empowerment functions in feminist and other embodied activisms. Thus, this book is situated in research

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that is both blended methodology and perspective designed to investigate the gendered nature of power relations and social inequalities enacted and inherent in the cultural structures observed.82 Feminist and embodied blended methods attempt to deconstruct hegemony and patriarchy by promoting alternate understandings of power.83 Like critical methods, knowledge is primarily viewed as a social construction formed through experience and discourse. Because knowledge is identified in experience, it is dislocated from traditional power structures and can therefore be read from the margins.84 Therefore, embodied critique and analysis deconstruct the accepted knowledge and power structures within the culture observed. Embodied methodology directly addresses the power structures inherent in local knowledge, especially those power structures which impact gender in local spaces. In discussing the embodied methodology applied via feminist ethnography, Stacey explains that “Like a good deal of feminism, ethnography emphasizes the experiential. Its approach to knowledge is contextual and interpersonal, attentive like most women, therefore, to the concrete realm of everyday reality and human agency.”85 Embodied scholar-activism sets out to uncover not only the operation of power, but the local knowledge and local empowerment constructs encouraged by embodied epistemologies.86 Embodied scholar-activism is designed to reveal and deconstruct local power structures. Further, it reveals the power structures inherent to the practice of methodological research and argument. The subject position and self-reflexivity of the investigator impact the way that he or she approaches the study and, therefore, the goals of the study. In her discussions of feminist ethnography, Visweswaran argues that embodied epistemology is enacted methodologically through resisting acknowledged power structures that place the researcher in a dominant position in her or his relationship with the participants of the study.87 Further, embodied critique reveals the nature of contained empowerment in liminal action, how empowerment is revealed through contained construction, and how contained empowerment is negotiated with patriarchal and hegemonic power.88 As a conceptual framework, contained empowerment is designed to examine liminal, betwixt and between, multiple, and intersectional subject positions. It investigates power located in and on the margins that utilizes ideals from outside of normative power structures. The framework allows us to look at how personal and political power is often limited to echo chambers where such the agency sought is welcomed but without meaningful translation ability outside of that space. While such power uses constructs associated with systems and institutions, these constructs can run counter to the institutional and hegemonic ideals upon which they draw. Thus, contained empowerment is a lens for viewing what often plays out as agency-based empowerment

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which simultaneously challenges norms and standards of society and, at the same time, reinforces normative understandings of what it means to be an individual. This reinforcement also personalizes empowerment to the individual, while essentializing the status of that individual. Thus, the framework is designed to investigate problematic empowerment that reflects and reconstitutes institutional power by widening the gap between the marginalized and the powerful. As a communicative construct, the limited agency implied within this theory of contained empowerment is situated both within and outside of mainstream systems of power: in the liminal spaces betwixt and between contrasting modes of critical engagement. The resulting construct is powerful because, while it is constrained within established systems of power, it offers hope by creating alternative ways of defining the self and the self’s relation to others. Thus, contained empowerment is subversive even as it works within hegemonies. However, if the practitioners operate unaware of the contained nature of their empowerment, it begs the question of how contained empowerment might be simultaneously reinforcing of, and subversive to traditional forms of institutional structure. This book will provide an understanding of how power can function in liminal spaces, spaces of contained empowerment, and what is needed for agency from those spaces to exist beyond the confines of an echo chamber. THE LIMINAL NATURE OF NON-HEGEMONIC EMPOWERMENT The common focus of embodied activisms on changing individual status within the system rather than altering the system itself often serves to reconstitute and reinforce hegemonies. Therefore these activisms function as contained empowerment existing between or within reconstructive and deconstructive systemic approaches. They can provide a partial attempt to re-create systems of power by making specialized spaces that are still within the structures of patriarchy. It provides a space for resistance within a specific set of circumstances that create, intentionally and unintentionally, the possibility of change. It exemplifies the types of power limited by the very social conventions associated with particular activist spaces constructed by and for subversive politics. Contemporary feminisms and identity-based activisms reflect the same conflicts of balancing between feminist action and feminine, patriarchal values found in third wave feminism. Historical applications of and calls for third wave feminist action and activism demonstrate power in unique ways, resisting the limiting patterns of feminist literature and action: activism from

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within or activism from outside of patriarchy. Reconstructive activism that occurs from within hegemonic structures seeks to dismantle patriarchy by using the system against itself; deconstructive activism from without seeks to shift the system onto new grounds and redefine the rules of the system. Some embodied feminisms instead address patriarchy by attempting to bridge both positionings, redefining what it means to be both feminine and powerful, using traditional patriarchal concepts of femininity as well as alternative concepts of power. These feminisms function in localized spaces: empowering the practitioners within these contained sites by allowing them to feel personally empowered. However, whether this different approach can be actualized outside of these liminal spaces is questionable. The liminal positionality of the self-empowered can impact structural power, particularly as it can be located in the experiences of a variety of marginalized groups whose identity characteristics place them betwixt and between systemic power norms. One of the most dynamic examples of this was provided by Gloria Anzaldúa in Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza.89 The Mestiza consciousness occupies a liminal space between Mexican and “American” identity, and between cultural understandings of femininity; thus it can help break down the dualistic hegemonies that drive the definition of Mestiza.90 In this book, contained empowerment is grounded in a liminal border consciousness; theorized through third wave feminism and the relationship between the third wave and contemporary feminisms because it directly addresses and builds on feminist theoretical constructs and methods of deconstruction; however, this does not mean contained empowerment is limited or in any way restricted to feminist applications. The effort here is to create a conceptual framework for others to use as they examine liminal, betwixt and between multiple subject positions. Concepts such as girl power and the ideological goals of third wave feminism reveal the desire to reclaim traditionally disempowered concepts of femininity as new forms of power. Third wave feminism, as a result, is itself a liminal movement, not clearly defined in, but identified as, a generational understanding of feminism. The concept of waves of feminism indicates that feminism changes, or is reimagined by younger generations of participants. Third wave ideology is centered, in part, on insistence on feminine pleasure as a means of personal empowerment. Further, efforts such as third wave feminism reclaiming feminine qualities and using those qualities to enhance personal empowerment are problematic in that they often fail to negotiate empowerment other than within an individual practitioner’s existing power dynamics. This type of empowerment can challenge norms and standards of society yet at the same time reinforces normative understandings of what it means to be feminine. The concept of focusing on pleasure also personalizes empowerment to the individual, yet at the same time essentializes feminine

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pleasure. It also reflects the contrasting feminine constructs attached to the debates over ratification of the ERA. Third wave also focuses on personal experience and empowerment rather than an organized attack on patriarchy with the goal of empowerment for all women. This challenges feminist activism, particularly those that reflect the pushback against feminism highlighted by antifeminist Phyllis Schlafly and those echoing her goals. Third wave activism instead situates itself in localized spaces with what appears to be a naïve belief that localized empowerment will transcend boundaries and become literal empowerment outside of the liminal spaces from which it generates. For those in the third wave their power is legitimate, yet it does not directly impact and change patriarchal power. In fact, third wave’s contained empowerment reflects and reconstitutes patriarchal power by widening the gap between the marginalized and the powerful. The nature of contained empowerment, then, is challenging because it utilizes contrasting ideals. It is a place of power located on the margins, utilizing ideals from outside normative power structures. While it also uses constructs from within the system, these constructs can counter the ideals from the outside being utilized. For example, girl power is the site of negotiating two competing ideals: the traditional construct of “girl” as defined by patriarchy with a new style of “power” from outside of the system. Likewise, the third wave reclamation of traditional femininity as a source of power unique to young women requires juxtaposing the ideal of the female with a new construct of power. Digital activisms similarly are restrained and sometimes conscripted by literal systemic gatekeeping and narrative architectural concerns. While these juxtapositions of contrasting ideals can function in spaces of third wave feminist contained empowerment, whether they will continue to function outside of these spaces is questionable. Therefore, as we negotiate empowerment within liminal, temporal realities, we must recognize the need to bridge this power back into system-recognized empowerment. NOTES 1. See Markus Pausch, “Ist Es Gar Eine Revolution? Nein, Sire, Es Ist Eine Revolte! Vom Demokratischen Urmoment Und Seinen Folgen an Den Beispielen Fridays for Future, Gelbwesten, Extinction Rebellion Und Black Lives Matter” [Is It Even a Revolution? No, Sire, It Is a Revolt! From the Original Democratic Moment and Its Consequences Using the Examples of Fridays for Future, Yellow Vests, Extinction Rebellion and Black Lives Matter”]. SWS - Rundschau 60, no. 3 (July 2020): 250–71; Nicholas De Genova, “The ‘Migrant Crisis’ as Racial Crisis: Do Black Lives Matter in Europe?” Ethnic and Racial Studies 41, no. 10 (August 2018):

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1765–82. doi:10.1080/01419870.2017.1361543; Amien Essif, “Black Lives Matter . . . in Europe, Too.” In These Times 39, no. 7 (July 2015): 10–13; Emma Mahony, “Empty Plinths: The Significance of Absence.” Art & the Public Sphere 10, no. 1 (July 2021): 55–70. doi:10.1386/aps_00048_1; Ursula von der Leyen, “The Face of an Anti-racist Europe.” Vital Speeches of the Day 87, no. 5 (May 2021): 117–18; Peter O’Dowd, “Black Lives Matter Movement Resonates across Africa.” WBUR, June 12, 2020. www​.wbur​.org​/hereandnow​/2020​/06​/12​/black​-lives​-matter​-africa​/. 2. See Michelle Samuels, “‘Rights Will Hang in a New Balance.’” Boston University School of Public Health, 2020. www​.bu​.edu​/sph​/news​/articles​/2020​/rights​-will​ -hang​-in​-a​-new​-balance​/. Chris Van Hollen, “Van Hollen Delivers Floor Speech Fighting against Unprecedented, Rushed Nomination of Amy Coney Barrett.” Chris Van Hollen, U.S. Senator for Maryland, October 26, 2020. www​.vanhollen​.senate​.gov​/news​/press​-releases​/van​ -hollen​-delivers​-floor​-speech​-fighting​-against​-unprecedented​-rushed​-nomination​-of​ -amy​-coney​-barrett​/. 3. These concerns were intensified yet again in 2022 with accusations against the impartiality of Justice Clarence Thomas regarding his wife’s activities in relation to the January 6, 2021, insurrection and his refusal to recuse himself in related cases. For more on this controversy see Adam Liptak, “Ginni Thomas’s Texts, and the Limits of Chief Justice Roberts’s Power.” New York Times, March 31, 2022. www​.nytimes​.com​ /2022​/03​/31​/us​/politics​/ginni​-thomas​-john​-roberts​-supreme​-court​.html; See, also, John Bowden, “Pelosi accuses SCOTUS Justice Thomas’s Wife of Being a ‘Proud Contributor to a Coup.’” The Independent (UK), April 1, 2022. www​.independent​ .co​.uk​/news​/world​/americas​/us​-politics​/pelosi​-justice​-thomas​-ginni​-texts​-b2048388​ .html. 4. For details on the global protests against the Russian invasion of Ukraine, see RFE/RL, “Protests Erupt In Russia, Worldwide against Moscow’s Invasion Of Ukraine.” Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty (RFE/RL), February 27, 2022. www​ .rferl​.org​/a​/russia​-ukraine​-protest​-georgia​-invasion​/31725406​.html; Alan Taylor, “A Weekend of Global Protest against the Invasion of Ukraine.” Atlantic, February 28, 2022. www​.theatlantic​.com​/photo​/2022​/02​/photos​-weekend​-global​-protest​-against​ -invasion​-ukraine​/622951; Rachel Treisman, “Russia Arrests Nearly 5,000 Anti-war Protesters Over the Weekend.” NPR, March 7, 2022. www​ .npr​ .org​ /2022​ /03​ /07​ /1084967986​/russia​-arrests​-more​-protesters. For details on the protests against the overturning of Roe v. Wade, see Sam Levin and Victoria Bekiempis, “‘It’s Important to Fight’: US Cities Erupt in Protest as Roe v Wade Falls.” Guardian (UK), June 25, 2022. www​.theguardian​.com​/us​-news​/2022​/jun​/24​/us​-cities​-protest​-roe​-v​-wade​ -abortion​-rights​/; Clash. “Roe v Wade: Can Pop Activism Help Rally for Abortion Rights? Absolutely.” Clash, June 27, 2022. www​.clashmusic​.com​/features​/roe​-v​ -wade​-can​-pop​-activism​-help​-rally​-for​-abortion​-rights​-absolutely​/. 5. Victoria A. Newsom, Lara Martin Lengel, and Desiree A. Montenegro, “Centuries of In/Visibility: Origins of Embodied Activism as Theory and Practice.” In Embodied Activisms: Performative Expressions of Political and Social Action, edited by Victoria A. Newsom and Lara Martin Lengel, 3–35 (Lanham, MD: Lexington, 2022).

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6. Deborah G. Martin, Susan Hanson, and Danielle Fontaine, “What Counts as Activism? The Role of Individuals in Creating Change.” Women’s Studies Quarterly 35, no. 3/4 (2007): 78–94; Rachel Loney-Howes, “The Contours and Critiques of Anti-rape Activism: A Brief History.” In Online Anti-rape Activism: Exploring the Politics of the Personal in the Age of Digital Media. Emerald Studies in Criminology, Feminism and Social Change (Bingley, UK: Emerald Publishing Limited, 2020). doi:10.1108/9781838674397; Jasmine R. Linabary, Danielle J. Corple, and Cheryl Cooky, “Feminist Activism in Digital Space: Postfeminist Contradictions in #WhyIStayed.” New Media & Society 22, no. 10 (2020): 1827–48. 7. Finex Ndhlovu, “South Africa’s Social Transformation Policies: Raciolinguistic Ideologies and Neoliberal Rhetoric.” Journal of Multicultural Discourses 14, no. 2 (June 2019): 131–51. doi:10.1080/17447143.2019.1592177, 133. See, also, Evelyn A. Clark, Victims of Time, Warriors for Change: Chilean Women in a Global, Neoliberal Society (Newcastle upon Tyne, England: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2013); Linda Colley, and Catherine White, “Neoliberal Feminism: The Neoliberal Rhetoric on Feminism by Australian Political Actors.” Gender, Work & Organization 26, no. 8 (2019): 1083–99; Hendrik Huelss, “Be Free? The European Union’s Post-Arab Spring Women’s Empowerment as Neoliberal Governmentality.” Journal of International Relations and Development 22, no. 1 (March 1, 2019): 136–58; Kathleen Lynch, “Neoliberalism and Marketisation: The Implications for Higher Education.” European Educational Research Journal 5, no. 1 (2006): 1–17; Catherine Rottenberg, “The Rise of Neoliberal Feminism.” Cultural Studies 28, no. 3 (2013): 418–37; Maarja Saar, and Kadri Aavik, “Negotiating Neoliberalism in the Private Sphere: Narratives of Estonian Single Mothers.” Journal of Baltic Studies 53, no. 1 (2022): 1–18. doi:10.1080/01629778.2021.1980071. 8. Anjilee Dodge and Myani Gilbert, “His Feminist Facade: The Neoliberal Co-option of the Feminist Movement.” Seattle Journal for Social Justice 14, no. 2 (2016): Article 9. digitalcommons.law.seattleu.edu/sjsj/vol14/iss2/9; See, also, Tashina Blom, “‘My Body My Choice’: Why the Anti-lockdown Protesters are Appropriating Memory.” Presented at “Remembering Activism: The Cultural Memory of Protest in Europe,” Utrecht University, May 20, 2020. rememberingactivism. eu/2020/05/20/my-body-my-choice-why-the-anti-lockdown-protesters-are-appropriating-memory/; Lara Lengel, Anca Birzescu, and Victoria A. Newsom, “AstroTurf Activism during the Pandemic: Whiteness, Greed, and Grassroots Mimicry behind the Operation Gridlock Protests.” Paper as part of the peer-reviewed panel, “Re/Imaginings of Embodied Activisms during the COVID-19 Pandemic,” sponsored by the Ethnicity, Race, International, and Class Concerns Caucus, presented at the Central States Communication Association convention, March 25, 2021 (online conference, COVID-19); Office of US Senator Chris Murphy, “Murphy Calls Out Republican Hypocrisy on Abortion, Limits to ‘Pro-Life’ Argument.” Office of US Senator Chris Murphy, May 10, 2022. www​.murphy​.senate​.gov​/newsroom​/press​-releases​/murphy​ -calls​-out​-republican​-hypocrisy​-on​-abortion​-limits​-to​-pro​-life​-argument. 9. Thorstein Veblen, The Theory of the Leisure Class [Project Gutenberg electronic version], 1989/2008. www​.gutenberg​.org​/files​/833​/833​-h​/833​-h​.htm​/.

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10. Jacqueline Elaine Urda, “Empowering Women: A Guide for the Design of Hand and Power Tools that Accommodate Women’s Needs” (unpublished master’s thesis, Auburn University, 2009). etd.auburn.edu/bitstream/handle/10415/150/URDA_JACQUELINE_8.pdf?sequence=1&ts=1429182121473/. 11. Judy Muller, “Women Design Female-Friendly Power Tools.” ABC News, November 22, 2017. abcnews.go.com/WNT/story?id=129999&page=1, para 3. 12. Anne-Marie Campbell, cited in Judy Muller, “Women Design Female-Friendly Power Tools,” para 3. 13. Florida’s HB 1557 was designed to prohibit “classroom instruction by school personnel or third parties on sexual orientation or gender identity” among kindergarten through third grade in Florida public schools, and additionally to avoid any instruction “in a manner that is not age appropriate or developmentally appropriate for students,” which can be interpreted to address students of all ages. Brooke Sopelsa, and Tat Bellamy-Walker, “‘Don’t Say Gay’ Bill: Florida Senate Passes Controversial LGBTQ School Measure.” NBC News, March 8, 2022. www​.nbcnews​.com​/nbc​-out​ /out​-politics​-and​-policy​/dont​-say​-gay​-bill​-florida​-senate​-passes​-controversial​-lgbtq​ -school​-mea​-rcna19133​/, par. 6; Further, the bill gives parents the right to sue school districts that fail to disclose material and instruction that may be deemed “inappropriate.” The bill repeats claims made in earlier bills in multiple US states. For example, a 2012 Tennessee “Don’t Say Gay” bill which sought to limit sexual related instruction to “natural human reproduction science.” Dominic Rushe, “Gay Rights Activists Urge Tennessee to Halt Passage of ‘Don’t Say Gay’ Bill.” Guardian (UK), February 27, 2012. www​.theguardian​.com​/world​/2012​/feb​/27​/tennessee​-dont​-say​-gay​-bill​/, par. 4. In 2022, alongside and since the efforts in Florida, many GOP-led legislatures and school boards have proposed similar restrictions. One such new bill was introduced in Tennessee, HB 800, which declared that public and charter schools must “not locally adopt or use . . . textbooks and instruction materials or supplemental materials that promote, normalize, support, or address lesbian, gay, bi-sexual, or transgender (LGBT) issues or lifestyles.” Peter Green, “Think Florida’s Don’t Say Gay Bill Is Bad? Tennessee Is Considering One That’s Worse.” Forbes, March 16, 2022. www​ .forbes​.com​/sites​/petergreene​/2022​/03​/16​/think​-floridas​-dont​-say​-gay​-law​-is​-bad​ -tennessee​-is​-considering​-one​-thats​-worse​/​?sh​=b3fe4786f834, par. 5. Analysts have identified similarities between the Florida bill and Section 28 of the UK Local Government Act 1988 that a local authority “shall not intentionally promote homosexuality or publish material with the intention of promoting homosexuality” or “promote the teaching in any maintained school of the acceptability of homoexuality as a pretended family relationship.” Local Government Act 1988 (c. 9), section 28. Accessed 1 July 2006 on opsi.gov.uk. For details on the reaction to this law, see Chris Godfrey, “Section 28 Protesters 30 Years On: ‘We were Arrested and Put in a Cell Up by Big Ben.’” Guardian (UK), March 27, 2018. www​.theguardian​ .com​/world​/2018​/mar​/27​/section​-28​-protesters​-30​-years​-on​-we​-were​-arrested​-and​ -put​-in​-a​-cell​-up​-by​-big​-ben​/. Recent efforts among rising populist and fascist movements in Europe include Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orban’s “child protection law” which criminalized the sharing of information with minor children that might be perceived as

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promoting homosexuality, and Russia’s ban on the “propaganda of non-traditional sexual relations among minors” (cited in Claire Hayward, “A Suppression of LGBT History? The Legacy of Section 28” [History Matters, University of Sheffield]. www​ .historymatters​.group​.shef​.ac​.uk​/suppression​-lgbtlegacy​-section​-28, par. 2/). See, also, George Kyris, “Could the European Union Kick out Hungary?” The Conversation, July 26, 2021. theconversation.com/could-the-european-union-kick-outhungary-165029/. See, also, Paige Hamby Barbeauld, “‘Don’t Say Gay’ Bills and the Movement to Keep Discussion of LGBT Issues Out of Schools.” Journal of Law & Education 43, no. 1 (2014): 137–46; Jennifer Logue, “Sanctioned Curricular Ignorance as a Challenge to Critical Educational Communities.” Philosophical Studies in Education 44 (January 2013): 44–49; Eric Berger, “How Florida’s ‘Don’t Say Gay’ Law Could Harm Children’s Mental Health.” Guardian (UK), April 4, 2022. www​ .theguardian​.com​/us​-news​/2022​/apr​/04​/florida​-dont​-say​-gay​-bill​-children​-mental​ -health​/; Chrissy Stroop, “‘Don’t Say Gay’: Anti-equality Legislation Spreading State by State in the US.” Open Democracy, March 4, 2022. www​.opendemocracy​.net​/en​ /5050​/dont​-say​-gay​-anti​-equality​-legislation​-spreading​-state​-by​-state​-in​-the​-us​/. 14. Berger, “Florida’s ‘Don’t Say Gay’ Law,” par. 8. For more on similar bills across the US, see Dustin Jones and Jonathan Franklin, “Not Just Florida: More Than a Dozen States Propose So-Called ‘Don’t Say Gay’ Bills. NPR, April 10, 2022. www​.npr​.org​/2022​/04​/10​/1091543359​/15​-states​-dont​-say​-gay​-anti​-transgender​-bills​ /; Trudy Ring, “16 States Pushing ‘Don’t Say Gay’ Bills and Censorship Laws Right Now.” The Advocate, April 10, 2022. www​.advocate​.com​/law​/2022​/3​/29​/16​-states​ -pushing​-dont​-say​-gay​-bills​-and​-censorship​-laws​-right​-now​#media​-gallery​-media​-3​ /; Stroop, “‘Don’t Say Gay.’” 15. Monica Hesse, “Senators Marsha Blackburn and Ted Cruz Missed the Point with Their Questions about Gender.” Washington Post, March 25, 2022. www​ .washingtonpost​.com​/lifestyle​/2022​/03​/25​/ketanji​-brown​-jackson​-woman​/, par. 3. 16. Stephen T. Russell, Anna Muraco, Aarti Subramaniam, and Carolyn Laub, “Youth Empowerment and High School Gay-Straight Alliances.” Journal of Youth and Adolescence 38, no. 7 (2009): 891–903. doi:10.1007/s10964-008-9382-8, 891; See, also, Matthew J. Chinman and Jean Ann Linney, “Toward a Model of Adolescent Empowerment: Theoretical and Empirical Evidence.” The Journal of Primary Prevention 18 (1998): 393–413. doi:10.1023/A:1022691808354; Paul Crawshaw, “Youth Empowerment and Youth Research: Expertise, Subjection, and Control.” Youth & Policy 69 (2000): 1–16; Andea DiBenedetto, “An Analysis of Youth Empowerment through Group Involvement” (unpublished doctoral dissertation, University of Massachusetts, Amherst, 1991). 17. Russell et al., “Youth Empowerment and High School Gay-Straight Alliances,” 891. 18. Russell et al., “Youth Empowerment and High School Gay-Straight Alliances,” 891. 19. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “Three Women’s Texts and a Critique of Imperialism.” Critical Inquiry 12, no. 1 (1985): 243–61. 20. Sara Danius, Stefan Jonsson, and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “An Interview with Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak.” Boundary 2 20, no. 2 (1993): 24–50.

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21. Jarrel De Matas, “Making the Nation Great Again: Trumpism, Euro-Skepticism and the Surge of Populist Nationalism.” Journal of Comparative Politics 10, no. 2 (2017): 19–36. 22. Farnush Ghadery, “#Metoo—Has the ‘Sisterhood’ Finally Become Global or Just Another Product of Neoliberal Feminism?” Transnational Legal Theory 10, no. 2 (2019): 252–74; Jing Zeng, “You Say #MeToo, I Say #MiTu: China’s Online Campaigns against Sexual Abuse.” In #MeToo and the Politics of Social Change, edited by Bianca Fileborn and Rachel Loney-Howes, 71–83 (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019); Zhongxuan Lin and Liu Yang, “Individual and Collective Empowerment: Women’s Voices in the #MeToo Movement in China.” Asian Journal of Women’s Studies 25, no. 1 (2019): 117–31; Pengxiang Li, Hichang Cho, Yuren Qin, and Anfan Chen,“#MeToo as a Connective Movement: Examining the Frames Adopted in the Anti-sexual Harassment Movement in China.” Social Science Computer Review (2020, September 15). doi:10.1177/0894439320956790. 23. See, for instance, Levin and Bekiempis, “‘It’s Important to Fight’”; Clash, “Roe v Wade: Can Pop Activism Help Rally for Abortion Rights?”; RFE/RL, “Protests Erupt in Russia, Worldwide against Moscow’s Invasion of Ukraine”; Taylor, “A Weekend of Global Protest against the Invasion of Ukraine”; Treisman, “Russia Arrests Nearly 5,000 Anti-war Protesters over the Weekend.” 24. The Southern Democrats in the US is a label used to refer to nineteenth- and early- to mid-twentieth-century members of the Democratic Party representing former Confederate states. Ethical, moral, and religious associations between Southern Democrats and the pushback against Reconstruction after the US Civil War, civil rights, and gender-based rights efforts persisted until the presidency of Democrat Lyndon Johnson, who signed the Civil Rights Act of 1964 into law. By the 1980s, heavily influenced by voter behavior leading to the presidencies of Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush, such anti–civil rights associations had shifted to the Republican Party, as strongly evidenced by George H. W. Bush’s veto of the Civil Rights Act of 1990, which is viewed as a rejection of civil and gender rights’ legislative priorities. See, also, Morris P. Fiorina, Unstable Majorities: Polarization, Party Sorting, and Political Stalemate (Stanford, CA: Hoover Institution Press, 2017); Devin Caughey, “Review of Unstable Majorities: Polarization, Party Sorting, and Political Stalemate, by Morris P. Fiorina.” Perspectives on Politics 16, no. 4 (2018): 1178–79; Elizabeth M. Schneider, “The Violence of Privacy.” In Privacy, edited by Eric Barendt, 263–89 (Abington, Oxon: Routledge, 2017). 25. Cited in Nicole Via y Rada, “Rep.-Elect Marjorie Taylor Greene Challenges House Mask Rule with ‘My Body, My Choice.’” NBC News, November 13, 2020. www​.nbcnews​.com​/politics​/2020​-election​/live​-blog​/2020​-11​-13​-trump​-biden​ -transition​-n1247607​/ncrd1247735​#blogHeader, par. 2. 26. With Voices Raised (1999, June 14). Time 153, no. 23, 174. 27. Jean Genet, “Bobby Seale, the Black Panthers, and Us.” In Underground Press Anthology, edited by Thomas King Forçade, 48–52 (New York: Ace Books, 1972); Huey P. Newton, War against the Panthers: A Study of Repression in America (New York: Harlem River Press, 1996).

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28. Mary Ellen Chase, Jonathan Fisher, Maine Parson: 1768–1847 (New York: MacMillan, 1948). 29. Chase, Jonathan Fisher, Maine Parson: 1768–1847, 24. 30. See Sarah H. Arshad, Jaclyn Datar Chua, Lauren P. Baker, and Cheryl S. Al-Mateen, Diversity and Culture, Transition-Age Youth Mental Health Care (2021): 419–37. doi:10.1007/978-3-030-62113-1; Adam B. Becker, Barbara A. Israel, Amy J. Schulz, Edith A. Parker, and Laura Klem, “Predictors of Perceived Control among African American Women in Detroit: Exploring Empowerment as a Multilevel Construct.” Health Education & Behavior 29, no. 6, (2016): 699–715. doi:10.1177/109019802237939; Susan Cadell, Jeff Karabanow, and Miguel Sanchez, “Community, Empowerment, and Resilience: Paths to Wellness.” Canadian Journal of Community Mental Health 20, 1 (2001): 21–35. doi:10.7870/cjcmh-2001-0002; Mark Faulkner, “A Measure of Patient Empowerment in Hospital Environments Catering for Older People.” Journal of Advanced Nursing 34 (2001): 676–87; Jessica A. E. Kinsaul, Lisa Curtin, Doris Bazzini, Denise Martz, “Empowerment, Feminism, and Self-Efficacy: Relationships to Body Image and Disordered Eating.” Body Image 11, no 1 (2014): 63–67. doi.org/10.1016/j.bodyim.2013.08.001; Liisa Kuokkanen and Jouko Katajisto, “Promoting or Impeding Empowerment? Nurses’ Assessments of Their Work Environment.” Journal of Nursing Administration 33 (2003): 209–16; Christopher M. Masi, Yolanda Suarez-Balcazar, Margaret Z. Cassey, Leah Kinney, and Harry Piotrowski, “Internet Access and Empowerment: A Community-Based Health Intiative.” Journal of General Internal Medicine 18, no. 7 (2003): 525–30. https://doi.org/10.1046/j.1525-1497.2003.20344.x; Carolyn F. Swift, Meg A. Bond, and Irma Serrano-Garcia, “Women’s Empowerment.” Handbook of Community Psychology (2000): 857–95. doi:10.1007/978-1-4615-4193-6. 31. See Stein Amundsen and Øyvind L. Martinsen, “Linking Empowering Leadership to Job Satisfaction, Work Effort, and Creativity.” Journal of Leadership and Organizational Studies 22 (2015): 304–23. doi:10.1177/1548051814565819; Koen Dewettinck and Maaike van Ameijde, “Linking Leadership Empowerment Behaviour to Employee Attitudes and Behavioral Intentions: Testing the Mediating Role of Psychological Empowerment.” Personnel Review 40 (2011): 284–305. doi:10.1108/00483481111118621; Scott B. Dust, Christian J. Resick, Jacklyn A. Margolis, Mary B. Mawritz, and Rebecca L. Greenbaum, “Ethical Leadership and Employee Success: Examining the Roles of Psychological Empowerment and Emotional Exhaustion.” Leadership Quarterly 29, no. 5 (2018): 570–83. doi:10.1016/j.leaqua.2018.02.002; Kai Hung Fong and Ed Snape, “Empowering Leadership, Psychological Empowerment and Employee Outcomes: Testing a Multi-Level Mediating Model.” British Journal of Management 26 (2015): 126–38. doi:10.1111/1467-8551.12048; M. Lance Frazier and Stav Fainshmidt, “Voice Climate, Work Outcomes, and the Mediating Role of Psychological Empowerment: A Multilevel Examination.” Group & Organization Management 37 (2012): 691–715. doi:10.1177/1059601112463960; Yong Wu Gong, Peng Huang, Xiaofei Yan, and Zhengxue Luo, “Psychological Empowerment and Work Engagement as Mediating Roles between Trait Emotional Intelligence and Job Satisfaction.” Frontiers in Psychology, March 6, 2020. doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2020.00232; Baek-Kyoo Joo and

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Taejo Lim, “Transformational Leadership and Career Satisfaction: The Mediating Role of Psychological Empowerment.” Journal of Leadership & Organizational Studies 20 (2013): 316–26. doi:10.1177/1548051813484359; Reza Khany and Khalil Tazik, “On the Relationship between Psychological Empowerment, Trust, and Iranian EFL Teachers’ Job Satisfaction: The Case of Secondary School Teachers.” Journal of Career Assessment 24, no. 1 (2015): 112–29. doi:10.1177/1069072714565362; Amin Nikpour, “Psychological Empowerment and Organizational Innovation: Mediating Role of Job Satisfaction and Organizational Commitment.” International Journal of Organizational Leadership 7, no. 2 (2018): 106–19. doi:10.33844/ijol.2018.60421; Carsten C. Schermuly, Laura Creon, and Phillip Gerlach, “Leadership Styles and Psychological Empowerment: A Meta-Analysis.” Journal of Leadership & Organizational Studies 29, no. 1 (2022): 132–42. doi:10.1177/15480518211067751; Laveman, Larry. “The Harmonium Project: A Macrosystemic Approach to Empowering Adolescents.” Journal of Mental Health Counseling 22, no. 1 (2000): 17–32; Herbert M. Lefcourt, “Durability and Impact of the Locus of Control Construct.” Psychological Bulletin 112 (1992): 411–15; Nadine Nehls, “Recovering: A Process of Empowerment.” Advances in Nursing Science 22 (2000): 62–71; Tammy A. Orava and Peter McLeod, “Perceptions of Control, Depressive Symptomatology, and Self-Esteem of Women in Transition.” Journal of Family Violence 11, no. 2 (1996): 167–87; Jin-Liang Wang, Da-Jun Zhang, and Linda A. Jackson, “Influence of Self-Esteem, Locus of Control, and Organizational Climate on Psychological Empowerment in a Sample of Chinese Teachers.” Journal of Applied Social Psychology 43, no. 7 (2013): 1428–35. doi:10.1111/jasp.12099. 32. See Mungin Eddy Wibowo, Thrisia Febrianti, Urotul Aliyah, and Rohmatus Naini, “Mindfulness Training as Stress Prevention for Guidance and Counseling Teachers during a Pandemic.” Indonesian Community Empowerment Journal 2, no. 2 (2022). doi: 10.37275/icejournal.v2i2.20; Mark B. Borg, Jr., “The Avalon Gardens Men’s Association: A Community Health Psychology Case Study.” Journal of Health Psychology 7 (2002): 345–58; David M. Fetterman, “Empowerment Evaluation Building Communities of Practice and a Culture of Learning.” American Journal of Community Psychology 30 (2002): 89–103; Pennie G. Foster-Fishman, Deborah A. Salem, Susan Chibnall, Ray Legler, and Courtney Yapchai, “Empirical Support for the Critical Assumptions of Empowerment Theory.” American Journal of Community Psychology 26, no. 4 (1998): 507–36. doi:10.1023/A:1022188805083; Linda D. Garnets, and Anthony R. D’Augelli, “Empowering Lesbian and Gay Communities: A Call for Collaboration with Community Psychology.” American Journal of Community Psychology 22, no. 4 (1994): 447–70. 33. Radhika Gajjala, “An Interrupted Postcolonial/Feminist Cyberethnography: Complicity and Resistance in the Cyberfield.” Feminist Media Studies 2 (2002): 177–93; Radhika Gajjala, “‘Third World’ Perspectives on Cyberfeminism.” Development in Practice 9, no. 5 (1999): 616–19; Donna J. Haraway, “A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century.” In Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature, 149–81 (New York: Routledge, 1991); Victoria A. Newsom, and Lara Lengel, “The Power of the Weblogged Word: Contained Empowerment in the Middle East North Africa Region.” Feminist Media

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Studies 3, no. 3 (2003): 360–63; Victoria A. Newsom and Lara Lengel, “Framing Messages of Democracy through Social Media: Public Diplomacy 2.0, Gender, and the Middle East and North Africa.” Global Media Journal 11, no. 21 (2012) [online; refereed paper 4]. www​.globalmediajournal​.com​/open​-access​/framing​-messages​-of​ -democracy​-through​-social​-media​-public​-diplomacy​-gender​-and​-the​-middle​-east​ -and​-north​-africa​.pdf; Victoria A. Newsom and Lara Lengel, “Arab Women, Social Media, and the Arab Spring: Applying the Framework of Digital Reflexivity to Analyze Gender and Online Activism.” Journal of International Women’s Studies 13, no. 5 (2012): 31–45. 34. Michael Barr, Valentina Feklyunina, and Sarina Theys, “Introduction: The Soft Power of Hard States.” Politics 35, no. 3–4 (2015): 213–15. 35. Batliwala, “Taking the Power Out of Empowerment.” 36. Naresh Singh and Vangile Titi (eds.), Empowerment for Sustainable Development: Toward Operational Strategies (London: Zed Books, 1995). 37. Salil Shetty, “Development Project in Assessing Empowerment.” Occasional Paper Series 3 (New Delhi: 5Society for Participatory Research in Asia, 1991). 38. Singh and Titi, Empowerment for Sustainable Development, 16. 39. Jeffrey L. Katz, “Clinton Proposes New Zone Plan.” Congressional Quarterly Weekly Report 51, 1160 (1993); Nicholas Berthelot Lemann, “Fighting the Last War.” Atlantic 267 (1991): 28–33. 40. Anne-Emmanuèle Calvès, “Empowerment: The History of a Key Concept in Contemporary Development Discourse.” Revue Tiers Monde 4 (2009): 735–49; Alessandra Galiè and Cathy R. Farnworth, “Power Through: A New Concept in the Empowerment Discourse.” Global Food Security 21 (2019): 13–17, 13; Sarah Shareen Joshi Gammage and Yana van der Meulen Rodgers, “The Intersections of Women’s Economic and Reproductive Empowerment.” Feminist Economics 26, no. 1 (2020): 1–22; Krystyna Adams, Jeremy Snyder, Valorie A. Crooks, and Nicole S. Berry, “A Critical Examination of Empowerment Discourse in Medical Tourism: The Case of the Dental Tourism Industry in Los Algodones, Mexico.” Globalization and Health 14, no. 1 (2018): 1–10; Andreas Hepp, Susan Alpen, and Piet Simon, “Beyond Empowerment, Experimentation and Reasoning: The Public Discourse around the Quantified Self Movement.” Communications 46, no. 1 (2021): 27–51. 41. Anne-Emmanuèle Calvès, “Empowerment: The History of a Key Concept in Contemporary Development Discourse.” Revue Tiers Monde 4 (2009): 735–49, 735. 42. Srilatha Batliwala is senior advisor, Knowledge Building, with CREA (Creating Resources for Empowerment in Action), a Global-South-based international feminist human rights organization. See Srilatha Batliwala, “Taking the Power Out of Empowerment—An Experiential Account.” Development in Practice 17, no. 4–5 (2007): 557–65. 43. Farida Akhter’s feminist activist engagement spans 35 years. She has been involved in the national-level women’s movement in Bangladesh, is an active member of various national and international networks such as FINRRAGE (Feminist International Network for Resistance against Reproductive and Genetic Engineering), the South Asia Network on Food, Ecology and Culture, and Tamak Birodhi Nari Jote TABINAJ [Anti-tobacco Women’s Alliance]. See Farida Akhter, “Resisting

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‘Technology’ and Defending Subsistence in Bangladesh: Nayakrishi Andolon and the Movement for a Happy Life.” In There Is an Alternative, Subsistence and Worldwide Resistance to Corporate Globalization, edited by Veronika Bennholdt-Thomsen, Nicholas G. Faraclas, and Claudia von Werlhof, 167–77 (London: Zed Books, 2001). 44. S. Laurel Weldon has worked to investigate the interrelationships between gender, politics, and economies for more than twenty years. She currently serves as a Distinguished Professor of political science at Simon Fraser University in British Columbia, and a fellow of the Royal Society of Canada. For more on her analysis of the conflict between individual and strategic empowerment, see S. Laurel Weldon, “Power, Exclusion and Empowerment: Feminist Innovation in Political Science.” Women’s Studies International Forum, vol. 72 (2019): 127–36. 45. Victor Turner, The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-structure (Cornell University Press, 1969), 96. 46. The concept of the “Other” in feminisms echoes the term as defined by Hegel. See Philip Tonner, “Hegel on the ‘Other’: Introducing the Concept of Recognition in Hegel’s Phenomenology.” E-Logos, Electronic Journal for Philosophy 2 (2009). e-logos.vse.cz/pdfs/elg/2009/01/02.pdf/. 47. Simone de Beauvoir, Le Deuxième Sexe (Paris: Gallimard, 1949). 48. This is particularly true of social media influencers who rely on their audience to build their visibility, as well as requiring their audience in order to gain financial and advertising success. 49. Srilatha Batliwala, “The Meaning of Women’s Empowerment: New Concepts from Action.” In Population Policies Reconsidered: Health, Empowerment and Rights, edited by Gita Sen, Adrienne Germain, and Lincoln C. Chen, 127–138 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994). 50. The connection of wife and mother gender roles to institutional constructs is further explored in chapters 2 and 3 of this book. A particularly powerful and frightening connection to Nazi Germany’s constructions of gender is investigated in chapter 8. 51. The use of the terms “conservative” and “conservatism” here are in the literal sense of conserving the structure. See Andrew Hamilton, “Conservatism.” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, October 29, 2019. plato.stanford.edu/entries/ conservatism/. 52. Political and ideological conservatisms covers a vast range of social and moral movements, the majority of which seek to maintain or claim a nostalgic version of hegemonic reality. 53. See, also, Newsom, Lengel, and Montenegro, “Origins of Embodied Activism as Theory and Practice.” 54. Jewish Women’s Archive, “Emma Goldman.” jwa.org/womenofvalor/goldman. Accessed June 29, 2022. 55. The right to privacy is an interpretation of constitutional intent, based on legal review and judicial process in regard to the 14th Amendment. Often cited as rooted in the theoretical jurisprudence of an 1890 Harvard Law Review article by Brandeis and Warren, this “right” is an assumption of privacy that has heavily influenced US court decisions regarding gender and sexuality, including most decisions related to contraceptive and abortion rights. For more details see Louis Brandeis

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and Samuel Warren, “The Right to Privacy.” Harvard Law Review 4, no. 5 (1890): 193–220; Jed Rubenfeld, “The Right of Privacy.” Harvard Law Review (1989): 737–807; Dorothy J. Glancy, “The Invention of the Right to Privacy.” Arizona Law Review 21 (1979): 1–39; Joanna Wuest, “A Conservative Right to Privacy: Legal, Ideological, and Coalitional Transformations in US Social Conservatism.” Law & Social Inquiry (2021): 1–29; Allyson Haynes Stuart, “A Right to Privacy for Modern Discovery.” George Mason Law Review 29, no. 3 (2022). lawreview.gmu.edu/ print__issues/a-right-to-privacy-for-modern-discovery/. 56. Bradwell v. Illinois, 1873, 141, reprinted in McBride & Parry, 2016, 25. 57. “Natural Law” in this context refers to Jean Jaques Rousseau’s discussion of hegemony, and its particular interpretation through a feminist lens as misogynist. For more see Helena Rosenblatt, “On the ‘Misogyny’ of Jean-Jacques Rousseau: The Letter to d’Alembert in Historical Context.” French Historical Studies 25, no. 1 (2002): 91–114; Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, vol. 1. (R. Hurley, trans.) (New York: Random House/Vintage, 1990. Original work published 1976); Michael Stolberg, “The Crime of Onan and the Laws of Nature: Religious and Medical Discourses on Masturbation in the Seventeenth and Early Eighteenth Centuries.” Paedagogica Historica: International Journal on the History of Education 39, no. 6 (2003): 701–17. doi:10.1080/0030923032000128863. 58. Ellen Alderman and Caroline Kennedy, In Our Defense: The Bill of Rights in Action (New York: Harper Perennial, 2002. Original work published 1991); Dorothy E. McBride and Janine A. Parry, Women’s Rights in the USA: Policy Debates and Gender Roles, 5th ed. (New York: Routledge, 2016). 59. Kimberly A. Hamlin, From Eve to Evolution: Darwin, Science, and Women’s Rights in the Gilded Age America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014); Kimberly Jensen, “War, Transnationalism and Medical Women’s Activism: The Medical Women’s International Association and the Women’s Foundation for Health in the Aftermath of the First World War.” Women’s History Review 26, no. 2 (2017): 213–28; McBride and Parry, Women’s Rights in the USA. 60. Jennifer Emerling Bone, “When Publics Collide: Margaret Sanger’s Argument for Birth Control and the Rhetorical Breakdown of Barriers.” Women’s Studies in Communication 33, no. 1 (2010): 16–33; David M. Kennedy, Birth Control in America: The Career of Margaret Sanger (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1970); McBride and Parry, Women’s Rights in the USA. 61. Bone, “When Publics Collide.” 62. Bone, “When Publics Collide.” 63. McBride and Parry, Women’s Rights in the USA. 64. Alderman and Kennedy, In Our Defense. 65. Thomas B. Stoddard, “Bowers v. Hardwick: Precedent by Personal Predilection.” The University of Chicago Law Review 54, no. 2 (1987): 648–56. 66. Nelson Lund and John O. McGinnis, “Lawrence v. Texas and Judicial Hubris.” Michigan Law Review 102, no. 7 (2004): 1555–614. 67. The “quickening” refers to when a baby’s movements could first be felt by the mother, usually 15–20 week from time of conception. For more see Charles I. Lugosi, “When Abortion was a Crime: A Historical Perspective.” University of Detroit Mercy

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Law Review 83, no. 2 (2005): 51–69; Kathryn G. Milman, “Abortion Reform: History, Status, and Prognosis.” Case Western Reserve Law Review 21 (1969): 521–48; Paul Benjamin Linton, “Roe v. Wade and the History of Abortion Regulation.” American Journal of Law & Medicine 15, no. 2–3 (1989): 227–33; Paul Saurette and Kelly Gordon, The Changing Voice of the Anti-abortion Movement (University of Toronto Press, 2018); Paul Saurette and Kelly Gordon, The Changing Voice of the Anti-abortion Movement (University of Toronto Press, 2018), 37–64; Reva B. Siegel, “Abortion and the Woman Question: Forty Years of Debate.” Indiana Law Journal 89, no. 4 (2014): 1365–80; Reva B. Siegel, “She the People: The Nineteenth Amendment, Sex Equality, Federalism, and the Family.” Harvard Law Journal 115, no. 4 (2002): 947–1046. 68. Milman, “Abortion Reform.” 69. Interviewed by Katie Kindlan, “Amy Coney Barrett Raises Adoption in Abortion Case Hearing that Poses Challenge to Roe v. Wade.” Good Morning America, December 3, 2021. www​.goodmorningamerica​.com​/wellness​/story​/amy​-coney​ -barrett​-raises​-adoption​-abortion​-case​-hearing​-81519473​/. 70. Ginsburg, Ruth Bader, “Some Thoughts on Autonomy and Equality in Relation to Roe v. Wade.” North Carolina Law Review 63 (1984): 375–86, 375. 71. Baumgardener and Richards, cited in Shaw, “The Ms. Q&A.” 72. Nancy Chodorow, Feminism and Psychoanalytic Theory (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1991); Nancy Chodorow, “Feminism and Psychoanalytic Theory.” In Feminisms, edited by S. Kemp and J. Squires, 182–88 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997; Original work published 1989); Carol Gilligan, “In a Different Voice.” In Feminisms, edited by Sandra Kemp and Judith Squires, 146–52 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997; Original work published 1982); Nancy Hartsock, “The Feminist Standpoint: Developing the Ground for a Specifically Feminist Historical Materialism.” In Discovering Reality: Feminist Perspectives on Epistemology, Metaphysics, Methodology, and Philosophy of Science, edited by Sandra G. Harding and Merrill B. Hintikka, 283–310 (Hingham: Kluwer Boston, 1983); Nancy Hartsock, The Feminist Standpoint Revisited and Other Essays (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1998); Alison M. Jaggar, “Love and Knowledge: Emotion in Feminist Epistemology,” Inquiry 32, no. 2 (1989): 151–76; Lara Lengel, “Researching the ‘Other,’ Transforming Ourselves: Methodological Considerations of Feminist Ethnography.” Journal of Communication Inquiry 22, no. 3 (1998): 229–50. 73. Sandra Harding, Introduction. In Feminism and Methodology, edited by Sandra Harding, 1–14 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987), 3. 74. Gloria E. Anzaldúa, “Speaking in Tongues: A Letter to 3rd World Women Writers.” In This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color, edited by Cherrie L. Moraga and Gloria E. Anzaldúa, 183–93 (Watertown: Persephone Press, 1981); Patricia Hill Collins, Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment (Rev. Ed.) (New York: Routledge, 2000); and Kimberlé Crenshaw, “Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence against Women of Color.” Stanford Law Review 43, no. 6 (1991): 1241–99. 75. Clifford, Geertz, Local Knowledge: Further Essays in Interpretive Anthropology (New York: Basic Books, 1983).

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76. Victoria A. Newsom, Catherine Cassara, and Lara Lengel, “Discourses on Technology Policy in the Middle East and North Africa: Gender Mainstreaming vs. Local Knowledge.” Communication Studies 62, no. 1 (2011): 1–16; Lara Lengel, Ahmet Atay, and Yannick Kluch, “Decolonising Gender and Intercultural Communication in Transnational Contexts.” In The Cambridge Handbook of Intercultural Communication, edited by Guido Rings and Sebastian Rasinger, 205–26 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020). 77. Shulamit Reinharz, Feminist Methods in Social Research (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), 251. See, also, Lengel, “Researching the ‘Other,’ Transforming Ourselves.” 78. bell hooks, “Postmodern Blackness.” In Yearning. Race, Gender, and Cultural Politics, 23–31 (Boston: South End Press, 1990); bell hooks, “The Oppositional Gaze. Black Female Spectators.” In Black Looks: Race and Representation, 115–31 (Boston: South End Press, 1992); bell hooks, “This is the Oppressor’s Language, Yet I Need It to Talk to You.” In Between Languages and Cultures: Translation and Cross-Cultural Texts, edited by Anuradha Dingwaney and Carol Maier, 295–302 (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1995). 79. bell hooks, Ain’t I a Woman? Black Women and Feminism (Boston: South End Press, 1981), 194. 80. Catherine MacKinnon’s discussion of intersectionality as method provides a foundation to the goals of this analysis. Catharine A. MacKinnon, “Intersectionality as Method: A Note.” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 38, no. 4 (2013): 1019–30. See also, Kevin Delucio and Adrian J. Villicana, “Intersectionality as an Analytic Sensibility in Cultural Research.” Cultural Methods in Psychology: Describing and Transforming Cultures (2021): 389–409; and Carla Rice, Elisabeth Harrison, and May Friedman, “Doing Justice to Intersectionality in Research.” Cultural Studies ↔ Critical Methodologies 19, no. 6 (2019): 409–20. 81. Emma D. Velez, “Decolonial Feminism at the Intersection: A Critical Reflection on the Relationship between Decolonial Feminism and Intersectionality.” The Journal of Speculative Philosophy 33, no. 3 (2019): 390–406. 82. Kondo, Dorrine K. Crafting Selves: Power, Gender, and Discourses of Identity in a Japanese Workplace (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990); Lengel, “Researching the ‘Other,’ Transforming Ourselves”; Kamala Visweswaran, Fictions of Feminist Ethnography (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994). 83. See Diane Bell, “Yes Virginia, There Is a Feminist Ethnography.” In Gendered Fields: Women, Men and Ethnography, edited by Diane Bell, Pat Caplan and Wazir Jahan Karim, 28–43 (New York: Routledge, 1993); Deborah Gordon, “Border Work: Feminist Ethnography and the Dissemination of Literacy.” In Women Writing Culture, edited by Ruth Behar and Deborah Gordon, 373–89 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995); Deborah Gordon, “U.S. Feminist Ethnography and the Denationalizing of ‘America’: A Retrospective on Women Writing Culture.” In Feminist Fields: Ethnographic Insights, edited by Rae Bridgman, Sally Cole, and Heather Howard-Bobiwash, 54–69 (Toronto: Broadview Press, 1999); Deborah Gordon, “Imagining Travel after Feminist Ethnography: Accounting for ‘Sex’ at National Borders.” In Crossings: Art, Literature, Travel, Politics, edited by Rudolphus Teeuwen,

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63–77 (Tapei: Bookman Press, 2001); Lengel, “Researching the ‘Other,’ Transforming Ourselves”; Visweswaran, Fictions of Feminist Ethnography. 84. Visweswaran, Fictions of Feminist Ethnography. 85. Judith Stacey, “Can There Be a Feminist Ethnography?” Women’s Studies International Forum 11 (1988): 21–27, 22. 86. Desiree A. Montenegro, Victoria A. Newsom, and Lara Martin Lengel, “Emerging Activisms: Responding to Current and Future Crises. In Embodied Activisms: Performative Expressions of Political and Social Action, edited by Victoria A. Newsom and Lara Martin Lengel, 227–35 (Lanham, MD: Lexington, 2022); Newsom, Cassara, and Lengel, “Gender Mainstreaming vs. Local Knowledge.” 87. Visweswaran, Fictions of Feminist Ethnography. 88. Visweswaran, Fictions of Feminist Ethnography. 89. Gloria E. Anzaldúa, Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza (San Francisco: Aunt Lute Books, 1987). 90. The liminality of the borderland has been explored in literary, feminist, gender, sexuality, and cultural criticism. For literary and textual studies see Lamiaa Hassan Abdulaal, “It is No Longer Possible to Go Back Home: Crossing Borders and Liminal Space in Thomas King’s Borders.” Cairo Studies in English 2021, no. 1 (2021): 81–94; Jessica Elbert Decker and Dylan Winchock, “Introduction: Borderlands and Liminality across Philosophy and Literature.” In Borderlands and Liminal Subjects: Transgressing the Limits in Philosophy and Literature, edited by Jessica Elbert Decker and Dylan Winchock, 1–18 (Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017); Tereza Jiroutová Kynčlová, “Queering and Gendering Aztlán: Anzaldúa’s Feminist Reshaping of the Chicana/o Nation in the US–Mexico Borderlands.” In Borderlands and Liminal Subjects: Transgressing the Limits in Philosophy and Literature, edited by Jessica Elbert Decker and Dylan Winchock, 145–66 (Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017); Orquidea Morales, “Borderland Films: American Cinema, Mexico, and Canada during the Progressive Era.” Journal of American Ethnic History 36, no. 3 (2017): 79–81. For cultural criticism see Leslie Bary, “Border Trouble.” In Intersectional Feminism in the Age of Transnationalism: Voices from the Margins, edited by Olga Bezhanova and Raysa E. Amador, 41–52 (Lanham, MD: Lexington, 2021), 41; and Nagendra Bhandari, “Negotiating Cultural Identities in Diaspora: A Conceptual Review of Third Space.” Curriculum Development Journal 42 (2020): 78–89. For feminist, gender, and sexuality studies criticism see, for instance, Noel Siqi Duan, “Policing Beyoncé’s Body: ‘Whose Body Is this Anyway?’” In The Beyoncé Effect: Essays on Sexuality, Race, and Feminism, edited by Adrienne Trier-Bieniek, 55–74 (Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Co., 2016); Janelle Hobson, “Feminists Debate Beyoncé.” In The Beyoncé Effect: Essays on Sexuality, Race, and Feminism, edited by Adrienne Trier-Bieniek, 11–26 (Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Co., 2016).  In the context of LGBTQIA+ empowerment from a liminal “borderland” see Christina. Holmes, “‘Yo Soy Mujer’ ¿Yo Soy Ecologista? Feminist and Ecological Consciousness at the Women’s Intercultural Center 1.” In Women and Nature, edited by Douglas A. Vakoch and Sam Mickey, 154–66 (London: Routledge, 2017); Adela C. Licona, “(B)orderlands’ Lullaby: The Song of the Entremundista.” Trivia: Voices of Feminism

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5 (2007). www​.triviavoices​.com​/b​-orderlands​-lullaby​.html; Adela C. Licona, “La Migra.” Sexing the Political: A Journal of Third Wave Feminism on Sexuality, 3, no. 1 (2004). www​.sexingthepolitical​.org​/2004​/lamigra​.html​/; and Nyk Robertson, “The Power and Subjection of Liminality and Borderlands of Non-Binary Folx.” In Gender Forum 69, no. 6 (1981): 45–59.

Chapter 2

The Contained Embodiment of Feminist Activism

On September 26, 2020, Amy Coney Barrett was nominated to the Supreme Court of the United States by then President Donald Trump. Her appointment was to replace the late Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg, who had risen to national and later international prominence after founding the Women’s Rights Project at the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and through that project argued six cases of gender discrimination before the Supreme Court, winning five. Ginsberg’s gender rights legal arguments were centered around gender discrimination as a violation of the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment to the US Constitution. Her arguments, therefore, were tied to stronger constitutional grounds than the right to privacy impetus behind the arguments and decisions of Roe v. Wade, the US Supreme Court case allowing women a right to an abortion. Barrett’s addition to the court helped ensure the overturning of Roe in the June 24, 2022, Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health decision. Ginsberg herself pointed out the inadequacy of basing rights on a court decision rather than through legislation. Speaking at the University of Chicago School of Law in 2013, Ginsberg explained, “Roe isn’t really about the woman’s choice, is it? . . . It’s about the doctor’s freedom to practice . . . it wasn’t woman-centered, it was physician-centered.”1 Her criticism of the Roe decision concerns the inadequacy of judicial processes to create law, and to a complacency which she believed slowed the momentum of gender-based and other progressive rights movements in the United States. Her critique is of the contained, limited nature of a woman’s power to make her own body choices when the protection implied is dependent on the rights of medical practitioners to perform a procedure. Her criticism serves as a warning of the inadequacy of empowerment and choice that is contained within a liminal construct, betwixt and between the rights of medical practitioners and the right to marital privacy upon which the Roe decision was grounded. Her 51

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words also reflect the loss of momentum in the women’s liberation movement, as well as the growing momentum from antifeminist and conservative grassroots activism that would block the success of the other key women’s lib effort: ratification of the Equal Rights Amendment. Ginsberg’s concerns beg two questions of US politicians and activists: (1) Would a legislative effort afford a more permanent protection than court decisions?; and (2) Would gender-based rights tied to constitutional imperatives of equal protection under the law afford more identity protections than those tied to a nebulous gendered right to privacy? Efforts to grant a genderbased right to equal rights and protections through a constitutional amendment, as well as the antifeminist and socially conservative movements to block the passage of such an amendment instantiate such potential. They also highlight another example of how feminist activism has often been revealed as a form of liminal, temporal contained empowerment. Alongside the lack of inclusivity and equitable representation of women, women’s bodies have long been oppressed in structural, hegemonic narratives, often around narratives and control mechanisms related to procreation. Womanist activist-scholar Trinh T. Minha places the codification of procreation at the core of women’s rights, discussing how women’s bodies function as state property, particularly in terms of abortion. “Women began to be spoken of as if they were wombs on two feet when the fetus was described as a citizen . . . in other words, when women were denied the right to create. Or not to create. With their bodies.”2 Here, Trinh argues that the state legislates both for and against the rights of women to their own bodies. Women’s and gender-based activism therefore developed around the invisibility and lack of presence and control of one’s own body within systemic mechanisms. Feminisms and gender-based activisms are rooted in the use of bodies to engage with patriarchal institutions and norms and promote change. Women’s and feminist activism has always been centered around notions of difference, among the most profound of which is rooted in procreative narratives. Feminist activism both critiques and resists the historical narratives that have been used as justifications for offenses committed against female and other feminine-of-center bodies. These justifications have been extended into intersectional oppressions against black and brown female bodies, indigenous female bodies, and other nonsystemically empowered bodies. Embodied feminisms, particularly those focused on gender equity and the right for women to manage their own body choices, have sometimes generated situations of contained empowerment masked as successful societal change. For example, abortion protections and the efforts to ratify the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) are ephemeral, temporal, liminal. This liminality creates an inconstant foundation for gender and bodily equities, and one easily targeted by patriarchal, hegemonic, and supremacist arguments. Such

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temporality illustrates why antifeminist arguments flourish concurrently with feminist activism and efforts. It also illustrates the need for feminist change that incorporates both deconstructionist and reconstructionist frameworks. Non-white women in Western culture illustrate both the commodification and exoticisation of female bodies. The historical example of Sarah Baartman, one of two women known colloquially as the “Hottentot Venus,”3 illustrates the problematic nature of sexist and racist procreation discourses. Baartman, a Black woman from Cape Town, spent most of her life as a “Freak Show” exhibit in Europe, showcasing her large buttocks as a hypersexualized example of exotic femininity.4 After her death in 1815, her skeleton, brain, and sexual organs were displayed with a cast of her body until 1976 in the Musée de l’Homme in Paris.5 There is a great deal of debate surrounding Baartman and whether she allowed herself to be exhibited freely or was forced into her role. At one point sold to a French animal trainer who subsequently sold her remains to medical researchers,6 she became associated with a trend in medicine called “scientific racism,”7 based on the concept that different “races”8 had different evolutionary histories and different embodied needs. Baartman has been described as the most famous, unknown woman in the world during her time; a statement indicative of the intentionally restricted status of a marginalized body made hypervisible. She is therefore an example of racialized subaltern9 containment, as well as an essentialized, body-based feminine containment reflecting a pattern for women that would dictate their delegitimization and separation of femininity and woman-centered power within patriarchy. Another longstanding example is the use of Hippocrates’s “hysteria” and the essentialization and commodification of women’s bodies for approximately two thousand years. According to Foucault,10 the hysterization of women’s bodies was a process of scrutinizing and assigning the worth of women to their bodies, and particularly their roles in relation to procreative ability, childbirth, family, and children. It also provided justification to public arguments that women were too emotional for public service and work, and their concerns in the public sphere were easily dismissed or discredited. This process was constructed through public rhetorics and institutionalized through moralistic value assignments, tied both to church and legislation, and subsequent medical knowledge. Foucault’s argument addressed that hysterization had its roots in medieval and classical public moral argument, though he focused on the developments within hysteria during the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Because hysteria was tied in medical studies to procreation, it grounded arguments claiming that marriage and childbearing was the cure.11 Semen was thought to have healing properties, and thus parents were urged to marry off their daughters less they fall prey to the disease. Nuns and widows, often

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cited as the only women who could own property or make public arguments in this era, were seen as prone to melancholy due to a lack of regular intercourse. Both male and female masturbation became taboo and even criminalized in some areas by this period, reinforcing the need for, and healthiness of, procreative sex.12 During this period there was also a rise in the rhetoric connecting hysteria to demonic possession and witchcraft, with even the Salem witch trials envisioned as a form of hysteria.13 Contraceptives were also argued as problematic as they would not allow the healing properties of semen to aid a hysterical woman and could cause a buildup of excess female fluid, either female ejaculation or, more commonly, menstrual blood, echoing church-based concerns that women are too moist by nature, which was associated as a primary cause of hysteria.14 By the eighteenth century philosophies of the early Enlightenment era, secularism, and rationalism had influenced public rhetorics about hysteria enough to associate the illness with physical, rather than spiritual imbalances.15 By the end of the eighteenth century, a woman’s orgasm was regarded as irrelevant to procreative activity, while a man’s orgasm was seen as a medical and measurable necessity.16 These beliefs generated a public discourse that women were not naturally sexual creatures who gain pleasure in the sex act, and set up the madonna-whore dichotomy associated with Victorian Era literature and rhetoric,17 where women were either virtuous mothers or sinners. Because women’s medicine was not as advanced as it was for men, hysteria in the nineteenth century became a means of diagnosing unknown and sometimes measurable ailments. Jones explains, “By the end of the nineteenth century, hysteria came to mean the appearance of disease where no medical or physical pathology existed.”18 Hysteria therefore continued to be a catch-all for ailments doctors could not clearly identify, and this open diagnosis became a tool for the social control of women. Jones continues, “any aberrant behavior could be a symptom of disease; women were often labeled hysteric if they either took feminine roles to the extreme or if they failed to adhere to social expectations of women.”19 Medical techniques to address female hysteria included early attempts at electroshock therapy to stimulate better circulation and bodily flow.20 Additional treatments could include lobotomization, incarceration, and the popular treatment of medical stimulation of female genitalia, which led to the development of the female vibrator. The restrictions of the female body remained, and continue to be focused around, the concept of procreation. The debate over whether sex is intended for procreation, as opposed to recreation or pleasure, encompasses religious, contraceptive, economic, gender-based, marriage-based, and queer public arguments. The institution of education became a means of socializing sexual behavior, but this was not the only institution involved in socializing

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procreation and sex. Redefinitions of family were also advertised in response to urbanization and the population shift from older-style multi-generation families. The rise in popularity of “sensation novels,” scandal reporting, erotica, and pornographic content common in the new medium of film generated social reform calls. The continuing public argument is rooted in the conflict between religious and moral institutions centering around ethical-based reform, and institutions such as government, the culture industry, and medical industries more focused on economic-based reform.21 ENTER FEMINISM The lack of voting rights for women is another example of the containment of women and femininity. The Nineteenth Amendment to the US Constitution granting women the right to vote was ratified in 1920 after years of efforts by suffragists to legalize women’s ability to actively participate in democratic processes. The Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) was expected to shortly follow and continue granting and improving legal protections for women, but this process proved problematic. The problems are rooted in ongoing ideological shifts in women’s and gender-based activism, and build upon preexisting conflicts between ethical and economic reform models. Feminisms focus on suffrage, gender equality, anti-discrimination, and bringing an end to misogynistic behaviors, among many other themes. Most of these, however, are rooted in gender embodiment and resistance to prevalent, hegemonic narratives associated with the notion of sex as a procreative, rather than a pleasure-based act. North American feminism developed alongside the more sexually repressive gendered aspects of conservatism, and focused on getting women’s voices heard, recognized, and represented in hegemonic systems, including slavery, colonialism, and a long history of indigenous people’s oppression. Feminism’s “first wave,” with its core being the suffrage movement, evolved from women’s involvement in abolition.22 Feminism in the United States is rooted in arguments to change the role and perception of women in the public sphere. Abigail Adams, for example, often cited as an early example of US feminist ideology, argued for education and property and voting rights for women. In her March 31, 1776, letter to her husband, John Adams, she explains, “If particular care and attention is not paid to the Ladies we are determined to foment a Rebellion, and will not hold ourselves bound by any Laws in which we have no voice.”23 Activists after Abigail Adams continued similar goals, particularly after women became involved in abolition and recognized the irony of advocating for rights not granted themselves.24 In the late nineteenth and early

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twentieth centuries, ideological divisions between women’s activist groups regarding necessary rights and protections for women slowly became visible. The resulting schism was due to women’s involvement in the push for two constitutional amendments: the Eighteenth Amendment, prohibition, and the Nineteenth Amendment: suffrage. These movements had formed coalitions leading to the passage of both amendments. For example, the Women’s Christian Temperance Union (WCTU) was designed to promote regulation of social morality including what they saw as “impure” morality.25 Many WCTU members were also active in the suffrage movement, some arguing that it was women’s duty to guide the moral life of the nation with their votes.26 Adding to these activist voices, the rise in marketing toward targeted consumer groups created opportunities for institutions and media savvy activists to shape women’s ideals, needs, perspectives, and purchasing behaviors. Frances Willard, for example, a leader in the WCTU promoted an ideal of “true womanhood” that idealized the housewife and mother whose husband was the wage earner while she cared for the home and children.27 This notion was a continuation of “The Cult of True Womanhood” that evolved during the Victorian Era28 and is critiqued as a form of institutional repression of women through commodification practice, with publications and products targeted to housewives and homemakers. Women were treated as property of their husbands, fathers, brothers, and other men; becoming part of how women, particularly women in the middle and higher classes were legally categorized in the United States and Europe. Such categorization also served to further separate women in the upper and middle classes from those in the working and lower classes, who were expected to earn. Women in domestic labor and children’s education roles, which reflected the values and ideals associated with the private sphere, were viewed as superior jobs when compared to factory and textiles production work, reinforcing nuances of class distinctions in relation to women’s roles. Echoing these distinctions, publications such as Godey’s Lady’s Book were developed and marketed directly to middle- and upper-class women, with guides on proper etiquette, homemaking skills, and written sermons delivered specifically for female audiences. However, the women’s publishing industry ironically employed women, while the content they wrote promoted women staying at home. As the industry welcomed more women into the production of content, some of the women writers for these publications began to highlight stories of inequities regarding child labor, abolition, and other public issues. Most often, however, this was identified within the magazines as a key women’s issue: children. Thus, the Victorian Era is viewed in feminist history as establishing the first wave of feminism with clear ties to empowering the domestic housewife and mother, while simultaneously allowing some voices to promote public sphere concerns. In this way the era ensured feminism

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functioned as contained empowerment, bolstering patriarchal norms and highlighting issues-based narratives all within the constraints of feminine, domestic identity. The focus on domesticity is also a focus on the health and well-being of the family, and a core conflict between women’s movements. The focus includes welfare issues related to promiscuity and intemperance. Thus, the connections between the women’s home movement, including the “true womanhood” movements, and prohibition became a factor in its passage. The success of prohibition is, of course, nonexistent after its repeal through the Twenty-First Amendment in 1933. Women supporting the repeal of prohibition were confronted by the continuing rhetoric of the WCTU and those promoting values associated with “true womanhood.” WCTU rhetorics claimed that “repeal women” were only looking out for their financial agendas in selling alcohol and cared nothing for the conditions of children and the poor and working class who were most likely to suffer from abuse due to alcoholism. Women against prohibition in organizations like the Women’s Organization for National Prohibition Reform (WONPR) worked to counter WCTU rhetoric, arguing instead that repeal would protect families from the corruption and crime prohibition had created.29 Significantly, both movements maintained the core argument that women’s roles in the home and lives of children were the motivating factors behind their activisms. Therefore, women’s and feminist empowerment in this era remained rooted in and contained by domesticity. The increase of women in the workforce during the Great Depression and Second World War would shift visible women’s activism from the private to the public sphere and focus on female union and workplace participation, equal pay, women’s health care, and childcare.30 When men returned to work after the war, many women who had worked were displaced from employment and expected to return to home life and wife and mother roles. Feminists like Betty Friedan argued that this forced women into thankless roles and unpaid work.31 This would lead to the concept of feminism being for “women’s liberation” from these traditional roles.32 With the formation of the National Women’s Political Caucus (NWPC),33 we see the first time feminism is clearly linked to empowerment outside of the cult of domesticity and traditional constructs of femininity and womanhood. THE CONTAINMENT OF LIBERATION Following the election of a progressive legislature and executive branch in Virginia in 2019, the possibility of a 38th state ratifying the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) to the United States Constitution became one of the

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highlights in political news coverage. The state’s legislative action was considered, by some, past the originally understood deadline for ratification34 for the proposed amendment to officially change the US Constitution. However, multiple women’s and other rights’ activist organizations argue that a 38th state’s ratification could, in fact, ensure the amendment would go into effect. Public and legal debate over the ERA relies on the essentialized nature of women as an identity category. The category becomes a means of attack from two sides, those in support of the amendment using it to attack patriarchal norms, and those in opposition using women’s identity to reinforce patriarchal, conservative, and fundamentalist ethics and concerns. The Equal Rights Amendment has a long and complex history. It was first introduced to Congress in 1923, on the seventy-fifth anniversary of the first US Women’s Rights Convention. Alice Paul, a leader in the US women’s suffrage movement and representing the National Women’s Party (NWP) delivered the amendment, which read “Men and women shall have equal rights throughout the United States and every place subject to its jurisdiction. Congress shall have the power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation.”35 There were immediate critics, Congress did not pass the amendment, and it was reintroduced in every congressional session until 1943, when it was again reworded: “Equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any state on account of sex.”36 Again, the amendment was reintroduced to Congress each year until it passed both houses in 1972. Additional changes to the language were made to address individual states’ existing protections for women, primarily in the workplace. The version ultimately passed reads: Section 1: Equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any state on account of sex. Section 2: The Congress shall have the power to enforce, by appropriate legislation, the provisions of this article. Section 3: This amendment shall take effect two years after the date of ratification.37

The amendment passed with a 93.4 percent majority in the House, and a 91 percent majority in the Senate. US Congressional political party leaders agreed that the amendment needed to be ratified within seven years. Given that the majority of Congress was made up of men, and that both political parties backed the amendment, why did it not become ratified within that deadline? Advances in recognizing the rights of women and the need for gender equality to that point had been moving along a clear trajectory.

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However, counter arguments were raised by the voices of those who felt threatened by the systemic changes that would occur along with the ERA. These voices represented hegemonic, patriarchal norms and power structures perceived as threatened by feminism and women’s rights. Hegemony works to stabilize and reinforce itself and resists direct structural change. Yet, change for individuals to change their own positions within systems remains possible. Similarly, hegemonic systems can generate spaces wherein individuals can change their status, or groups of individuals can reframe their access to power. However, these changes can be perceived as threats to those already in power, who then seek to limit potential agency for these spaces and individuals. This results in a form of contained empowerment, as it allows people to feel a sense of agency, but simultaneously limiting that agency within patriarchal norms that govern US political institutions. Historians and women’s studies scholars lay the blame for the failure of the ERA to be ratified on the efforts of Phyllis Schlafly, a conservative38 activist who saw a rising neo-religious movement forming as a type of backlash to the progressive movements of the 1960s. Playing on the fears of this burgeoning religious right, Schlafly warned that the heterosexual world order was at risk, and that Christian morals would be lost. Generating a publication sent out to conservative households, The Phyllis Schlafly Report, she argued “The women’s libbers” are “radicals . . . waging a total assault on the family, on marriage and on children.”39 Schlafly furthered her campaign by drawing abortion rights into the ERA. She claimed the ERA was an attack on motherhood and the role of the wife in American society, and that ERA supporters promoted abortion as a means of escaping those roles.40 Schlafly used these arguments to create a movement of women against the ERA. Her aggressive labeling against feminists and ERA supporters led a backlash that had enough momentum to stop the swell toward ratification in a number of more conservative states. Many state legislators, fearing backlash from their constituencies, began to back away from what had only a few years earlier appeared to be a popular and foregone conclusion. In 1978 Congress extended the ratification period to 1982, but by that year only 35 of the required 38 states had ratified the amendment. Upon reaching the 1982 deadline 15 states had not ratified the ERA, and 4 states had retracted their ratification. However, in 1992, the Twenty-Seventh Amendment was added more than 203 years after being passed by Congress in 1789. Therefore, the time limit for ratifying the ERA became subject to change, though debate remains regarding a clear consensus on the processes required for ratifying the amendment. Further complicating the issue, due to precedent associated with the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments, the ability for state legislatures to retract ratification has never been seen as valid.

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Knowing that the newly democratic Virginia State Legislature would likely vote to ratify the ERA, and drawing on the complicating issues of precedent, the attorneys general of the three states that had previously sought to retract their ratifications—Alabama, Louisiana, and South Dakota—filed a lawsuit against the archivist of the United States, the federal officer that oversees the ratification process, to prevent Virginia’s or any other state’s ratification.41 Once the ERA was ratified in January of 2020, the attorneys general of the three late ratifying states—Illinois, Nevada, and Virginia—filed suit for “recognizing the complete and final adoption” of the ERA.42 The dates associated with the ERA are significant within “waves”43 theories of feminism. Feminist waves invoke the concept that there have been at least two key eras of US feminism, each of which are associated with a time the ERA was proposed to Congress: the “first wave” represented by the suffrage movement in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and the second wave represented by the women’s movement of the 1960s and early 1970s. All of the states that ratified the ERA with the exception of three did so in the 1970s, in alignment with the women’s rights movement of that era. The three that ratified later—Nevada, Illinois, and Virginia—did so between 2017 and 2020, during an era that some are now calling the “fourth wave” of feminism.44 This fourth wave is associated with intersectional feminisms and activisms, empowering multiple identity categories including women, and the use of social and digital media to promote activist goals, including hashtag activisms. For many journalists and contemporary media analysts, the rise in #MeToo in particular,45 is seen as influencing the renewed interest in ratifying the ERA. This application of the waves approach to feminism, however, begs a question: Was there a third wave of feminism? The history of the ERA illustrates a number of issues of interest to feminists and identity-rights activists regarding codifications of concepts such as rights, equality, access, and empowerment.46 The many complications involving these topics when applied to gender are partly due to the fact that gender involves the category of woman, and women are technically not a minority group. For this reason, legal protections accorded “minority” groups have not been evenly applied to women, and similarly to other gender-based groupings. This complication echoes the invisibility of women in history,47 the invisibility of lesbians in public and legal discussions of homosexuality,48 and the hystericization of the female body49 in religious, medicinal, psychological, and public discourse. The conflicts over the passage and ratification of the ERA also reflect conflicts within the notion of feminism itself. Feminism is by no means a monolithic body of theory. Instead, as has been outlined by numerous scholars of feminism and gender and women’s rights movements, a collection of arguments and activisms aimed at altering systemic notions of identity constructs,

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with particular emphasis on those built around binary gender codes. The essentialization and invisibility of women in political and legal discourse, and perceptions of an antithetical relationship between patriarchal constructs of femininity and notions of gender equality are core issues that have served to unify and divide those claiming feminist labels at various points in history. When ratification failed to be achieved, critics began arguing that the ERA was no longer necessary due to women having already achieved protections against discrimination. The amendment also continued to be opposed due to its public correlation with abortion. These issues became associated with what Jerome Himmelstein calls “antifeminism,” a movement promoted by women who recognize patriarchal oppression but fear that marriage, family, and other moral and ethical values will be lost if feminism succeeds.50 This movement would have an impact on the evolution of feminist theory and activism in the forthcoming decades. Antifeminist voices directly echoed Schlafly’s arguments in creating a stereotypical category of “feminists” as activists that was intentionally contrasted with those seeking to promote the value of gender roles associated with patriarchal femininities, particularly the roles of housewife and mother. An intentional divide between feminists seeking equality and women seeking recognition and rights as housewives and mothers was constructed through these efforts. The question of women’s rights ties to complex notions of women’s empowerment. The public discourse surrounding the ERA highlights a clash between notions of progressive women’s empowerment and empowering traditionally feminine identities. Schlafly’s arguments that feminism was an attack on traditional women’s roles is echoed in postfeminist and other more contemporary arguments that traditional and older feminists attack patriarchal constructs of femininity itself. Schlafly and her followers argue that if women are empowered and given “equal rights” within a patriarchal system, notions of biological difference that ground patriarchy will be destabilized. Further, these anti-equality arguments further narratives of the hystericization of female bodies and systemic/patriarchal control of procreation, particularly as a means of raising fears over ideals of abortion and family values. The focus on contrasting narratives of power and identity becomes a commodity of soft power51 with the ability to promote consumptive responses and behaviors based on emotive response.52 Contained empowerment is located in the juxtaposition themes such as these from opposing ideologies, particularly power resistant to the system and power contained systematically. The containment of power potentially harmful to a hegemonic system provides an opportunity to simultaneously address change agents and maintain the status quo. The differences between systemic and poststructural empowerment ideals must be looked at in order to understand how the containment operates. Further, the contrasts between identity constructs from within and without

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systemic norms must be interpreted and linked to the narratives associated with these spaces. THE IMPACT OF INTERNATIONAL FEMINISMS As the women’s liberation movement evolved in North America, similar hypervisible53 feminist movements across the globe also took shape. These movements challenged the North American wave model of feminisms, and were seldom assigned the name “feminism” except from Western perspectives and in the context of transnational collaborative associations.54 For example, the first “wave” of South American feminism, which originated within independence movements in Ecuador and Argentina in the 1800s. It resurfaced with Caribbean feminists in the 1920s through the 1950s, primarily focused on social and political structures defined by colonialism and motivated by a long history of indigenous people’s oppression and enslavement. In the liberal feminist era, South American feminism would come to be dominated by neoliberal economic policy concerns that have disproportionately impacted vulnerable communities.55 Globally, Latin feminist movements have faced multiple moments of resistance, invisibility, and stagnation, typically due to external variables such as civil unrest and shifts in government and power. For example, Chilean feminist Julieta Kirkwood coined the term anos de silencio [years of silence] to explain the extreme stagnation of feminist movements in South America, particularly Guatemala, the Dominican Republic, Nicaragua, Colombia, Argentina as well as Chile between the 1950s and 1970s.56 More critically at this time, there was a rise in participation in feminisms by privileged and politically connected women and an overshadowing effort from women due to their literary styles and education levels, such as Rosario Castellanos of Mexico.57 The reinforcement of privileged voices within South American feminisms created pushback similar to what was seen in North America, with concerns over the lack of intersectional voices, particularly the voices of the working class women that had once been dominant in that region’s feminist rhetoric. For example, 1945 Nobel Prize in Literature awardee Gabriela Mistral (1889–1957) was internationally recognized as a Latin American feminist, yet her arguments are criticized for having privileged patriarchal gender norms. Born Lucila Godoy of Chile, she was noted as both feminist and educational reformer in Chile and Mexico, and represented Chile in the United Nations. Consider her words in her 1923 anthology, Lecturas Para Mujeres [Readings for Women], republished by the Mexican Ministry of Education and meant to be taught in schools:58 “In my opinion, perfect patriotism in women is perfect

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motherhood [emphasis author’s].”59 She goes on to insist, “Therefore, the most patriotic education one can give a woman is one that underscores the obligation to start a family.”60 Mistral’s work and similar arguments framed within the suffrage movement in the region illustrated themes that promoted women’s right to vote and work, but insisted on motherhood roles as the primary goal for feminine values. As such, many North American feminists rejected Latin feminists while their voices were simultaneously welcomed on global political stages. Further, as the suffrage movement waned in Latin America, regional media, government, and the prevalent Catholic Church promoted anti-feminist and pejorative viewpoints about feminists, portraying them as antifamily, antimale, and self-indulgent. Thus, by the end of the 1960s as many Latin feminisms began to focus on equal pay, equality, and reproductive rights within social justice frames instead of suffrage, they were already removed from potentially unifying conversations with North American liberal feminists. This would be further intensified by the human rights arguments developing in Chile, Argentina, and Mexico, refocusing feminism within labor and class struggle arguments. Rising militant juntas worked to eliminate feminists among other forms of resistance. Among the most notable examples is the forced dissolution of feminist organizations after the 1969 Argentine civil uprising known as the Cordobazo, led by students and workers against the military government. Women’s and feminists groups that would arise in the late 1970s in the aftermath of junta violence and militarism had to work within the confines of the resulting dictatorships and military stratocracys. These organizations often focused, in visible attributes, on motherhood rights and education for women and girls. Some of the more notable include the Madres de la Plaza de Mayo [Mothers of the Disappeared] and Asociación de Trabajo y Estodio Sobre la Mujer [Association for Work and Study of Women] in Argentina; Centro da Mulher Brasileira [Center for Brazilian Women] in Brasil; Círculo de Estudios de la Mujer [Women’s Study Circle] in Chile; and La Casa de la Mujer [The House of the Woman] in Colombia,61 which was among the earliest to focus on violence against women in the region. In Eastern Europe, feminist efforts were shaped by the governing Eastern European Communist parties. Post–World War II, women’s emancipation was proclaimed throughout most of the region’s socialist states. Both women and men were expected to participate in the labor force and earn wages. Women also held substantive positions in government during this period, and would greatly influence the development and launching of the United Nations’ Decade for Women in 1975.62 Women were granted new educational opportunities and had access to state entitlements to aid in work-family

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balance. Yet, by no means was this a monolithic process, and women’s rights and expectations were tied to the necessity of labor management espoused by their governments.63 Private sphere issues were not addressed as directly as those for women in labor and the public sphere. Maria Bucur explains, “once communist regimes offered women additional responsibilities, there was no room to argue for reduced duties in the home within the context of the local feminist discourses.”64 Feminism, therefore, was not an active form of activism in this era, as women had gained “the right to vote, and access to unprecedented public services, from generous paid pre- and post-natal leaves to full-day state-funded kindergarten and birth control.”65 Women organizing outside of communist foci was not encouraged, so little address to the work-life burden outside of government-established entitlement programs offered opportunity for guidance and personal value assigned to motherhood and housewife roles. Anti-feminism instead arose as a pushback to what many women in the region felt were authoritarian denials of femininity.66 After the Cold War, women’s rights issues in Eastern Europe often focused on notions of femininity and motherhood and religious connections that had been removed from public discourse under Soviet authority. Arising postsocialist feminisms67 arose in academic circles, most of the practitioners multilingual intellectuals exposed to postcolonial, North American, and Latin American feminist arguments.68 Postsocialist femninisms in Eastern Europe would also be closely aligned with women’s nongovernmental organizations (NGOs); often this alignment was to investigate and alleviate examples of domestic violence and encourage women’s and girls’ education. However, much of the women’s rights arguments in this region countered North American and Western European feminisms, further challenging global efforts to align. The hystericization of women’s bodies that drove many early and liberal era feminist arguments in the Americas and Europe also played a role in Middle East and North African (MENA) women’s activisms, particularly in relation to narratives of purity applied to female identities. These narratives were commonly tied to virginity and the need to protect women’s procreative bodies. These narratives have persisted and re-arisen with Islamic conservatisms; after the end of the colonial era, and after the construction of the modern nation of Israel, many MENA cultures shifted back toward conservative, patriarchal, and nationalistic cultural standards.69 For example, virginity is medicalized and equated to hymen possession in Iran, Egypt, and other Islamic nations.70 In Iran, since the 1979 Shi’a Revolution, brides, grooms, and interested family members could request a govahiye bekarat [virginity certificate] to prove the hymen is medically intact. Similarly publicized were “inspections for purity” among young women to ensure their virginities are

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intact in Egypt, echoing both Middle Eastern conservatism and Western fears of the spread of Islam. In many of these regions, hymenoplasty has risen as a means of ensuring the marriageability of women. In her examination of the challenges of liberal feminism in the MENA, Cyra Akila Choudhury explains: I suggest that most liberal feminists also have a specific idea of women’s flourishing that prevents it from fully comprehending Muslim women who choose to adhere to Islam, which is, in their view, a hopelessly patriarchal and gender oppressive religion. Liberal notions of flourishing require progress towards a liberal society. As such, “reform” is used to further this vision. I argue that liberal feminism also shares this “narrative progress” that reduces non-liberal societies to “developing” and, consequently, global southern women to victims.71

As in North American history, religious ideologies and citizenship narratives within the MENA have therefore either erased women or framed them within specified gender roles rooted in wifely behavior and motherhood. This impacts visibility both in the MENA and in Western patriarchal history.72 Foucauldian bio-power discussions of the hysterization of women’s bodies and psychiatrization of perverse pleasure apply to MENA women’s categorizations as well as the Victorian-era criticism Foucault presented.73 Women’s erasure and removal from public discourse, both in formal law and informal policy, and these values are reflected both in Islamic (and Sharia) law and tradition, and in Western conservatisms. As a result, intersectional understandings become necessary to recognizing and making MENA women visible in global discourse, and as a networking mechanism for actualizing their narratives within westernized definitions of feminisms. One obvious example is the Western focus on hijab,74 which, Barbara Harlow notes, “has long fascinated its orientalizing observers.”75 Further, the orientalist fascination of Muslim women’s practice of hijab lead many Western feminists through the early years of the third wave to erroneously assume that there was no Muslim feminism. Susan Muaddi Darraj, in “Third World, Third Wave Feminism(s): The Evolution of Arab American Feminism,” argues, “Indeed, it comes as a surprise to many Western women and Western feminists to learn that there is, and has been, a strong Arab feminist movement in the Middle East at least since the beginning of the twentieth century.”76 Similarly, April Najjaj argues, “the assumptions that are often part of the Western feminist tradition, as well as the traditional, largely patriarchal perspective of postcolonial theory, create an intersectionality of discrimination against Muslim women.”77 The Western assumptions of oppression and lack of agency, together with the postcolonial emphasis on returning to

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original cultural traditions, places the identity politics of women who wear hijab in doubled or overlapping states of discrimination.78 In “Theorizing the Politics of ‘Islamic Feminism,’” Shahrzad Mojab critiques not only the lack of awareness of Arab and, more broadly, Muslim feminisms, but also critiques Western feminist theory which, she argues: in spite of its advances, is in a state of crisis since (a) it is challenged by the continuation of patriarchal domination in the West in the wake of legal equality between genders, (b) suspicious of the universality of patriarchy, it overlooks oppressive gender relations in non-western societies and (c) rejecting Eurocentrism and racism, it endorses the fragmentation of women of the world into religious, national, ethnic, racial and cultural entities with particularist agendas.79

Arlene MacLeod, in her study, “Hegemonic Relations and Gender Resistance: The New Veiling as Accommodating Protest in Cairo,” was one of the earlier feminist scholars from Europe or North America to interrogate this Western orientalist fascination and problematize the practice of what is referred to in her work as “the new veiling” as a “form of hegemonic politics in a modernizing environment that might allow alternative discourse and effective political actions.”80 Global feminisms have faced multiple challenges that have situationally formed and directionally determined the trajectory and development of US and North American feminisms. Decolonial, intersectional, and other international voices would blend with those of North American feminists to form new styles and attitudes within and related to feminism. The late 1970s and 1980s would see a rise in Black feminism and womanism, indigenous and Native American feminism, a division within feminism and feminist advocacies around the role sex-work and pornography as empowering opportunities, the development of neoliberal and postfeminism, and the rise of antifeminism. And the question of a woman’s right to choices about her own body would continue to dominate the core of these discussions. All of these derivations would influence the development of third and fourth wave feminist movements. These derivations and their rhetorics would also remain consistently framed within localized echo chambers, making it difficult for coalition, and challenging the ability to expand women’s local knowledge into systemic understanding.

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THE IN/VISIBILITY OF EMBODIED FEMINIST ACTIVISMS The impacts of global feminism on liberal feminism in North America were complicated by the alignment of arguments to protect private sphere rights and notions of femininities with the arguments of Phyllis Schlafly and US antifeminism. The ongoing struggle over the ERA would dominate North American feminist discourse, and the growing awareness of intersectional and other gaps in that focus would serve to encourage a dispersal of feminist goals in the West. Intersectional views of gendered embodiment and femininities would impact the construction of narratives of feminism, antifeminism, womanism, and other labels regarding gender rights and gender roles advocacies. By focusing on women’s issues, the women’s liberation movement made feminism and women’s embodiment hypervisible. Similarly, international women’s movements focused on an embodied woman as an archetypal form within their strategic goals. This hypervisibility was necessary to frame women’s issues within political rhetoric, using the process of “strategic narrative”81 construction to generate ideological and political messaging to address their counter-hegemonic advocacies. A challenge in making the embodied needs of women visible is complicated by how hegemonic and patriarchal structures emphasize bodies. Patriarchal emphases on bodies produce a cultural narrative of woman as other: anyone who is not a heteronormative male can be placed in a similar embodied othering.82 The belief that a woman’s embodied purpose as a childbearing vessel adds a unique layer of complication to her othered status, particularly when hegemonies are rooted Judeo-Christian traditions which reinforce this characteristic of womanhood: “It was necessary for woman to be made, as the Scripture says, as a helper to man; not, indeed, as a helpmate in other works, as some say, since man can be more efficiently helped by another man in other works; but as a helper in the work of generation.”83 Such bias influences the legitimization of hegemonic embodiment, and makes advocacy to shift embedded understandings of the worth of a woman a key component for any feminism. Feminisms must therefore simultaneously address multiple hegemonies, including sociopolitical and religious ones, as evidenced in bell hooks’s argument that we must dismantle the entire “white supremacist capitalist patriarchal”84 hegemonic structure. In political history, very often the major policy changes impacting gender and sex are not made with sex and gender as the focus of determination. Courts, legislatures, state governments, and political actors remove gender and sexuality, particularly women, from most political discussions on the issues being decided. One extremely visual example of women’s invisibility

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in discussions about their rights and bodies comes from images of former US President George W. Bush signing the Partial Birth Abortion Ban Act of 2003, with no women present among the many congressional observers flanking him as he signed.85 Not only have women consistently been systematically excluded from these processes, their presence is often removed from the legislation of court rulings themselves. For example, the Supreme Court’s decision to legalize birth control in Roe v. Wade was centered around arguments for the right to privacy, rather than women’s rights.86 Legislative, judicial, and other codifications of sex and gender continue to resonate around the arguments of whether sex is for pleasure or procreation, and the lack of visibility of women in political rhetoric and practice. For example, a former California statutory rape law was inherently sex-discriminative. It argued “males could be prosecuted for having sexual relations with underage females, but not vice versa.”87 The invisibility of women is problematically present here, as the implication is women cannot commit rape. Simultaneously this is tied to the procreative definition of sex, especially when that is dependent, as it was in this case, on sexual penetration. In 1981, a court appeal challenging this law was lost because justices determined that the law was designed to prevent teen pregnancy.88 Equal rights ideology is a struggle of essentialism and identities, and is grounded in conflict regarding what Foucault calls bio-power,89 and the historical centering of definitions of sex on procreation. Bio-power is a means of controlling bodies through legislation and economic incentive, and is influenced by political, religious, and cultural ideologies focused on defining moral behavior to suit economic and political gain.90 Bio-power is a necessary component of the functions of patriarchy. It also serves as an agent of the commodification of identity, conscripting agency and action within normalized social scripts. There are multiple examples of legislation tied to procreation, sexuality, and personal choice. Significantly, how these were advertised and responded to in media and popular culture fed the ongoing public debates. The Comstock Laws of 1873, passed by the US Congress for the “Suppression of Trade in, and Circulation of, Obscene Literature and Articles of Immoral Use” prohibited buying, selling, mailing, and importing “obscene” materials across state lines. Today, some states still have laws in place restricting the sales of contraception and sexual toys.91 Sex toys, especially the vibrator, became a target of Comstock, which clashed with the tool’s medical definition.92 Significantly, however, after Comstock there have been relatively few legislative examples of procreative-based restriction other than those most easily tied to deviance. Instead, social varieties of bias have flourished within the culture industry.

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Andrea Dworkin explains that notions of pornography are tied to the Greek origin of the term: porne meaning prostitute or whore, and graphos meaning to write. Thus, explains Dworkin, pornography literally refers to “writing about whores,” who for the ancient Greeks were sexual slaves. Dworkin further argues that pornography therefore isn’t about sex, but about the “depiction of women as vile whores.”93 Thus the porn industry serves to victimize and dehumanize women through terrorism and male physical strength, as well as the consumptive power of money. Pornography holds a unique space in feminist theories and activism as some argue that it is degrading to women and leads to misogyny and violence against women including rape and sexual harassment.94 Others argue it can lead to distorted understandings of sexualized bodies in both men and women, encouraging anxiety about sexuality and sexual prowess. Still others argue that it holds the potential for a true feminine and female form of empowerment, if the cultural read of the industry comes to understand the centering of women and women’s bodies as a site of power. However, capitalism is at play, and the porn industry is one of the largest media industries in the United States. Dines argues that the inherent patriarchal aspects of porn have allowed for an increase in violence and misogyny both in the industry’s products and in culture.95 Consumer desensitization has pushed the industry recently to incorporate more hard core extremes.96 However, anti-porn legislative efforts remain aggressive, aimed either at the industry as a whole, and do little to reign in the “toxic misogyny of sexist advertising, cultural images, and speech practices that put women . . . in a secondary place—not just as citizens and political participants but as human beings.”97 Thus, women’s hypersexualized selves are visible, yet they are restricted and removed from systemic power, and the power claimed through pornographic practice is highly personal, highly persona-pleasure centric, and remains problematically separate from hierarchical power structures. Again, this illustrates the invisibility of women and female-centric politics and industry. McBride and Parry explain that various aspects of reproductive rights and freedoms, such as affordable access to contraception and abortion, “have not been in the policy arena continuously. In fact, legislators have acted infrequently on these subjects. Perhaps they avoid them. After all, these topics are difficult for politicians.”98 The authors reference the concept, emerging in early political science research, of emotive-symbolic issues. “With emotive-symbolic issues, the demands of interest groups are not for money or contracts but for values: these demands force legislators to decide between strong but conflicting convictions of right and wrong.”99 When politicians do promote values-based legislation it increases conflict-driven public argumentation from multiple interest groups. Feminists have also avoided directly discussing the legalities of procreative topics in some eras, discussing instead medical needs and personal identity choices connected to procreation,

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including early twentieth-century movements promoting “voluntary motherhood” as a choice for women to make about when to bear a child100 and arguments about disease prevention.101 HAVE WE COME A LONG WAY? The highly visible US protest movements associated with the 1960s and early 1970s encouraged the visibility of human rights, antiwar, and antiracism and discrimination issues. In response, the late 1970s and 1980s saw a rise in protest and rallies organized by the Christian Right and evangelical organizations against perceived changes in sexual and cultural norms. Among the earliest of these protests, often met by counter-protests, were movements against abortion after the 1974 passage of Roe v. Wade. Thus, by the late 1970s, the feminist era of “women’s liberation” would encounter Phyllis Schlafly’s pushback which drew upon the long history of the cult of domesticity, and reconnected that notion to women as voices for morality. The women’s liberation movement would become what is understood as core to the second wave of feminism, a fight for equal rights for women in the workplace.102 Second wave feminism as a label would also envelop notions of equality in home life, with a focus on abortion rights and the rights of rape and abuse victims. It is this private sphere interpretation that Schlafly used to demonize feminism and the ERA, and the interpretation that would complicate the next era of feminisms. The contrast between these two sets of women’s voices would continue to shape notions of feminism for the next several decades, particularly in terms of how they each promote notions of empowerment. Feminism was also again reinforced as a consumer notion. Like the cult of womanhood’s consumer relationship with the publishing industry that promoted women’s ideology while reinforcing hegemonic institutions, feminism became a product that could be sold to interested audiences. Popular media artifacts promoted “women’s liberation” feminism throughout the 1970s, linking that empowerment to consumptive behavior.103 The popular advertising slogan for Virginia Slims, marketed specifically as women’s cigarettes, read “We’ve come a long way, baby.”104 This slogan implies behavioral freedoms and choices often associated with second wave feminism and the women’s liberation movement. For some, this would indicate a shift in feminism to a postfeminist era. This era assumed that feminism was an outdated political movement and ideal because women had the choices they wanted.105 Postfeminism emerged after the failed ratification of the ERA, and after the label was first used by Susan Bolotin in New York Times Magazine in 1982.106 Bolotin interviewed young women 18–25 and found they believed feminism was politically outdated and that they were resistant to the label.107

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Postfeminism would become one of the earliest feminist and gender activist movements to claim generational space in contrast to women’s liberation and the second wave. Beginning with the critique that the second wave was too white and straight, postfeminists argued that there was no room for intersectionality within that older wave. However, postfeminism became particularly focused on popular culture and ideals of femininity, and, for some, sexual empowerment.108 This label would be challenged in that same era by the notion of a third wave of feminism that, for some, encompassed postfeminism. Yet another conflicting label in this era is neoliberal feminism. Neoliberal feminism echoes aspects of third wave by promoting personal empowerment.109 All of these overlapping labels create conflict that prevents any notion of feminist stability, a situation ideal within all of these feminisms opposing the essentialist nature of the second wave. Significantly, none of these movements applied activism or generated a collective movement to alter that status of women. All of them instead promoted the idea that individuals suffered under monolithic performances of activism, therefore suggesting that finding a personal means of empowerment within or outside of systems of power was more beneficial and fulfilling than arguing for systemic change. On January 21, 2017, one day after the inauguration of Donald Trump, over three million people in the United States and globally joined together in a massive Women’s March protesting the new administration, prior misogynistic actions and words of Trump, and the administration’s expected restrictions on women’s and gender rights. This was the first globally high-profile women’s movement in decades and echoed activist goals and activity from the second wave. In October of that same year, the #MeToo movement provided another space for women’s and gender-based organizing and activism after the publication of details regarding allegations of sexual harassment against major media figure Harvey Weinstein. This collective action highlighted the voices of individual victims of harassment and sexual abuse and allowed these voices to encourage others to speak out against victimization and victimhood. Even more than the women’s march had, #MeToo encouraged the promise and hope found within spaces of contained empowerment: the potential for power unfettered by hegemony. However, it should be noted that it took the highly visible election of Trump and a rise in global conservatisms to engage the public in “feminism” and “activism” on this scale. At the time of this writing, one hundred years since the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment, the argument made in those Virginia Slims ads is far from accurate. In 2018 Moira Donegan, creator of the “Media Men List” highlighting male media figures accused of bad behavior including harassment and rape and helped spark the hashtag #MeToo movement, spoke out on the relationship between #MeToo and contemporary forms of feminism. She examined a then common characterization that “older” feminists were

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complicit in a culture of misogyny because they promoted self-sufficient individualism as the means of achieving empowerment in contrast to younger feminists using #MeToo to promote a collective form of outreach.110 While Donegan found that this generational divide was not an accurate read of the contemporary state of feminism, it is reflective of a clash of generational ideals tied to identity constructs and applied to GenZ, millennials, generation X, and “boomers.”111 The internet meme “OK Boomer,” now acknowledged within the hallowed halls of the US Supreme Court,112 reflects the conflicts inherent in cross-generational dialog and shifting definitions of power, activism, and individual versus collective choice. Donegan’s discussion echoes the generationally structured concept of waves of feminism, the idea of feminist waves is rooted in a complexity of distraction and distinctions between categories of essentializations that serve to keep patriarchal norms in place. The waves ideology can create barriers that impact the ability of feminists, and activists in general, to investigate intersectional applications of theory and action. It also erases the multiplicities implied within feminism and sets up the idea that each wave is resistant to the ideologies of the last (and future) waves. The waves are generated by a perception of inadequacy in each prior wave and focus on the successes and failures of those prior waves by highlighting where each is limited. The connective tie between the waves, particularly when those rhetorically constructing each wave frame their messages as resistance and change, is therefore often overlooked and erased from within the movements. However, the label of “feminism” itself encourages a unified resistance from the outside, strengthened by institutional and patriarchal norms. The polarization that has been witnessed in recent years has heightened public awareness of deconstructively oriented activists’ concerns as a response to rising authoritarianism and legislative attempts to hinder notions of progress and what conservatives see as attempts to disrupt or dismantle traditionally understood norms. Women’s movements and feminists within the United States have been sounding alarms regarding the continuing efficacy of Roe v. Wade, ongoing misogynistic structural norms, and wage and childcare inequities which disproportionately impact women. The growing public awareness of continuing gender discrepancies is a reminder of the contained nature of feminist empowerment, no matter the wave or geographic location, particularly when it is perpetually met by patriarchally reinforced gender role standards based in procreative narratives that are used to justify misogyny and gender repressions. The past several years have further heightened these concerns. Sexual harassment and assault cases brought against highly visible figures such as Harvey Weinstein, Bill Cosby, R. Kelly, and Karry Nassar placed structural misogyny prominently in news coverage. The COVID-19 pandemic heightened awareness of structural and economic gender gaps

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related to employment. And the passing of Ginsberg, along with the passage of anti-abortion legislation in Texas and Mississippi, among others, brought abortion rights arguments back into the center of US political rhetoric. NOTES 1. Cited in Meredith Heagney, “Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg Offers Critique of Roe v. Wade during Law School Visit.” University of Chicago Law School. www​.law​ .uchicago​.edu​/news​/justice​-ruth​-bader​-ginsburg​-offers​-critique​-roe​-v​-wade​-during​ -law​-school​-visit​/. 2. Trinh T. Minha, Woman, Native, Other (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989), 37. 3. The concept of the “Hottentot” was historically used to refer to non-Bantu speaking indigenous people of South Africa. The term is also often associated with Black women who are presented in popular culture as the embodiments of exotic, “Othered” hypersexualized deviance. All of these interpretations apply to the label assigned to Sarah Baartman. For more on the conceptualization of the Black Hottentot see Shaweta Nanda, “Re-Framing Hottentot: Liberating Black Female Sexuality from the Mammy/Hottentot bind.” Humanities 8, no. 161 (2019): 1–32. doi.org/10.3390/ h8040161. 4. Carol E. Henderson, “AKA: Sarah Baartman, the Hottentot Venus, and Black Women’s Identity.” Women’s Studies 43, no. 7 (2014): 946–59; Clifton Crais and Pamela Scully, Sara Baartman and the Hottentot Venus: A Ghost Story and a Biography (Princeton University Press, 2010); Brandi Wilkins Catanese, “Remembering Saartjie Baartman.” Atlantic Studies 7, no. 1 (2010): 47–62; Alexandra Stewart, and Bernard De Meyer, “La Carte d’Identification: Saartjie Baartman et le Langage de Classification dans 53cm de Bessora.” French Studies in Southern Africa 2018, no. 48 (2018): 189–210. 5. Henderson, “Sarah Baartman, the Hottentot Venus.” 6. Clifton Crais, “Baartman, Sara.” In Oxford Research Encyclopedia of African History, 2020. Published online: 29 May 2020. 7. Brenda Schmahmann, “Senzeni Marasela’s Reworking of Women’s Histories in Beyond Booty: Covering Sarah Baartman and Other Tales.” Textile 19, no. 1 (2021): 49–75. See, also, Alexander D. Barder, “Scientific Racism, Race War and the Global Racial Imaginary.” Third World Quarterly 40, no. 2 (2019): 207–23. 8. I problematize the term “race,” following Fanon. See Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth (New York: Grove Press, 1964); Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks (New York: Grove Press, 1967). 9. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “Can the Subaltern Speak?” In The Post-Colonial Studies Reader, edited by B. Ashcroft, G. Griffiths, and H. Tiffin, 24–28 (London: Routledge, 1996; Original work published 1985). 10. Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, vol. 1, translated by R. Hurley (New York: Random House/Vintage, 1990; Original work published 1976); See, also, David

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T. Evans, Sexual Citizenship: The Material Construction of Sexualities (London: Routledge, 1993). 11. Cara E. Jones, “Wandering Wombs and ‘Female Troubles’: The Hysterical Origins, Symptoms, and Treatments of Endometriosis.” Women’s Studies 44, no. 8 (2015): 1083–113; Winifred Schleiner, “Early Modern Green Sickness and Pre-Freudian Hysteria.” Early Science and Medicine 14, no. 5 (2009): 661–76. 12. Michael Stolberg, “The Crime of Onan and the Laws of Nature: Religious and Medical Discourses on Masturbation in the Seventeenth and Early Eighteenth Centuries.” Paedagogica Historica: International Journal on the History of Education 39, no. 6 (2003): 701–17. doi:10.1080/0030923032000128863. 13. Andrew Scull, Hysteria: The Disturbing History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009); Herman Westerink, “Demonic Possession and the Historical Construction of Melancholy and Hysteria.” History of Psychiatry 25 no. 3 (2014): 335–49. 14. Sabine Arnaud, On Hysteria: The Invention of a Medical Category between 1670 and 1820, 1st ed. (University of Chicago Press, 2015); Joseph Pentangelo, “Burning Feathers: A Hint at Hysteria in a Connecticut Witchcraft Case.” Folklore 132, no, 1 (2021): 59–71. doi: 10.1080/0015587X.2020.1763624; Scull, Hysteria. 15. Michael Trimble and Edward H. Reynolds, “A Brief History of Hysteria: From the Ancient to the Modern.” Handbook of Clinical Neurology 139 (2016): 3–10. 16. Thomas W. Laqueur, Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992). 17. Kimberly VanEsveld Adams. “Feminine Godhead, Deminist Symbol: The Madonna in George Eliot, Ludwig Feuerbach, Anna Jameson, and Margaret Fuller.” Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion 12, no. 1 (1996): 41–70. 18. Cara E. Jones, “Wandering Wombs and ‘Female Troubles’: The Hysterical Origins, Symptoms, and Treatments of Endometriosis.” Women’s Studies 44, no. 8 (2015): 1083–13, 1095. 19. Jones, “Wandering Wombs and ‘Female Troubles,’” 1096. 20. Stanley Finger, “Benjamin Franklin’s Wife’s Apoplexy and Mid-Eighteenth Century Medicine.” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 159, no. 2 (2015): 169–97. 21. Evans, Sexual Citizenship; Jeffrey Weeks, Sex, Politics and Society: The Regulation of Sexuality Since 1800 (3rd ed.) (London: Routledge, 2012). 22. Ellen Carol DuBois, Feminism and Suffrage: The Emergence of an Independent Women’s Movement in America, 1848–1869 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1999). 23. Abigail Adams, “Letter from Abigail Adams to John Adams, March 31, 1776.” Adams Family Papers: An Electronic Archive, par. 9. www​.masshist​.org​/digitaladams​ /archive​/. 24. Jessica R. Pliley, “Claims to Protection: The Rise and Fall of Feminist Abolitionism in the League of Nations’ Committee on the Traffic in Women and Children, 1919–1936.” Journal of Women’s History 22, no. 4 (2010): 90–113. 25. Deborah G. Martin, Susan Hanson, and Danielle Fontaine, “What Counts as Activism?: The Role of Individuals in Creating Change.” Women’s Studies Quarterly 35, no. 3/4 (2007): 78–94; Alison Marie Parker, Purifying America: Women, Cultural

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Reform, and Pro-Censorship Activism, 1873–1933 (University of Illinois Press, 1997). 26. Bonnie J. Dow, “The ‘Womanhood’ Rationale in the Woman Suffrage Rhetoric of Frances E. Willard.” Southern Journal of Communication 56, no. 4 (1991): 298–307; Richard H. Chused, “The Temperance Movement’s Impact on Adoption of Women’s Suffrage.” Akron Law Review 53 (2019): 359–86. 27. Dow, “The ‘Womanhood’ Rationale.” 28. Barbara Welter, “The Cult of True Womanhood: 1820–1860.” American Quarterly 18, no. 2 (1966): 151–74. 29. Kenneth D. Rose, American Women and the Repeal of Prohibition (New York: New York University Press, 1996). 30. Ruth Milkman, “Redefining ‘Women’s Work’: The Sexual Division of Labor in the Auto Industry during World War II.” Feminist Studies 8, no. 2 (1982): 337–72; Ruth Milkman, Gender at Work: The Dynamics of Job Segregation by Sex During World War II (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1987); Susan E. Riley, “Caring for Rosie’s Children: Federal Child Care Policies in the World War II Era.” Polity 26, no. 4 (1994): 655–75. 31. Betty Friedan, The Feminine Mystique (WW Norton & Company, 2010). 32. Sara Margaret Evans, Personal Politics: The Roots of Women’s Liberation in the Civil Rights Movement and the New Left (New York: Vintage, 1980). 33. Kathryn Thoms Flannery, Feminist Literacies, 1968–75 (University of Illinois Press, 2010). 34. For more details see Ruth Bader Ginsburg, “Ratification of the Equal Rights Amendment: A Question of Time.” Texas Law Review 57 (1978): 919–45; Allison L. Held, Sheryl L. Herndon, and Danielle M. Stager, “The Equal Rights Amendment: Why the ERA Remains Legally Viable and Properly before the States.” William & Mary Journal of Women and the Law 3 (1997): 113–36. 35. Cited in Committee on the Judiciary, U.S. Senate, “Equal Rights Hearing Before a Subcommittee of the Judiciary United States Senate Seventy-First Congress Third Session on S.J. Res. 52. A Joint Resolution Proposing an Amendment to the Constitution of the United States Relative to Equal Rights for Men and Women,” 53 (Washington, DC: United States Printing Office, 1931). 36. The 1943 text, in what has been dubbed the “Alice Paul Amendment” became the language used in the amendment passed by both Houses of Congress in 1972. For more information, see Rebecca DeWolf, “The Equal Rights Amendment and the Rise of Emancipationism, 1932–1946.” Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies 38, no. 2 (2017): 47–80. 37. Cited in Alice Paul Institute, “ERA. Frequently Asked Questions,” par. 4, 2018. www​.equalrightsamendment​.org​/faq​/. 38. The label conservative as applied to Schlafly is contemporary to her work. Her arguments were seen in contrast to “radical” at the time but the label “conservative” was not clearly applied until her efforts were merged into Reagan-style neoconservatism. In her own work, and the work of her Eagle Forum the terms “progressive” and “conservative” were sometimes conflated or reversed, particularly when their arguments intended to illustrate feminism as antiquated or outdated. For more information

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see Susan Marshall, “Confrontation and Cooptation in Antifeminist Organizations.” Feminist Organizations: Harvest of the New Women’s Movement (1995): 323–35; Donald T. Critchlow, Phyllis Schlafly and Grassroots Conservatism (Princeton University Press, 2018); Alexa Bankert, “Let’s Talk about Sexism: The Differential Effects of Gender Discrimination on Liberal and Conservative Women’s Political Engagement.” American Politics Research 48, no. 6 (2020): 779–91. 39. Phyllis Schlafly, 1972, cited in Martha Solomon, “Stopping ERA: A Pyrrhic Victory.” Communication Quarterly 31, no. 2 (1983): 109–17, 112. 40. Reva B. Siegel, “Abortion and the Woman Question: Forty Years of Debate.” Indiana Law Journal 89, no. 4 (2014): 1365–80. 41. Veronica Stracqualursi, “3 Conservative-Leaning States Sue to Block ERA from Ratification.” CNN, December 19, 2019. Accessed January 30, 2020. www​.cnn​ .com​/2019​/12​/19​/politics​/alabama​-lawsuit​-equal​-rights​-amendment​/index​.html​/. 42. Patricia Sullivan, “U.S. Justice Department Says Virginia Action Would Come Too Late to Ratify ERA.” Washington Post, January 9, 2020. Accessed January 12, 2020. www​.washingtonpost​.com​/local​/legal​-issues​/us​-justice​-department​-says​ -virginia​-action​-would​-come​-too​-late​-to​-ratify​-era​/2020​/01​/08​/3ebe2642​-324f​-11ea​ -9313​-6cba89b1b9fb​_story​.html​/. 43. Chilla Bulbeck, “Explaining the Generation Debate: Envy, History or Feminism’s Victories?” Lilith: A Feminist History Journal 15 (2006): 35–47. 44. Jennifer Baumgardner, “Is There a Fourth Wave? Does it Matter?” Feminist. com, 2011. Accessed January 31, 2020. www​.feminist​.com​/resources​/artspeech​/ genwom​/baumgardner2011​.html​/; Melody Berger, We Don’t Need Another Wave: Dispatches from the Next Generation of Feminists (Emeryville: Seal Press, 2006); Shelley Budgeon, “Emergent Feminist(?) Identities: Young Women and the Practice of Micropolitics.” European Journal of Women’s Studies 8 (2001): 7–28; Shelley Budgeon, Third-Wave Feminism and the Politics of Gender in Late Modernity (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2011); Shelley Budgeon, “The Contradictions of Successful Femininity: Third-Wave Feminism, Postfeminism and ‘New Femininities.’” In Femininities: Postfeminism, Neoliberalism and Subjectivity, edited by Rosalind Gill and Christina Scharff, 279–92 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011); Kira Cochrane, All the Rebel Women (London: Guardian Shorts, 2013); Nicole Gaudiano, “‘Me Too’ Movement Renews Equal Rights Amendment Push.” USA Today, November 18, 2017. www​.usatoday​.com​/story​/news​/politics​/2017​/11​/18​/me​-too​-movement​-renews​ -equal​-rights​-amendment​-push​/875903001​/. 45. Zeng, “You Say #MeToo, I Say #MiTu.” 46. See Jane J. Mansbridge, Why We Lost the ERA (University of Chicago Press, 1986). 47. Dorothee Wierling, “The History of Everyday Life and Gender Relations: On Historical and Historiographical Relationships.” In The History of Everyday Life: Reconstructing Historical Experiences and Ways of Life, edited by Alf Lüdtke and translated by W. Templer, 149–68 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995; Original work published 1989). 48. See Terry Castle, The Apparitional Lesbian: Female Homosexuality and Modern Culture (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993); Rebekah Ranger and Paul

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Fedoroff, “Perversions and Sexology.” The International Encyclopedia of Human Sexuality, 887–901 (Chichester, West Sussex, UK: 2015). doi:10.1002/9781118896877. 49. Michel Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave, 2008); Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, vol. 1, translated by R. Hurley (New York: Random House/Vintage, 1990; Original work published 1976); Michel Foucault, Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972–1977, Colin Gordon; translated by Colin Gordon, Leo Marshall, John Mepham, and Kate Sope (New York: Pantheon, 1980). See, also, Evans, Sexual Citizenship. 50. Jerome L. Himmelstein, “The Social Basis of Antifeminism: Religious Networks and Culture.” Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 25, no. 1 (1986): 1–15. doi.org/10.2307/1386059. 51. Joseph S. Nye, “Soft Power.” Foreign Policy 80 (Autumn 1990): 153–71; Joseph S Nye, Soft Power: The Means to Success in World Politics (New York: Public Affairs, 2004). 52. Sara Ahmed, The Cultural Politics of Emotion (Edinburgh, Scotland: Edinburgh University Press, 2014). 53. For an analysis of hypervisible activisms, please see Newsom, Lengel, and Montenegro, “Origins of Embodied Activism as Theory and Practice”; Denise Montenegro, Victoria A. Newsom, and Lara Martin Lengel, “Emerging Activisms: Responding to Current and Future Crises.” In Embodied Activisms: Performative Expressions of Political and Social Action, edited by Victoria A. Newsom and Lara Martin Lengel, 227–35 (Lanham, MD: Lexington, 2022). 54. Barbara Molony and Jennifer Nelson, Introduction. Women’s Activism and “Second Wave” Feminism: Transnational Histories (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2017). 55. Francesca Gargallo, Las Ideas Feministas Latinoamericanas (Mexico City: Universidad del la Ciudad de México, 2004). See, also, Francesca Gargallo, Antología del Pensamiento Feminista Nuestroamericano (Buenos Aires: Pañuelos en Rebeldía, Escuela de Relaciones Internacionales de la Universidad Nacional-CLACSO, 2010); Francesca Gargallo,“El Feminismo Filosófico.” In El Pensamiento Filosófico Latinoamericano, del Caribe y “Latino,” edited by Enrique Dussel, Eduardo Mendieta, and Carmen Bohórquez, 418–33 (Mexico City: Siglo XXI Editores, 2011). 56. Julieta Kirkwood, Ser Politica en Chile: Las Feministas y Los Partidos (Santiago de Chile: Facultad Latinoamericana de Ciencias Sociales [FLASCO], 1986). 57. Gargallo, Las Ideas Feministas Latinoamericanas. 58. Elizabeth Horan, The Letters of Gabriela Mistral and Victoria Ocampo (Austin: University of Texas Press. 2009). 59. Gabriela Mistral, Madwomen: The “Locas Mujeres” Poems of Gabriela Mistral. Bilingual edition translated and edited by Randall Couch (University of Chicago Press, 2008), 12. 60. Cited in Licia Fiol-Matta, A Queer Mother for the Nation: The State and Gabriela Mistral (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002), 74. 61. Of note, many of these organizations, while seeking a visible-yet-hidden status to protect their members from their governments are also viewed (by their North American counterparts) as “radical feminist” due to a common Marxist association in

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connection with their continuing labor rights efforts. See Hammer Museum, “Digital Archive: Radical Women: Latin American Art, 1960–1985.” “Chronology.” 2022. hammer.ucla.edu/radical-women/research/chronology/. 62. ​​Celia Donert, “Women’s Rights in Cold War Europe: Disentangling Feminist Histories.” Past & Present 218, no. suppl_8 (2013): 180–202. 63. Maria Bucur, “An Archipelago of Stories: Gender History in Eastern Europe.” The American Historical Review 113, no. 5 (2008): 1375–89. 64. Bucur, “An Archipelago of Stories,” 1379. 65. Bucur, “An Archipelago of Stories,” 1380. 66. Barbara Einhorn, “Democratization and Women’s Movements in Central and Eastern Europe: Concepts of Women’s Rights.” In Democratic Reform and the Position of Women in Transitional Economies, edited by Valentine M. Moghadam, 48–74 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993). 67. Madina Tlostanova, Suruchi Thapar-Björkert, and Redi Koobak, “The Postsocialist ‘Missing Other’of Transnational Feminism?” Feminist Review 121, no. 1 (2019): 81–87. 68. Andrea Pető, “Eastern Europe: Gender Research, Knowledge Production and Institutions.” In Handbuch Interdisziplinäre Geschlechterforschung, edited by Beate Kortendiek, Birgit Riegraf, and Katja Sabisch, 1535–45 (Wiesbaden, Germany: Springer VS, 2019). 69. Angela Y. Davis, “Women and Capitalism: Dialectics of Oppression and Liberation.” In The Black Feminist Reader, edited by Joy James and T. Denean Sharpley-Whiting, 146–82 (Malden: Blackwell, 2000); Robert D. Lee, Overcoming Tradition and Modernity: The Search for Islamic Authenticity (New York: Routledge, 1997). 70. Azal Ahmadi, “Recreating Virginity in Iran: Hymenoplasty as a Form of Resistance.” Medical Anthropology Quarterly 30, no. 2 (2016): 222–37. doi:10.1111/ maq.12202/. 71. Cyra Akila Choudhury, “Empowerment or Estrangement: Liberal Feminism Visions of the Progress of Muslim Women.” University of Baltimore Law Forum 39 (2008): 153–72. 72. Fatima Mernissi, Can We Women Head a Muslim State? (Lahore, Pakistan: Simorgh, Women’s Resource and Publications Centre, 1991). 73. Michel Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2008); Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, vol. 1; Michel Foucault, Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972–1977, edited by C. Gordon and translated by C. Gordon, L. Marshall, J. Mepham and K. Soper (New York: Pantheon, 1980). See, also, Evans, Sexual Citizenship. 74. While the term hijab is commonly used to indicate a head scarf worn by Muslim women, a more attentive translation indicates a partition or curtain in the literal or metaphorical sense, i.e., a screen of some sort that partitions an individual from another. 75. Barbara Harlow, “Review.” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 20, no. 1 (1994): 223–28; Leila Ahmed, Women and Gender in Islam: Historical Roots of a Modern Debate (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1992);

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Sahar Khamis, “The Many Faces of Arab Women’s Activism.” The New Arab, March 8th, 2019. www​.alaraby​.co​.uk​/english​/comment​/2019​/3​/8​/the​-many​-faces​-of​-arab​ -womens​ -activism; Sahar Khamis, “The Unfinished Gender Equality Revolution of the Arab Spring.” The New Arab, March 8, 2021. english.alaraby.co.uk/english/indepth/2021/3/8/the-unfinished-gender-equality-revolution-of-the-arab-spring/; Lara Lengel, Victoria A. Newsom, and Catherine Cassara, “Transcender l’Essentiel et les Stratégies Discursives d’In/Visibilité: Politique d’Intégration du Genre et des Femmes du Moyen-Orient et Afrique du Nord dans les Médias” [Transcending Essentialisation and Discursive Strategies of In/Visibility: Gender Mainstreaming and MENA Women in the Media]. French Journal for Media Research no 11 (2019). ISSN: 2264–4733. frenchjournalformediaresearch.com/lodel-1.0/main/index. php?id=1777/. 76. Susan Muaddi Darraj, “Third World, Third Wave Feminism(s): The Evolution of Arab American Feminism.” Catching a Wave: Reclaiming Feminism for the 21st Century, edited by Rory Dicker and Alison Piepmeier, 188–205 (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 2003). See, also, Chandra Talpade Mohanty, “Under Western Eyes: Feminist Scholarship and Colonial Discourses.” In Feminist Postcolonial Theory: A Reader, edited by Reina Lewis and Sara Mills (New York: Routledge, 2003); Chandra Talpade Mohanty, Ann Russo, and Lourdes Torres, eds., Third World Women and the Politics of Feminism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991). 77. April L. Najjaj, “Feminisms and the Hijab: Not Mutually Exclusive.” Social Sciences 6, no. 80 (2017): 1–8. doi:10.3390/socsci6030080, 7. 78. Katherine Bullock, Rethinking Muslim Women and the Veil, Challenging Historical and Modern Stereotypes (Herndon: The International Institute of Islamic Thought, 2002); Lama Abu-Odeh, “Post-Colonial Feminism and the Veil: Considering the Differences.” New England Law Review 6 (1991): 1527–37; Leila Ahmed, Women and Gender in Islam (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1992). 79. Shahrzad Mojab, “Theorizing the Politics of Islamic Feminism.” Feminist Review 69 (2001): 124–46. 80. Arlene E. MacLeod, “Hegemonic Relations and Gender Resistance: The New Veiling as Accommodating Protest in Cairo.” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 17, no. 3 (Spring 1992): 533–57. doi:10.1086/494748. 81. Miskimmon, Alister, Ben O’Loughlin, and Laura Roselle. Strategic Narratives: Communication Power and the New World Order (London: Routledge, 2014). See, also, Joost de Moor, “Postapocalyptic Narratives in Climate Activism: Their Place and Impact in Five European Cities.” Environmental Politics (2021): 1–22; Dionne Espinoza, María Eugenia Cotera, and Maylei Blackwell, eds., Chicana Movidas: Narratives of Activism and Feminism in the Movement Era (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2018); Victoria A. Newsom, Lara Lengel, and Ann Kowalski, “Strategic Narratives and Essentialising Visualisations: A Decade of the Affective, Embodied Activism of FEMEN.” In Visual Production in the Cyberspace: A Theoretical and Empirical Overview, edited by Ugur Bakan, 1–35 (London: Macro, 2018). 82. de Beauvoir, Le Deuxième Sexe.

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83. St. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica, translated by the Fathers of the English Dominican Province. www​.gutenberg​.org​/cache​/epub​/17611​/pg17611​-images​ .html. 2006. Original work published 1485. 84. bell hooks, Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center 85. White House Archives, The. “President Bush Signs Partial Birth Abortion Ban Act of 2003.” The White House Archives-President George W Bush. georgewbushwhitehouse.archives.gov/news/releases/2003/11/20031105–1.html/. 86. Ellen Alderman and Caroline Kennedy, In Our Defense: The Bill of Rights in Action (New York: Harper Perennial, 2002; Original work published 1991). 87. Dorothy E. McBride and Janine A. Parry, Women’s Rights in the USA: Policy Debates and Gender Roles (5th ed.) (New York: Routledge, 2016), 8–9. 88. See McBride and Parry, Women’s Rights in the USA. 89. Michel Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave, 2008); Michel Foucault, Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972– 1977, edited by C. Gordon and translated by C. Gordon, L. Marshall, J. Mepham and K. Soper (New York: Pantheon, 1980). 90. See Evans, Sexual Citizenship; Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality. 91. See Susan Frelich Appleton, and Susan Ekberg Stiritz, “Going Wild: Law and Literature and Sex.” In Special Issue: Feminist Legal Theory 69 (2016): 11–62. doi:10.1108/S1059-433720160000069002; Michael J. Hooi, “Substantive Due Process: Sex Toys After Lawrence.” Florida Law Review 60, no. 2 (2008): 507–18; Kara Loewentheil, “The Satanic Temple, Scott Walker, and Contraception: A Partial Account of Hobby Lobby’s Implications for State Law.” Harvard Law and Policy Review 9 (2015): 89–128; Martha McCaughey and Christina French, “Women’s Sex-Toy Parties: Technology, Orgasm, and Commodification.” Sexuality and Culture 5, no. 3 (2001): 77–96. doi.org/10.1007/s12119-001-1031-2; Heather M. Prescott, “‘An Uncommonly Silly Law’—Contraception and Disparities in the United States.” New England Journal of Medicine 374, no. 8 (2016): 706–8. 92. Appleton and Stiritz, “Law and Literature and Sex.” 93. Andrea Dworkin, “Pornography” [Excerpt]. In The Feminism and Visual Culture Reader, edited by A. Jones, 387–89 (New York: Routledge, 2003; Original work published 1979), 385; Andrea Dworkin, Pornography: Men Possessing Women (New York: Penguin/Putnam, 1979). 94. Renee Mikorski and Dawn M. Szymanski, “Masculine Norms, Peer Group, Pornography, Facebook, and Men’s Sexual Objectification of Women. Psychology of Men & Masculinity 18, no. 4 (2017): 257–67. 95. Gail Dines, Pornland: How Porn Has Hijacked Our Sexuality (Boston: Beacon Press, 2010). 96. Dines, Pornland. 97. Lynne Tirrell, “Toxic Misogyny and the Limits of Counterspeech.” Fordham Law Review 87 (2018): 2433–52. 98. McBride and Parry, Women’s Rights in the USA, 92. 99. McBride and Parry, Women’s Rights in the USA, 92; See, also Sara Ahmed’s work on affect in The Cultural Politics of Emotion.

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100. See Hamlim, From Eve to Evolution; Jensen, “War, Transnationalism and Medical Women’s Activism”; McBride and Parry, Women’s Rights in the USA. 101. See Bone, “When Publics Collide”; Kennedy, Birth Control in America; McBride and Parry, Women’s Rights in the USA. 102. Bonnie J. Dow, Watching Women’s Liberation, 1970: Feminism’s Pivotal Year on the Network News (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2014). 103. Sherrie A. Inness, Disco Divas: Women and Popular Culture in the 1970s (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003). 104. Nancy J. Kaufman, “Smoking and Young Women: The Physician’s Role in Stopping an Equal Opportunity Killer.” JAMA 271, no. 8 (1994): 629–30. 105. Sandra Coney, “Why the Women’s Movement Ran Out of Steam.” In Heading Nowhere in a Navy Blue Suit and Other Tales from Feminist Revolution, edited by Sue Kedgley and Mary Varnham, 51–74 (Wellington: Daphne Brasell Associates Press, 1993); Sheila Scraton, “The Changing World of Women and Leisure: Feminism,‘Postfeminism’ and Leisure.” Leisure Studies 13, no. 4 (1994): 249–61. 106. Vicki Coppock, Deena Haydon, and Ingrid Richter, The Illusions of Post-Feminism: New Women, Old Myths (London: Routledge, 2014), 3. 107. Susan Bolotin, “Voices from the Post-Feminist Generation.” New York Times Magazine, October 17, 1982. www​.nytimes​.com​/1982​/10​/17​/magazine​/voices​-from​ -the​-post​-feminist​-generation​.html​/. 108. See Anderson and Stewart, “Politics and the Single Woman”; Joan K. Bushman and Silvo Lenart, “‘I am Not a Feminist, But . . .’: College Women, Feminism, and Negative Experiences.” Political Psychology 17, no. 1 (1996): 59–75. https:// doi.org/10.2307/3791943; Butler, “For White Girls Only?”; Jenny Coleman, “An Introduction to Feminisms in a Postfeminist Age.” Women’s Studies Journal 23, no. 2 (November 2009): 3–13; Tasha N. Dubriwny, The Vulnerable Empowered Woman: Feminism, Postfeminism, and Women’s Health (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2012); Jane Gerhard, “Sex and the City: Carrie Bradshaw’s Queer Postfeminism.” Feminist Media Studies 5, no. 1 (2005): 37–49; Rosalind Gill, “Post-Postfeminism? New Feminist Visibilities in Postfeminist Times.” Feminist Media Studies 16, no. 4 (2016): 610–30; Rosalind Gill and Ana Sofia Elias, “‘Awaken Your Incredible’: Love Your Body Discourses and Postfeminist Contradictions.” International Journal of Media & Cultural Politics 10, no. 2 (2014): 179–88; Lia Litosseliti, Rosalind Gill, and Laura Garcia Favaro, “Postfeminism as a Critical Tool for Gender and Language Study.” Gender & Language 13, no. 1 (2019): 1–22; Angela McRobbie, “Notes on the Perfect: Competitive Femininity in Neoliberal Times.” Australian Feminist Studies 30, no. 83 (2015): 3–20; Angela McRobbie, “Postfeminism and Popular Culture: Bridget Jones and the New Gender Regime.” In Interrogating Postfeminism: Gender and the Politics of Popular Culture, edited by Yvonne Tasker and Diane Negra, 27–39 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007); McRobbie, Angela. “Top Girls? Young Women and the Post-Feminist Sexual Contract.” Cultural Studies 21, no. 4–5 (2007): 718–37; Meredith Nash and Ruby Grant, “Twenty-Something Girls v. Thirty-Something Sex and the City Women: Paving the Way for ‘Post? Feminism.’” Feminist Media Studies 15, no. 6 (2015): 976–91; Diane Negra, What a Girl Wants? Fantasizing the Reclamation of Self in Postfeminist

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Culture (New York: Routledge, 2009); and Yvonne Tasker and Diane Negra, “Introduction: Feminist Politics and Postfeminist Culture.” In Interrogating Postfeminism: Gender and the Politics of Popular Culture, edited by Yvonne Tasker and Diane Negra, 1–26 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007). 109. Hester Baer, “Redoing Feminism: Digital Activism, Body Politics, and Neoliberalism.” Feminist Media Studies 16, vol. 1 (2016): 17–34; Jessalynn Keller and Jessica Ringrose, “‘But then Feminism Goes out the Window!’: Exploring Teenage Girls’ Critical Response to Celebrity Feminism.” Celebrity Studies 6, no. 1 (2015): 132–35; Kaitlynn Mendes, Jessica Ringrose and Jessalynn Keller, “#MeToo and the Promise and Pitfalls of Challenging Rape Culture through Digital Feminist Activism.” European Journal of Women’s Studies 25, no. 2 (2018): 236–46; Nicola Rivers, “Concluding Remarks: Looking Forward to the Fourth Wave.” In Postfeminism(s) and the Arrival of the Fourth Wave: Turning Tides, edited by Nicola Rivers, 133–56 (Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017); Catherine Rottenberg, “The Rise of Neoliberal Feminism.” Cultural Studies 28, no. 3 (2014): 418–37; Catherine Rottenberg, “Neoliberal Feminism and the Future of Human Capital.” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 42, no. 2 (2017): 329–48; Catherine Rottenberg, The Rise of Neoliberal Feminism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018); Shir Shimoni, “Happy and Entrepreneurial within the ‘Here and Now’: The Constitution of the Neoliberal Female Ageing Subject.” Feminist Media Studies (2021, September 19): 1–16. doi:10.1080/14680777.2021.1979067; Holly Thorpe, Kim Toffoletti, and Toni Bruce, “Sportswomen and Social Media: Bringing Third-Wave, Postfeminism and Neoliberal Feminism into Conversation.” Journal of Sport and Social Issues 41, vol. 5 (2017): 359–83; Jessica Valenti, Full Frontal Feminism: A Young Woman’s Guide to Why Feminism Matters (Emeryville: Seal Press, 2007); Sylvia Walby, The Future of Feminism (London: Polity Press, 2011); Kalpana Wilson, “Towards a Radical Re‐Appropriation: Gender, Development and Neoliberal Feminism.”  Development and Change 46, no. 4 (2015): 803–32; and Harriet Kimble Wrye, “The Fourth Wave of Feminism: Psychoanalytic Perspectives Introductory Remarks.” Studies in Gender and Sexuality 10, vol. 4 (2009): 185–89. 110. Jing Zeng, “You Say #MeToo, I Say #MiTu: China’s Online Campaigns against Sexual Abuse.” In #MeToo and the Politics of Social Change, edited by Bianca Fileborn and Rachel Loney-Howes, 71–83 (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019). 111. Bridget Haire, Christy E. Newman, and Bianca Fileborn, “Shitty Media Men.” In #MeToo and the Politics of Social Change, edited by Bianca Fileborn and Rachel Loney-Howes, 201–16 (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019). 112. Madeleine Carlisle, “Welcome to 2020: The Phrase ‘OK Boomer’ Was Said for the First Time in the Supreme Court.” Time, January 16, 2020. time.com/5766438/ john-roberts-ok-boomer-scotus/.

Chapter 3

The Liminality of Feminist Waves

Feminisms are rooted in political action. Feminisms address politics with a focus on gender, one that often essentializes categories such as woman, feminine, and femininity. This type of “single identity movements,” notes Éléonore Lépinard in Feminist Trouble: Intersectional Politics in Post-Secular Times, “sideline and render invisible the interests and identities of women situated at the intersection of other axes of domination than gender alone.”1 When Kimberlé Crenshaw used the term “intersectionality” in 1991 to point out how Black women and Black feminists face different challenges than white women and feminists, young feminists sought to address that challenge and create a “third wave” of feminism in the United States that would respond to intersectional needs.2 As third wave feminism emerged and became visible in North America, however, it reinforced a contrast between white and nonwhite approaches to feminism, rooted in understandings of what the second wave of feminism in that region had accomplished. Third wave feminism is a label applied to a form of feminist theory and activism that developed in the 1990s and early 2000s. It was focused on improving young women’s personal experience and empowerment rather than as an organized attack on patriarchy with the goal of broader societal gender-based empowerment. The movement was one of those claiming a feminist label that promoted feminine constructs as tools for social change, and sexual choice and freedoms as empowerment. These forms of feminism, designed to challenge older notions of feminist activism, reframed what was interpreted within the movement as a second wave ideal that “the personal is political” to the more individually-focused “the political is personal.” Third wave activism situated itself in localized spaces with a somewhat naïve belief that localized power would transcend boundaries and become systemic empowerment. This belief in the potential boundary transcendence illustrates how third wave functioned as a type of limited or contained empowerment, recognizing that while, for those in the third wave, their power is legitimate within their 83

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personal lives and spaces, it does not directly impact and change patriarchal power outside of their personal spheres. In fact, it can be argued that third wave contained empowerment reflected and reconstituted patriarchal power by widening the gap between the marginalized and the powerful, due to its reliance on consumer culture through practice. As such, it mirrors other feminist activisms that have been challenged by the contrasting ideologies and resulting identities found within US understandings of feminism and patriarchally constructed femininity since the ratification process for the ERA began in 1972. Third wave’s containment started in its core definition within the wave model.3 Defining and categorizing waves of feminism as oppositional generates a liminal essence to feminist ideology that feeds into restricting its potential change. It held its own in-group identity, and assumes a generational identity that is fixed within time and in relation to other generations.4 This diminished the space for those who might not fit easily within generational frameworks, or whose generational distinction is blurred by cultural and national borders. Waves as a metaphor provide yet another challenge, as waves are not generally separate from other waves, instead waves travel on the ocean or through radio frequencies in cycles, rather than independently.5 Further, third wave did not easily cross cultural and political boundaries, in spite of its intersectional center,6 thus limiting the reach output of waves. Two core ideological drivers of third wave argument and framing developed in the 1990s. First, that third wave rejected second wave agendas and sought to utilize methods and ideals they believed that second wave denounced, particularly in relation to a young woman’s right to choose traditional feminine attributes, even if that meant encouraging patriarchal norms. However, these types of third wave arguments illustrate conflation with anti- and postfeminist arguments, and a growing generational divide rooted in confusion over what feminist intent should entail. Thus, third wavers chose to reclaim traditional feminine ideals with an understanding that these ideals were not considered to be empowering tools within the second wave. In the second core ideological approach, third wave practitioners sought to redefine feminine ideals through intersectional attributes in order to reflect a larger variety of women than either patriarchy or the second wave addressed. This approach, rather than drawing on anti- and postfeminisms drew from Black feminism, womanism, and LGBT(QIA+) movements,7 rooted in arguments that second wave feminism really only worked for suburban, white women of the middle and upper classes. Thus, women of color, and those of non-binary and different class statuses were directly addressed in third wave rhetoric and goals. In both definitions, the emphasis from within the third wave appeared to be on choice, a choice to be feminine and act in a male capacity with a number of different meanings attached to this ideal. However,

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some of these choices were rooted in structural emancipation, while others reaffirmed structural norms. The result is actualized contained empowerment: taking the tools associated with patriarchy and reclaiming them (“empowering” the tools) in spite of patriarchy. Therefore, analysis of third wave feminist action and activity from a feminist perspective requires specifically observing feminist empowerment in the local spaces of these sites. My arguments center on self-identified marginalized young women as feminists who choose forms of contained empowerment in order to obtain power while maintaining qualities (such as femininity and youth) which act as part of their marginalization within normative power structures. My theory of contained empowerment questions the ability for epistemic challenges to occur in localized, resistant spaces. Contained empowerment is empowerment tied to marginalized people resisting social norms from within marginalized spaces where local forms of empowerment flourish. Unlike the poststructural theories that this activist ideal builds upon, however, the liminality of contained empowerment allows it to become a bridge for the locally empowered to utilize that resistant power within the system it resists. CONTAINING FEMINIST EMPOWERMENT: THE PROBLEMATIC WAVES MODEL Defining and categorizing waves of feminism as oppositional generates a liminal essence to feminist ideology that feeds into restricting its potential change. Third wave self-generated in contrast to second-wave, particularly in its presentational commitment to privileging individuals rather than seeking systemic change, and in so doing placed itself in a position of generating intentionally contained, individualized empowerment. Further, this focus on the individual presented a selfishness that has been critiqued as a core of third wave and its contemporary feminist movements, such as postfeminism.8 The wave model assumes categorical limitations in relation to earlier waves, establishing and assuming conflicts between generations of feminists. One such core conflict in the definition of North American third wave feminism lies in its dependence on the association with Generation X and the issues and popular culture association with that generation.9 A related conflict is the youth-focus of third wave arguments, which contains an inherent inability for the feminist wave to age with the practitioner.10 The focus on individualism and individual empowerment would also overshadow the goal of systemic change espoused by many third wave founders, often conflating third wave activism with the postfeminist, neoliberal feminism, and popular feminist arguments associated with Naomi Wolf and Katie Roiphe.11

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Third wave self-generated in contrast to second-wave, regarding privileging individuals rather than seeking systemic change, and in so doing placed itself in a position of generating intentionally contained, individualized empowerment. Third wave also generated its own gatekeepers and has its own archaeology of knowledge governing who is contained within the label “feminist.”12 How can we account, then, for feminists such as “African-American women” who “if inserted into this wave model, make the wave, shall we say, a much bigger swell.”13 The wave metaphor cannot account for all the variables that developed in association with the label of third wave, nor can it address the activism’s ability to empower other than through its liminal framing. Definitions and ideological framings of third wave feminism are dependent on an understanding of a unified second wave of feminism. However, many feminist scholars and activists deny the existence of such a monolith. North American second wave feminism in its most recognizable form developed during and after the employment of women while men fought overseas in the Second World War. Within this understanding of second wave, feminism is grounded in a rejection of biological essentialism between the genders and the goal of generating structural change in regard to gender normalizations. As such, other identity constructs such as race, ethnicity, and class were not of core concern in the movement. Gender-based divisions of labor and workplace rights are the core argument associated with this form of the second wave, and their efforts culminate in attempts to pass the ERA. However, this is not the only form of second wave feminism recognized in North American feminist histories. As second wave became known as the women’s liberation movement, a branch or subset of second wave developed that is sometimes identified as liberal feminism. Liberal feminists maintain a focus on the rights and opportunities for women in the workplace, and also focus on women’s autonomy and self-determination, grounding the basis for earning the “choices” associated with young white women in third wave. Liberation feminism is therefore a type of second wave primarily focused on economic and workplace conditions and choices, and valued capitalism as a means of ensuring women’s economic choices. In contrast, socialist and radical feminism became labels associated with feminists that did not ascribe to a foundational relationship between feminism and capitalism. Radical feminists question capitalism as a patriarchal, hegemonic structure, arguing that it undermined women’s embodied choices by promoting the nuclear family ideal. Radical and socialist feminisms became central in the proliferation of pro-choice arguments related to abortion and reproductive rights. Influenced by Third World and postcolonial feminisms, activists from this feminist standpoint argued that male dominance must be challenged in both the public and private spheres.

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Academic feminism in the era of the second wave offered yet a third difference. Taking on postmodern and poststructural goals, this approach to feminism is grounded in Foucauldian theories of surveillance and bio-power, warning that gender is by nature fluid, and it is only institutionalizations that restrict that fluidity. Academic, poststructural feminisms therefore reject the gender binary, and provide the basis for non-binary gender arguments that would not become part of the mainstream of activisms until late in the third wave movement. All of these forms of second wave inform the development of third wave feminism, as well as other movements often viewed as existing outside of the second wave, including Black feminism, lesbian feminism, Third World and postcolonial feminism, and ecofeminism. Anti-feminism and postfeminism, particularly arguments promoting the role of women as mothers, wives, and homemakers also had a significant impact. Third wave notions of choice and power are therefore complicated by the contrasting frameworks associated with prior forms of feminism, and its relationship to patriarchally understood femininities. Third wave authors discuss third wave empowerment as unique among feminists because they grew up in an era where many feminist ideologies were an accepted part of American culture.14 Ironically, the patriarchal confines that these feminist ideologies were situated within also contained the potential of feminist empowerment. These authors claim that this unique environment led to new forms of empowerment for young women who start from a perceived equal footing with males. However, such empowerment is limited to the public sphere, and turned out for most young women to be illusory because the glass ceiling and public sphere inequalities remained in place. Uniquely feminine empowerment was not part of the image constructed, nor was equality brought into the private sphere. Feminine empowerment, in third wave writings, is instead associated with hyperfemininity and the ideal of girl power, takes place primarily in online spaces, and focuses on personal empowerment rooted in personal, feminine pleasure. Girl power as a concept incorporated a contrast between patriarchal victimization of girls and the ability for a girl to find power through hyperfeminine performance and directing the male gaze. This concept would be popularized in consumer-based feminism, a process that had already been adapted by the emergence of popular feminist celebrities. When she published Fire with Fire in 1993, Naomi Wolf was at the height of her fame. Given the platform she enjoyed at the time as a celebrity feminist, following the 1991 publication of her book The Beauty Myth, Wolf made the bombastic announcement of a “genderquake” which she claimed would be “a resurgence of female political power.”15 She identified two key approaches to or enactments of feminism: “victim feminism” and “power feminism.”16 “Victim feminism,” she argued, “casts women as sexually pure and mystically nurturing, and stresses the evil

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done to these ‘good’ women as a way to petition for their rights.”17 By contrast, she argued, “‘power feminism,’ sees women as human beings—sexual, individual, no better or worse than their male counterparts—and lays claim to equality simply because women are entitled to it.18 The consumer variety of third wave girl power would be rooted in this contrast. Third wave was further framed through an interactive lens with tenets associated with corporate and lifestyle-focused postfeminisms that celebrated the successes of the second wave through assuming the heavy work of gender equity had been accomplished. Rosalind Gill explains that postfeminism developed in the 1990s in response to presumed successes of women’s liberation, particularly in the workforce, and as a framing centered around the “repeated assertion that any remaining inequalities were not the result of sexism but of natural differences and/or of women’s own choices.”19 Seen by many as an alternative or popular derivative of both third wave and earlier forms of feminism, postfeminism was heavily influenced by the gender identity building of antifeminism as well as the nature-nurture debate regarding identity construction.20 These power feminist and postfeminist arguments notably did not assume an end to misogyny. Instead, they envisioned hyperfeminine and corporate women as threats that would deter misogynistic action over time. Many of these arguments were paired with consumptive empowerment; consider arguments regarding the rabbit as a sex symbol. Once identified with the porn industry, the reclamation of the symbol as a vibrator impacted notions of femininity and empowerment: Traditionally a symbol of sexual appetite—albeit in relation to reproduction—the rabbit become a fitting sign of the sexual revolution in the form of the Playboy “bunny girl” where it signified sexual pleasure, recreation and consumerism for men. More recently . . . a scene in Sex and the City featuring the Rabbit—and the consequent dramatic rise in sales of this sex toy . . . representing women’s sexual pleasure as fashionable, safe, aesthetically pleasing, and feminine.21

Notably, this implies that hyperfeminine empowerment comes with a price tag, which critics further highlight in relation to the upscaling of women’s sexual consumerism through the development of female-oriented sex stores.22 The reclamation of femininity and female bodies and pleasures within third wave was simultaneously rebellious and rejective of both patriarchy and older forms of feminism. It was also reflected in, tempered and minimized by popular culture, particularly in the consumptive drive to dress and reclaim sexual identity constructs such as bras, lipstick, high heels, and miniskirts deemed sexist in earlier feminist waves. However, the appeal of third wave,

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particularly among young, white, middle-class women who had benefited from their predecessor’s feminist successes and broadcast in programming like Sex and the City and musical performances by “bitches” and “grrls” was subject to cultural and political conflation with postfeminism, particularly through its rejection of and discomfort with feminist labelling. The popularized, commercial version of third wave was not the only side of the movement, of course, and among the strongest aesthetic advocacies was the Riot Grrrl movement, which directly challenged the constraints of patriarchy and sexual violence.23 There have been other notable exceptions of third wave feminist efforts directly seeking to address patriarchy and active inclusivity, such as Feminist Dare who, in 2015, “adopted intersectionality as one of its core values and stressed the need to work with antiracist collectives.”24 Third wave outside of the United States is also more inclusive of ideas and intersectional identities. Third wave feminism in the Middle East and North Africa, for example, is influenced by increasing Islamophobia after the start of the “war on terror,” and sought to empower women through the formulation of Muslim-feminine agency in contrast to white, Western interpretations of women’s power.25 These examples incorporate intersectional identity realities, particularly race, ethnicity, and religion, into the third wave focus on understanding the difference between subject position and identity formation.26 THE PERSONAL IS POLITICAL . . . BUT THE POLITICAL IS PERSONAL The first iteration of third wave feminism is generally ascribed to a self-labelling as part of a “Third Wave” by Rebecca Walker, daughter of author Alice Walker, in a 1992 article in Ms. Magazine.27 Walker’s argument was reinforced in Jennifer Baumgardner’s and Amy Richard’s 2000 Manifesta: Young Women, Feminism, and the Future, which sought to expand the goals of feminism to include disease, particularly HIV/AIDS awareness, child sex abuse, and technology access.28 North American, and particularly US-based third wave feminism espoused intersectionality as a founding ideal, but often maintained a focus on personal freedoms for young women with little regard to social status concerns. Third wave writings, organizational emphases, and artistic endeavors in this region and era revolved around a generational insistence on the concept of feminine pleasure as a means of personal empowerment. This focus personalizes empowerment to individuals rather than an organized attack on patriarchy with a goal of empowering persons located as feminine-of-center, and at the same time essentializes feminine pleasure.

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This type of local-personal as political echoes the efforts of antifeminist Phyllis Schlafly: empower the self through a claimed femininity reflective and accepting of patriarchal norms and standards. Third wave practitioners, however, were attempting to reinscribe femininity with a unique power that could withstand, rather than adhere to patriarchal and misogynistic appliqués, becoming a form of localized power that would eventually transcend boundaries and become literal systemic empowerment outside of the liminal spaces from within which it generates. I argue, however, that the contained empowerment inherent in this third wave approach reflects and reconstitutes patriarchal power, widening the gap between the marginalized and the powerful. Third wave feminisms were enacted through the negotiation of empowerment from both within and outside of the system. As an activist movement, it sought to redefine activism as an examination of the everyday lived experience of women as political. Arguing past “the personal is political” to “the political is personal” in terms of needing to politicize factors of women’s personal experience, third wave thought to separate individual potential from the restrictions of political categorization. However, this process would play out as a form of “the personal is personal,” promoting the belief that everyone should experience empowerment in their own terms, outside of political and social structures. Thus, third wave empowerment exists in a purely liminal space, implying the impetus for change, but providing no systemic recourse. As Victor Turner explains, “In other words, in liminality people ‘play’ with the elements of the familiar and defamiliarize them.”29 The liminal space of third wave feminism is betwixt and between the normative, familiar, elements of feminine cultural restrictions and stereotypes and an imagined alternative; a space ideally free of cultural, patriarchal, and other hegemonic restrictions. The intersectional drive behind many third wave voices and organizers was also contained through its placement within notions of identity politics. Political strategies such as identity politics require negotiation, compromise, and concession that often favors the step-by-step success model of minimal changes that leaves out the needs of those in the most heavily marginalized positions. Aisha Durham, in her work on “Black Feminist Thought, Intersectionality, and Intercultural Communication,” explains, “Third wave inherited a whitewashed model and its birth was legitimated by incorporating intersectionality at the expense of their young women of color counterparts whose theorization of power had been grafted from the same language.”30 Further, the role of third wave as a progression from second wave implies a movement toward intersectional inclusivity that belies the fundamental presumption of gender as a category. Thus, third wave is contained by its self-reference to a second wave that failed to examine intersectionality, as argues Leela Fernandes:

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One of the underlying effects of the three-wave model of feminism is the inadvertent representation of feminist thought as a teleological historical narrative of progressive inclusion . . . In other words, according to this historical narrative, if second wave feminism was the preserve of white, middle-class women, third wave feminism marked a new phase in which feminists of color and questions of race and gender were now included. The feminist wave model thus implicitly rests on a narrative of multicultural inclusion.31

Third wave can then only respond to second wave by forcing inclusivity, and therefore could not act toward an empowerment for women, or a group of women, without running the risk of generating exclusion. Further, the popularized “girl power” version of third wave remained economically and, in many ways, ethnically and culturally exclusive and therefore provided a steady contrasting narrative to the core intersectional goals espoused from within the movement. The third wave in North America sought to be international as well as intersectional, and invited men and transgendered individuals to participate.32 However, the focus of third wave philanthropic and political efforts remained dominantly aimed at girls and young women who had access to the technologies through which third wave evolved and was shared.33 Similar traits and digital communication foci evolved as third wave ideology spread through the UK and Europe, and became adopted in global settings.34 However intersectional in intent, third wave voices primarily remained those of middle-class young women and girls with technological skills and access, and who evidenced the economic gains of their second wave predecessors in their own lives. Third wave theory, like most feminist theory, thus developed based around the invisibility and lack of presence and control of one’s own body within systemic mechanisms: activism rooted in the use of bodies to engage with patriarchal institutions and norms and promote change. Women’s and feminist activism has always been centered around notions of difference, among the most profound of which is rooted in procreative narratives, a form of embodied activism seeking to negotiate gendered body statuses through both reconstructive and deconstructive advocacy and action. Such embodied activism is liminal: located within and between visibilities. Historically, narratives of bodies made visible through social discourse have restricted feminine-of-center embodied performances. These historical narratives have been used as justifications for offenses committed against female and other feminine-of-center bodies. And these justifications have been extended into intersectional oppressions against black and brown female bodies, indigenous female bodies, and other nonsystemically empowered bodies.

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Intersectional narratives are enhanced within many contemporary activisms and feminisms allowing individuals’ stories to reach larger public audiences, thus normalizing, at least in part, media narratives of difference and inclusion. Millennial and postmillennial generational identities are thus likely to have experienced intersectional and liminal categorizations as normative constructs, impacting their understanding and acceptance of difference across cultural, spiritual, and ideological boundaries than earlier generations. However, the increased flow of ideas, people, and ideologies has also generated polarization: participants in digital discourses are often influenced by cognitive biases and in-group ideological framings. Intersectionality has become a visible component of US life since the 1990s. However, perceptual fears of change and declining hegemonic and patriarchal traditions have driven some who identify with hegemonic power to defend it; illustrating the liminal and contained nature of intersectional empowerment. Thus, some claiming the mantle of activist argue from a patriarchal standpoint that “white working-class American men constitute a neglected minority”35 in an increasingly intersectional society. Arguments of this nature reinforce the lack of visibility and voice of the multiply marginalized activist, further minimizing or erasing their identity-based needs. Feminism for women of color evolved from perceived differences in what white women could claim under patriarchal and hegemonic constructs, and what was available to non-white feminine-of-center individuals. Kimberlé Crenshaw explains, “When feminism does not explicitly oppose racism and when anti-racism does not incorporate opposition to the patriarchy, race and gender politics often end up being antagonistic to each other and both interests lose.”36 Crenshaw’s arguments echo abolitionist and suffragette Sojourner Truth’s “Ain’t I a Woman” speech, and how Truth questioned the experiences of Black women in Antebellum America. Hierarchy is a tool of those with agency to keep those without power from gaining authority.37 To dismantle the constraints of the hierarchy, activists must find ways to alter or amplify notions of empowerment through reconstructive or deconstructive address, meaning they must acknowledge both systemically essentialized identities and those resistant to essentialization. As such, feminists need to acknowledge the different lived experiences of feminine-of-center identities and use this as a basis for strategically empowering a multiplicity of selves, both systemically and outside of patriarchal norms. Differences and intersectionalities can thus serve as a creative power that will lead to more choices and options for selves, and new ways of being. Historical waves of Western feminism have overlooked and minimized Black, lesbian, intersectional, and Third World identities; this failure to acknowledge experience reinforces and perpetuates patriarchy. To dismantle patriarchy, women need to unite without essentializing themselves to a

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specific understanding of woman, femininity, or power; they must view their differences as a source of strength. This destabilizes how traditional interpretations of the female and her body are denied structural power through her normative restriction to private spaces. Contemporary feminisms and identity-based activisms reflect two core conflicts: (1) balancing between feminist action and feminine, patriarchal values; and (2) balancing feminine and gender essentializations necessary for promoting and generating changes within political categorizations with recognizing intersectional needs. Modern feminist activism therefore demonstrates power by seeking to engage simultaneously from within and outside of patriarchy. Feminists thus engage in both reconstructive activism that occurs from within hegemonic structures and seeks to dismantle patriarchy by using the system against itself; and deconstructive activism from without seeks to shift the system onto new grounds and redefine the rules of the system. Instead, it must address patriarchy by attempting to bridge both positionings, redefining what it means to be both feminine and powerful, using traditional patriarchal concepts of femininity as well as alternative concepts of power. These feminisms function in liminal spaces: empowering the practitioners within these sites by allowing them to feel personally empowered. The collective approaches to which the label “third wave” was applied in the 1990s and early 2000s reflected the evolving epistemological views of feminist theory as enacted through the negotiation of empowerment from both within and outside of the system. As an application of contained empowerment, third wave is an interesting site of study because it is an activist movement that worked to redefine activism as a means of achieving multiple styles of deconstruction simultaneously. Historically, most eras of feminisms promoted activism as an examination of the everyday lived experience of women as political, as was particularly reflected in the second wave feminist slogan “the personal is political.”38 Third wave was an effort to move past this concept, defining “the political as personal” in terms of needing to politicize factors of women’s personal experience, rather than defining experience in politicized terms. Third wave ultimately argued that the personal is personal and thereby promoted the belief that everyone should define their experiences in their own terms and determine their own empowerment outside of political and social structures. Third wave focused too much on the personal as political—on personal empowerment for an individual rather than systemic empowerment that could change opportunities beyond an individual’s status. This suggests a liminal state where individuals can shape their own ideals about empowerment. Third wave feminism exists in a purely liminal space, implying the impetus for change. As Turner explains, “In other words, in liminality people ‘play’ with the elements of the familiar and defamiliarize them.”39 The space that

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third wave feminism inhabits is such a liminal space: betwixt and between the normative, familiar, elements of feminine cultural restrictions and stereotypes and an imagined alternative, free of those cultural restrictions. Academic ideals of the third wave similarly focus on engendering personal empowerment for young women. The ideal is enacted as a form of activism. Some third wave activism incorporates some of the strategies of the second wave (i.e., those that encourage a unified female front), while encouraging individual action. By negotiating between normative and resistant strategies, third wave exemplifies contained empowerment. The tendency toward individualistic goals combined with strategic organizing is one of the contradictions of third wave and contained empowerment. Combined with the contradictions inherent in the feminine-feminist identity associated with third wave illustrates the problematic nature of defining third wave identities and activist styles. Generating and maintaining such a balance is hampered by the movement’s adherence to its containments. Third wave is further contained, in part, by its underlying presumptions that the second wave of feminism, particularly in the West and North America, had successfully changed realities for white women, moving them “from the kitchen to the boardroom”40 and making rape and violence against women a visible reality in dominant cultural narratives.41 The implied narrative these assertions grounded is that young women, white women in particular, had more choices than their predecessors.42 Third wave activism therefore grounded itself in personal choice, and personal empowerment, allowing the definition of empowerment to lie with the individual based on their choice-framework. By making a non-patriarchal, non-hegemonic form of power the core of third wave identity, it also encouraged a stereotype-based essentialization for the third wave, limiting choices for different feminine-ofcenter identities based on their assumptive relation to privilege. Indigenous, Black, and other women of color could enact third wave personal power by claiming the same choices attributed to white women. North American, white third wave practitioners, in contrast, had to claim power from outside of patriarchal norms, claiming subcultural, consumer-based, or hyperfeminine constructs as a source of personal empowerment. Contained empowerment both challenges traditional norms and reinforces normative understandings. As examples of contained empowerment, girl power and third wave feminism suggest a paradox: personal, individualized empowerment and independence restricted through intentional containment. The contained empowerment of girl power and third wave feminisms continually re-contains itself through classist, gendered, consumerist, raced, and ageist exclusivity.43 Significantly, this implies an extreme temporality to contained empowerment and does not guarantee a means by which the

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practitioner of empowerment in contained spaces can carry her power with her into normative patriarchal structures. The contained empowerment of third wave ideals is evident in spaces where rhetorics related to these same ideals are both created and constrained. Significantly, the power provided within spaces of contained empowerment cannot exist either fully within traditional patriarchal structures or fully removed from them. The power of contained empowerment comes from the liminal and contained status of its practitioner. This containment, and the identity constructed through the practitioner’s containment, are what allow for a unique empowerment that is not in accordance with the systemic norms associated with that contained locality. Thus, marginal positions must be contained and, in part, restricted in order that the characteristics of marginalization be maintained through the empowerment process. Therefore, we must question whether it is possible to negotiate an uncontained position that maintains some of the characteristics of marginalization while appropriating other characteristics associated with power. The rebirth of action to implement the ERA, the women’s marches in response to Trump’s election, and the rise of global #MeToo movements44 illustrate how personal empowerment ideals need to be enacted within the system, rather than in liminally contained, “safe” spaces. In essence . . . the political is personal and the personal is political. Both must engage simultaneously to truly address the needs of multiple categories of identity. To engage the political as personal, activists take a reconstructive approach to hierarchies and institutionalizations, drawing upon institutionalized political narratives and placements to change the status or empower an individual. Thus, it is crucial to ask if social resistance from a marginalized space can exist other than as contained empowerment or whether all resistance movements are necessarily contained by their structural location. If it cannot, then understanding how the contained empowerment of these social movements functions is the best way to offer hope to these movements. In order to do this, we need to better understand the nature of empowerment and how alternative means of empowerment may or may not function within the system. Third wave writers tied empowerment to popular culture as hyperfeminine stereotypes enactments of feminist politics: another means of containing third wave empowerment. Young women who grew up in the 1970s and 1980s, the generation(s) associated with third wave feminism, grew up watching strong female characters who were clearly empowered, extremely feminine, and yet still constrained by patriarchal norms. Lindsay Wagner’s portrayal of The Bionic Woman, Lynda Carter’s turn as Wonder Woman, Deidre Hall and Judy Strangis as Electrawoman and Dynagirl, and Farah Fawcett, Jaclyn Smith, Kate Jackson, and subsequent Charlie’s Angels in the original television series are all examples of popular culture heroines who were clearly strong

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and empowered, both socially and physically, yet they all still worked for male audiences and within the male gaze.45 Third wave’s focus on specific topics without necessarily clarifying an overall set of goals or responsibilities reinforces the need to contain their approach to empowerment. The containers themselves, particularly hyper/ visible feminism, ageism, and topical foci, are the primary distinguishing characteristics for this body of activisms. Further, technological advances that dissipate traditional types of barriers actually created new barriers and containment, thus further limiting activist empowerment. PERSONAL PLEASURE AS PARAMOUNT Third wave feminism intentionally claimed rhetorical placement within the bio-power arguments by claiming individual women’s sexual pleasure as a site of empowerment. Third wave’s focus on pleasure was made hypervisible through media targeted at Generation X women and third wave consumers. The claiming of the rabbit vibrator, for example, as a symbol of feminist empowerment was highlighted in an episode of Sex and the City, illustrating “the consequent dramatic rise in sales of this sex toy.”46 Not all third wave voices were in full agreement. In fact, third wave feminist writers Martha McCaughey and Christina French question the reclamation of the vibrator, asking if sex toys sold through home-marketing to women actually empower women within the sex industry. They questioned, in particular, whether embodied empowerment through capitalistic consumption was liberatory, or a type of containment.47 Further, by bringing the ideal of hyper/feminine sexual empowerment into the public through a popular culture phenomenon, the concept itself becomes commodified, along with the toy. This reflects “a contemporary cultural trend towards representing women’s sexual pleasure as fashionable, safe, aesthetically pleasing, and feminine.”48 Reclaiming feminine pleasure demands (re)claiming feminine routes to power. Yet, the industries involved are nevertheless a part of that empowerment, and implications for needing the items, themselves commodities, in order to be empowered are complex and problematic. Thus, women-centered erotica and feminine-centered sex narratives became a core aspect of third wave feminism in North America; an aspect meant to reclaim sexuality from the patriarchy. Such reclamation, however, reflects containment, particularly through the commodification of sexual and feminine identity. Reclaiming feminine pleasure demands, for many feminists and activists, claiming and reclaiming feminine routes to power. Yet, the industries involved are nevertheless a part of that empowerment, and implications for needing the toys to be empowered are themselves

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complicated. Eileen Meehan explains that female audiences are manufactured and manipulated by industry values, and that “the demographic category of gender was an industrial concern for the ratings monopolist.” Looking at the second wave feminist era, Meehan found two gendered ideals permeated the female audience commodity: caretaking/homemaking and paid work. Thus, both the feminine mother-nurturer and the female worker were commodified within advertisements and characterizations in media; and these were promoted through fashion and commodities marketed directly to women.49 These categories of femininity continued to dominate popular culture through the third wave feminist era in North America. These categories would blur, however, in regard to sex toys and feminine pleasure narratives in popular culture. In their research on the development and implementation of sex toy parties in North America and Europe, McCaughey and French examine the tradition of Tupperware style parties as a women’s form of commodity-based entertainment and identity building. In-home marketing through product-sales “parties” to women is an industry built around a woman’s private-sphere identity. These parties have rules and expectations built around corporate goals and sales of woman-centric commodities.50 The corporation guides the language and characterizations used to discuss embodied selves and products at these parties.51 Thus, third wave feminists both celebrated and questioned the liminality of direct marketing parties: they may empower individual women while simultaneously being exploited for corporate gain. The modern corporate system adds further complications as it reinforces the differences between gender roles, as well as the differences between employee and management roles. Corporate colonization52 becomes a means of empowering the system to limit people’s opportunities to advance while privileging both home and work, both the private and public spheres. Furloughing, cutting wages, limiting family leave, and other attempts at saving corporate monies are also viewed as forms of corporate colonization.53 The ability to afford only one job, especially for young women in the third wave, was also challenging. Third wave author Michelle Sidler provided an early critique of the trend toward multiple jobs to make ends meet witness by the third wave: The rise of women in the workplace sounds like bright news, but it begins to take on a new face when I consider again my own shaky job dilemma. Like many other twentysomethings, I feel job security slipping out from under me. Economic restructuring has destabilized employment for both men and women. Women can no longer depend on the security of a husband’s income (or their own, for that matter). Nor can they assume that jobs are available; often women just have not had access to them. Even young working men are finding more

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McJobs and lower salaries. Third wave feminism will have to face these harsh economic conditions.54

Sidler’s use of “McJobs” and “McJobdom” is adapted from Douglas Coupland’s discussion of Generation X.55 McJobdom, for Sidler and Coupland, reflects the need for more than one low paying, low prestige, low benefit job to make ends meet since those were understood to be the dominant types of jobs available to young people in the 1990s and early 2000s. Salaries also did not have as much buying power as in previous generations, complicating expectations for both men and women seeking stronger work-life balance, a pattern that would continue into the pandemic era in 2020.56 Significantly, third wave authors like Sidler would focus not solely on gender bias and the gender glass ceiling in their analyses, but also included young men in their discussions as well as highlighting intersectional issues such as race and class, and how those compounded McJobdom. From a third wave perspective, this set their values and arguments apart from the second wave. Thus, third wave feminism and other embodied activisms functioning from liminal positions face containment in two possible veins: organic containment rooted in feminine embodiment and organizational containment rooted in the commodified nature of visibly feminine empowerment. Yet both of these contaminants revolved around the ideal of uniquely feminine and often recreational pleasure: embodied, sexual, and life-balance pleasures. McCaughey and French present a core argument for why personal pleasure was a necessary aspect of North American third wave: “Pleasure is yet another commodity in late capitalism, but it’s also worth having nonetheless. Pleasure is politically complex, which makes us hopeful that it could serve as a vehicle toward the critiques begun in the second wave of the feminist movement.”57 CONTAINING IN/VISIBLE LOCAL KNOWLEDGE Feminine pleasure-based empowerment is therefore rooted in commodities and self-expression. Feminist ideals of empowerment simultaneously challenge and reinforce the commodification of identity. Thus, feminist and embodied empowerment can be interpreted as shifting between two definitions of empowerment: (1) a reconstructionist focus on power rooted in access to and authority within established systems of power, and reflecting domesticity and patriarchal constructs of femininity; and (2) a deconstructionist approach to power by attempting to break down established social norms and structures, rooted in arguments for public sphere change. Arguments highlighting the domestic, feminine identity reflect ideals of access and authority and refer to women acting as agents of power, using the system and available

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power structures, what Audre Lorde would call the “master’s tools.”58 In contrast, feminists promoting arguments for public sphere change often question the nature of how power operates. These arguments imply a need for changing ground, shifting power away from hegemonic and patriarchal structures. An alternative to both these patterns is offered by Naila Kabeer who suggests that individual power within the self needs to be strengthened. She suggests that power must be self-generated and taken, implying a need to negotiate between power outside of and within the system.59 This is how contained empowerment functions, as a means of bridging power constructed outside of the system into the system itself. The significance of the liminal location of contained empowerment between the system and the outside provides an impetus for cultural change by providing a space for negotiating the tensions between poststructural ideologies from outside the system and structural ideals from within the system. Examining the feminist activisms self-labeled as “third wave” in the late 1990s and early 2000s in the United States locates where and how feminist empowerment occurs from localized spaces. Several applications of third wave feminist ideologies in various performative activist locales where the marginalized young feminists who use contained empowerment depend on its localized nature. Because third wave feminism draws its potential from both outside of and within normative power structures, third wave feminists find self-confidence in their position between internal and external patriarchal resistance. Contained empowerment looks at ways to empower based on the liminality between feminine identity-promoting and feminist empowerment. Contained empowerment occurs in liminal spaces where the rules of patriarchy are suspended but not fully removed. In order to discuss how this occurs, the following sections outline interaction between these two feminist activist styles, and how the liminal spaces of contained empowerment allow negotiation of the tensions between these two approaches. Third wave ideals of personal empowerment and personal pleasure function as a form of empowerment. For example, in the early 2000s the activist organization Third Wave Foundation argued that only by empowering the individual is there any hope of social change: revealed as one of the Foundation’s activist goals. Third wave focuses on individual empowerment, encouraging the notion that if a young woman believes herself powerful, then she can access power. Third wave sought to construct spaces where personal voices and issues could be raised and shared. However, we must question whether these examples of contained empowerment are also empowerment that impacts the system itself—or if it is limited to the individual. Further, third wave feminisms are incredibly restrictive in who they can or will empower. Both power and simple association with the concept of focusing on “young” women implies restriction by age and gender. Third

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wave activism by practitioners from within the movement requires redefining the ideal of activism as well as the concept of empowerment. There is little evidence to suggest that third wave activism had any systemic impact on the offline patriarchal power structures that the female-centered ideals defy, other than a rise in celebrity and other visible voices claiming similar empowerment. Third wave, in general, encourages individual empowerment among their participants. This style of empowerment is extremely personalized, which is another means of containing the power because personal power is defined in terms of personal identities and needs. Therefore, personal empowerment is not a power that can easily transcend the specific space (the individual) of its formation. Third wave empowerment is simultaneously confining and empowering, because it remains strategically tied to the ability for a participant to acknowledge stereotypically feminine qualities often associated with confinement through patriarchy and makes these qualities empowering. This is extremely problematic because the feminine qualities encouraged within girl power are qualities that can generally be achieved only by a specific group of participants: young, primarily white, middle-class, American female consumers. It also presupposes a particular body type and athleticism not shared by all young women. This is extremely liminal and reflects contained empowerment because, eventually, this contained group of young women will outgrow girl power. The concept of “girl power,” for example, is a historically visible enactment of third wave ideals for empowerment in spaces designed for such empowerment to occur; empowerment defined in third wave terms. However, empowerment cannot happen in a vacuum; requiring a bridge or means of connecting uniquely feminist spaces to patriarchal norms if the produced power is to be legitimized outside of the liminal, contained empowerment space. Third wavers intend that the spaces they create influence social norms through their existence and promote the development of ideologies that can be used to destabilize patriarchal norms. Third wave activism, then, is produced in contained spaces of third wave empowerment, but aimed at altering the structural norms of society. Third wave activism must occur in liminal spaces of contained empowerment because liminality implies transformation and provides the impetus for change. Public-sphere oriented feminist empowerment cannot be separated from feminist activism. As bell hooks argues, feminism has to be active and impact patriarchy to survive.60 Flax concurs; explaining “without feminist political actions theories remain inadequate and ineffectual.”61 However, activism must be checked by theory, as theory is enacted through activism: a concept grounding the basis for the goal of contained empowerment. Contained empowerment provides an impetus for bridging the feminisms rooted in

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activism with those rooted in generating theory because it can be located betwixt and between these ideals. Third wave online activism is also a form of contained empowerment; contained both by the internet itself and by patriarchal concepts that form third wave identities. Traditional understandings of feminist activism are generally attributed to political movements. Third wave feminist activism is not traditional activism. Instead, it creates spaces for third wave feminist voices. Others challenge third wave activism because most of the people entering these spaces are third wavers. This promotes a problematic exclusivity, while not necessarily intentional, inherent in this style of organizing and activism. Third wave activism also, often, takes place online, where empowerment is contained by offline realities defining the information and the value of knowledge as generated in cyberspace. While women were always active in the construction of the web,62 they were historically dissociated from producing meaning in web spaces. As a result, the internet has become a tool of patriarchy in the public sphere. However, feminists have constructed feminist identities online, masked in patriarchal characteristics so as to access power. Third wave feminist sites in the 1990s and early 2000s sought to create new meanings and new online realities while acknowledging their displacement from offline power. The temporal nature of the gendered third wave space, and its clear location online rather than in the offline world, is a form of third wave activism. These are examples of contained empowerment because they clearly illustrate both the restrictions of and the potential for change inherent in this form of empowerment. Along with locating empowerment in popular culture icons and online spaces, another major ideal within the perceived third wave feminist identity is the concept of personal pleasure as empowerment. Pleasure is associated with the third wave as it relates to personal empowerment and sexuality. In particular, this is tied to the discussion that icons of femininity should be empowering. In particular, women and girls should be able to dress the way they want to, and not be accused of being unempowered or being victimized. The desire to re-create the meanings associated with stereotypical femininity is voiced in spaces of contained empowerment. Baumgardner and Richards argue that this type of stereotyping is a patriarchal construct intended to keep women from finding personal pleasure and finding power in feminine constructs. They seek to empower these constructs outside of patriarchal norms without changing all of the meanings of the concept, rather empowering those meanings.63 This is contained empowerment: reclaiming feminine concepts, marking them as feminine in patriarchal terms (the containment), and then empowering them in spite of their normative associations. Further, contained empowerment is an ideal place to locate third wave personal empowerment,

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because the liminality of contained empowerment suggests a personal transformation into an activist who can alter the system. Third wave involved seeking a tolerance for ambiguity, for multiple interpretations of gendered experiences, and for breaking down the stereotypes and boundaries separating the gendered experiences in society today. Third wave deconstructed these stereotypes by reclaiming them as powerful, in liminal spaces of contained empowerment. There are a few clear patterns regarding issues constantly indicated in third wave writings. These include ideals of multicultural inclusion; equalizing women of various backgrounds; a call to activism; feminism for a younger generation that defines itself against the older generations of feminists; a strong focus on popular culture; personal pleasure as empowerment; and the use of technology as a tool for empowering women. Websites became a space where third wavers actualized their voices, and where they sought to actively undermine the patriarchal structures that function both on and offline. Third wave online spaces were distinctly liminal spaces where third wave ideals can form, neither fully part of nor separate from patriarchy: spaces where contained empowerment could promote the transformation of the system. A BALANCING ACT: FEMINIST DECONSTRUCTION OR INTERSECTIONAL RECONSTRUCTION? Third wave was actualized in the 1990s as a type of deconstruction of earlier forms of feminism. This is evident in the aggressive examples of “grrl power” highlighted by the earliest activists to claim either label in that era. As the 90s progressed, third wave took on far more of the consumptive characteristics associated with popular and mediated interpretations of “girl power.” The deconstructive focus of the early stages of the movement on shifting away from what practitioners viewed as the limits of second wave and “suburban” feminism would highlight a goal of moving from a second wave sense of “the personal is political” toward “the political is personal.”64 Third wave as feminist deconstruction aimed to highlight how efforts to change the status of women were limited to essentialist notions of femininity devoid of recognition of non-cisgender, non-white, and non-Westerners. Baumgardner and Richard’s Thirteen-Point Manifesta argued that everyone needed to find their own understanding of feminism and how it could impact an individual. In a 2020 interview regarding the twentieth anniversary of the publication of their Manifesta, Amy Richards provides one of the goals for third wave, as outlined in their original book. She explains:

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The point of Manifesta is that it’s meant to inspire you to turn around and look in your community and find the ways you personally can enact feminism . . . It’s not up to any one person or organization or government to tell you what feminism should look like. It’s up to you to take the example that others have given you and apply it to yourself.65

In that interview, the authors go on to explain that feminism has grown “more tentacles” since the efforts of third wave practitioners began gaining ground, and particularly point out that feminism has moved away from legal and legislative change as a primary concern. A primary goal for those involved in the early stages of third wave was to reject having to work to change how patriarchy treats gender, instead focusing on the concept of liberating gender identity from the system by destabilizing the binary entirely. Pop culture icons such as Madonna, Queen Latifa, and girl power characters like the eponymous Buffy the Vampire Slayer illustrate female characteristics that were empowered irregardless of systemic norms. Many third wave theorists and activists used blog, e-zines, and other digital media forms of communication to get their messages out and attempt to popularize their themes to a large audience. However, the power granted to pop culture icons remained conscripted by patriarchy; the hyperfeminine characteristics that were the core of third wave arguments that girls should be powerful in their own right were, nevertheless, still subject to misogyny and victimization techniques; and the digital media of that era were primarily limited to audiences that knew how to find them, therefore functioning as echo chambers. The result was a third wave of feminism that functioned in its most visible sense as a consumer product sold to audiences as part of a contained or limited form of agency that could be purchased or performed. This made it appealing as a form of constructing self-confidence and a sense of individual emboldenment. In this way, third wave feminism was a reconstructive form of activism that masqueraded as a system for generating change yet focused on changing the rights or status of an individual through action, rather than systemic shifts. Activists using the court system to impact gender-based social structures sought to generate agency that is limited by its connection to other accepted forms of privilege. In “New Feminist Activism: Waves and Generations,” a paper prepared for the twenty-fifth anniversary of the UN WOMEN Beijing Platform for Action, Maxine Molyneux, Adrija Dey, Malu Gatto, and Holly Rowden argue, “A historical perspective is important in understanding the re-emergence of feminism in the current period as it both highlights the continuities in feminist thought and sharpens an appreciation of the contextual and temporal

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differences across movements.”66 Nevertheless, the authors ask, “How useful is the idea of feminist ‘waves’ as a way of periodizing the history of feminism?”67 How feminism as a movement or collection of movements has changed across time, and how to periodize its evolution, are questions that have preoccupied historians and activists. In analysing feminism, the metaphor of “waves” is often invoked to periodize its evolution and to capture its significant features at different times. As any historian knows, periodization is always a contested endeavour: When does one epoch end and another begin? How to characterize the distinguishing features of a particular era or time? What is the territorial reach of a movement?68

The authors highlight the core challenge of the wave metaphor: “intergenerational disputes over the characterization”69 of the eras to which each wave responds, and the resulting definitions of each wave within the ongoing metaphor. The result is liminal, dependent on definitional understandings that shift with generations themselves, and limits the performance of feminist wave identity to an age-based cohort. Where third wave overlapped with what would come to be called postfeminism further heightened the individual focus of the movement. While theory and action associated with postfeminism built on an assumption that systemic and institutional gender needs had already been addressed, third wave assumed that earlier forms of feminist success were limited to people who acted to empower themselves within the system,70 as women and feminine and without the necessity of the label. Jennifer Baumgartner, one of two authors of what is considered an ovular text of third wave feminism explains, “It was a youth-led movement and . . . operated at a time when it wasn’t part of pop culture. So we felt like we were having to break through people’s emotional barriers, not wanting to call themselves feminist or even seeing feminism as a good thing.”71 Thus, like postfeminism, the third wave movement rose at a time when the feminist label was popularly seen as a problematic, and also like postfeminism, challenged how earlier (second wave) forms of feminism had failed to meet the needs of individual women in favor of promoting what they saw as limited economic, workplace advantages that often failed to materialize. Third wave feminism in the United States therefore existed as an entity betwixt and between deconstructive and reconstructive activist goals. Like all waves of feminism, third wave maintains a liminal aspect in terms of how it can become part of the global movements for gender rights. For feminist waves to function as a space for providing change, they must be more than examples and spaces for ideas; they must also resonate and be reconnected

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to intersectional experiences and idealized expectations. Feminist and other embodied activisms must balance allowing individuals to find and feel personal agency within systems of power with seeking to directly change those systems and how they are articulated. For this reason, third wave and other contemporary feminisms often occur in spaces of contained empowerment that act as sites of negotiation between deconstructive and reconstructive efforts to address embodied systemic inequities. Activisms generating forms of contained empowerment thus encourage engagement through disrupting hegemonic, patriarchal conscriptions by empowering the otherwise invisible, however liminally, by increasing visibility of gender-based needs. NOTES 1. Éléonore Lépinard, Feminist Trouble: Intersectional Politics in Post-Secular Times (Oxford University Press, 2020), 30. 2. For scholarship on intersectionality, see Avtar Brah and Ann Phoenix, “Ain’t I a Woman? Revisiting Intersectionality.” Journal of International Women’s Studies 5, no. 3 (2004): 75–86; Bernadette M. Calafell, “(I)dentities: Considering Accountability, Reflexivity, and Intersectionality in the I and the We.” Liminalities: A Journal of Performance Studies 9, no. 2 (2013): 6–13; Karma R. Chávez, “Doing Intersectionality: Power, Privilege, and Identities in Political Activist Communities.” In Identity Research and Communication: Intercultural Reflections and Future Directions, edited by Nilanjana Bardhan and Mark P. Orbe, 21–32 (Lanham, MD: Lexington, 2012); Patricia Hill Collins, Intersectionality as Critical Social Theory (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2019); Sara Hayden and D. Lynn O’Brien Hallstein, “Placing Sex/Gender at the Forefront: Feminisms, Intersectionality, and Communication Studies.” In Standing in the Intersection: Feminist Voices, Feminist Practices in Communication Studies, edited by Karma R. Chávez, and Cindy L. Griffin, 97–123 (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2012); Julia R. Johnson, “Cisgender Privilege, Intersectionality, and the Criminalization of CeCe McDonald: Why Intercultural Communication Needs Transgender Studies.” Journal of International and Intercultural Communication 6, no. 2 (2013): 135–44. 3. Nancy A. Hewitt, “Feminist Frequencies: Regenerating the Wave Metaphor.” Feminist Studies 38, no. 3 (2012): 658–80; Kimberly Springer, “Third Wave Black Feminism?” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 27, no. 4 (2002): 1059–82. 4. Astrid Henry, Not My Mother’s Sister: Generational Conflict and Third-Wave Feminism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2004); Ednie Kaeh Garrison, “Are We on a Wavelength Yet? On Feminist Oceanography, Radios, and Third Wave Feminism.” In Different Wavelengths, edited by Jo Reger, 267–86 (New York: Routledge, 2014).

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5. Hewitt, “Feminist Frequencies”; Ednie Kaeh Garrison, Are We on a Wavelength Yet? On Feminist Oceanography, Radios, and Third Wave Feminism (New York: Routledge, 2005). 6. Jonathan Dean and Kristin Aune, “Feminism Resurgent? Mapping Contemporary Feminist Activisms in Europe.” Social Movement Studies 14, no. 4 (2015): 375–95. 7. Here I use the acronym LGBT(QIA+) to indicate that, at the time period being analyzed, the commonly used acronym was LGBT. 8. For examples of selfishness in third wave and postfeminism see: Katharine Viner, “The Personal is Still Political,” In On the Move: Feminism for a New Generation, edited by Natasha Walter, 10–26 (London: Virago Press, 2000), 22; Amber Lynn Zimmerman, M. Joan McDermott, and Christina M. Gould, “The Local Is Global: Third Wave Feminism, Peace, and Social Justice.” Contemporary Justice Review 12, no. 1 (March 2009): 77–90. doi:10.1080/10282580802681766; Stacy Gillis and Rebecca Munford, “Genealogies and Generations: The Politics and Praxis of Third-Wave Feminism.” Women’s History Review 13, no. 2 (2004): 165–82; Rebecca Munford, “Genealogies and Generations: The Politics and Praxis of Third Wave Feminism.” Women’s History Review 13, no. 2 (2004): 165–82; Harry T. McMaster, The “Whitely” Appeal of Individualism and Choice in “Post,” “Conservative,” and “Third-Wave” Feminism (Denton, TX: Texas Woman’s University, 2007); Kristin Aune and Rose Holyoak. “Navigating the Third Wave: Contemporary UK Feminist Activists and ‘Third-Wave Feminism.’” Feminist Theory 19, no. 2 (2018): 183–203. 9. Helene A. Shugart, “Isn’t It Ironic? The Intersection of Third-Wave Feminism and Generation X.” Women’s Studies in Communication 24, no. 2 (2001): 131–68; Victoria A. Newsom, “Young Females as Super Heroes: Super Heroines in the Animated Sailor Moon.” Femspec 5, no. 2 (2004): 57–81, 57; Marc A. Ouellette, “‘And Nothing She Needs’: Victoria’s Secret and the Gaze of ‘Post-Feminism.’” Visual Culture & Gender 14 (2019): 6–17. 10. Victoria A. Newsom, Theorizing Contained Empowerment: A Critique of Activism and Power in Third Wave Feminist Spaces (Bowling Green State University, 2004); Paige P. Edley, Annika Hylmo, and Victoria A. Newsom, “Alternative Organizing Communities: Collectivist Organizing, Telework, Home-Based Internet Businesses, and Online Communities.” Communication Yearbook 28, no. 1 (2004): 87–125; Lisa Maria Hogeland, “Against Generational Thinking, or, Some Things that ‘Third Wave’ Feminism Isn’t.” Women’s Studies in Communication 24, no. 1 (2001): 107–21; Amber E. Kinser, “Negotiating Spaces for/through Third-Wave Feminism.” NWSA Journal 16, no. 3 (2004): 124–53; Amber E. Kinser, ed., Mothering in the Third Wave (Toronto: Demeter Press, 2008); Jennifer Purvis, “Grrrls and Women Together in the Third Wave: Embracing the Challenges of Intergenerational Feminism(s).” NWSA Journal (2004): 93–123. 11. Sarah Banet-Weiser, Rosalind Gill, and Catherine Rottenberg, “Postfeminism, Popular Feminism and Neoliberal Feminism? Sarah Banet-Weiser, Rosalind Gill and Catherine Rottenberg in Conversation.” Feminist Theory 21, no. 1 (2020): 3–24. doi:10.1177/1464700119842555; Ian Burrell, “Naomi Wolf’s Slide from Feminist, Democratic Party Icon to the ‘Conspiracist Whirlpool.’” Insider, June 5, 2021. https:​//​

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www​.businessinsider​.com​/whos​-afraid​-of​-naomi​-wolf​-2021​-6; Susan Hopkins, “Girl Power-Dressing: Fashion, Feminism and Neoliberalism with Beckham, Beyoncé and Trump.” Celebrity Studies 9, no. 1 (2018): 99–104; Stacy Gillis and Rebecca Munford, “Genealogies and Generations: The Politics and Praxis of Third-Wave Feminism.” Women’s History Review 13, no. 2 (2004): 165–82; Leslie Heywood, “ThirdWave Feminism and Representation.” In The Palgrave Handbook of Feminism and Sport, Leisure and Physical Education, edited by Louise Mansfield, Jayne Caudwell, Belinda Wheaton and Beccy Watson, 463–477 (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018); Angela McRobbie, “Post‐Feminism and Popular Culture.” Feminist Media Studies 4, no. 3 (2004): 255–64; Sarah Banet-Weiser, “Postfeminism and Popular Feminism.” Feminist Media Histories 4, no. 2 (2018): 152–56; Ednie Kaeh Garrison, “Contests for the Meaning of Third Wave Feminism: Feminism and Popular Consciousness.” In Third Wave Feminism, edited by Stacy Gillis, Gillian Howie, and Rebecca Munford, 24–36 (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004); Jennifer Drake, “Review Essay: Third Wave Feminisms.” Feminist Studies 23, no. 1 (Spring 1997): 97–108; Ouellette, “‘And Nothing She Needs.’” 12. Kathleen A. ​​Laughlin, Julie Gallagher, Dorothy Sue Cobble, Eileen Boris, Premilla Nadasen, Stephanie Gilmore, and Leandra Zarnow, “Is it Time to Jump Ship? Historians Rethink the Waves Metaphor.” Feminist Formations (2010): 76–135. 13. Springer, “Third Wave Black Feminism?” 14. Jennifer Baumgardner, “Who’s the Next Gloria? The Quest for the Third Wave Superleader.” In Catching a Wave: Reclaiming Feminism for the 21st Century, edited by Rory Dicker and Alision Piepmeier, 159–70 (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 2003); Jennifer Baumgardner, F’em! Goo Goo, Gaga, and Some Thoughts on Balls (New York: Seal Press, 2012); Neal Curtis and Valentina Cardo, “Superheroes and Third-Wave Feminism.” Feminist Media Studies 18, no. 3 (2018): 381–96; Natalie Fixmer and Julia T. Wood, “The Personal Is Still Political: Embodied Politics in Third Wave Feminism.” Women’s Studies in Communication 28, no. 2 (2005): 235–57; Gillis and Munford, “Genealogies and Generations”; Anita Harris, Future Girl (London: Routledge, 2004); Anita Harris, “Not Waving or Drowning: Young Women, Feminism, and the Limits of the Next Wave Debate.” Outskirts Online Journal 8 (2001). http:​//​www​.outskirts​.arts​.uwa​.edu​.au​/volumes​/volume​-8​/harris; Anita Harris, “Mind the Gap: Attitudes and Emergent Feminist Politics Since the Third Wave.” Australian Feminist Studies 25 (2010): 475–84; Rebecca Munford, “‘Wake Up and Smell the Lipgloss’: Gender, Generation and the (A)politics of Girl Power.” In Third Wave Feminism: A Critical Exploration, edited by Rosalind Gill and Christina Scharff, 266–79 (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave MacMillan, 2007); Claire R. Snyder, “What is Third-Wave Feminism? A New Directions Essay.” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 34, no. 1 (Autumn 2008): 175–96; Naomi Zack, Inclusive Feminism: A Third Wave Theory of Women’s Commonality (New York: Rowman and Littlefield, 2005); Elizabeth Evans, “What Makes a (Third) Wave? How and Why the Third-Wave Narrative Works for Contemporary Feminists.” International Feminist Journal of Politics 18, no. 3 (2016): 409–28.

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15. Goldberg, Carole. “Naomi Wolf Says It Is Time for Women to Reject ‘Victim’ Feminism.” Hartford Courant, November 22, 1993. https:​//​www​.courant​.com​/news​/ connecticut​/hc​-xpm​-1993​-11​-22​-0000001637​-story​.html​/, par. 3. 16. Naomi Wolf, Fire with Fire: ​​The New Female Power and How It Will Change the 21st Century (Random House, 1993), xvii. 17. Wolf, Fire with Fire, xvii. 18. Wolf, Fire with Fire, xvii. 19. Banet-Weiser, Gill, and Rottenberg, “Postfeminism, Popular Feminism and Neoliberal Feminism?” 5. 20. See Rosalind Gill, “Postfeminist Media Culture: Elements of a Sensibility.” European Journal of Cultural Studies 10, no. 2 (2007): 147–66. See also Sarah Gamble, “Growing Up Single: The Postfeminist Novel.” Studies in the Literary Imagination 39, no. 2 (2006): 61–78; Stéphanie Genz, “Third Way/ve: The Politics of Postfeminism.” Feminist Theory 7, no. 3 (2006): 333–53. 21. Feona Attwood, “Fashion and Passion: Marketing Sex to Women.” Sexualities 8, no. 4 (2005): 392–406, 396. 22. Louise Crewe and Amber Martin, “Sex and the City: Branding, Gender, and the Commodification of Sex Consumption in Contemporary Retailing.” Urban Studies 54, no. 3, (2016): 582–99. See, also, Lynn Comella, Vibrator Nation: How Feminist Sex-Toy Stores Changed the Business of Pleasure (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2017). 23. Kate Siegfried, “Feeling Collective: The Queer Politics of Affect in the Riot Grrrl Movement.” Women’s Studies in Communication 42, no. 1 (2019): 21–38. See, also, Susan O’Shea, “Activate, Collaborate, Participate: The Network Revolutions of Riot Grrrl-Affiliated Music Worlds.” Punk & Post-Punk 9, no. 2 (2020): 309–25. 24. Éléonore Lépinard, Feminist Trouble: Intersectional Politics in Post-Secular Times (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020), 283. 25. Sertaç Sehlikoglu, “Revisited: Muslim Women’s Agency and Feminist Anthropology of the Middle East.” Contemporary Islam 12, no. 1 (2018): 73–92. 26. Muneerah Badr Almahasheer, “Feminism in the Works of Fawziyya Abū Khālid.” CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture 20, no. 1 (2018): 1–10, 6. 27. Rebecca Walker, “Ms. Magazine.” Becoming the Third Wave (1992). See also Patricia J. Williams, Barbara Smith, Rebecca Walker, Marcia Ann Gillespie, and Eleanor Holmes Norton, “Refusing to be Silenced.” Ms. Magazine, 1992. 28. Baumgardner and Richards, Manifesta. 29. Victor Turner, “Liminal to Liminoid, in Play, Flow, and Ritual: An Essay in Comparative Symbology.” Rice Institute Pamphlet-Rice University Studies 60, no. 3 (1974). https:​//​creativecommons​.org​/licenses​/by​-nc​/4​.0​/, 60. 30. Aisha Durham, “Black Feminist Thought, Intersectionality, and Intercultural Communication.” In De-Whitening Intersectionality: Race, Intercultural Communication, and Politics, edited by Shinsuke Eguchi, Bernadette Marie Calafell, and Shadee Abdi, 45–58 (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2020), 47. 31. Leela Fernandes, “Unsettling ‘Third Wave Feminism’: Feminist Waves, Intersectionality, and Identity Politics in Retrospect.” In No Permanent Waves: Recasting

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Histories of U.S. Feminism, edited by Nancy A. Hewitt, 98–118 (Rutgers University Press, 2010). http:​//​www​.jstor​.org​/stable​/j​.ctt1bmzp2r, 100. 32. Kristin Aune and Rose Holyoak, “Navigating the Third Wave: Contemporary UK Feminist Activists and ‘Third-Wave Feminism.’” Feminist Theory 19, no. 2 (2018): 183–203. 33. Anna Mercedes, and Jennifer Thweatt-Bates, “Bound in the Spiral Dance: Spirituality and Technology in the Third Wave.” In Feminist Spirituality: The Next Generation, edited by Chris Klassen (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2009), 63–84. 34. Aune and Holyoak, “Navigating the Third Wave”; Mercedes and Thweatt-Bates “Bound in the Spiral Dance”; Su-lin Yu, “Third-Wave Feminism: A Transnational Perspective.” Asian Journal of Women’s Studies 15, no. 1 (2009): 7–25; Rebecca L. Clark Mane, “Transmuting Grammars of Whiteness in Third-Wave Feminism: Interrogating Postrace Histories, Postmodern Abstraction, and the Proliferation of Difference in Third-Wave Texts.” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 38, no. 1 (2012): 71–98; Sherin Saadallah, “Muslim Feminism in the Third Wave: A Reflective Inquiry.” Third Wave Feminism: A Reflective Inquiry, edited by S. Gillis, G. Howie, and R. Munford, 216–26 (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004). https:​//​doi​ .org​/10​.1057​/9780230523173​_18; Norell Martínez, “Femzines, Artivism, and Altar Aesthetics: Third Wave Feminism Chicana Atyle.” Chiricù Journal: Latina/o Literature, Art, and Culture 2, no. 2 (2018): 45–67; Loubna H. Skalli, “The Girl Factor and the (In)Security of Coloniality: A View from the Middle East.” Alternatives, Global, Local, Political 40, no. 2 (2015), 174–87. Elizabeth Evans, “What Makes a (Third) Wave? How and Why the Third-Wave Narrative Works for Contemporary Feminists.” International Feminist Journal of Politics 18, no. 3 (2016): 409–28. 35. Patricia Hill Collins, Intersectionality as Critical Social Theory (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2019), 21–22. 36. Crenshaw, Kimberlé. “Whose Story Is It, Anyway? Feminist and Antiracist Appropriations of Anita Hill.” In Race-ing Justice, En-Gendering Power: Essays on Anita Hill, Clarence Thomas, and the Construction of Social Reality, edited by Toni Morrison, 402–40 (New York: Random House, 1992), 405. 37. Audre Lorde, “The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House” (Comments at “The Personal and the Political” Panel, Second Sex Conference, New York, September 29, 1979). See, also, the reprinted essay in This Bridge Called my Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color, edited by Cherrie L. Moraga and Gloria E Anzaldúa, 98–101 (Watertown: Persephone Press, 1981). 38. Carol Hanisch, “The Personal Is Political.” In Notes from the Second Year: Women’s Liberation, edited by Shulamith Firestone and Anne Koedt (New York: Radical Feminism, 1970). 39. Victor Turner, From Ritual to Theater: The Human Seriousness of Play (New York: PAJ Publications, 1982), 27. 40. Natasha Pinterics, “Riding the Feminist Waves: In With the Third?” Canadian Woman Studies / Les Cahiers de la Femme 20 / 21, no. 1 (Winter/Spring 2001): 15–21.

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41. Nicola Gavey, Just Sex? The Cultural Scaffolding of Rape. London: Routledge, 2005. 42. For more on the core arguments grounding the North American Third Wave, see Rita Alfonso and Jo Triglio, “Surfing the Third Wave: A Dialogue between Two Third Wave Feminists.” Hypatia. 12 (3) (Summer 1997): 7–15; Siegel, “The Legacy of the Personal”; Rebecca Walker, “Being Real: An Introduction.” In To be Real: Telling the Truth and Changing the Face of Feminism, edited by Rebecca Walker, x–xi (Toronto: Anchor, 1995). 43. Aune and Holyoak, “Navigating the Third Wave”; Buchanan, “‘Third Wave Feminism Has Led Us’”; Holly Thorpe, Kim Toffoletti, and Toni Bruce, “Sportswomen and Social Media: Bringing Third-Wave, Postfeminism and Neoliberal Feminism into Conversation.” Journal of Sport and Social Issues 41, vol. 5 (2017): 359–83; Mary Catherine Whitlock, “Selling the Third Wave: The Commodification and Consumption of the Flat Track Roller Girl” (Master’s Thesis, University of South Florida, Tampa, 2012). http:​//​scholarcommons​.usf​.edu​/etd​/4255​/. 44. Jing Zeng, “You Say #MeToo, I Say #MiTu: China’s Online Campaigns against Sexual Abuse.” In #MeToo and the Politics of Social Change, edited by Bianca Fileborn and Rachel Loney-Howes, 71–83 (Palgrave Macmillan, 2019). 45. Drawing upon Mulvey, it could be argued that these empowered women characterizations would be reinterpreted and rebooted in relation to “girl power” to better fit third wave and developing fourth wave ideals of empowered femininities; yet each would also be criticized for continuing to cater to the hyperfeminine male gaze in order to justify the character’s strength. 46. Attwood, “Fashion and Passion,” 396. 47. Martha McCaughey and Christina French, “Women’s Sex-Toy Parties: Technology, Orgasm, and Commodification.” Sexuality and Culture 5, no. 3 (2001): 77–96. 48. Attwood, “Fashion and Passion,” 393. 49. Meehan’s explanation directly echoes the consumer marketing associated with the “Cult of True Womanhood” of the Victorian Era, as discussed in chapter 2 of this book. 50. Jamie L. Mullaney and Janet Hinson Shope, Paid to Party: Working Time and Emotion in Direct Home Sales (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2012). 51. McCaughey and French, “Women’s Sex-Toy Parties.” 52. Stanley A. Deetz, Democracy in an Age of Corporate Colonization: Developments in Communication and the Politics of Everyday Life (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1992). 53. Amy L. Fraher and Yiannis Gabriel, “Meeting and Resisting the Corporate Body Snatchers: The US Piloting Profession in Times of Downsizing and Restructuring.” Tamara: Journal for Critical Organization Inquiry 14, no. 1 (2016): 35–51. 54. Michelle Sidler, “Living in McJobdom: Third Wave Feminism and Class Inequity.” In Third Wave Agenda: Being Feminist, Doing Feminism, edited by Leslie Heywood and Jennifer Drake, 1–24 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997). 55. Douglas Coupland, Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1991).

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56. Sarah Blithe, Gender Equality and Work-Life Balance: Glass Handcuffs and Working Men in the US (New York: Routledge, 2018). 57. McCaughey and French, “Women’s Sex-Toy Parties,” 95. 58. Lorde, Sister Outsider, 110. 59. Naila Kabeer, Reversed Realities: Gender Hierarchies in Development Thought (London: Verso, 1994). 60. bell hooks, Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center (Boston: South End Press, 1984). 61. Jane Flax, “Postmodernism and Gender Relations in Feminist Theory.” In Feminisms, edited by Sandra Kemp and Judith Squires, 170–78 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997; Original work published 1987), 171. 62. Susan Myburgh, “Cyberspace: A New Environment for Women.” Women and Environments International 42/43 (1998): 20–23. 63. Baumgardner and Richards, Manifesta. 64. Susan Archer Mann and Douglas Huffman, “The Decentering of Second Wave Feminism and the Rise of the Third Wave.” Science & Society 69, no. 1 (2005): 56–91, 74. 65. Baumgardener and Richards, cited in Shaw, “The Ms. Q&A.” 66. Maxine Molyneux, Adrija Dey, Malu A. C. Gatto, and Holly Rowden, “New Feminist Activism: Waves and Generations.” Discussion paper prepared for the 25th anniversary of the UN WOMEN Beijing Platform for Action, 64th session of the Commission on the Status of Women, UN Women, no. 40, April 2021. https:​ //​www​.unwomen​.org​/sites​/default​/files​/Headquarters​/Attachments​/Sections​/Library​/ Publications​/2021​/Discussion​-paper​-New​-feminist​-activism​-waves​-and​-generations​ -en​.pdf, iv. 67. Molyneux et al., “New Feminist Activism,” iv. 68. Molyneux et al., “New Feminist Activism,” 3. See, also, Rory Dicker and Alison Piepmeier, eds. Catching a Wave: Reclaiming Feminism for the 21st Century (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 2003); Christina Ewig and Myra Marx Ferree, “Feminist Organizing: What’s Old, What’s New? History, Trends, and Issues.” In The Oxford Handbook of Gender and Politics, edited by Georgina Waylen, Karen Celis, Johanna Kantola, and S. Laurel Weldon (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013). doi:10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199751457.013.0017 Astrid Henry, Not My Mother’s Sister: Generational Conflict and Third-Wave Feminism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2004); Claire R. Snyder, “What is Third-Wave Feminism? A New Directions Essay.” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 34, no. 1 (Autumn 2008): 175–96; Nancy A. Hewitt, ed. No Permanent Waves: Recasting Histories of U.S. Feminism (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2010); Leslie Heywood and Jennifer Drake, “We Learn America Like a Script: Activism in the Third Wave; or, Enough Phantoms of Nothing.” In Third Wave Agenda: Being Feminist, Doing Feminism, edited by Leslie Heywood and Jennifer Drake (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 40–54; Leila J. Rupp, “Challenging Imperialism in International Women’s Organizations 1888–1945.” National Women’s Studies Association Journal 8 (1996): 8–27; Leila J.

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Rupp, Worlds of Women: The Making of an International Women’s Movement (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press). 69. Molyneux et al., “New Feminist Activism,” 3. 70. Jenny Coleman, “An Introduction to Feminisms in a Postfeminist Age.” Women’s Studies Journal 23, no. 2 (2009): 3–13. 71. Baumgardener and Richards, cited in Shaw, “The Ms. Q&A,” par. 11.

SECTION II

The Contained Nature of US Third Wave Feminisms

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Chapter 4

Metaphors of Containment

The form of US feminism that became most visible in the 1990s and early 2000s existed as a mediated offshoot of third wave feminist activism: a glamorized and contained form of empowerment popularly known as “girl power.” Girl power feminism in that era reflects a form of contained empowerment as narratives constructed to simultaneously advertise and minimize feminist action seen in earlier waves of feminism, as well as in the minimal legislative efforts toward gender equity actualized during the earlier US feminist waves. It is a uniquely Westernized interpretation of feminist empowerment that exemplifies the goal of centering a “feminine” power between deconstructive and reconstructive approaches to activism and engagement. The term “girl power” derived from the Riot Grrrl punk and “grunge” movement of the early 1990s, highlighted by bands such as Bikini Kill, Babes in Toyland, 7 Year Bitch, and Calamity Jane.1 The Riot Grrrl movement was a direct attack on the hypersexual representation of women and girls in media, and the lack of powerful women that were not illustrated as independent of men and patriarchal norms of empowerment. In the second edition of her Bikini Kill zine, Kathleen Hanna explained, “We are angry at a society that tells us Girl = Dumb, Girl = Bad, Girl = Weak.”2 As this movement entered the mainstream, the Riot Grrl became recognized through acts associated with Seattle-style grunge and mid-90s punk-pop, most notably highlighted by hits such as Hole’s3 “Doll Parts,” Alanis Morrisette’s “You Oughta Know,” Meredith Brooks’ “Bitch,” and No Doubt’s “I’m Just a Girl.” Later songs like Aqua’s “Barbie Girl” would perpetuate the same sentiment. However, these hits and their associated acts were not as marketable or acknowledged in the industry or by fans as their male counterparts. By the late 1990s, however, the Riot Grrrl’s form of “grrrl power” had become a marketing tool for the industry, and a version of “girl power” that was more easily confined within patriarchal norms could be seen in the success of industry-created acts such as the Spice Girls, Destiny’s Child, En Vogue, TLC, and Xscape to name a few. The more glamorized, 115

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accessible, hypermarketed version of girl power espoused by pop icon groups like the Spice Girls has been problematized and critiqued as exploitative of women by critics and other grrrl power acts, such as the critique from Garbage’s lead singer, Shirley Manson. Many years later, Manson recalled, “I always hated the term Girl Power. It was pretending to be women taking control, but none of them took control, they weren’t writing, they weren’t producing, they weren’t playing . . . I found it a sham.”4 However, this form of girl power appealed to a larger worldwide audience, and inspired a number of young women to enter the music industry, and something that would help young, Generation X and millennial women find a connection to the term feminism.5 Essentially, girl power provides a convenient prepackaged form of modern-day feminism. The musical icon was not the only form of mediated girl power to become popularized in the 1990s. A narrative form of mediated girl power character also developed, one that simultaneously highlighted both traditional stereotypes of femininity and empowerment. This character type was designed to exhibit power that directly challenged both traditional media norms and acknowledged decades of feminist media criticism. Further, the girl power character also projects a problematic form of contained empowerment that, while applicable to the stories for which she was created, does not necessarily translate to audiences’ live experience and therefore to enactable, consumptive power. Girl power is therefore simultaneously reconstructive and deconstructive; directly reflective of struggles for feminist empowerment while consistently reinforcing structural norms. Media studies situated on sexuality and gender predominantly focus on the analysis of how idealized gender constructs are projected within popular media. The resulting media representations generally fall well within heteronormative values that reinforce patriarchy, heterosexuality, and traditionally understood gender roles. Within this framework, gender-focused media studies are most predominantly centered on critiquing mediated characterizations of gender that reinforce repressive stereotypes, particularly those implying limitations on women and women’s roles in society. A resulting challenge within gender-based and feminist media studies, then, is whether non-heteronormative identities be represented in media products and within the culture industry if they are consistently othered and contained by patriarchal language and power structures. A foundational argument that influenced the girl power character within gender-based media studies and feminist media theory is Laura Mulvey’s male gaze, which critiques the objectification of women in films as characters “to-be-looked-at”6 rather than as characters with subject-position agency. Mulvey’s analysis looked specifically at the creation of female roles in Hollywood’s golden era, and her theory continues to be used to locate most

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mediated female performances in relation to those traditions. Thus, women on screen serve as the object of that gaze of male characters and heteronormative expectations of audiences. This challenges women as audience members who are thereby limited to viewing from a male perspective, and means that women are therefore trained to see their gender and themselves as objects for male lust. bell hooks furthers this argument with her oppositional gaze,7 where she argues that Black audiences are aware of racial normalizing factors in film and television that act similarly to the patriarchal norms of Mulvey’s male gaze, and therefore Black audiences view media texts with skepticism and a critical eye. Building further on concepts from Stuart Hall’s reception theory,8 the oppositional gaze illustrates, for hooks, how not all audiences read texts through a prescriptive lens. Thus, intersectional approaches to the object position of women in media can allow for alternative understandings of agency, subject positionality, and potential impacts on the representation of power constructs. The genre of media texts can also play a role in how a gendered character is positioned as subject with agency vs. to-be-looked-at object. Genres that appeal to predominantly female audiences have often allowed female characters to play a subject role, though critiques of these characters remaining primarily objectified and their narratives constrained to relationships with male characters persist.9 There are particular genres, however, where some gender-flexibility is part of the world-building narrative.10 In particular, the science fiction, fantasy, and horror genres, among others, allow for characters who represent androgyny and gender-bending norms within the worlds where their stories take place. However, the ability for these female, androgynous, and non-binary characters to succeed in these spaces is, itself, a form of scripted, contained power. The girl power character was created within these flexible genres. The girl power character of the late 1990s and early 2000s in US media was a liberated, young heroine acting in roles traditionally assigned to male action heroes.11 These characters were hyperfeminine as their femininity was illustrated in an extreme fashion, through both body type and characterization. These characters are tough girls12 in that they are warriors, utilizing violence and physical prowess to defeat a variety of villains. The characters were also intentionally created to appeal to a large buying market of teenage girls. The characters encourage young women to stand up for themselves and be independent, while maintaining a distinctly feminine style.13 Girl power, as a form of third wave empowerment, is contained empowerment. The girl power hero of recent popular culture and persons “practicing” girl power as a type of third wave feminist empowerment are marked by an attempt to control their bodies. There are two distinct aspects to this. First,

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the girl power body is carved in the image of an ideal body type through the girl power practitioner’s motivated sculpting, through fitness routines and dieting. Second, the attempt to control the girl power body is both a response to perceived masculine aggression and oppression and a struggle to reclaim feminine ideals as part of the pleasure of being feminine. It is a body capable of operating and succeeding in a male dominated system while maintaining extreme or hyperfeminine qualities. There is an element of empowerment in the physical control of the female body by the female. However, it cannot be overlooked that this empowerment is in the terms of an older interpretation of femininity viewed as having been constricted by patriarchy. Therefore, the definition of femininity itself contains the potential power associated with this ideal of feminist empowerment. There are varying definitions of girl power in popular culture and in academe. The popularity of the term in the 90s and early 2000s was generally associated with popular culture icons such as the Spice Girls, Buffy (Buffy the Vampire Slayer), Xena (Xena: Warrior Princess), Ally MacBeal (Ally MacBeal), and the witches on Charmed. The term is also used in many popular books. One book, among the earliest to use the phrase “girl power” is Girl Power: Young Women Speak Out.14 Carlip writes about overcoming personal struggle and finding oneself. This is only one example of a number of self-help texts using the term “girl power” in order to sell. Girl Power: Self Defense for Teens provides another example, this one exemplifying ideals found in third wave feminisms.15 Other scholars and writers have similarly defined girl power in relation to third wave ideals. Karras’s discussion of Buffy the Vampire Slayer identifies that character as an example of “the third wave’s commitment to girl power by turning the victim role typical of the action and horror genres on its head with the character of Buffy herself.”16 Baumgardner and Richards place a similar empowerment in what they call the “girlie movement,”17 an attempt to utilize artifacts and ideals associated with girlhood and femininity as if they are empowering. Third wave writers similarly define girl power as power located in both the feminine and the “girlie” movement, encouraging young women to find their own way in the world, regardless of the traditions associated with being female.18 GIRL POWER PROTAGONIST AS FEMINIST METAPHOR The concept of girl power became commonplace in American media in the late 1990s, becoming both a catch phrase and a character type in popular culture. Girl power is itself a metaphor that refers to the ability for young

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women to choose their own lifestyles, to wear clothes that make them feel both powerful and feminine, and to the ability for young women to defend themselves from male aggressive behavior.19 Of course, girl power also refers to particular characters in the popular media, characters that are both a reflection of the perceived independent and strong young women of today, as well as a template for creating that young woman. The girl power character illustrates a set of norms associated with teenaged girls (i.e., a preoccupation with dating and with dressing and acting in order to pass as a “normal” girl). The girl power character simultaneously acts as a role model for young women, encouraging them to be strong and independent. This combination of traditional norms and the role model template exemplifies the mixed metaphor inherent to girl power. “Girl power” is located at the intersection between traditional patriarchal concepts of femininity and traditional concepts of power.20 The girl power hero of US popular culture is an example of contained empowerment because she is restricted by those traditional concepts of femininity and power—she must exhibit a use of power traditionally identified with masculine hero characters while maintaining portrayals traditionally ascribed to feminine characters. The girl power hero then uses her feminine characteristics as a source of power; uses her containment as a means of becoming powerful. Girl power requires this contained space in order for that juxtaposition of femininity and power to be productive. Thus, girl power as a metaphor suggests both traditional power and the figures denied such power traditionally embodied in one ideal. The power of girl power is the juxtaposition of two opposing ideals: a female character appearing traditionally objectified but acting as a hero. The term girl power itself comprises traditionally oppositional norms: girl and power. The first norm is a powerful term, power, implying agency and an ability to create change. This label is combined with another term representing marginalization and a group of people traditionally removed from the power structure and denied agency: girl. The juxtaposition of these terms implies my concept of contained empowerment as it entails empowering the marginalized girl without removing the characteristics that create the marginalization of girl. A non-patriarchal type of agency tied to the ideal of girl must then be the result: agency that is outside of but not removed from the power structures that define the label of girl. The metaphor of girl power is bound to the social structures by its conception and labeling. Girl power is a fluid metaphor in terms of what it represents. This is different from traditional interpretations utilizing metaphor analysis. Metaphors represent ideals and thoughts masking other thoughts to subvert social norms.21 Thus, girl power, and contained empowerment itself, suggests agency masked by stereotype; thus, it is both subversive and reaffirming to

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the patriarchy. In particular, “girl” is a fixed stereotype, while “power” is fluid, representing multiple styles of agency. Metaphor analysis is a useful application to investigate the girl power character because the site contains literal and abstract texts, discourses, and constructs revealing how third wave activism is enacted through contained empowerment. Further, feminist metaphor analysis seeks to uncover the gendered (and other) inequalities implied within the term itself. The potential for empowerment located in this metaphor centers on how contained empowerment locates power in the doubly-marginalized group of young women. The metaphor of girl power contains the values and ideals associated with the two juxtaposed terms “girl” and “power.” First, the concept of “girl” as it is incorporated into the ideal of girl power, especially as it pertains to the girl power character of popular media, implies a fixed analysis located in patriarchal identity constructs. Girl power’s “girl” acts as a stable entity with normative associations. Second, there are fluid associations of the term “power” as that term is integrated into the notion of girl power. The “power” of girl power is drawn from both within and outside of normative structures. The interaction of the two unique terms when juxtaposed in the mixed metaphor of girl power functions as a mediated third wave feminist ideal. The metaphor of girl power is therefore mixed because it is both fluid and fixed, combining these two elements in order to empower a normally marginalized position. Metaphors historically are traceable to Aristotle, viewing the metaphor as a word replacing another word in language. Burke argues that metaphors reveal how truth is constructed, claiming that through metaphor analysis we can see the ideas of one character or person revealed through the point of view and experience of another.22 Metaphor analysis reveals the specific words or terms we use to describe reality, and how people in different places and experiences use these ideals for their own constructed realities. Further metaphors are intentional fusions of powerful and inferior terms.23 By using a metaphor, those without power can experience the reality of those with power.24 Girl power as a metaphor suggests particular types of action and experiences embodied in one ideal. Girl power is not a stable entity, because the “power” of girl power draws upon poststructural rather than systemic ideals, thus it is a fluid rather than fixed metaphor. Girl power is itself a composite of third wave identity constructs and reveals clearly oppositional norms: “girl” and “power.” This mediated character is reconstituted in third wave feminist online sites. Mediated characterizations of girl power both define and describe the metaphor as it enacts contained empowerment. Clearly, the ideal of “girl power” represents a powerful term, “power,” fused with a marginalized one, “girl.” This juxtaposition implies contained empowerment because it implies that a fixed social category can be empowered in its own

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right regardless of social structures, yet at the same time is completely bound to those social structures by the conception and labeling of the category itself. When individuals live by the concepts suggested in metaphors, they create their own systems of power in terms of the metaphor’s relation to normalized power structures. Metaphors represent ideals and thoughts that impact everyday experience: thoughts replacing or masking other thoughts in order to subvert social norms.25 Girl power suggests that empowerment can happen in the local knowledge of this metaphoric or contained space. Further, studying girl power as a metaphor reveals another feminist methodological concern: the suggestion of potential benefits for the marginalized categories of youth and female. The metaphor of girl power suggests a gendered space where contained empowerment occurs, confined both temporally and locally. It implies a liminal space where change and reintegration will occur. Girl power has the potential to be true empowerment for young women, yet contained by its own hyperfeminine and heteronormative characterization. Girl power has the ability for young women to achieve personal empowerment while maintaining a distinctly “girlish” style, in a US context.26 Girl power is a pleasure-centered form of female empowerment tied to ideals found in third wave feminism. Girl power is also the most visible incorporation of third wave feminism into popular media. The manifestation of girl power in the media is a site of negotiation between the stereotypical construct of traditional femininity and an empowered, active female. Girl power is therefore a liminal point between and unifying concepts associated with the terms girl and power. It is the central focus of this chapter to see how the elements in the metaphor of girl power work to create a kind of contained empowerment that restricts young women while providing a sense of agency. THE FIXED METAPHOR As discussed above, the metaphor of girl power is dependent upon normative, and thus contradictory understandings of the terms “power” and “girl.” The location of girl power in feminine constructs is the primary way that girl power is contained. Because feminine ideals propagate within patriarchy, the nature of girl power is unavoidably tied to and contained by patriarchal, normative ideals. The concept of girl power implies a necessary deconstruction of the system of knowledge and power that traditionally defines both the terms girl and power. It entails a need to move away from the restrictions and containment of the system; providing the opportunity to redefine or re-create how the concept of power relates to the hyperfeminine girl stereotype. It implies the potential for power to be removed from the normative

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structure and transcend gender: however, girl power is itself confined by the activism-from-within ideal of empowering the traditional notion of girl. The fixed nature of the term girl and its implications acts as the container for girl power. Girl is a concept implying marginalization in terms of both gender and youth, and it brings with it a set of stereotypes and expectations. There are varying identifications of the “girl” of girl power in popular culture and in the academy. While the popular term is associated with the character type mentioned above, the term is also associated with young women’s self-defense and self-improvement. In either interpretation, girl power suggests that one in both the marginalized categories of youth and female, the doubly marginalized girl, can be empowered in spite of her marginalization. Still, the girl power character inhabits the double marginalization implied by the girl and is therefore partially contained by tradition. The media represents girl power through a character type evolved from 1970s fantasy and action female heroes. Girl power characters contain similar stereotypes to those 1970s superheroines. The stereotypical body types and feminine attitudes portrayed in current images are not any less confining than for the 1970s characters. Further, the fantastic settings of girl power characters, as well as the victim role that the characters constantly resist, confine these images as much as past examples.27 The girl power character’s agency lies, not in her girlhood, but in how that girlhood is reinterpreted through the fantastic setting. Femininity, itself, contains and fixes the character with expected traits and behaviors. Further, girl power characters are often policed into a type of normality, specifically a set of norms associated with girl. This normality is part of what allows them to function as females in society. For example, Buffy and the witches from Charmed deal with forced normality. In fact, these characters illustrate a tendency to police themselves to be normal. The Charmed sisters want the loves and lives of normal women, yet find themselves forbidden to date, or constantly endangering their dates. Buffy constantly desires a “normal” life, yet her attempts, like those of the Charmed sisters, are continually interrupted by demon and vampire problems. This results in the girl power character as a liminal figure, neither fully female nor independent of feminine stereotypes. She is an embodiment of the contradictory nature of the mixed metaphor she implies, and of contained empowerment. She is tied to, but not limited by, the fixed nature of girl. The primary containment of girl power is its fixed location in feminine constructs. However, girl power (like third wave feminism) promotes uniquely feminine empowerment. This goal, bridging the gap between private and public forms of empowerment occurs in spaces of contained empowerment. Girl power ideals are enacted through the girl power characteristics. The girl power character balances her public, powerful identity with the

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empowerment she locates in her feminine, private sphere identity. Her negotiation takes place in a space of contained empowerment, contained by the stereotypes enacted but providing the possibility that that stereotype can attain power it is otherwise denied. For example, Buffy reflects a normative understanding of the female youth in America as often preoccupied with their bodies. In her book discussing the history of bodies of American girls in the twentieth century, Brumberg argues that body modification has become a priority for American girls because they perceive it as improvement.28 This reflects the constant sculpting necessary in the girl power body. A girl power body must be in excellent physical condition, because it has to perform a type of violent fighting (against vampires and other demons representing patriarchal abuses of women). However, this confined body type is only one of the ways in which girl power negotiates understood preoccupations and trials of teenage angst. Heteronormative understandings of the female body further contain and empower girl power. Girl power traps the character in her hyperfeminine body. Bordo defines the body as woman’s enemy within patriarchal culture.29 The body becomes a prison for the soul. Women, anorexics in particular, attempt to shape and control their bodies because it gives them a sense of personal empowerment—power over their own bodies. However, Bordo argues that this is false empowerment because it is reconstructing the female body to the confines of the patriarchal system. The girl power characters in the media often have “perfect” bodies; however, these bodies imprison the characters who must use their bodies in prescribed fashions, limiting and containing them in traditional stereotypes. The girl power body is trapped by the fixed girl metaphor. Further, the girl power character is performed in an extremely sexual fashion, introduced as a very sexually attractive girl. In the first episode of Buffy, one of the other characters, Xander, is so distracted by his first sight of her that he skates into a railing. Buffy is usually dressed in clothing that is attractive to heterosexual men (and probably lesbians—the gaze is not restricted to heteronormative audiences, but it still implies heteronormative power). Very often, she is in tight fitting pants. Her shirts are often sleeveless, with thin spaghetti-straps and low-cut necklines showing her cleavage. Other costume aspects often include knee-high boots, short skirts, and high-heeled shoes or sandals. Similarly, in one Charmed episode, the three witch sisters are forced to work with a guardian who is not their normal guardian, an older woman rather than an attractive young man. When this guardian insists that the witches not wear sleeveless, slinky clothing, one sister responds, “but then we have nothing to wear.” This reinforces how aware these characters are of their femininity, and how they find pleasure in it. The characters are, unavoidably, objectified in the sense of Mulvey’s male gaze because she is

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clearly “to-be-looked-at.”30 Further, the obvious appreciation by male characters, demons, and vampires (both male and female) of Buffy and the Charmed sisters illustrates the young women’s sexual attractiveness. The need for the girl power character to perform as a girl is further complicated by the implied threat of the object in a subject role: complicated by the threat of a powerful and attractive woman. The girl power character looks like an object but acts like a subject. Girl power heroes are all hyperfeminine examples of feminine masquerade.31 They disguise the implied threat of their power behind extreme or hyperfemininity, performing an identifiable, overstated feminine body. Buffy and the Charmed sisters all clearly flaunt their femininity, both in their manner of dress and in their movements. Their femininity is also incorporated into their fighting styles. Most of the fighting involves kickboxing, and hand-to-hand techniques. These techniques are very similar to techniques taught to women in self-defense classes. As mentioned above, this illustrates the role of the girl power character representing the female victim “fighting back” against her victimization and oppressions associated with patriarchy. What is particularly interesting is that it seems to be a natural function of the girl power character, a normal part of her routine to be able to defend herself so literally. Her mask is practically unidentifiable. The mask of girl is both a container restricting her behavior and a means by which she can undermine the system from within. The girl mask must be maintained: because of the specific images associated with girl power bodies, practitioners must maintain a specific body type. That body type is physically fit, cute or pretty, and young (preferably a teenager). The girl power body freezes in time, providing the illusion of permanent girlhood and youth. However, this is paradoxical because the potential of girl power freezes with the image of the performance. Girl power cannot progress into “woman power” if womanliness is kept at bay. Therefore, not only are people who do not fit a particular stereotype based on age, gender, body type, and ethnicity not considered within the girl power framework, but due to the confines of the metaphor itself, the current practitioners will eventually outgrow it. Girl power participants will eventually pass beyond its fixed, contained location. The girl power body itself is therefore a liminal site of contained empowerment betwixt and between victim and power. Girl power characters embody femininity as a form of power localized to that specific character type; power contained in the mediated, hyperfeminine body. While embodied identity constructs associated with girl are a significant means of locating the girl power character in the fixed and contained metaphor, patterns of behavior and activities associated with girlhood also confine the character. Such behavior is inherent in the ideal of girl in America. Susan Douglas maintains that girlhood itself teaches American girls how to behave and how to mask themselves in conflicting ideals about femininity. She

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discusses a public ideal of femininity based on two contradictions, illustrated in terms of the author’s own experience with girlhood: Was I supposed to be an American-individualistic, competitive, aggressive, achievement-oriented, tough, independent? This was the kind of person who would help us triumph over Sputnik. Or was I supposed to be a girl-nurturing, self-abnegating, passive, dependent, primarily concerned with the well-being of others, and completely indifferent to personal success?32

This contradiction refers to the baby boom generation but is still in place for American girls. The contradiction is further complicated by the popular notion of a feminist as other-than-feminine or lacking in feminine qualities; the idea that a woman has to reject femininity in order to be empowered in a man’s world. The contained empowerment of girl power is, again, a space to negotiate these traditionally contradictory ideals of femininity. Feminine characteristics and sexuality are clearly marked within the girl power character, who cannot deviate from these characteristics without punishment within the fantastic settings of these characters. For example, a slayer who fails to nurture adequately may go crazy, as in the case of another slayer in the Buffy series, Faith. Faith fails to protect the innocent, instead killing an innocent, and is driven insane by the guilt. Similarly, sisterly love and femininity are at the core of the powers of the witches of Charmed, who must constantly reaffirm their femininity or their powers are literally removed. The girl power hero is thus restricted in her choices, fixed and controlled by her femininity yet locating her empowerment in her choice to be female. Ultimately, the girl power hero simply has to perform girl. The character needs the double-marginalization status to fight from. She needs to be unexpected, for her abilities to not fit her characteristics and the stereotypes associated with her in a normative understanding. Girl power heroes are always hyperfeminine, attractive, and girlish. Each must negotiate her power from within, from her status as a girl. She must move beyond the fixed stereotypes associated with girlhood and find her empowerment inside the girl container itself. THE FLUID METAPHOR In the 1992 theatrical release of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, we learn that slayers have a vampire warning system: they get menstrual cramps when a vampire is nearby.33 There is a biological requirement for the character to be female in Buffy’s fantastic setting. Further, the characters enter the roles before reaching adulthood. This also implies a type of embodied activism,

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or the use of bodies to engage in social and political action.34 Young women need training and lessons about their bodies not easily taught to a grown woman in US society. Girl power characters have powers granted to them through their fantastically constructed gender roles. However, audience members will encounter understandings of their bodies and the power constructs associated with their bodies through much different processes. Therefore, the girl power that is present in these characters is a power institutionalized within the fantasy system designed for the character that must be performed by a girl. It is power that can only occur in contained, hyperfeminine spaces. Such woman or girl-centered empowerment illustrates and implies a new, non-patriarchal interpretation of power. While the concept of girl power clearly indicates normative ideals related to the term and concept girl, implying activism-from-within, the metaphor itself also implies power and agency normally denied those in the position of girl. The power of the girl power media character is a type of power generally ascribed to hypermasculinity in cultural representations: physical, aggressive, heroic power. Therefore, the juxtaposition of this power with the hyperfeminine girl of girl power, implies a poststructural transcendence of the masculine/feminine binary. However, enactments of girl power within culture are not limited to hypermasculine power. In fact, girl power as much comes to be power rooted in girlishness as it is physical prowess. Therefore, the challenge for the metaphor is not how it is restricted to the girl stereotype, but how it must constantly renegotiate the meaning of power. Poststructural feminist theories suggest that traditional norms can be set aside or overturned in favor of those normally marginalized. The contained empowerment implied in the metaphor of girl power, then, represents not only a type of activist-from-within feminism, but also a poststructural response to the normative containment of the girl. Further, the fact that the power of girl power is fluid implies a poststructural or transcendent type of empowerment. This reinforces how, while the girl metaphor is fixed, the power metaphor can flourish within and in spite of its containment. Given the understanding that the girl power body is a site of negotiation between hyperfemininity and power, a process echoed by her audience and the girl power practitioner in society, the challenge is determining not how to enact girl, but what power is appropriate. The girl power heroes in the media are filling hero roles that, in the fantasies created for the characters require women, complicate the conflict between a nurturing female image and that of a powerful warrior. The girl power participant offscreen, however, is not called upon to be a warrior like her role models. Her power is much more difficult to define and much more difficult to link to a need for feminine participation. The girl power participant must find her means to empowerment in terms of her femininity. She must locate her contained empowerment in

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herself, by altering the ideals of power as they normatively apply or are distinguished from the girl herself. The girl power character acts as a role model for young women in society, yet, for young women emulating girl power heroes, reality does not function following the rules created in the fantastic girl power settings. The empowered roles that young women choose to take on are not generally created for women as slayerhood was created for women in Buffy’s world. This reinforces the contained nature of this fantastic girl power as power that only works in a mediated setting, in a particular body type. However, the potential for empowerment remains appealing. Samanta and Franzman explain: One of the best running subplots touches on Buffy’s reluctance to fully accept her slayer status, trying instead to fit in and live a “normal” teenage life. It’s surprisingly compelling to watch her realize and embrace the scope of her power, as the Slayer and as a woman. The show’s message is mature, and Buffy’s ability to take care of herself, save the world from the undead and still maintain her impeccable lip-gloss make her a decidedly Gen X heroine.35

For the girl power character, fighting the system does not include resisting the stereotypical qualities of femininity supported by patriarchy and capitalism. Further, the fantastic settings of girl power replace patriarchal systems with systems that are just as confining. Buffy, for example, has no choice but to be a slayer; her own body conscripts her into slayerhood and girlhood. Buffy chooses to perform by heightening her hyperfeminine and sexualized qualities and locating her personal empowerment in these characteristics. Both the ability for the hyperfeminine to be recognized as legitimate power and agency and for a person of hyperfeminine characteristics to be empowered with traditionally hypermasculine agency necessitate a poststructural reconstruction of systemic knowledge and truths which reflects the writings of poststructural feminists and US women of color.36 The girl power hero does not function within the normative system, in fact the mediated girl power hero is most often a fantastic character, acting in a world where femininity is often a requirement of her power. For example, all of the slayers in the Buffyverse are female: it is impossible for a male to be a slayer in that world. Similarly, the witch sisters of Charmed maintain their power through their sisterhood—all of the witches in that world are women, all witchcraft, like slaying in Buffy, is rooted in a feminine tie to nature. Thus, while the nature of the girl in this site of contained empowerment is not changed, the nature of power attributed to the girl is not confined to normative ideals. For example, the negotiation between male and female action and between the victim and hero character types is evident in the sexual tension created between Buffy and Angel (as well as Buffy and Spike) the vampire

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who becomes Buffy’s friend and lover. Buffy and Angel, a vampire with a soul, are drawn together from the start. After they have sex, something that Clover sites as typical of the victim character type,37 Angel loses his soul and becomes evil. Later in the series, Buffy and Spike have a sexual relationship. When Buffy breaks it off, Spike attempts to rape Buffy. These plot devices associate Buffy with Clover’s victim; punished for sexual transgressions. They further serve to remind audiences that power, especially in terms of sexuality, is normally reserved for men, and that male abuse is not unusual. The classic victim character type is virtually incapable of action to save either herself or another character, needing rescue by a hero. Buffy clearly is no victim, and instead remains a hero; her association with the victim character is a mask hiding her power. Buffy maintains her power in spite of being victimized. Her femininity is also a means of self-containment, as it becomes obvious that Buffy chooses to act in the victim role and maintain her girlishness, rather than visibly perform as a hero. The power of the girl power character comes from her depiction as a victim able to fight back against oppression. Joss Whedon, the creator of Buffy the Vampire Slayer reinforced this interpretation of the girl power body in discussions and interviews during the series’ run. He reflected on his own fandom of the horror genre and his dismay for the ongoing trope: so many horror movies where there was that blonde girl, who would always get herself killed. I started feeling bad for her. I thought, you know, it is time she had a chance to, you know, take back the night. And so, the idea of Buffy came from just the very simple thought of a beautiful, blonde girl walks into an alley, and she’s not only ready for him, she trounces him.38

Whedon’s thoughts reveal the impetus for his protagonist created to fight back against oppression and victimization. It is particularly interesting that he chooses the terminology “take back the night,” directly linked to female survivorship, specifically to discuss recovery from rape. The message indicated by Whedon is that girl power practices may allow females to “fight back” against potential victimization. However, this also constrains the character; placing the girl power character in the specific space of potential victim. The fact that Buffy transcends victim status does not negate the significance of that character type in the audience’s expectations of Buffy. While Buffy is clearly a site of negotiation between normative understandings of masculinity and femininity, her sexuality, personal choices, and hyperfemininity remain constant. Further, the inherent irony of the character, the object who acts like a subject, is itself both the containment and the source of girl power. In the decades since Whedon’s original discussions, much of his interpretation of Buffy as empowering has come under critique. As a male producer,

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some feminists have questioned his role in the construction and implementation of empowered women characters, similar to the critiques of the Spice Girls as nonwriters and nonproducers.39 Further, accusations of abuse and inappropriate behavior since the rise of the #MeToo movement, from both women and persons of color, have brought his sincerity as a self-defined male feminist into question.40 The contrast of Whedon’s behaviors and the feminism inherent in Buffy reinforces the role of girl power as a confined metaphor that simultaneously empowers individuals without impacting the structural biases inherent in patriarchy and media. Much like accusations that the Spice Girls were false feminists because men controlled their mediation, the Buffy creator illustrates how girl power characters were, essentially, feminist unicorns. Thus, not only is the potential girl power enactor restricted by her required embodiment, part of her individuality is dislocated from her potential empowerment. This dislocation illustrates how the girl power metaphor, while exhibiting the goal of transcending traditional notions of femininity, fails to remove itself from the system. The metaphor is poststructural in that it does not devalue the feminine or the female body: however, the metaphor is dependent on traditional interpretations of feminine embodiment and femininity. Further, the metaphor essentializes girls who can be empowered, restricting them to body and age stereotypes. This confinement, while rooted in the mediated girl power stereotype, is enacted through the marketing of the girl power metaphor as a means of personal empowerment for young women. Girl power does not act to alter the gender structure of society but to alter an individual’s place in that structure, reinforcing the need for a young woman to find her girl power within her contained girl self. The early history of the concept of girl power sets up the individual nature of girl power empowerment. Carlip was among the earliest authors to use the phrase “girl power.”41 Significantly, this usage predates most of the girl power mediated constructs. In Girl Power: Young Women Speak Out, Carlip explains girl power as overcoming personal struggle and finding oneself. It becomes a sort of guide to empowering young women, significantly focusing on individualized methods of empowerment while giving them a space for their voices to flourish. However, after the media claimed the metaphor, particularly when the Spice Girls claimed the label and declared that “feminism needs a kick up the ass,”42 girl power became less about individual empowerment than about a stereotypical set of actions and goals. Thus, the liminal site is reincorporated into patriarchy and the power of the site is reduced. Other authors and government agencies then began utilizing the metaphor. Girl Power: Self Defense for Teens43 is a self-defense manual which presumes that many young women will be victimized; thus, the authors provide young women with the skills to avoid such maltreatment and discrimination.

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The power of girl power, in this case, is defined by the authors as physical prowess. Clearly fed by the media image, the empowering ideals associated with girl power no longer focus on voice so much as they are stereotyped. In another example of the fluidity of power, an online search for the words girl power uncovered the board game “Girl Power” with the following description: Girl Power! This game celebrates the female spirit, encourages loyalty and makes players feel proud to be girls! Move around the board collecting spirit, loyalty and pride and exchanging it for Girl Power! Help out a friend . . . And get a loyalty bonus. Players determine their own destiny and influence the progress of other players.44

Again, the power of girl power is being constructed, not by young women themselves, but in accordance with hyperfeminine stereotypes. Again, this illustrates my theory that girl power is a form of contained empowerment, contained both by the media and by the marketing and commodification of the concept in society, yet with a fluid empowerment potential. Thus, not only is the empowerment of girl power contained in the fixed location of the girl, but it is also contained because that power draws directly from its location, focusing on the individual rather than the system of oppression. Girl power is about altering an individual’s status within the system, not changing the system. The fixed, yet fluid nature of girl power does not apply to a population but to individuals changing their own status. Thus, not only will practitioners age out of girl power, they will also need to renegotiate their status in society after aging occurs.45 THE MIXED METAPHOR Girl power has been tied to third wave feminism, often as a means of popularizing third wave feminist ideals. Again, this is another example of the fluidity of the power potential and further illustrates that the agency of girl power is dependent upon interpretation. The 1970s characters that girl power evolved from are characters the third wave feminist generation grew up watching on US television.46 These characters had a direct impact on how today’s young women view femininity and empowerment, teaching them that feminism was “just a part of life.”47 The girl power character is empowered by her hyperfeminine nature, and her ability to perform as a sexualized body. The power of girl power occurs because of the girl, rather than in spite of the girl. Her double marginalization reflects third wave feminist ideals of empowerment for young women.

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Third wave zines and journals focus on the right to sexual choices that range from the choice to find pleasure in sexuality to the choice to determine your own sexual preferences. These writings generally promote the empowerment of women through the right to make choices. For example, Orr discusses the development of third wave feminisms from the Riot Grrrl movement. She cites Kathleen Hanna, the lead singer of Bikini Kill, a punk band associated with the Riot Grrrl movement, discussing what feminism means to the younger generation: To me, a big part of feminism (or whatever you wanna call the rejection of the equation girl=dumb) is the simple assertion that us girls are important. Our bodiesheartsminds are important enough that we will defend them, protect them, ourselves. We don’t have to live lives that are filled up with events that are really just sentimentalized versions of abuse. We don’t wanna live that way and we don’t have to.48

Orr’s insistence on protecting and defending the self is one of the most common themes in all of the recognizable forms of third wave feminisms. Self-protection requires the individual to be both knowledgeable and formidable enough to defend herself, so the focus of third wave feminism becomes individual empowerment that recognizes differences among women. Such personal empowerment is contained because it is limited to the individual, not necessarily transferable to other individuals. Further, those attempting to emulate stylized girl power may give up some of their individuality in order to perform the role adequately, nullifying the personal nature of this style of empowerment. Other scholars and writers have similarly defined girl power in relation to third wave feminist ideals. Karras identifies the character of Buffy (Buffy, the Vampire Slayer) as an example of “the third wave’s commitment to girl power by turning the victim role typical of the action and horror genres on its head with the character of Buffy herself.”49 Thus, girl power exemplifies third wave enactment, reclaiming the icons of femininity as powerful tools unique to feminine culture. Empowerment takes place in a liminal space with patriarchal rules suspended and value systems reassigned. In order to actuate change the re-created rules of the contained empowerment space must be reintegrated into greater society. In the case of the girl power character, as particularly evidenced by Buffy, reintegration typically takes place in media spaces. The girl power character comes to represent a type of true power, contained, yet legitimate, in the public consciousness. However, this process is not immediate; containment of feminine-centered power swiftly reinstates itself when the girl power character’s temporal nature (her age and appearance, in particular) exposes itself.

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Many third wave feminists choose to empower themselves by enacting the ideals they grew up watching in mediated popular culture texts, but modify these 1970s characteristics, redefining power in terms of their own feminine goals and ideals.50 The mediated nature of girl power exemplifies how ideals of empowerment are themselves enacted in contained spaces. Girl power is similar to third wave feminism in this way. Mass media in the United States has appropriated third wave ideals into the girl power character that, ironically, challenges feminine empowerment by limiting empowerment to within specific characteristics. The ideology of girl power centers on the belief that items and icons of traditional femininity need neither be discarded nor relegated to the traditionally understood role of enhancing objectivity and submissiveness. In fact, these “trappings of femininity”51 indicate female power. Girl power encourages a feminine form but supports an empowerment that is defined in terms of masculine stereotypes. Despite the contradictions, girl power suggests a means for personal empowerment and independence to the practitioner, especially in terms of personal pleasure and choices, as well as confidence in one’s sexuality and femininity. However, the contained nature of girl power prevents the practitioner from fully developing an independent nature, a contradiction associated with mixed messages about the value of femininity in modern society. Girl power is repeatedly confined by its reliance on the metaphor for girl—a fixed metaphor. Thus, its power is contained empowerment because it implies a change in spite of the fixed status of the bearer of power. According to writers speaking from a self-proclaimed third wave perspective the third wave of feminism is located in a specific generation: primarily young women who grew up in the 1970s and 1980s.52 In this era, mediated feminine icons were often people who held positions of power, although these positions were generally in deference to male authority figures. These feminine/feminist media icons include Lynda Carter’s portrayal of Wonder Woman, the original Charlie’s Angels, The Bionic Woman, and Princess Leia from Star Wars. With the arguable exception of Leia, these women all worked for men. Patriarchy restricted, contained, and marketed ideologies associated with these characters, which the third wave generation grew up watching. Similarly, today’s girl power character, associated with third wave feminism, is contained and restricted by the normative power structure; further she is marketed to both third wave and younger audiences. While the girl power character’s power is rooted in a poststructural ability to overturn norms, the girl power hero does not fully reflect fluidity of identity promoted by feminists of color. These feminists argue that the experiences of race and femininity are disconnected from binary systems that encourage women of color to choose between their oppressions, and ultimately to liberate identity from the body.53 The metaphor of girl power,

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on the other hand, suggests that empowerment can come, not from experience or disembodied identity, but from a carefully constructed embodiment that reinterprets how femininity functions in society. The girl power character is generally alone—an individual negotiating her role in the system, rather than a sisterhood changing the status of women. Both girl power and third wave feminism encourage individualized empowerment among their participants. For example, Buffy is herself empowered, not women in general, and only one slayer is usually empowered at a time. Willow, another female character in the program, is also individually empowered, as a witch. This style of empowerment is extremely personalized. In fact, only in the final episode of the series do we see the empowerment of multiple slayers at once, and therefore multiple women being empowered in this fashion. I consider this means of empowerment to be simultaneously confining and empowering, with girl power or third wave empowerment strategically tied to the ability for a participant to acknowledge stereotypically feminine qualities that are often associated with confinement through patriarchy and make these qualities empowering. This is extremely problematic because the feminine qualities that are encouraged within girl power are qualities achievable only by a specific group of participants: young, primarily white, middle-class, American female consumers. It is the contradiction of girl empowerment that it is only available to girls of a particular status, emulating the chosen status of the girl power character. Further and significantly, eventually, this contained group of young women will outgrow girl power. Only one girl power example reinforces the notions of shared experience discussed by poststructural feminists. The powers of the witch sisters of Charmed are cooperative and dependent on the sisters’ ability to maintain their relationship as sisters. However, each of the sisters must individually negotiate balancing their witch lives with their mundane lives, jobs, and outside relationships. Ultimately, girl power empowerment is extremely personalized, the fluidity of its power both contained by and dependent upon the individual herself. Regardless, there is hope for the girl power metaphor. Some of this hope, in fact, draws again from the mediated characters themselves. In the final season of Buffy, for example, Buffy herself began negotiating a job and caring for her younger sibling (motherhood) with her slaying, evidence that she was growing up and taking on adult responsibilities. The Charmed sisters have also grown up; one of the sisters died, one became a mother, and one went through a difficult divorce (from the source of all evil). None of these characters have lost their hyperfeminine qualities, in fact, these qualities have been enhanced through their journey into a more mature womanhood. These characters have all had to face adult decisions and adult situations. Yet, the focus on girl, similar to the youth focus of third wave feminism, is problematic because it

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continually reinforces the containment of girl power. If the fixed stereotypes of girl power fail to age with its practitioners, those young women will lose their empowerment status. Buffy and other girl power characters are quite literally frozen in time, but real-life practitioners and third wave feminists are not. Those young women will outgrow girl power’s fixed containment. BEYOND THE CONTAINER: RECONSTRUCTING CONSUMERS Ultimately, girl power is a site of negotiation for enacting multiple gendered characteristics as power. Girl power is interpreted in the media as both a means of reinforcing a male/female binary and blurring that same binary. The violent acts represented in girl power characterizations are acts that protect and nurture while they aggressively seek change. The characters also illustrate the struggles with teenage life and the need to appear normal. This is masked through the rigid control of social policing when they are acting as heroes and through self-policing hyperfemininity when they are acting as girls. When they fail to balance these sides of themselves, they suffer. The girl container, the fixed metaphor, must be maintained at all costs or the fluidity of the power fails to actualize. Significantly, girl power cannot exist either tied to traditional and patriarchal structures nor fully removed from them: girl power depends entirely upon its liminal space between activism-from-within and activism-fromwithout. It takes place betwixt and between traditional stereotypes of girl and feminist empowerment ideals. It is an example of contained empowerment because it reinforces the symbolism associated with itself as metaphor, while simultaneously challenging those same notions. Further, girl power is a consumed and commercialized form of agency, restricted both by the mediated practitioner (wearing the right clothing and paying for the kickboxing lessons) as well as the general audience (our own purchasing of girl power artifacts). Mediated girl power characters reveal the contradictions within the concept of girl power, such as marketed clothing styles and other items that are often associated with girlhood, such as diaries to record girl power in their lives, toys, dolls, and makeup. These mediated characters act as role models for the young practitioner of girl power. The characters are all physically fit, are generally able to fight to defend themselves and others, and they often portray a dual nature that is partially heroic and partially striving to be “normal.” Girl power is also limited by its racial and ethnic qualities. Bae explains, “girl power discourse tends to valorize White girls’ socially accepted aggressiveness and link it to the rhetoric of liberation and empowerment through

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‘heroification.’ In contrast, girls of other races—portrayed as insignificant characters that eventually disappear—are characterized by their inability to self-empower.”54 Girl power is a form of contained empowerment because the metaphor suggests power confined to specific gendered performances. Further, my theory of contained empowerment informs the balance of personal and political empowerment. Both should, by nature, imply that empowerment can and will happen for a group, rather than an individual. However, contained empowerment plays out within girl power and third wave feminisms as a mixed metaphor that rigidly locates young women in a fixed position as it empowers them. Such empowerment is often restricted to the individual, changing an individual’s status within the system without altering the system. Further, if girl power fails to grow up with its practitioners, they will outgrow it and be forced to seek new means of empowerment. The continuing influence of the girl power era in popular culture on feminisms and young women is the most visible ongoing illustration of third wave.55 Popular culture-based role models for young women, both fictional and the real-world celebrities who inhabited girl power in the late 1990s and 2000s provided grounds for an increasing number of visible women in media to claim the label “feminist.” Women and those claiming female identity as athletes, musical and performance artists, as well as financial, technology, and other industry leaders today claim the label, many of whom in the entertainment industries perform it with the hyperfeminine attributes associated with girl power’s heightened femininity. This has provided opportunity for young women and those identifying with feminine characteristics to claim an updated “girl power.” The mediated message was complicated by non-heroic feminine icons that shared many of the physical, hyperfeminine attributes of Buffy. Much like the Spice Girls heightened the commodification of girl power, series like Girls Gone Wild56 rose during that same era that highlighted young college-aged women willing to expose their hyper/visible feminine bodies through “wild” and sexualized activity. This series exhibited traits associated with soft porn that can only provide limited empowerment when faced with the ongoing systemic reinforcement of feminine sexuality through industries such as advertising and mass media.57 It also reinforces the commodification of femininity and tools for feminine empowerment, a style of mediated marketing that is echoed by the pink tools trend created for Home Depot and others in the home “Do-it-Yourself” industry.58 There are positive outcomes to this as these audiences are able to find self-empowerment through adopting the values espoused by girl power media. However, there are also drawbacks associated with the consumption of hyperfeminine attributes of girl power. Research done at the end of

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the “girl power” era of popular culture reflects these trends. In 2006, in an analysis of young women, Kindlon59 found that the generation of girls who came of age during the third wave and, specifically, the girl power era had higher levels of self-esteem than was reported for earlier generations. While psychology until that time was wary of popular culture in terms of its impact on body image and self-esteem, Kindlon argued that the increasing number of girl power and other female role models in media generated a generation of young women, ones now recognized as millennials, who believed they were not disenfranchised from empowerment the way that earlier generations of women had been. Significantly, Kindlon’s research indicates that this belief was not restricted by the wealthier and traditionally recognized as more powerful white youth. In fact, his research illustrated that the majority of those participating in the study who held this belief in female empowerment were African Americans. In contrast, other scholars found that girls and young women who claim empowerment often reject the hyper/visible femininity of girl power, in favor of echoing the more radical “grrl power” espoused by Bikini Kill and others outside of mainstream popular culture before girl power dominantly became a commodified identity construct. These girls engaged in sports and other roles traditionally often associated with boys. Girls in these studies chose versions of empowerment through nontraditionally feminine identity constructs, including “skateboarding and online gender bending . . . unconventional monikers, alternative identities, and embraced the risk of being labeled unusual.”60 The continued application of hyper/visible feminine attributes as an aspect of girl power empowerment has also been critiqued as leading to an era of neoliberal feminism that rejects the address of systemic gendered oppressions in favor of personal empowerment for individual women and girls. This definition61 echoes a common critique of third wave feminist activisms, that the refocus on the “political is personal” removes the possibility of engaging in actual, systemic change. Implicit biases thrive when activisms reinforce the hegemonic norms they claim to change for individuals without shifting the system’s impact for larger groups of those marginalized. It reinforces essentialist limitations while celebrating the ability for some to rise above those limits. And it can generate a naïve belief in an empowerment that does not maintain substance when moved outside of the liminal spaces where it openly exists.

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NOTES 1. See Kristen Schilt, “‘The Punk White Privilege Scene’: Riot Grrrl, White Privilege, and Zines.” In Different Wavelengths, ed. Jo Reger (New York: Routledge, 2014) 39–56; El Hunt, “A Brief History of Riot Grrrl—The Space-Reclaiming 90s Punk Movement.” NME, August 27, 2019. www​.nme​.com​/blogs​/nme​-blogs​/brief​-history​ -riot​-grrrl​-space​-reclaiming​-90s​-punk​-movement​-2542166​/. 2. Kathleen Hanna, “Riot Grrrl Manifesto.” Bikini Kill 2 (1991): 16–23. 3. Hole’s success is often discussed as directly tied to the popularity of male Seattle-based acts, as Hole’s lead singer, Courtney Love, is the widow of Nirvana’s Kurt Cobain. For more detail see Susan Hopkins, “Hole Lotta Attitude: Courtney Love and Guitar Feminism.” Social Alternatives 18, no. 2 (1999): 11–14; Briana Nave, “Honeysuckle Full of Poison: Gender Politics and the 1990s Reception of Courtney Love.” Unpublished PhD dissertation, 2019. 4. Cited in Jenny Stevens and VICE staff. “How the Spice Girls Ripped ‘Girl Power’ from Its Radical Roots.” VICE, November 4, 2016. www​.vice​.com​/en​/article​ /bn3vq5​/girl​-power​-spice​-girls​-jenny​-stevens​-geri​-horner​/. 5. Stevens and VICE staff, “How the Spice Girls Ripped ‘Girl Power.” 6. Laura Mulvey, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.” In The Sexual Subject: A Screen Reader in Sexuality, edited by Mandy Merck, 22–33 (Abington, Oxon, UK: Routledge, 1992; Original work published 1975), 27. 7. bell hooks, Black Looks: Race and Representation (Boston, MA: South End Press, 1992). 8. Stuart Hall, “Encoding and Decoding in the Television Discourse.” Paper for the Council of Europe Colloquy on “Training in the Critical Reading of Televisual Language.” Organized by the Council and the Centre for Mass Communication Research, University of Leicester, Leicester, England, September 1973. core.ac.uk/ download/pdf/81670115.pdf/; and Stuart Hall, “The Television Discourse—Encoding and Decoding.” Education and Culture 25 (1974): 8–14. 9. Janice A. Radway, “Women Read the Romance: The Interaction of Text and Context.” Feminist Studies 9, no. 1 (1983): 53–78. doi:10.2307/3177683; Janice Radway, “Interpretive Communities and Variable Literacies: The Functions of Romance Reading.” Dædalus: Journal of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences 113, no. 3 (1984): 49–73; Janice A. Radway, Angela Miles, John Markert, Gaye Tuchman, Patricia Frazer Lamb, Judy Simons, John G. Cawelti, and Allan Lloyd Smith, Reading the Romance: Women, Patriarchy, and Popular Literature (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1984); Janice A. Radway et al., Reading the Romance: Women, Patriarchy, and Popular Literature (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1991). 10. Jochen Achilles, and Ina Bergmann, “‘Betwixt and Between’: Boundary Crossings in American, Canadian, and British Short Fiction.” In Liminality and the Short Story: Boundary Crossings in American, Canadian, and British Writing, edited by Jochen Achilles and Ina Bergmann, 3–28 (New York: Routledge, 2015); See also Jenny Wolmark, Aliens and Others: Science Fiction, Feminism, and Postmodernism (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1994).

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11. Mel Gray and Jennifer Boddy, “Making Sense of the Waves: Wipeout or Still Riding High?” Affilia, 25 (2010): 368–89; Rebecca C. Hains, “Power Feminism, Mediated: Girl Power and the Commercial Politics of Change.” Women’s Studies in Communication 32, no. 1 (2009): 89–113; Irene Karras, “The Third Wave’s Final Girl: Buffy the Vampire Slayer.” Thirdspace 1, no. 2 (2002). www​.thirdspace​.ca​/ articles​/karras​.htm; Victoria A. Newsom, “Young Females as Super Heroes: Superheroines in the Animated Sailor Moon.” FEMSPEC 5, no. 2 (2004): 57–81; Emilie Zaslow, Feminism, Inc.: Coming of Age in Girl Power Media Culture (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2009). 12. Sherrie A. Inness, Tough Girls: Women Warriors and Wonder Women in Popular Culture (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999). 13. Newsom, “Young Females as Super Heroes.” 14. Hillary Carlip, Girl Power (New York: Warner Books, 1995). 15. Burt Konzak, Melina Konzak, and Sonya Konzak, Girl Power: Self Defense for Teens (Toronto: Sport Books, 1999). 16. Karras, “The Third Wave’s Final Girl,” 1. 17. Sarah Banet-Weiser, “Am I Pretty or Ugly? Girls and the Market for Self-Esteem.” Girlhood Studies 7 no. 1 (2014): 83–101; Sarah Banet-Weiser, “Girls Rule! Gender, Feminism, and Nickelodeon.” Critical Studies in Media Communication 21, vol. 2 (2004): 119–39; Sarah Banet-Weiser, “Whom Are We Empowering? Popular Feminism and the Work of Empowerment.” Presented at “Console-ing Passions: International Conference on Television, Video, Audio, New Media and Feminism.” Dublin, 18–20, June 2015; Baumgardner and Richards, Manifesta, 161–66. 18. Kimberly J. Roberts, “Girls in Black and White: The Iconography of Teenage Girls in Post-Feminist America.” Unpublished dissertation, University of Virginia, 2002; Debbie Stoller, “Feminists Fatale: Busting the Beauty Myth.” In The Bust Guide to the New World Order, edited by Marcell Karp and Debbie Stoller, 41–47 (New York: Penguin, 1999). 19. Carlip, Girl Power, 1–10. 20. Victoria A. Newsom, “Theorizing Contained Empowerment: A Critique of Activism and Power in Third Wave Feminist Spaces” (Doctoral dissertation, Bowling Green State University, 2004); Newsom, “Young Females as Super Heroes.” 21. George Lakoff and Mark Johnson. Metaphors We Live By (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980); George Lakoff and Mark Turner, More than Cool Reason: A Field Guide to Poetic Metaphor (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989). 22. Kenneth Burke, A Rhetoric of Motives (New York: Prentice-Hall, 1950). 23. Chaïm Perelman and Lucie Olbrechts-Tyteca, The New Rhetoric: A Treatise on Argumentation, 2nd ed., translated by John Wilkinson and Purcell Weaver (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1969; Original work published as Traité de l’Argumentation: La Nouvelle Rhetoric, Paris: Editions de l’Institut de Sociologie, 1958). See, also, David A. Frank, “The Origins of and Possible Futures for Chaïm Perelman and Lucie Olbrechts-Tyteca’s Dissociation of Concepts.” Philosophy & Rhetoric 53, no. 4 (2020): 385–99. 24. Lakoff and Johnson, Metaphors We Live By. 25. Lakoff and Turner, More than Cool Reason.

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26. Newsom, “Theorizing Contained Empowerment”; Newsom, “Young Females as Super Heroes.” 27. Newsom, “Theorizing Contained Empowerment”; Newsom, “Young Females as Super Heroes.” 28. Joan Jacobs Brumberg, The Body Project: An Intimate History of American Girls (New York: Vintage Books, 1997). 29. Susan Bordo, Unbearable Weight: Feminism, Western Culture, and the Body (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993). 30. Mulvey, “Visual Pleasure,” 27. 31. Mary Ann Doane, “Film and the Masquerade: Theorizing the Female Spectator.” In The Sexual Subject: A Screen Reader in Sexuality, edited by Mandy Merck, 227–43 (Abington, Oxon, UK: Routledge, 1992; Original work published 1982). 32. Susan J. Douglas, Where the Girls Are (New York: Times Books, 1994), 25. 33. Carol Baum, Sandy Gallin, and Fran Rubel Kuzui (Producers), and Fran Rubel Kuzui (Director). (1992). Buffy the Vampire Slayer [Film]. Hollywood, CA: Twentieth Century Fox. See, also, Chris Bobel, New Blood: Third-Wave Feminism and the Politics of Menstruation (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2010). 34. See, also, Newsom, Lengel, and Montenegro, “Origins of Embodied Activism as Theory and Practice.” 35. Anamika Samanta and Erin Franzman, “Women in Action,” In HUES: Hear Us Emerging Sisters, edited by Robert Newman, Jean Bohner, and Melissa C. Johnson, 4/3 (1998), 28. See, also, Samanta and Franzman’s analysis of intersectional feminist perspectives in this article. For more on HUES and other Third Wave feminist zines, such as BUST, Bitch, Venue Zine, and Rockgrl, see Elizabeth Groeneveld, Making Feminist Media: Third-Wave Magazines on the Cusp of the Digital Age (Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2016). 36. See, for instance, Rachel Alicia Griffin, “I AM an Angry Black Woman: Black Feminist Autoethnography, Voice, and Resistance.” Women’s Studies in Communication 35, no. 2 (2012): 138–57; Lore/tta LeMaster and Michael Tristano Jr., “Performing (Asian American Trans) Femme on RuPaul’s Drag Race: Dis/orienting Racialized Gender, or, Performing Trans Femme of Color, Regardless.” Journal of International and Intercultural Communication (2021). doi:10.1080/17513057.2021.1955143; Brenda J. Allen, “Black Womanhood and Feminist Standpoints.” Management Communication Quarterly 11, no. 4 (1998): 575–86; Brenda J. Allen, “‘Learning the Ropes’: A Black Feminist Standpoint Analysis.” In Rethinking Organizational and Managerial Communication from Feminist Perspectives, edited by Patrice M. Buzzanell, 177–208 (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 2000); Gloria Anzaldúa, “Speaking in Tongues: A Letter to Third World Women.” In This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color, edited by Cherrie L. Moraga and Gloria E. Anzaldúa, 183–93 (Watertown: Persephone Press, 1981); Angela Y. Davis, “Masked Racism: Reflections on the Prison Industrial Complex in the USA.” Lola Press 12 (2000): 52; Angela Y. Davis, “Race, Gender, and the Prison Industrial Complex: California and Beyond.” Meridians: Feminism, Face, Transnationalism 2, no. 1 (2001), 1–25; Toni Morrison, “Unspeakable Things Unspoken: The Afro-American Presence in American Literature.” In The Black Feminist Reader, edited by Joy James and T. Denean

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Sharpley-Whiting, 24–56 (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2000. Original work published 1988). 37. Carol J. Clover, Men, Women and Chain Saws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992). 38. Joss Whedon, “Welcome to the Hellmouth/the Harvest” (Producer). In C. M. Smith (Dir.), Buffy the Vampire Slayer, 1998 (Beverly Hills: Twentieth Century Fox Home Video). 39. Stevens and VICE staff, “How the Spice Girls Ripped ‘Girl Power’”; See, also, Lewis Call, Sexualities in the Works of Joss Whedon (Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Co., 2020). 40. Of note are the accusations of infidelity and “fake feminism” from Joss Whedon’s ex-wife, Kai Cole, the critiques of his script for a cinematic version of Wonder Woman in which the eponymous character Diana Prince was scripted in a sexist fashion relegating her to a helper of male lead Steve Trevor, and the accusations by Buffy alum Charisma Carpenter that Whedon’s anger upon learning of her pregnancy resulted in her firing from Buffy spin-off Angel, which she explains as having gotten in the way of his creative vision and resulted in a hostile work environment. Carpenter’s hostile work environment accusations echo those of Ray Fisher who worked on Whedon’s revised version of Zack Snyder’s Justice League. Carpenters’s accusations have also been supported and reinforced by Buffy stars Sarah Michelle Gellar, Amber Benson, and Michelle Trachtenberg. For more information, see Call, Sexualities in the Works of Joss Whedon; Karen Dill-Shackleford and Cynthia Vinney, Finding Truth in Fiction: What Fan Culture Gets Right—And Why it’s Good to Get Lost in a Story (New York: Oxford University Press, 2020); Dan Kois, “Buffy Deserves Better than Joss Whedon.” Slate, February 12, 2021. slate.com/culture/2021/02/joss-whedon-buffy-abuse-allegations-charisma-carpentersarah-michelle-gellar.html/; Sandy Schaefer, “All the Joss Whedon Abuse & Misconduct Allegations Explained.” ScreenRant, February 10, 2021. screenrant.com/ joss-whedon-abuse-misconduct-allegations-accusations-explained/. 41. Carlip, Girl Power. 42. Stevens and Vice staff, “How the Spice Girls Ripped ‘Girl Power,’” par. 2. 43. Konzak, Konzak, and Konzak, Girl Power. 44. Epinions, Inc., Product Details for Girl Power! 2001. www​.epinions​.com​/kifm​ -Games​-Girls​_Role​_Play​-Girl​_Power!​/additive​_​~1. 45. For scholarly work on the female ageing subject, see Josephine Dolan and Estella Tincknell (eds), Aging Femininities: Troubling Representations (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2012); Dana Sawchuk, “The Raging Grannies: Defying Stereotypes and Embracing Aging through Activism.” Journal of Women and Aging 19 (2009): 171–85; Shir Shimoni, “Happy and Entrepreneurial within the ‘Here and Now’: The Constitution of the Neoliberal Female Ageing Subject.” Feminist Media Studies (2021, September 19): 1–16. doi.org/10.1080/146807 77.2021.1979067. 46. Jenifer Baumgardner and Amy Richards, Manifesta: Young Women, Feminism, and the Future (New York: Farrar Straus and Giroux, 2000); Stoller, “Feminists Fatale.”

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47. Baumgardner and Richards, Manifesta. 48. Catherine M. Orr, “Charting the Currents of the Third Wave.” Hypatia, a Journal of Feminist Philosophy 12, no. 3 (1997): 37–45. 49. Karras, “The Third Wave’s Final Girl,” 1. 50. Jennifer Baumgardner and Amy Richards, “Feminism and Femininity: Or How We Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Thong.” In All About the Girl: Culture, Power and Identity, edited by Anita Harris, 59–67 (London: Routledge, 2004); Baumgardner and Richards, Manifesta; Stoller, “Feminists Fatale.” 51. Marcelle Karp and Debbie Stoller (eds.), The Bust Guide to New Girl Order (New York: Penguin Books, 1999). 52. Baumgardner and Richards, Manifesta; Leslie Heywood and Jennifer Drake, “We Learn America Like a Script: Activism in the Third Wave; or, Enough Phantoms of Nothing.” In Third Wave Agenda: Being Feminist, Doing Feminism, edited by Leslie Heywood and Jennifer Drake, 40–54 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997). 53. Suggested by feminists such as Gloria E. Anzaldúa, in particular, “Speaking in Tongues” and “(Un)Natural Bridges, (Un)Safe Spaces”; Judith Butler, Gender Trouble and “For White Girls Only?”; Patricia Hill Collins, Black Feminist Thought and Intersectionality as Critical Social Theory; Angela Y. Davis, “Women and Capitalism”; and Trinh, T. Minha. Woman, Native, Other. 54. Michelle S. Bae, “Interrogating Girl Power: Girlhood, Popular Media, and Postfeminism.” Visual Arts Research 37, no. 2 (2011): 28–40, 32. 55. Kathleen Rowe Karlyn, Unruly Girls, Unrepentant Mothers: Redefining Feminism on Screen (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2010); Thorpe, Toffoletti and Bruce, “Sportswomen and Social Media.” 56. Susan J. Douglas, Enlightened Sexism: The Seductive Message that Feminism’s Work is Done (New York: Times Books, 2010); Susan J. Douglas, The Rise of Enlightened Sexism: How Pop Culture Took Us from Girl Power to Girls Gone Wild (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2010); Deborah L. Siegel, “The Legacy of the Personal: Generating Theory in Feminism’s Third Wave.” Hypatia 12, no. 3 (1997): 46–76; Deborah L. Siegel, Sisterhood Interrupted: From Radical Women to Girls Gone Wild (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2007). 57. Suzy D’Enbeau, “Sex, Feminism, and Advertising: The Politics of Advertising Feminism in a Competitive Marketplace.” Journal of Communication Inquiry 35, no. 1 (2011): 53–69; Susan. J. Douglas, Where the Girls Are (New York: Times Books, 1994); Susan J. Douglas, Enlightened Sexism: The Seductive Message that Feminism’s Work is Done (New York: Times Books, 2010); Susan. J. Douglas, The Rise of Enlightened Sexism: How Pop Culture Took Us from Girl Power to Girls Gone Wild (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2010); Newsom, “Young Females as Super Heroes”; Wan-Hsiu Sunny Tsai, Aya Shata, and Shiyun Tian, “En-Gendering Power and Empowerment in Advertising: A Content Analysis.” Journal of Current Issues & Research in Advertising 42, no. 1 (2021): 19–33. 58. See Judy Muller, “Women Design Female-Friendly Power Tools.” ABC News, November 22, 2017. abcnews.go.com/WNT/story?id=129999&page=1/; Jacqueline Elaine Urda, “Empowering Women: A Guide for the Design of Hand and Power Tools

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that Accommodate Women’s Needs” (Unpublished Master’s Thesis, Auburn University, 2009). etd.auburn.edu/bitstream/handle/10415/150/URDA_JACQUELINE_8. pdf?sequence=1&ts=1429182121473/. 59. Dan Kindlon, Alpha Girls: Understanding the New American Girl and How She Is Changing the World (New York: Rodale, 2006). 60. Dawn H. Currie, Dierdre M Kelly, and Shauna Pomerantz, “Girl Power”: Girls Reinventing Girlhood (New York: Peter Lang, 2006), xv. 61. See Amanda Atkinson, Beth Meadows, Carol Emslie, Antonia Lyons, and Harry Sumnall, “‘Pretty in Pink’ and ‘Girl Power’: An Analysis of the Targeting and Representation of Women in Alcohol Brand Marketing on Facebook and Instagram.” International Journal of Drug Policy 101, no. 18 (2022): 103545. doi:10.1016/j. drugpo.2021.103547; Hester Baer, “Redoing Feminism: Digital Activism, Body Politics, and Neoliberalism.” Feminist Media Studies 16, vol. 1 (2016): 17–34; Susan Hopkins, “Girl Power-Dressing: Fashion, Feminism and Neoliberalism with Beckham, Beyoncé and Trump.” Celebrity Studies 9, no. 1 (2018): 99–104; Jessalynn Keller and Jessica Ringrose, “‘But then Feminism Goes Out the Window!’ Exploring Teenage Girls’ Critical Response to Celebrity Feminism.” Celebrity Studies 6, no. 1 (2015): 132–35; Kaitlynn Mendes, Jessica Ringrose and Jessalynn Keller, “#MeToo and the Promise and Pitfalls of Challenging Rape Culture through Digital Feminist Activism.” European Journal of Women’s Studies 25, no. 2 (2018): 236–46; Nicola Rivers, “Concluding Remarks: Looking Forward to the Fourth Wave.” In Postfeminism(s) and the Arrival of the Fourth Wave: Turning Tides, edited by Nicola Rivers, 133–56 (Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017); Catherine Rottenberg, “The Rise of Neoliberal Feminism.” Cultural Studies 28, no. 3 (2014): 418–37; Catherine Rottenberg, “Neoliberal Feminism and the Future of Human Capital.” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 42, no. 2 (2017): 329–48; Catherine Rottenberg, The Rise of Neoliberal Feminism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018); Holly Thorpe, Kim Toffoletti, and Toni Bruce. “Sportswomen and Social Media: Bringing ThirdWave, Postfeminism and Neoliberal Feminism into Conversation.” Journal of Sport and Social Issues 41, vol. 5 (2017): 359–83; Kalpana Wilson, “Towards a Radical Re-Appropriation: Gender, Development and Neoliberal Feminism.” Development and Change 46, no. 4 (2015): 803–32.

Chapter 5

Digital Activism as an Echo Chamber

In 2020 Susan Faludi revisited her ovular work, Backlash: The Undeclared War against American Women, to discuss a counterassault on women’s rights rising again in US politics and culture.1 The end of the women’s liberation era in the 1980s was signified by what Faludi saw as an increase of backlash2 to women’s rights, one that coincided with the elevation of a newly reframed Republican Party that promoted what would come to be known as neoconservatism. The antifeminism of Phyllis Schlafly was one of the core voices rising from within the neoconservative movement. A core argument within antifeminism was that feminism was too limited, too constrained only to women who wanted to enter the workforce, and rejected the possibility that some women might want to take on the roles of housewife and mother that antifeminists claimed feminism sought to deny. As antifeminist ideology rose in volume in North America, another group of women’s rights activists raised another attack on the traditions of feminism and the women’s liberation movement. Womanist voices in the 1980s expanded feminisms from the dominant white voices such as Gloria Steinem associated with the women’s liberation movement to include Latina, lesbian feminists such as Gloria Anzaldúa and Cherrie Moraga,3 and Black feminist activists like Angela Davis, Alice Walker, and bell hooks. While these arguments had little in common with antifeminism, they shared a rejection of a uniform category of woman and women’s needs. Generation X youth were therefore presented with two narratives of feminism stripped from previous understandings of embodied womanhood: a multicultural, increasingly inclusive feminism that questioned the nature of womanhood, and the economic arguments presented in critiques of backlash to working women and embodied rights. In the 1990s and early 2000s, third wave feminist voices rose from that conflicting narrative by seeking to find a feminist identity that was not restricted by essentialist notions of womanhood, 143

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and could encourage femininity and feminine attributes as power. Third wave voices made themselves apparent through public arguments and activities designed to highlight uniquely feminine forms of power. Digital activisms, including third wave feminismin the 1990s and early 2000s, were contained empowerment because it was limited in both access and its echo-chamber qualities. It generated a type of “preaching to the choir” situation wherein the audiences shared the same basic concerns and values as speakers, primarily due to the necessity for prior knowledge of a concept or online location in order to render it searchable. While the searchability of digital materials has increased since that time, and inclusive of the bots and intelligent news feeds and marketing tools that have become routine in digital and social media, most digital cultures still illustrate a shared sense of community in regard to information motility. Therefore, contemporary digital activism maintains many of these same echo-chamber qualities due to ideological polarizations and confirmation bias directing people to those spaces. Third wave, as it evolved, sought to occupy a space that was simultaneously reconstructive of feminine characteristics associated with patriarchy and deconstructive of patriarchal empowerment as tied to masculinity. Consider the following statement: “I am a woman, and I often have sex with a man . . . When I think about all the things I’ve learned to do to appeal to him and pleasure him, I realized that I, too, would like to be the man in bed. I don’t mean, however, that I’d like to be the one with the penis.”4 This quote, from the Spring, 2002, issue of the self-labeled “third wave feminist e-journal” Sexing the Political refers, not only to the idea of having power in bed and in sexual relationships, but to the idea that female pleasure (clitoral sex) should be privileged and valued in society, and thus in individual sexual relationships. This concept, that female pleasure needs to be assigned cultural capital, is one of the primary ideologies associated with third wave feminism and stands as one of the themes repeatedly found within this third wave feminist publication. Sexing the Political was founded in 2000 as an outlet for third wave feminist voices.5 Specifically, the journal was created as a place where self-proclaimed third wave feminists would be able to openly discuss issues of personal choice, sexuality, and defining third wave feminism and activism. In the journal, young feminists would “celebrate their pluralities.”6 The journal focuses primarily on issues of feminine sexuality, sexual healing for young women who have been raped or abused, and empowering young women through personal choices and freedoms.7 Young women who feel a need to share their experiences in these areas are invited, by editor Krista Jacob, to write their stories and submit them to the journal. Significantly, publication in the journal is limited to young women.8 This feminist rhetorical criticism will illuminate how Sexing the Political contains its own empowerment.

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In the late 1990s and early 2000s many activist organizations began moving their public arguments and organizing practices online.9 This process, at the time labeled “cyberactivism”10 and more contemporarily “online” or “digital activism” was examined with a focus on differences from traditional activism in several key ways. First, online activism occurs in a thirdspace, a place where traditional rules governing society can be set aside;11 a place providing the potential for contained empowerment. Activists are openly and knowingly creating a community, and defining rules for empowerment within that community.12 Second, online activism allows an issue-focus that is different than many traditional activisms that are more goal oriented. People can easily identify with and support specific topics without having to identify with an overall social movement impetus. Third, online activism allows the promotion of ideals and values at a faster pace than traditional activism and can reach further than traditional activism,13 potentially reaching beyond its contained status.14 These early digital activist characteristics allowed what was then a “new” style of activism to be simultaneously contained and empowering. The reach and potential of this form of activism was problematic in a technological era where most of those who located the information were ones actively seeking it. As we’ve progressed into a more ideologically siloed contemporary era, and recognize the role of algorithmic features within web pages and search engines that are designed to further this division, movements like third wave’s form of online activism function as contained empowerment as well as simultaneously visible and invisible mechanisms for advocacy. Sexing the Political is one of several era-specific online sources of third wave feminist ideologies highlighting specific topics associated with third wave. The journal is an example of an attempt at third wave online activism that functions simultaneously to reach a uniquely third wave appreciative audience and to suggest, define, and organize methods by which that audience could empower themselves. Characteristics that distinguished 1990s and early 2000s online activism from other forms of activism such as strategic marketing and messaging designed to make the site searchable to those looking for key terms were evident in Sexing the Political as an online space, and thereby reinforced its containment to and limitations within audience reach. While online forms of activism ideally allow advocates to connect with each other and share ideas regardless of distance and time, potentially resisting containment, the journal and other similar spaces were designed with inherent and intentional limits and permissions, with only minimal interactive components to encourage further and ongoing dissemination of the messaging. Further, Sexing the Political was designed as an online journal space, rather than a form of social or other interactive media type more prevalent in activisms in the 2020s. Further, even while what were called cyberactivist

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advantages at the time were encouraged, they were not fully utilized within the journal. Both the exclusiveness of participants and audiences, and the focus on particular issues reinforce the contained status of this journal’s agency-empowering potential. The rhetorical space provided by Sexing the Political was a space allowing the creation and maintenance of the female-centered power ideals found within third wave feminisms. This space further provided an alternative to patriarchal norms, yet at the same time was bound to standards of normalized gender oppression found both in online and gendered spaces. Further, third wave feminists involved with the site as practitioner or audience tended to be relatively tech savvy for the time, meaning non-tech savvy young women and men, or those without easy access to the technology required were unintentionally displaced from the journal and the social movement it implied. As such, the journal had significant limitations in reach and scope, and resulted in, however unintentionally, reinforcing issues of access to capital that were part of the discomfort the movement espoused and critiqued. Third wave activism within the journal does not follow traditional patterns of social activism or feminist activism. Sexing the Political’s version of third wave was web-based outreach and concept building, rather than an effort seeking direct action toward systemic change.15 Systemic change was, instead, implied in the goals statements of the articles and claims made within the text. Let’s go back to the concept of a young third wave activist wanting to “be the man in bed” as a means of promoting feminine sexuality and, potentially, undermining normalized sexual understandings. The majority of third wave in the 1990s and early 2000s existed in this limited, web-based capacity. While Manifesta authors Amy Richards and Jennifer Baumgartner were among a select group of third wave writers who gave speaking tours and attended feminist and youth events, most of the third wave voices were mediated in internet, music, and other performance art events. These advocates were therefore conscripted by the narrative architectures16 and gatekeeping mechanisms of their chosen media, and hampered by issues of access and digital border fluidity.17 Third wave feminist and similar activist sites of that era were often fully situated, sometimes even celebrated, for existing within cyberspace, with no physical office or meeting spaces. In fact, activists in this era often sought spaces where they could be heard separately from what they perceived to be the more mainstream understandings of feminisms and social activisms, believed at the time to be removed from the patriarchal structures of the physical world.18 Further, because the internet is an international space, digital activisms had the potential for reaching people across multiple boundaries and borders. This can both place activist ideology in the view of others who are unfamiliar with it as well as allow the ideology to reach others with

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similar experiences. However, the need for translation, the need for access to these spaces remained significant, and the Americanist tendencies evident in activist spaces such as Sexing the Political may have turned off non-American and nonfeminist visitors to the site. Sexing the Political was an example of an attempt to use the web as a tool for altering reality offline. It highlighted the ability for young activists and feminists to use the web as a tool for networking and information sharing. It also generated a safe space where these young women and men could explore ideals in community based in shared values, without immediate or common exposure to the backlash and trolling that would become more prominent in later forms of social media. Third wave feminists were also a young generation of activists who grew up with computer technology, the first generation of digital natives,19 and as such held a perceived comfort level with the internet necessary for activism online to occur, as well as a perception of understanding the rules and potential impact of digital communication rooted in a belief that digital identities could transcend cultural, legal, and social boundaries. However, this perceptual flaw exemplifies how digital activism in that era was often a form of contained empowerment: functioning outside of hegemonic norms yet restrained by these norms and the power structures inherent in the internet itself. Thus, most of the articles in Sexing the Political were aimed at a young female audience predisposed to agree with third wave identities, attitudes, and goals. Thus, this type of activism was designed to create a “gendered space” wherein specifically feminist and feminine ideals operate. This allowed third wave voices to flourish within these spaces, but held no immediate or direct impact on patriarchal norms, nor was it visible outside of its targeted, limited audience. Third wave feminism historically placed significance on the ability for young women’s voices to be heard, and generated a platform for these voices, but did not seek to ensure that those voices would be heard outside of their own constituent audience, and thereby serving as activist and political echo chambers. NEGOTIATING PERIPHERAL IDENTITIES Online activist identities are a combination of cyborg and advocate characteristics. As they negotiate between these outcomes, online identities may circumvent some digital gatekeeping and structural constraints within and outside of the many barriers associated with identity border crossing. Within a specified online space such as Sexing the Political is the potential for peripheral identity construction20 wherein narrative identities differ from personal-public constructs. However, the narrative architecture nonetheless

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requires at least partial adherence to understood social constructs espoused by the framing of the spaces themselves.21 In other words, the medium is the message;22 thus, Sexing the Political was uniquely a journal with all the characteristics of online journal publications, by third wave feminists, for third wave feminists, and comprised of the tensions promoted and experienced within third wave. In its era of publication, Sexing the Political was assumed to be a type of thirdspace or socially defined location wherein two opposing ideals can be negotiated.23 Rooted in theories of space as constructed by the material needs of its inhabitants, the concept of the thirdspace assumes that space is not empty, socially defined by the contrast between what is experienced in them and what can be imagined for them.24 The journal sought to highlight native third wave voices in a way that would reach a wider audience, while maintaining the voice characteristics that appealed to existing practitioners and those already familiar with and supportive of the movement. The activist thirdspace therefore existed betwixt and between experience and imagination, between the ideal and the real, in a liminal space. The cyberactivist thirdspace is therefore located between the concepts and experiences of power, revealing a space of contained empowerment. As a thirdspace, Sexing the Political existed not in the communication technology that powers it, but in the connections between the technological space (the data itself online) and the space of the participant (the participants ability to access, understand, and interpret the data). Digital spaces are liminal, encompassing both text and experience within a thirdspace situated between beliefs and proceedings.25 Thus, digital and online activism are limited by the ability for people to access, experience, and interpret the data presented. Online activism is also contained by the knowledge and goals of those who form the individual cyberspaces themselves. Therefore, online activism is confined to those with access to the type of knowledge presented in its thirdspace: online activism is by nature contained empowerment. Sadie Plant introduced the concept of cyberfeminism as a set of practices intended to generate non-oppressive alternatives to the power structure of the internet.26 Cyberfeminisms, also referred to as online and digital feminisms are viewed as women-centered spaces within the internet, where women’s issues can prevail and not fall under patriarchal control. Online feminism, like third wave, offers the hope that particular spaces online provide opportunity for feminine or women-centered social relations.27 Digital space is gendered; it destroys the identity of the patriarchal figure through the fluidity of the web itself. Patriarchy requires fixed structures in order to function, set rules and norms that maintain male domination.28 Others view the web itself as patriarchal in nature, and therefore resist Plant’s notion that a presumed fluidity of the space can deconstruct

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patriarchy.29 For some, the web is a space of both patriarchy and assumed misogyny, and view the understanding of it being gender-neutral as outdated and capable of more harm than good.30 Digital spaces generate highly stereotypical gender roles tied to the identity chosen by the user. Politicizing the web is a means of dismantling the power structures invested in cyberspace, overturning the structure that informs the web itself. For these digital feminists and activists, the web is a space where women-centered spaces can be utilized within the confines of the system, so that women’s voices and experiences can be recognized within the system. Contained empowerment is located at the juxtaposition of these two theories. In Sexing the Political both concepts about third wave and experiences from third wave perspectives are enacted or embodied. The journal focuses on the ideal that third wave is a break from what its participants see as a monolithic second wave, generationalizing third wave feminism. The journal’s location between third wave feminist beliefs and experiences illustrates it contained empowerment nature. Further, the focus on a single generation of young women in the site’s marketing reinforces the containment of its empowering potential. Third wave beliefs or ideals are grounded in the generational perspective of third wave feminism. Likewise, third wave experiences are positioned in how that generation perceives itself. Locating a specific third wave identity or definition is not an easy task, as evidenced in the last chapter by the reluctance of the Third Wave Foundation to choose a definition or goal. Third Wave Foundation is not alone in this: there is no single or clear definition of third wave feminism. No other third wave organization has a clear definition for itself, including the journal Sexing the Political. The journal, rather than focusing on a specific definition, limits itself: it places age and gender restrictions on who can contribute to the journal. The journal also focuses on a set of themes, including sexuality, personal pleasure, and the importance of personal choice, as primary topic areas for articles. Thus, the journal creates a demographically limited identity focused on a series of narrow topics. Most significantly, the journal reaffirms that third wave is a generation of feminists, locating itself and the experiences of its contributors and audience in contrast to other feminisms. This, then, becomes the prominent third wave ideal espoused within the online activist journal. For example, from a third wave perspective, women from the second wave are often viewed as having rejected feminine qualities in order to take on those masculine qualities and attitudes that prevail in the patriarchal structure in order to achieve success within the system.31 Third wavers instead insist on enjoying their opportunities and insist that men should take them seriously as feminine females.32 Sexing the Political’s editor, Krista Jacob, cites

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generational conflict in the definition of third wave feminism she created for the journal itself: Third wave feminism provides a forum for illuminating the multifaceted experiences of young women—a group that is consistently misrepresented by older generations, the mainstream media, and other avenues. Using young women’s personal testimonies and autobiographical accounts, we reveal young women struggling to incorporate the lessons from the women’s movement of the 60’s and 70’s (second wave feminism) into their own unique, lived experiences.33

Here, we not only see the perception of a generational conflict highlighted as a means of identifying who third wave is, we see that value is placed on both the beliefs and the experiences of young women, reinforcing the role of the thirdspace in this cyberactivist example. Within the journal itself, it becomes clear that its contributors assume a generational experience with challenges and problems setting them apart from other generations of feminists, other women and men, containing and limiting the audience and thus the potential for cyberactivist empowerment. Jacob’s third wave definition indicates the journal’s focus on young women’s experiences, highlighting the challenges faced by this generation. Jacob illustrates these experiences as a response to “the lessons” of what she sees as second wave feminism. Jacob implies that these lessons are the failures and challenges of earlier feminisms as they are encountered by young women today. Again, this reinforces third wave feminism as a local site focused on the contained empowerment of a specific demographic. In contrast to this strongly anti–second wave stance taken by Jacob, other third wave writers in the journal openly build upon second wave writings, viewing the third wave experience as a natural progression out of the second wave. Thus, the third wave generation has inherited a unique set of experiences due to second wave successes. Sexing the Political provides the example via self-defined third wave feminist Bochardt’s (2001) academic analysis in the journal: Over the years I have watched and learned from some amazing women who are indeed feminists. Many of whom may have burned their bras if they felt it was right, but many who equally felt that their bras served a pretty good purpose. What I have learned from these great teachers is that there are many feminists, and feminism is indeed diverse . . . I respect the women who have helped me to become who I am, and I am thankful for the many opportunities I have had thus far. If I could give a word of wisdom for other young women who may be confused as to their stance on feminism, it would be to explore what you really believe.34

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This example, while clearly more supportive of earlier feminists than Jacob’s, still situates third wave feminism as a generation different from the second wave. The primary difference is that Borchardt’s discussion illustrates how third wave builds upon the ideals and experiences created in second wave feminism, rather than building itself by rejecting second wave values and experience. The thirdspace of the journal itself allows, through its ability to incorporate both experience and beliefs, the juxtaposition of individual third wave experiences with empowerment ideology. Therefore, it is not surprising that the focus of empowerment within the journal is upon the individual third wave feminist and her position and experience in the social structure, rather than upon a goal-based movement. This focus illustrates why third wave ideals function well in a cyberactivist thirdspace that allows a more narrow focus than traditional activisms. The focus on the individual practitioner of third wave is maintained throughout the journal. In Sexing the Political, the authors iterate the third wave ideals of personal pleasure and individual choices as significant generational values in third wave feminism.35 The authors explain that the third wave generation holds these values as expectations built on the successes and failures of earlier feminisms. Thus, these ideals are presented, not as goals for a movement, but as perceived rights for a generation of young women. Further, these authors reinforce the value of individual voices being heard and individual experiences being valued, both clear goals of the journal itself. For example: “They show us that young women are celebrating their pluralities, embracing their personal and political contradictions: (i.e., choosing to wear makeup while maintaining a critical stance toward the misogyny and racism inherent in the cosmetic industry), and refusing to follow a feminist party line.”36 This reference to “a feminist party line” is explained as “what many young feminists perceive to be constrictive and unfair expectations set up by certain mainstream definitions of feminism” that limit the choices and freedoms of individual young women.37 Jacob further explains that young women have the right to choose to be youthful and feminine, as opposed to perceptions of the second wave acting in a masculinized fashion in order to function and prosper in the public sphere. Third wave feminism, as espoused by the journal, supports the opposing view that femininity is a necessary part of feminism.38 Again, this reinforces the location of third wave identity in the individual and the ability for this young woman to empower herself as a form of online activism. Significantly, because individual persons interact with cyberspace itself, as well as with others in cyberspace, the individual is easily promoted in online activism. The focus on the individual is the result of the location of third wave empowerment in a thirdspace that allows the individual to negotiate her experience directly with ideologies. The resulting individual

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choices and values promoted in thirdwave and by Sexing the Political include traditionally feminine ideals that are not associated with public sphere power. This, again, is part of the way third wave is defined in opposition to a perceived second wave. Thus, third wave is contained empowerment focused on personal goals situated betwixt and between public and private identities, reinforcing the liminal identity constructs made possible by a cyberactivist thirdspace. Thus, the concept of third wave as a generation of individual young women remains clear throughout Sexing the Political. Issues of generational conflict (especially those related to economic challenges) take precedence over issues of race, class, urban-rural divide, and ethnicity in much of the journal, thereby reinforcing the generational perspective of third wave as a type of monolith.39 While background and ethnicity are not ignored, they take a back seat to the specifically generational feminist perspectives. In part, this is due to the dominant, middle-class, American perspective evident in the journal. For example: Undoubtedly, the thousands of supportive emails we receive show how important feminism is to our generation of women, and how connected Gen X women feel to feminist issues . . . and despite an entire generation of women and men who have come of age post–women’s liberation movement, our culture is still pathetically misinformed about what feminism is, and who feminists are.40

Again, this is part of Jacob’s continual effort to emphasize the significance of third wave as generational. Jacob focuses on the similarities experienced by young people of Generation X, arguing that feminism is misunderstood even as young women in that generation feel strongly connected to the concept of feminism. Thus, in using the cyberactivist thirdspace the experiences of young women and their right to multiple experiences become the driving ideology of third wave feminism. The generational monolith evident in Sexing the Political exemplifies how third wave activism functions as contained empowerment. The journal is itself a liminal space where voices are raised and empowerment occurs rooted in third wave ideals, both reflecting young women only and resisting cultural norms. This empowerment is, however, confined to the journal’s web space. The writing, further, is a call to change the way individuals think, not to directly alter the system but to alter individual’s understandings of the system. Further, Sexing the Political becomes a female space where female issues can be voiced and characterized. This is problematized by how the journal’s location online limits access: only people specifically looking for the topical information or third wave feminism are likely to find the journal or even know of its existence. The journal remains insular, tied to its specific

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definitions and specific audiences. Again, this is an example of the liminal, contained empowerment space the journal provides. This space can, naturally, be bridged to the mainstream should a larger audience find the journal, yet the journal itself provides no space for commentary outside of its own prescribed audience and does not illustrate a desire to communicate to a larger community. Finally, in terms of the generationalized perspective as a self-definition of third wave feminism, the significance of the choice of cyberspace as the location for a third wave journal cannot be overlooked. Third wave feminists are part of a generation that grew up with computers and information technologies. Therefore, they were raised with access to the norms of computer mediated communication. Such a claim, of course, illustrates particular class, ethnic, and cultural associations with the participants of third wave for whom it was a movement of young women with access to communication technologies located in the Global North. Thus, third wave feminist online activism implies middle-class Western experience. However, more significantly to the generationalizing within the movement itself, third wave online activism also implies a comfort level with computer mediated communication not attributed to earlier “generations” of feminists. Significantly, after two full years of editing the journal, Jacob opened the possibility for third and second wave generation feminists to connect. She created a column within the journal for second wave voices to be heard: And, finally, after many requests to incorporate Baby Boomer feminists into our cyberzine mix, I’ve added the column, “Boomerang,” a space reserved for the opinions of Baby Boomer (Second Wave) feminists. We want to hear about lessons learned, what Gen X is doing well or not so well, and your reflections on feminism, both then and now.41

Thus, the second wave generation is invited to participate, yet contained within a specific column as a response to third wave feminism. The column separates the ideologies attributed to the waves themselves by separating the experiences contained within the cyberspaces. The “other” feminist is invited to share opinions and even to critique third wave itself, but her voice maintains an identity separate from and without access to the contained empowerment potential of the journal itself.

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FOCUSING ON THE ISSUES: THE “SPECIALIZATION AND LOCALIZATION” OF THIRD WAVE One of the dominant characteristics of online activism is the ability for its participants to focus on specialized issues and themes. Unlike traditional activisms that focus primarily on goals and efforts to enact change, most online activism is issue-driven, focusing on particular themes and concerns among a specific group of people.42 In particular, the ability for cyberactivists to focus more tightly on specific issues and voices distinguishes it from earlier forms of activism. Online activism encourages the “specialization and localization” of activist groups.43 While the technology of the internet allows small groups and single voices to be heard far beyond traditional territorial concerns, it also encourages groups to form around specific topical issues and limit themselves to those issues.44 The issue-focus of online activism encourages grassroots participation and reinforces local needs, as it provides the ability for more specific concerns to be voiced than in more traditional activisms. Significantly, this also reinforces online activism as contained empowerment, locating and limiting its empowering potential to the specific concerns and themes voiced in its localized spaces. Sexing the Political, as a digital activism example, allows third wave writers to specialize in voicing the concerns of the third wave generation. The journal is limited not only by its generational focus, but also by the way the themes it promotes reinforce the generational feminist identity of the journal’s writers and audience. The articles, columns, and reviews within Sexing the Political reflect repeating ideologies and themes; these ideals are associated with personal pleasure and personal choice as the rights of this young generation of feminists. The generational focus is maintained in the journal and its themes reflect this primary concern. As evidenced in the last chapter, the themes of personal pleasure and choice as individual empowerment reinforce my interpretation that third wave functions as contained empowerment. These themes also illustrate how the journal functions as a thirdspace allowing the negotiation of a specific generation of feminist’s ideas and experiences. Further, the means by which these themes are displayed and enacted within the journal reinforce online activism as a form of contained empowerment. It is important to note that the articles in the journal start from the premise that its themes of personal pleasure and choice are rights rather than privileges to be achieved. Thus, theoretically the journal assumes a particular audience with a particular standpoint already at least partially empowered in the social structure. Therefore, the journal’s themes become an online activism that

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voices concerns with that assumed status rather than focused on promoting specific changes to women’s status. For the contributors and readers of Sexing the Political, these themes do not need to be achieved through activist methods, but rather recognized and respected as rights already attained. Among the constructs of third wave feminism in which Sexing the Political illustrates are issues such as developing a third wave voice and the struggle to avoid a monolithic tone and message. In Sexing the Political, Borchardt suggests: “Don’t be afraid to use your voice. Speak up about things you disagree with, find a cause worth fighting for. This may help you identify yourself as a feminist or the kind of feminist you are, which may in fact be one of the most empowering things you ever do.”45 Borchardt highlights the empowering potential of Sexing the Political; that the journal can provide individual third wavers the opportunity to express themselves and their concerns. This self-expression is, itself, empowering, reflecting poststructural ideals.46 Yet the limits placed on writers restrict the voice, containing this form of empowerment. Thus, as well as being, in part, restricted by third wave norms, Sexing the Political is also a place where power is locally oriented: Admittedly, the mainstream media does provide coverage of the abortion issue, especially during election time. The problem, rather, is with how abortion is talked about  . . . When public support for abortion rights is limited to simply reciting a bumper sticker slogan, our very cause is being undermined . . . As a movement and as a society, we need to cultivate a radical language of choice that reflects the continuum of the abortion experience. This honesty will strengthen our movement and provide much needed support and validation to the women who make this choice.47

Here, Jacob argues that the journal is itself an activist space that can provide individual empowerment for women. She locates this empowerment in the ability for women to honestly voice their opinions and experiences, a clearly cyberactivist goal. An individualized focus reinforces the localized and specialized opportunities the cyberactivist journal provides. In their discussion of cyberactivist feminisms, Christina Vogt and Peiying Chen argue that “Increasing specialization has channeled many women into special interest niches.”48 Clearly, Sexing the Political is such a niche, but is limited by its topical, audience, and submissions restrictions. Before the internet, such specialization within activism was challenging. This type of specialization ideally allows third wave feminists to unify around shared values and experiences. However, instead, it reinforces the belief that third wave is unique to a generation sharing in particular norms, values, and struggles.

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The struggles of Generation X as the third wave generation represented in Sexing the Political impact the choices available to third wave practitioners. As choice is one of the targets in Sexing the Political, naturally a variety of subtopics do arise centered around this issue: Even as a young girl growing up in Washington, DC, I never thought much about getting married. It was never a thought that daunted my mind with excitement or pleasure. I always envisioned marriage as a state of bondage—a prison; an institution where women must perform routine duties on a daily basis. I saw my mother working, cooking, cleaning, instructing, and, yes, arguing most of the time with my demanding father who never seemed to appreciate her efforts to be a good wife. He acted as if it was her duty to perform for him, to satisfy him, to comfort him, and to be catered to by her . . . In some ways, it reminded me of slavery.49

Given this third wave feminist description of the expectations of a housewife, it’s no wonder that Hopkins opted to be a single mother, rather than marry. Yet, as she reveals later in the article, resisting societal expectations is a challenge: I have never married, but did give birth to a son seventeen years ago. I made the decision that I did not want to marry my son’s father, and my mother met this decision with no opposition . . . I did find, however, at times, guilt haunted me because I had been led to believe that I was being selfish by denying my son the societal acceptance of marriage. Yet, I did what I felt was best for me, and ultimately ended up being best for my son, for his father turned out to be a shiftless and irresponsible man who seemed to have no feeling at all for his biological son.50

Hopkins illustrates that economic standards have to be met in order for the multiplicity of choices that third wavers envision to be a possibility. Like the choices and pleasures that third wavers insist on as rights, a particular economic level is also expected. Here, it is evident that not only is this generation of feminists located by their experiences as young women responding to second wave, but also by a set of class-based expectations that fully situate third wave feminists in the American middle class. Significantly, these choices, as well as the value placed on the economic status itself, reinforce the limited nature of the audience for the journal. An assumed basic class status and education level consistently permeates the journal’s articles. Again, the ability for Sexing the Political to be used as a tool for empowerment is limited to the ability of its participants to correctly interpret these assumed generational norms. This is a huge challenge for third wave feminism and

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reflects how contained empowerment can fail because it occurs in a liminal space, and its messages bounce back from the walls of its echo chamber. Because the journal’s ability to empower depends on its participants, the successes and potential successes of the journal may not be correctly interpreted outside of a third wave mindset. Voices in Sexing the Political primarily criticize the system and the lack of power young women have within the system; these voices do not propose solutions to these challenges. Instead they reveal how those challenges are voiced as rights that feminists should have, rather than as a way of directly altering or attacking the system. Again, this focus on individual rights as opposed to specific goals highlights how effectively Sexing the Political functions in the localized and specialized role of online activism. Still, this role is built upon an assumption that young women can all have the same starting point. Thus, we see that the contained empowerment that works for those who fit the image and status assumed for third wave feminism, yet there is no indication of how to translate that empowerment to other starting positions or spaces. Third wave feminism within Sexing the Political focuses not solely on personal choices, but also personal freedom in regard to identity construction. Intersectional and borderland identities are explored and related to a shared sense of resistance.51 The contained empowerment of the journal provides the opportunity for identities to be examined and reconstructed outside of the normative confines of the system. In particular, American identities are discussed often in the journal: I never tried to claim America as mine. Yet, if I constantly tell my students that we cannot talk about “society” as if we are not a part of it, how can I hover around the outskirts of American foreign and domestic policy, picking at the carcass of democracy like a needy vulture? Can’t do it anymore. It’s simply not feasible for me to walk around like a radical without a cause because, in the words of 19th century black women writing about gender, I find an unequivocal dedication to asserting the American citizenship of newly freed African Americans . . . As soon as I heard George W. Bush’s comic book rhetoric of “You are either with us or against us” I had an epiphany: if I didn’t want to claim America before, well dammit, I want to claim it now. However, in looking for allies in this reclaiming of America, I’m encountering milquetoast, weepy, forever-apologizing leftists and so-called progressives.52

The challenges faced by those who wish to claim alternative identities and establish power related to those identities is continually explored in the journal. Significantly, those alternate identities are part of the overall third wave multicultural identity espoused by the journal. Similarly, in her essay “La Migra” Adela C. Licona recalls “las viejitas en la iglesia and pedos do monja at the bakery.” She remembers her family’s

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experience with their border culture situation, and their use of Spanglish, while also remembering the patriarchal, anti-LGBTQIA+ nature of that experience, “No eres lesbiana. No digas eso/I look at him, the migra again, patrolling my sexuality now, keeping me an alien from within.”53 Those who cannot claim a clearly white American identity illustrate how they can explore and redefine themselves using third wave feminist space, thus incorporating their own multiple experiences as part of third wave: Then, along the way, I experienced a kind of cultural identity crisis. Two professionals I worked with and respected encouraged me to be proud to be a woman of color, to be proud to be a Filipina. But I just couldn’t grasp what they meant: How do you learn to be proud of your cultural identity when most of your life has been so removed from the motherland?54

Here, we see Lavine, in discussing her non-white, hybrid self, her view of her self within a liminal space, a type of collage in relation to how she believes her self is viewed from without. Another example highlights the challenges of religious identity and a personal goal of informing others that Judaism is not limited to stereotypical female roles: I also want to demystify the female Orthodox world, both for other Jewish feminists, and for gentile women. The horrified expression that passes over women’s faces, and the things they say when I admit to my occasional Shabbat morning with the Orthodox presuppose a stereotype; ignorant women who believe themselves inferior to men, mumbling prayers they don’t understand, unaware of how oppressed they are. This is condescending, and ridiculous. . . . There are enough lines and curtains drawn between women already, without deliberately creating others.55

Again, while a unique standpoint is welcome for each individual within the third wave identity framed in Sexing the Political. The experiences discussed, however, reflect the themes of the journal itself: sexualities, religions, and other personal choices for young women. Again, these specialized and localized themes, although referring to a variety of experiences, all refer to a generation’s experiences and speak directly to a specifically third wave audience. Further, these examples also reaffirm the third wave focus of empowering the individual, rather than promoting structural change. These personal explorations reveal how empowering spaces of contained empowerment can be for an individual. Sexing the Political provides both the opportunity and the location for these individual voices and identities to flourish. The online space provided by Sexing the Political is significant as it provides both the opportunity and the location for these voices to be heard. Not only are the authors of these articles themselves offered the opportunity for personal empowerment,

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other women can be personally empowered through reading and responding to this online information. Contained empowerment comfortably functions as personal empowerment, rather than political or social empowerment, focusing on empowering the individual rather than communities or social groups. Yet through this individual empowerment, there is hope provided that other people from similar communities can come to be empowered through shared experience. Instead, the journal would be more effective as part of a network of feminisms that reaches beyond its specific target audience. This is how online activism ideally would function as both a specialized and far-reaching process. However, the resistance on the part of third wave feminists in Sexing the Political to trust older and other feminists challenges this process. Cullen explains, “the successes of second wave feminism have allowed many young women to grow up with the confidence that they ‘can do anything’ only to discover that they can be stopped.”56 Therefore, third wavers assume that they have different needs and goals than second wave feminists and that their needs are being ignored. Feminisms, including third wave feminism, need to include respect for alternate interpretations of feminism and other feminists. A goal of online feminism is to increase “communication and collaboration within and between feminist groups.”57 Yet, Sexing the Political focuses inward, avoiding collaboration. Significantly, these contrasts are discussed in the journal itself, yet without open recognition of their dissimilar nature. The journal instead reinforces the uniqueness of the third wave practitioner, particularly in regard to gender and age. It also serves as a type of echo chamber, as outside voices are neither encouraged nor likely to recognize and respond within the space. Thus, the journal reinforces the contained nature of its empowerment potential, and its separation from other forms of feminism. By focusing on its specialized and localized topics and audience, the journal restricts its empowering potential. FASTER AND FURTHER? THIRD WAVE SPREADING AMONG THE CONVERTED In the early 2000s and today, the outreach potential for online activism is enormous. Online spaces potentially provide opportunity for otherwise marginalized voices to be heard and provide the means by which those voices can be shared beyond normative political and cultural boundaries. However, digital communication was and remains criticized for re-creating global and gender divides and reinforcing ideological siloing. Online activism exists in both the public and private spheres, its nature determined by the cultural rules

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of both spheres. The power structures of both online and offline cultures dictate who and how many people have access to internet spaces, thus restricting online spaces and hampering online democratic discourse. This is another example of how online activisms are forms of contained empowerment: both limited to local spaces and illimitable in their potential for discursively diffusing resistant ideals and goals. Online activism inherently provides the possibility for voices to transcend traditional barriers, yet at the same time is restrained by cultural interpretations and social norms. The ability for activists to spread their beliefs and values to other people is challenged because the ability to both understand, locate, and use digital medium depends on access to the knowledge of how to use it, access to the technology itself, and awareness of the always-functioning gatekeeping and digital management forces that monitor and restrict online communications. Interaction online is therefore tempered by the norms of those who literally produce online spaces. However, this does not mean that the voices active in those spaces are completely restricted to dominant discourses. Further, the specialized nature of Sexing the Political reinforces its locality: it is created in a liminal thirdspace by and for, and appealing specifically to, a third wave audience. As such, it is questionable whether the voices raised and illustrated in the pages of the journal will have an impact outside of that localized audience. Given the attitude toward multiplicity of experience evident in scholarly writings about third wave, one would not expect to find the journal (and the third wave feminism it espouses) taking on an overall character reminiscent of an aspect of second wave feminism that third wave claims to reject: a monolithic feminist identity. Yet the journal’s call reads “Contributors must be 20 or 30 something feminists”58 reiterating an ageist attitude. Exclusion of this sort appears to be in opposition to the supposed goals of third wave: being a voice for all women and men. This exclusion also reinforces the tendency of online activisms to localize and specialize, serving as another example of contained empowerment that challenges the empowering ability of the site when such a limited community does not match the offline world. Therefore, the power in these spaces is less likely to translate offline than power in more inclusive online spaces. As a means of reinforcing a unique third wave identity, Sexing the Political takes pride in its multiethnic, yet twenty- or thirty-something female staff. Further, the journal specifically speaks to a limited audience; there is no indication that the editors or writers are attempting to reach beyond an already third wave audience. Limiting its reach further still, the journal is written entirely in English, clearly focused on a US, middle-class, young female audience. The writings in Sexing the Political do not indicate an awareness of this distinction, or how the journal is, itself, limited. The writings instead

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reflect a variety of experiences all told from a young, female point of view. Jacob explains: Frustration on the part of many second wave feminists is understandable considering their hard fought battles to elect pro-choice, pro-affirmative action, and pro-woman politicians, and to establish a unified feminist presence where there wasn’t one before. But second wave feminists have been criticized by lesbians, women of color and working class women for having a white middle class bias and for excluding the issues specific to them. Critics argue that the “unified feminist presence” was in fact a false sense of unity. . . . Unfortunately, this comprehensive approach to politics makes young women’s activism look more fragmented, which can give the appearance of political inactivity or apathy.59

Jacob’s argument against a “unified feminist presence” is incongruous when interpreted from a cyberactivist or cyberfeminist perspective. Cyberfeminists acknowledge the liminal nature of cyberspace as a logical place for women to gather and discuss gender issues. In discussions of online activisms the role of virtual identities, or the identities that people take on while in cyberspace, are theoretically not tied to “real self” factors such as gender, age, profession, disability, sexuality, or race, nor are they tied to “real” boundaries such as nation or culture. This can be empowering for activists in restricted regions but can also endanger individuals and manipulate information flow. Further, the speed of the internet itself implies that information and ideals can reach people immediately, regardless of how far they are from the creative site, and regardless of audience understanding of the local knowledge that generated the information. Thus, scholars concerned with internet identities do not agree that physical characteristics and boundary limitations of the internet user are completely erased on the internet. If anything, these characteristics are masked or hidden by the perception of virtual identity. This mask serves to hide the possibility of empowerment in these contained spaces. In the case of Sexing the Political, this mask is too firmly in place to allow empowerment to happen behind it and reduces the potential for empowerment. Sexing the Political’s empowerment is limited to the audience that third wave feminism brings to the journal. The journal provides no means for others to be empowered through the themes illustrated on the site. The journal’s potential to empower is contained by its failure to effectively reach beyond the borders of third wave identity. McGerty argues that in the 1990s and early 2000s researchers came to acknowledge that internet users actually negotiate between their physical and perceived identities.60 Online contexts are partially determined by offline characteristics, norms, and localities. Aspects of identities that are important

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offline are also important online. Reality in cyberspace is defined by information, but information is valued and gendered offline. Again, this reflects the liminal nature of the space because the space is neither fully part of hegemony nor removed from it. Information in cyberspace is both part of and separate from hegemonic norms. Therefore, information can be gathered and used in these spaces as a cyberactivist tool to undermine the normative structures. However, it must be recalled that such information is still limited and contained by access to the sites. Further, cyberspace is subject to hegemonic norms, because it was created within spaces of hegemonic power, and therefore is not fully removed or protected from hegemony. Third wave web spaces, including Sexing the Political must negotiate ways to cross these boundaries if they are to reach an authentically multiethnic and non-monolithic audience. One means of progressing past the boundaries associated with third wave feminism is illustrated by “Elizabeth” who argues that the tensions between second and third wave feminisms should become a call to action for both generations: No one is exactly like us, but we are all alike in our humanity. Feminists come in all shapes, sizes, and colors with all sorts of varied and changeable beliefs. To leave behind our history of divisiveness and exclusion, we must stop assuming there is going to be agreement and instead start having real dialogue and asking real questions. We aren’t going to get any farther in our battles against racism, sexism, homophobia, fundamentalism, and hate until we begin by questioning where people are, rather than assuming we are all in the same place. Only then will we be able to measure the distance between us and recognize that if we both take a few steps we can really have a great conversation. And it won’t be a conversation that starts with, “Can you believe those women who. . . . ?”61

Elizabeth argues that multiple feminist experiences, as well as multiple feminine experiences, need to be taken seriously by all feminists, in order for these same experiences to be taken seriously by society. The challenge here is that Elizabeth’s call goes out to feminists not of the third wave to become aware of third wave values. The impetus for change, therefore, is placed on an audience other than the journal’s own. This is highly problematic as there is no indication that the journal is being submitted to or suggested to feminists other than those in the third wave. This is also problematic as a form of online activism. Activist sites ideally present their information in such a way as to invite new participants and incorporate new experiences into the potential of the site. Again, the contained empowerment nature of Sexing the Political is reinforced even more evidently as the potential power of the site requires audiences to enter the site through third wave knowledge and experiences.

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Sexing the Political, like other third wave spaces, provides the opportunity for these voices to be heard which, for these writers, is the first step to empowerment. The journal itself becomes a space where third wave ideals can be tried out, a type of rehearsal space predisposed to the values espoused within third wave. The limitations of the audience itself, and the limits placed on those who can write reinforce the nature of the space as a rehearsal. Once these ideas are concretized within the journal and for the audience, perhaps they will be translated for a larger audience or into a less contained space. However, the role of the journal does not appear to be focused on spreading the issues to the masses so much as allowing a group to communicate among themselves. This again illustrates how third wave web space situates itself as contained empowerment. Third wave web space thus provided an opportunity for empowerment outside of cultural norms, yet the space still reflected those same norms. Sexing the Political functions as a site of individual empowerment that can hopefully be translated into systemic change. However, as evidenced in the last chapter, any systemic change is not quick or clear. The focus on young women as contributors in Sexing the Political places it in a sexist container as well as an ageist or generational one. Certainly men could define themselves as third wave feminists and be welcomed on the site (assuming they met the age requirements) but the site still is generating an exclusivity that defies the inclusive goals of the movement. The journal illustrates a notion in the third wave that women should not speak to men’s issues because women speak from our own standpoints. This reinforces the gender binary and the gender divide, again limiting third wave empowerment potential to a unique set of circumstances and a population predisposed to that power. Further, it illustrates that there are distinctly different issues for men than for women, reinforcing the concept that these spaces are meant to encourage feminine power and to avoid association with masculine and patriarchal power structures. Further still, Jacob’s response reinforces a unique third wave standpoint exclusively rooted in young women’s experiences. Again, no other experiences work within the journal’s contained system for empowerment. This contains the power, limiting the potential of third wave empowerment to an already third wave feminist audience and counters the cyberactivist goal to reach beyond boundaries that normally limit activists and prevent ideals from reaching as wide of audiences as possible.

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PRODUCTIVE DIGITAL FEMINISM: PROGRESS OUTSIDE THE CONTAINER? Online activism is a form of contained empowerment due to its location in a thirdspace and by its issue orientation. The empowering potential of online activism is contained, in part, by its resistance to activist goals. While online activism is empowering through the possibility of spreading ideas beyond normative borders, the crossing of borders is not always achieved, thus again limiting online activist potential. Sexing the Political, in particular, failed to break out of its container. Based on this analysis, in order to ensure that online actuates social change, specific activist goals must be formed and enacted. Thus, in order for the hope of contained empowerment to fully be realized, the confines themselves must be lessened. Sexing the Political reinforces and reaffirms patriarchal norms by its adherence to traditional notions of femininity, yet at the same time offers an opportunity for those norms to be dismantled. It is a liminal space where particular circumstances can be altered for the individual—but without direct impact on how that individual functions within the patriarchal system. This is the danger of contained empowerment: it can provide a sense of empowerment that is removed from systemic power. Thus, it can create a type of false hope. This again raises the question of whether individual empowerment that is not systemic is a form of power. There is some evidence that the hope implied within Sexing the Political’s online activism can be achieved, especially in terms of ageism. Sexing the Political addresses the challenges with growing up, and becoming less of a radical that you once were: Something unanticipated has arrived in my life, something I never really looked for or thought I would experience. Sailing into my thirties, I firmly believed that baby lust was, much like the desire to own an SUV, a house in the suburbs, or join the Republican party, something that happened to other people. Regular readers will doubtless be reassured to hear that I remain allergic to gas-guzzling vehicles and torpid, conservative subdivisions and senators alike, and will perhaps also be slightly startled, as I was myself, to discover that the onset of longings for a child in one’s life is not necessarily a symptom of the rather larger social disease known as Growing Up and Settling Down, American Style™.62

This example illustrates that third wave practitioners must grow up, and that they eventually seek to empower themselves systemically rather than outside of the system. They must eventually find a way to expand the digital and other activisms they espouse. These examples also illustrate how the goals of personal pleasure and choice are being incorporated into the growing up and

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out of third wave process. However, they also illustrate the potential that the contained empowerment achieved within third wave space must adapt to the system when leaving specifically controlled digital spaces; that digital activism and third wave empowerment cannot exist on their own terms outside of their liminal (third)spaces. Social and digital media continue to provide activist opportunities for individual and grouped practitioners to frame and reframe themselves. However, the influence of the narrative architecture of digital media remains a gatekeeping entity in the process. Further, these spaces are often echo chambers, particularly as they encourage and imply activist goal setting, empowerment, and agency. Social media are spaces wherein the identities and actions of activists can be promoted. Activism is vigorously shared via digital and social media. Therefore, activist voices can potentially be shared to a variety of audiences much more easily than during the third wave era and the tenure of Sexing the Political. However, activist voices remain conscripted by gatekeeping agents even as they are promoted through social and digital media information flow mechanisms. Further, digital and online activism contain the potential for abuse. Consider Cambridge Analytica’s unethical use of Facebook information.63 Further, a rise in extremisms such as alt-right authoritarianisms and ethnonationalisms both utilize gatekeeping as a means of monitoring and restricting information flow, and promoting their ideological frameworks. Nonauthoritarian governments and social media entities also play gatekeeping roles in some circumstances, such as promoting new legal requirements and to meet moral and ethical standards of speech, intellectual property, and the information economy. The role of gatekeeping in digital spaces therefore reflects the moral authority once claimed by women in the temperance movement and those like Phyllis Schlafly arguing against women’s liberation and the ERA. Activists and individual speakers are able to utilize digital media technologies to organize and promote their agendas. To do so, they create digital identities that can help to circumvent some of the gatekeeping and structural constraints of digital information flow. Yet they will continue to be constrained by hegemonic structures, including local, state, and national interests requiring some level of adherence to the normative power constructs. NOTES 1. Susan Faludi, Shauna Shames, Jennifer M. Piscopo, and Denise M. Walsh, “A Conversation with Susan Faludi on Backlash, Trumpism, and # MeToo.” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 45, no. 2 (2020): 336–45.

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2. Susan Faludi, Backlash: The Undeclared War against American Women (New York: Crown, 1991). 3. Gloria E. Anzaldúa, “Bridge, Drawbridge, Sandbar, or Island: Lesbians of Color Haciendo Alianzas.” In Bridges of Power: Women’s Multicultural Alliances, edited by Lisa Albrecht and Rose M. Brewer, 216–31 (Philadelphia: New Society Publishers, 1990). 4. Martha McCaughey and Christina French, “Why I Want to Be the Man in Bed.” 2002. Retrieved from www​.sexingthepolitical​.com​/2002​/one​/bed​.htm​/, pars. 1 & 4. 5. Krista Jacob, “Engendering Change: What’s Up with Third Wave Feminism?” Sexing the Political 1, no. 1 (2000), www​.sexingthepolitical​.org​/2001​/one​/engender​ .html; Krista Jacob, “Turning the Tide: A Letter from the Editor.” Sexing the Political 1, no. 1 (2001b). www​.sexingthepolitical​.com​/2001​/one​/editor​.html​/. 6. Krista Jacob, “What’s Up with Third Wave Feminism?” par. 1. 7. Krista Jacob, “Can We Talk?” Sexing the Political, 2002. www​.sexingthepolitical​ .com​/2002​/two​/talk​.htm; Krista Jacob, “Turning the Tide.” 8. Jacob, “Can We Talk?”; Jacob, “Turning the Tide.” 9. See Katherine Black, “The Doctor Is (Not) In.” Peace Review 13, no. 3 (2001): 411–15; Tiffany Danitz and Warren P. Strobel, “The Internet’s Impact on Activism: The Case of Burma.” Studies in Conflict and Terrorism 22 (1999): 257–69; Pamela Flores, Nancy Regina Gómez, Alana Farrah Roa, and Risa Whitson, “Reviving Feminism through Social Media: From the Classroom to Online and Offline Public Spaces.” Gender and Education 32, no. 6 (2020): 751–66; Laura Illia, “Passage to Cyberactivism: How Dynamics of Activism Change.” Journal of Public Affairs 3, no. 4 (2002): 326–37; Sonia Nuñez Puente, “Feminist Cyberactivism: Violence against Women, Internet Politics, and Spanish Feminist Praxis Online.” Continuum 25, no. 3 (2011): 333–46; Christina Vogt and Peiying Chen, “Feminisms and the Internet.” Peace Review 13, vol. 3 (2001): 371–74; Loong Wong, “The Internet and Social Change in Asia.” Peace Review 13, no. 3 (2001): 381–87. 10. See Victoria Carty and Jake Onyett, “Protest, Cyberactivism and New Social Movements: The Reemergence of the Peace Movement Post 9/11.” Social Movement Studies 5, no. 3 (2006): 229–49; Illia, “Passage to Cyberactivism”; Sahar Khamis, “Mediated, Gendered Activism in the ‘Post-Arab Spring’ Era: Lessons from Tunisia’s ‘Jasmine Revolution.’” In Journalism, Gender and Power, edited by Cynthia Carter, Linda Steiner, Stuart Allan, 251–64 (London: Routledge, 2019); Sahar Khamis and Katherine Vaughn, “Cyberactivism in the Egyptian Revolution: How Civic Engagement and Citizen Journalism Tilted the Balance.” Arab Media and Society 14, no. 3 (2011): 1–25. 11. See Illia, “Passage to Cyberactivism”; Jeroen van Laer, “Activists Online and Offline: The Internet as an Information Channel for Protest Demonstrations.” Mobilization: An International Quarterly 15 (2010): 347–66; Scott Wright, Todd Graham, and Dan Jackson, “Third Space, Social Media, and Everyday Political Talk.” In The Routledge Companion to Social Media and Politics, edited by Axel Bruns, Gunn Enli, Eli Skogerbø, Anders Olof Larsson, and Christian Christensen, 74–88 (New York: Routledge, 2016).

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12. Katherine Johnson, “Performing Pasts for Present Purposes: Reenactment as Embodied, Performative History.” In History, Memory, Performance, edited by David Dean, Yana Meerzon, and Kathryn Prince, 36–52 (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015); Bodil Petersson, “Anachronism and Time Travel.” In The Archaeology of Time Travel: Experiencing the Past in the 21st Century, edited by Cornelius Holtorf and Bodil Petersson, 281–97 (Oxford: Archaeopress, 2017); Susan Pike, “‘If You Went Out It Would Stick’: Irish Children’s Learning in Their Local Environments.” International Research in Geographical and Environmental Education 20, no. 2 (2011): 139–59. 13. Illia, “Passage to Cyberactivism”; van Laer, “Activists Online and Offline”; Vogt and Chen, “Feminisms and the Internet”; Loong Wong, “The Internet and Social Change in Asia.” Peace Review 13, no. 3 (2001): 381–87. 14. Danitz and Strobel, “The Internet’s Impact on Activism”; Flores, Gómez, Roa, and Whitson, “Reviving Feminism through Social Media”; Illia, “Passage to Cyberactivism”; Nuñez Puente, “Feminist Cyberactivism”; Wong, “The Internet and Social Change in Asia.” 15. Baumgardner and Richards, Manifesta; Siegel, “The Legacy of the Personal”; Siegel, Sisterhood Interrupted. 16. Henry Jenkins, “Game Design as Narrative Architecture.” In First Person, edited by N. Wardrip-Fruin, and P. Harrigan, 118–30 (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004). 17. Victoria A. Newsom, Michelle Yeung, and Lara Lengel, “The Digital Reflexivity of Post 9–11 Public Diplomacy: Survivor Stories, Strategic Narratives, and Islamophobic Politics.” Refereed paper presented at the National Communication Association Annual Convention, Feminist and Women Studies Division, Baltimore, MD, November, 2019. 18. Donna J. Haraway, “A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century.” In Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature, 149–81 (New York: Routledge, 1991). See also Olivia Belton, “Metaphors of Patriarchy in Orphan Black and Westworld.” Feminist Media Studies 20, no. 8 (2020): 1211–25; Susan Luckman and Michelle Phillipov, “‘I’d (Still) Rather Be a Cyborg’: The Artisanal Dispositif and the Return of the (Domestic) Goddess.” International Journal of Cultural Studies 23, no. 4 (2020): 458–74. 19. Marc Prensky, “Digital Natives, Digital Immigrants.” On the Horizon 9 no. 5 (2001): 1–6. 20. Frederic Barberà and Kathryn Crameri, “Editorial.” National Identities 4, no. 3 (2002): 213–21. 21. Nawal Hamad Mohmad Aljaad, “Whatsapp for Educational Purposes for Female Students at College of Education—King Saud University.” Education 137 no. 3 (2017): 344–66; Nezar AlSayyad and Muna Guvenc, “Virtual Uprisings: On the Interaction of New Social Media, Traditional Media Coverage, and Urban Space during the ‘Arab Spring.’” Urban Studies 52, no. 11 (2013): 1–17. 22. Marshall McLuhan, “Chapter 1: The Medium is the Message.” Understanding Media: The Extension of Man (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1964).

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23. Homi Bhabha, “The Third Space.” In Identity, Community, Culture, Difference, edited by J. Rutherford, 207–21 (New York: Routledge, 1990); Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984). 24. Bhabha, “The Third Space”; de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life; Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space, translated by D. N. Smith (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991; Original work published 1974); and Edward W. Soja, Thirdspace: Journeys to Los Angeles and Other Real and Imagined Places (Malden: Blackwell, 1996). 25. Bhabha, “The Third Space”; de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life. 26. Sadie Plant, “The Future Looms: Weaving Women and Cybernetics.” Body and Society 1, no. 4 (1995): 55–67. 27. Plant, “The Future Looms.” 28. Sadie Plant, “On the Matrix: Cyberfeminist Simulations.” In Cultures of Internet: Virtual Spaces, Real Histories, Living Bodies, edited by R. Shields, 184–95 (London: Sage, 1996). 29. Sarah A. Bell, “The Informatics of Domination and the Necessity for Feminist Vigilance toward Digital Technology.” In Feminist Vigilance, 23–42 (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2020); Barbara Crow, “Politicizing the Internet: Getting Women On-Line.” Women and Environments International no. 42/43 (1998): 6–9; Macarena Hanash Martínez, “Feminist Cyber-Resistance to Digital Violence: Surviving Gamergate.” Debats 5 (2020): 287–302. 30. Martínez, “Surviving Gamergate.” 31. McCaughey and French, “Why I Want to Be the Man in Bed”; Baumgardner and Richards, Manifesta; Lala, “Barbies We Would Like to See.” In A Girl’s Guide to Taking Over the World: Writings from the Girl Zine Revolution, edited by Karen Green and Tristan Taormino, 110–11 (New York: St. Martin’s Griffin, 1997). 32. Rebecca Walker, ed., To Be Real: Telling the Truth about the Changing Face of Feminism (New York: Anchor Books, 1995); Rebecca Walker, “Becoming the Third Wave.” 2002. Accessed January 15, 2003. www​.dac​.neu​.edu​/womens​.studies​/walker​ .htm; Baumgardner and Richards, Manifesta; Siegel, “The Legacy of the Personal.” 33. Jacob, “Turning the Tide,” par. 2. 34. H. Bochardt, “Burning Bras, Not Exactly: A Young Woman Finding Her Feminist Identity.” Sexing the Political 1, no. 2, 2001. www​.sexingthepolitical​.org​/2001​/ two​/bras​.html​/, para 3. 35. Borchardt “Burning Bras, Not Exactly”; Jacob, “What’s Up with Third Wave Feminism”; Jacob, “Turning the Tide”; Elizabeth, “If You Don’t Wear a Scarlet ‘O’ How Will I Recognize You?” Sexing the Political 2, no. 2, 2002a; Elizabeth, “Get Your Stereotypes off My Relationship.” Sexing the Political 2, no. 1, 2002b; Elizabeth, “Hi, my name is Elizabeth and I’m a Romance Novel Victim.” Sexing the Political 3, no. 1, 2003; and C. G. Honigman-Smith, “Drawing Curtains Drawing Lines.” Sexing the Political 1, no. 2, 2001. Retrieved from www​.sexingthepolitical​.org​/2001​ /two​/curtains​.html​/. 36. Jacob, “Turning the Tide,” par. 4. 37. Jacob, “Turning the Tide,” par. 4. 38. Jacob, “What’s Up with Third Wave Feminism?”; Jacob, “Turning the Tide.”

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39. Bochardt, “Burning Bras, Not Exactly”; Rhonda Chittenden, “Third Eye Open.” Sexing the Political: A Journal of Third Wave Feminists on Sexuality 1, no, 2, 2001. www​.sexingthepolitical​.com​/2001​/two​/third eye.html; Elizabeth, “Hi, my name is Elizabeth and I’m a Romance Novel Victim”; Honigman-Smith, “Drawing Curtains Drawing Lines”; Jacob, “What’s Up with Third Wave Feminism?”; Krista Jacob, “A Radical Language of Choice.” Sexing the Political 2, no. 1 (2001a). www​ .sexingthepolitical​.org​/2002​/one​/radical​.htm​/; Krista Jacob, “Turning the Tide: A Letter from the Editor.” Sexing the Political 1, no. 1 (2001b); Martha McCaughey and Christina French, “Why I Want to Be the Man in Bed.” 2002. www​.sexingthepolitical​ .com​/2002​/one​/bed​.htm​/. 40. Jacob, “Turning the Tide,” par. 2. 41. Jacob, “Turning the Tide,” par. 12. 42. Vogt and Chen, “Feminisms and the Internet.” 43. Vogt and Chen, “Feminisms and the Internet.” 44. Illia, “Passage to Cyberactivism”; Vogt and Chen, “Feminisms and the Internet.” 45. Bochardt, “Burning Bras, Not Exactly,” para 5. 46. See Luce Irigaray, “When Our Lips Speak Together.” In Feminist Theory and the Body: A Reader, edited by Janet Price and Margrit Shildrick, 82–90 (New York: Routledge, 1999; Original work published 1977); Trinh, Woman, Native, Other. 47. Jacob, “Turning the Tide,” paras 1–5. 48. Vogt and Chen, “Feminisms and the Internet.” 49. Ellen Hopkins, “Living Single: The Right Lifestyle for Me.” Sexing the Political 1, no. 2 (2002). www​.sexingthepolitical​.org​/2002​/two​/single​.htm​/, par. 2. 50. Hopkins, “Living Single,” par. 5. 51. E. Dimagiba Lavine, “Voices from the Motherland.” Sexing the Political 1, no. 2, 2001. Retrieved from www​.sexingthepolitical​.org​/2001​/two​/fan​.html; Zubeda Jalalzai, “The Personal Quests of Saira Shah.” Sexing the Political: A Journal of Third Wave Feminism on Sexuality, 3, no. 1 (2004): www​.sexingthepolitical​.org​/2004​ /quests​.htm​/; Adela C. Licona, “La Migra.” Sexing the Political: A Journal of Third Wave Feminism on Sexuality 3, no. 1 (2004): www​.sexingthepolitical​.org​/2004​/migra​ .htm​/; Kimberly Springer, “(Un)apologetically (un)American.” Sexing the Political 3, no. 1, 2003. www​.sexingthepolitical​.org​/2003​/one​/unapologetically​.htm​/. 52. Kimberly Springer, “(Un)apologetically (un)American.” See also Springer, “Third Wave Black Feminism?” 53. Adela C. Licona, “La Migra.” 54. E. Dimagiba Lavine, “Voices from the Motherland,” par. 3. 55. Honigman-Smith,“Drawing Curtains Drawing Lines,” par. 2. 56. Dallas Cullen, “The Personal Is Political: Third Wave Feminism and the Study of Gendered Organizations.” Paper presented at the CMS conference, 2001. www​ .mngt​.waikato​.ac​.nz​/Research​/ejrot​/cmsconference​/2001​/Papers​/Gender​/Cullen​.pdf​ /, 5. 57. Vogt and Chen, “Feminisms and the Internet,” 371.

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58. “About Sexing the Political.” Sexing the Political: A Journal of Third Wave Feminists on Sexuality 2, no. 1 (2002). Accessed April 8, 2002. www​ .sexingthepolitical​.com​/2002​/one​/about​.htm​/. 59. Jacob, “What’s Up with Third Wave Feminism?” par. 2. 60. Lisa-Jane McGerty, “‘Nobody Lives Only in Cyberspace’: Gendered Subjectivities and Domestic Use of the Internet.” Cyberpsychology and Behavior 3, no. 5 (2000): 895–99. 61. Elizabeth, “Get Your Stereotypes Off My Relationship.” Sexing the Political 2, no. 1, 2002b. Accessed May 12, 2003. www​.sexingthepolitical​.org​/2002​/one​/ stereotypes​.htm​/, para 5. 62. Hanne Blank, “Oh, Baby.” Sexing the Political 3, no. 1, 2003. Accessed September 29, 2003. www​.hanne​.net​/dab​/dab3​.htm, par. 1. 63. Kevin Granville, “Facebook and Cambridge Analytica: What You Need to Know as Fallout Widens.” New York Times, March 19, 2018. www​.nytimes​.com​/2018​ /03​/19​/technology​/facebook​-cambridge​-analytica​-explained​.html​/. See, also, Siva Vaidhyanathan, Anti–Social Media: How Facebook Disconnects Us and Undermines Democracy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018).

Chapter 6

In/Visible Activism The Contained Nature of Feminist NGOization

The stories of individuals in need of aid have long been a powerful tool for enticing audience engagement with, and donations to, charitable concerns. Individual narratives are, as Walter Fisher explained, “stories competing with other stories” that allow a resonance between the character presented in the story, and the lives of audience members “as inevitably moral inducements.”1 These stories frame their individual focus as victim characters as a form of audience appeal. For example, the efforts by Association Rwandaise pour le Bien-Être Familial (ARBEF) to reform abortion law in Rwanda in the 2010s highlighted young women’s personal testimonies of sexual violence. The individual narratives were shared among college and university students “to mobilize the support of a critical mass of young people around the issue.”2 Youth involvement and participation in the nation’s political environment would help to amend Rwanda’s abortion law to allow exceptions in cases of sexual violence. Similarly, in Turkey, the We Will End Femicide Platform (WWEF)3 was founded in 2010 to conduct and share research on femicide, as well as providing a space for women to share their stories of gender based violence and seek individual aid. The sharing of stories was explained as a means for women to gain the courage to contact the police, and seek legal aid in obtaining a divorce.4 In both Rwanda and Turkey the efforts are tied to the power of personal testimonies as emotional appeal. These testimonies helped change the ability for some Rwandan women to seek abortions because they functioned as what Fisher calls “good stories” that “justify (or mystify) decisions or actions already made or performed and to determine future decisions or actions.”5 The impact of individual stories in Rwanda created a partial shift in an otherwise patriarchal structure, and in Turkey provided networking 171

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opportunities for individual women to gain legal aid. Both of these examples illustrate how personal testimony can become the basis for the construction of liminal opportunities and empowerment. Many nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) focused on gender and women’s needs are challenged to find a means of generating power, for individuals, the status of women, and gendered rights, by negotiating the same challenges espoused within North American third wave and other styles of feminism: balancing the roles of women and girls as “agent” and “victim.”6 Women’s identities within NGOs and activists’ narratives are thus soft power7 articulated and distributed8 within liminal frames. The result is an individual who “may be able to take actions that protect her from violent acts at certain times in her life (and not others), in certain spaces, and surrounded by certain people who facilitate her resistance.”9 As such, NGOs are limited to reconstructing or deconstructing restricted opportunities for empowerment and change. An article entitled, “Hashtag for Empowerment,” published in Dubai’s Khaleej Times, reported “Twitter is empowering women one hashtag at a time.”10 The article addressed the rollout of the hashtag #PositionOfStrength in the United Arab Emirates (UAE). The UAE was the third country to partner with Twitter on the rollout of the hashtag campaign, behind Australia and Ireland, as it was host of the Global Women’s Forum. Speaking at the forum, Queen Rania of Jordan said it was “now up to the people to utilise the ‘power of digital space’ when it comes to promoting women empowerment.”11 #PositionOfStrength aimed “to engage and empower women online,” however, there seemed to be no details on how that would happen. Kira O’Connor (Europe, Middle East, and Africa (EMEA) Safety Outreach of Twitter Ireland) argued, “That’s where the NGOs will play a big part. We want this hashtag to reach a global audience. As well as giving a voice to empowered women, we have to give a voice to those who are not.”12 O’Connor said “it is up to the NGOs to go out into the field and tell the stories of those who need to be empowered.”13 Thus, the agency of women’s empowerment through these organizations is irrevocably intertwined with the agency of the NGO itself, and liminally conscripted to permanent networking and distributed action. Feminist and women’s NGOs14 evolved as human rights organizations focused on women, women’s rights, and women’s empowerment.15 They also evolved alongside broader feminist and gender-based movements, and responsive to fluctuations in gender identity constructs, gender role concerns, and intersectional political and social movements. The core conflict in feminist and gender-based activisms, that of promoting the personal or the collective, must be balanced with the political benefits an agency such as an NGO can bring to marginalized identities. In this chapter I investigate how

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this overlap functions, and how this type of collective organizing is a form of contained empowerment. I do this by investigating the limits and containments associated with NGOization efforts, and through a long-view analysis of a third wave feminist NGO, the Third Wave Fund, originally known as the Third Wave Foundation. BALANCING NARRATIVE APPEALS: ESSENTIALIZED VICTIM-AGENTS As a means of addressing the narrative conflict between victim and agent within empowerment discourses, many NGOs were designed to address globally recognized gender gaps in relation to a process known as “gender mainstreaming”16 and defined by the United Nations (UN) as a “strategy for promoting gender equality.”17 Thus, gender mainstreaming, intentionally designed to be nebulous and flexible in definition, reflects both debate about strategic essentialism and debates about the lack of strategical clarity centered in third wave feminism itself. However, gender mainstreaming by nature requires strategic essentialism to address the category of “woman” as espoused by the UN, and simultaneously requires alternative means of engagement to address individual women’s needs. In my previous work on gender mainstreaming in the Middle East and North Africa, I critique that “whose gender, whose voice, and whose needs are addressed is not always clear.”18 Further, individual voices are often lost in political rhetorics. “Cultural and political agendas cannot be adequately reflected by a single strategic gender essentialism.”19 The essentializing nature of gender mainstreaming is problematic not only as “a marketable strategy ideal on a global stage,”20 however, in the twenty-five years since its inception during the 1995 UN Beijing Platform, gender mainstreaming has been difficult to implement in practice and has had limited impact on the status of women and gender equality.21 Thus, NGOs play a key role in gender mainstreaming efforts, as they provide the means of addressing both individuals and categories simultaneously. A number of women’s activist organizations have been present at UN WSIS events and gender caucuses focused on a variety of gender rights issues, illustrating the significance and impact of NGOs within the international women’s movement. NGOs can function simultaneously within and outside of government and other hegemonic structures: echoing Anzaldua’s argument that feminist empowerment must be simultaneously liminal and structural. NGOs operate using a form of strategic essentialism that serves to contain the potential for empowerment while encouraging the possibility of structural change regardless of intersectional differences between and among women. Because

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governmental organizations are dependent upon legal classifications for promoting changes within demographic categories, NGOs can serve to promote individual status changes that can function at a quicker pace than legislative and other government-function base advocacies. However, the focus on the individual is also problematic if it never translates into structural shifts and deconstruction. Therefore, as gender mainstreaming is an attempt to find a way to make the containing force itself a tool of empowerment,22 NGOs seek to bridge liminal empowerment into structural functionality. The development of global women’s NGOs in the late twentieth century is rooted in shifts from “state feminisms,” particularly as this form of government-endorsed feminism had been practiced in Latin America, Eastern Europe, and former Soviet states.23 For instance, in her study, “Building Civil Societies in East Central Europe: The Effects of American NGOs on Women’s Groups,” Patrice McMahon analyzes how, in the early 1990s, US organizations, nongovernmental and governmental alike, were quick to offer guidance to develop women-centered NGOs in newly independent, post-Soviet nations including Hungary, Poland, and Russia. She argues that, while these efforts raised awareness about women’s issues, NGO development in these and other nations in the regions, were hindered by the lack of support and engagement at the local grassroots level. The NGO boom of the 1990s emerged concurrently with “the rise of postfeminism, a series of discursive, mediatized and intellectual interventions that furthered, but also broke away from, past forms of feminist theory and practice,” as argues Chakraborty Proshant in her study, “Rethinking NGOization as Postfeminist Practice: Interstitial Intimacies and Negotiations of Neoliberal Subjectivity in Violence Prevention.”24 The NGO boom, also identified as the “NGOization” of feminism, is a concept that refers to “the cooption and erasure of critical social movements. Beyond their temporal instantiation in the 1990s, postfeminism and NGOization converge and entangle in everyday practices of women’s NGOs and organizations.”25 While the 1990s saw a proliferation in feminist and women’s nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), the push to establish them began in the 1970s. For example, the United Nations designated 1975 as the International Women’s Year, and held a world conference, Conferencia Mundial del Año Internacional de la Mujer,26 from June 19 to July 2 of that year in Ciudad de México. One of the goals of the Conferencia was to create the World Plan of Action for the 1976–1985 United Nations Decade for Women.27 The “Declaration of Mexico on the Equality of Women and Their Contribution to Development and Peace, 1975,” highlighted thirty principles, fourth of which was:

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National non-governmental organizations should contribute to the advancement of women by assisting women to take advantage of their opportunities, by promoting education and information about women’s rights, and by co-operating with their respective Governments.28

One unique aspect of the Conferencia was a concurrent International Women’s Year Tribune, attended by four thousand delegates, and a concurrent forum of NGOs which “signalled the opening up of the United Nations to non-governmental organizations, which enable women’s voices to be heard in the organization’s policy-making process.”29 Later in the report, however, challenges were identified: “Despite these solemn pronouncements and notwithstanding the work accomplished in particular by the United Nations Commission on the Status of Women and the specialized agencies concerned, progress in translating these principles into practical reality is proving slow and uneven.”30 The Conferencia served as a keystone for the development and expansion of feminist NGOs, while it also highlighted the multiple difficulties in constructing and implementing a shared set of goals for women, women’s rights, and women’s empowerment among conflicting, contrasting, and complex cultural variables. NGOIZATION AND THE NON-PROFIT INDUSTRIAL COMPLEX The 1990s and early 2000s saw the NGO boom occur particularly in nondemocratic nations in Latin America, Southeast Asia, Eastern Europe, and the Middle East and North Africa.31 Reports indicate that NGOs have quadrupled numbers and in aid provided in the past twenty years.32 Kenya, for instance, houses twelve thousand NGOs that work to improve human rights, civic engagement, health care, and education.33 This boom, also known as the “Non-Profit Industrial Complex” (NPIC), was, not coincidentally, concurrent with rising neoliberalism of the years thereafter. Paula Lobato Gonzalez, in her article, “‘NGOization’: From Activism to Advocacy,” analyzes the trends that lead to the shift of NGOs. First, she notes, “one of the main consequences of the NGOization process is the shift from activism to advocacy.”34 This shift is accompanied by “a more resultoriented and less multidisciplinary activity, as well as a shift in the shape of mobilization, with greater collaboration with authorities.”35 Lobato Gonzalez argues that NGOs have historically been understood as positive mechanisms seen through moral lenses. Despite this underlying altruistic perception the

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process of NGOization has lead to a shift from “‘commitment to a particular issue’ to instead merely ‘talking about that particular issue.’”36 Another consideration that has resulted in critiques of NGOs is that the organizations become more elitist as they become institutionalized and take on hegemonically recognized aspects of professionalism. However, Lobato Gonzalez notes that NGOs have to do this to survive, particularly in “democratically developing countries,” where “‘civic oligarchies’ are created” that lead to a “detachment from the beneficiaries and the social base of the movement.”37 Lobato Gonzalez argues “The resulting elitism creates greater difficulties for the beneficiaries and the social base to actively participate and raise their demands, as the networks or oligarchies established tend to be more and more private and exclusive.”38 Building on the challenges highlighted by Lobato Gonzalez, feminist and activist scholars argue for a shift away from hegemonic adherence. Alvarez, Boyd, and others make the case that problematizing NGOization helps to support “a generative archive for scholars and activists critical of the NPIC and NGOization because of its explicit marking of the limitations of institutionalization and, moreover, its drastically different (even oppositional) and now alternative representations of feminist coalition.”39 Boyd notes “neoliberal feminist coalitions tend to prioritize institutional life-lines and outcome oriented activism at the expense of systemic social change organizing.”40 NGOs that developed in Latin America in the late twentieth century often adopted intersectional goals as they attempted to connect and coalition build between previously dispersed individuals and groups with unique needs.41 In post–Soviet Russia and Eastern Europe, women’s NGOs became a core means of attempting to readdress feminist and feminine values within the new democratic frameworks. These NGOs, like so many developing and expanding in this era, focused on empowering and improving the lives of individuals rather than a collective category of women or gender, thus echoing core tenets associated with North American third wave feminism. However, as Lisa McIntosh Sundstrom argues in her study, “Women’s NGOs in Russia: Struggling from the Margins,” women’s NGOs in many of these developing democracies and former Soviet republics were often lacking in “mechanisms for effective dialogue with levels of government that would allow their voices to be heard in public policy discussions.”42 An additional problem with NGOs in developing democracies was the financial structures within which they operated. For instance, in rural Uganda, Erika Deserranno observed a pattern of NGOs arriving, hiring workers away from lower-paying positions in local government, subsequently “siphoning talent away from government services that citizens depend on, but without improving those services.”43 Deserranno and colleague Nancy Qian argue that often NGOs lack a deep understanding of local community contexts, “leading

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to adverse consequences” such as shifting scarce resources from local institutions and organizations “leaving villagers worse off than they were before.”44 Local and national governments, already suspicious and untrusting of outside assistance, have responded to the unwitting and unintended negative results of NGOs by instituting limitations. For instance, in Ethiopia, the parliament passed a law in 2009 that limited external funding to 10 percent for approved NGOs in the nation.45 One outcome of this type of legislation is the politicization of NGOs, in order for them to gain favor with local and national governments.46 This adds to a loss of local knowledge production and consumption within NGOs as NGOization discourages developing goals and storytelling in favor of absorbing individual needs within global and hegemonic strategic narration.47 North American feminist NGOs in the 1990s and 2000s were struggling to attract young membership.48 For young women born in the 1970s and early 1980s, feminism lacked a clear focus: it centered on a number of issues and themes related to the experiences of the particular generation of young women, but had not distinguished itself with a specific goal or plan for creating change related to these issues and themes. Instead, third wave organizations sought to provide space for the voices of the above-mentioned generation of young women.49 However, the lack of focus within the movement is particularly problematic when seeking to identify the activism within the “movement.” This lack of focus is also problematic for a movement such as third wave feminism located within contained empowerment spaces, because while these spaces allow a generation to voice their opinions, they do not necessarily encourage these young women to actuate systemic change. THE CASE OF THE THIRD WAVE FOUNDATION One example of a North American third wave feminist NGO is the Third Wave Fund, formerly Third Wave Foundation, designed to promote the needs of young women and intersectional concerns. Rebecca Walker, daughter of famed second wave feminist Alice Walker joined the two other daughters of second wave feminists, Jennifer Baumgardner and Amy Richards, and, in 1992, created the Third Wave Direct Action Corporation.50 In 1997 the organization was re-branded as Third Wave Foundation, self-labeling as an organization dedicated to supporting “groups and individuals working towards gender, racial, economic, and social justice.”51 The Third Wave Foundation was the only offline feminist organization to claim the label “third wave” in the late 1990s and early 2000s. This organization practiced a form of activism limited by its audience and participants, by its lack of a clear vision, and by the way it chooses what issues to support.

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The ageism and narrow gendered focus in this activism are themselves a form of contained empowerment. Ageism itself acts as a container restricting its potential empowerment to young women. Further, the foundation’s focus on a specific generation locates the source of empowerment in the ideal of the young woman. Third wave empowerment is therefore not possible for anyone outside of that particular construct. Thus, we see that the movement, and particularly the foundation, builds a particular identity construct that can be empowered for its participants, yet temporally limits the potential of that construct. Like girl power empowerment, the Third Wave Foundation deliberately constructed an empowerment that would eventually be outgrown. Third Wave Foundation was not difficult to locate online or in-person in the early 2000s. Their presence was clearly identifiable online, both in their user-friendly web space and in other third wave web spaces that highlight the organization (such as feminist.com, wwwave.com, and the Women’s Funding Network). In fact, the organization, as a grant-funding organization, was cited numerous times as “The only activist foundation working nationally to support young women between the ages of 15 and 30. We contribute 100% of our resources to young feminists and the projects that serve them nationwide.”52 However, the descriptions gave no clear definition or description of Third Wave Feminism, other than its focus on young women. Unlike social movements, contained empowerment promotes individual status change rather than overall systemic change. The Third Wave Foundation functions from a liminal space of contained empowerment and, in many ways, the organization intentionally contributes to its own containment. Analysis of the organization was undertaken in terms of the self-imposed limits upon its activism, observing in particular: (1) who comprises the organization and how its members articulate its goals; (2) how the organization uses a logic of generation and age to build a specific, contained third wave identity; and (3) how this identity is played out through the foundation’s focus of promoting and funding ideals of individualism, personal pleasure and choice, as well as how the foundation rewards those reacting to their perception of second wave feminism. All of these serve as examples of the containment of the foundation’s empowering potential through its failure to empower those outside of the limited identity construct it supports. These self-limitations reflect the problematic way in which Third Wave Foundation functioned as a self-containing entity, illustrating the challenges with enacting contained empowerment as a means of social change. The self-definition of third wave feminism recognized by the foundation was a reaction to other forms of feminism. This served as a problematic basis for the foundation because other feminisms, most especially what third wave perceived to be second wave feminism, were part of overt social movements. Second wave feminism, from the perspective of members of the Third

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Wave Foundation in the early 2000s was associated with the (failed) equal rights movement. Second wave feminism therefore maintained a specific set of goals, and second wave organizations like the National Organization for Women (NOW) reflected those goals and resulting identity. Third wave feminism as espoused by the foundation intentionally lacked a clear activist goal (or set of goals); as such, third wave empowerment had no direction and no direct impact on the patriarchal system itself, instead, like many NGOs, their focus was on the individual and her place within the system. The liminal nature of the third wave thus served both as a container and as a source of empowerment for the movement. The contained empowerment of third wave feminism resulted in a movement that constructed an empowered identity for its participants and then took that identity away when the participants aged out of the movement. This chapter will illustrate how Third Wave Foundation upheld these intentionally limiting principles and systematically worked to constrict their own advocacies. Two young women, Rebecca Walker and Amy Richards, who clearly self-identify as third wave feminists, founded the organization.53 Rebecca Walker, daughter of famed author Alice Walker, is cited as having first identified the third wave of feminism.54 Amy Richards is one of the coauthors of the Manifesta: Young Women, Feminism, and the Future, a book outlining, though never defining, third wave feminism.55 At the time this research was undertaken, however, both of these women had retired from the organization itself and were now working with other feminist and social change groups. Third Wave Foundation was motivated by young women organizers to unite over issues of “campaigning for a living wage, environmental protections, reproductive rights, combating racism, voting registration and much more”56 as a means of unifying young women “across racial and ethnic lines throughout America.”57 This motivation aligns with the goal of third wave feminism to be inclusive of all races and ethnicities and serving as a response to participants’ perceptions of second wave inadequacies. This also illustrates the way that these young women grouped together based on their perceptions of generationally-shared needs and experiences. Third Wave Foundation was designed for the benefit of young women. Not only did they fund young women’s projects, abortions, and grant scholarship money to young women throughout the United States, they also provided internships and opportunities for young women to gain hands-on experience as activists within social justice movements. The foundation actuated its goals and ideologies by funding young women’s experiences. In 2003, during the ethnographic research for my dissertation,58 one member of the foundation explained that there are hundreds of young women around the world who are organizing or at least trying to speak up. The foundation, in response, was trying to be a vehicle where that work could be funded. The member

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further explained that young women, being doubly marginalized, were too often blocked from funding opportunities by the patriarchal system. This is the reason, according to foundation activists, that they focused solely on young women. The foundation placed self-limits on its activities; it was primarily a funding organization, and although members participated in other activist activities, these were sponsored by organizations other than the foundation itself. The foundation’s physical offices were located in New York City, in Chelsea, an area populated with up-and-coming art galleries and trendsetters. However, upon my arrival in New York and heading to the foundation, it became evident that the office was located on the fringes of Chelsea, near the Hudson, surrounded by dubious and shabby warehouses. Once the correct building was located (the street numbers were not visible on most of that block), locating the foundation’s offices among the many art galleries on their floor was a challenge. Their office was tucked in the back of one of the galleries, with no access except to pass through the gallery itself. However, as the foundation used its website and correspondence to accomplish most of its goals, its physical space was not a primary concern for the organization. When I completed my dissertation research there I asked a key question: “How do you define third wave feminism?” The response was troubling, yet illustrative of third wave’s efforts to encourage inclusiveness and intersectionality. The answer was simple, they rejected definition, not wanting to be confined and restricted to a particular set of ideals. Instead of what third wave was, they focused on who third wave was, explaining the work of the foundation was to serve young women ages fifteen to thirty. In fact, one of the members revealed she was turning thirty, and so would be retiring from the organization. Third Wave Foundation was established to raise awareness of and support for survivors of a variety of oppressions, “including violence, poverty, racism, homophobia, inaccessible health care and rigid workplace structures.”59 Third wave activism focused on personal empowerment for individuals, rather than systemic change, which permeated the efforts of the organization. Participants described this focus as a nontraditional form of activism designed to provide hope for individuals seeking to promote systemic change for themselves and others. However, such activism can also fail to actuate systemic change because of its liminal and temporal focus. The only restriction the foundation placed on its funding ability was the directed goal to only fund young women or organizations focusing specifically on young women. As a result, the foundation primarily became a funding organization, providing funds to activists and other organizations promoting young, fifteen- to thirty-year-old women. As such, it echoes the patterns of NGOization. Thus, the result was an NGO dedicated to the exclusive role of empowering young

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women, regardless of other indicators of need or feminist ideology, through a type of limited activism. GENERATIONAL AND GENDERED IDENTITIES: INTENTIONALLY RESTRICTED EMPOWERMENT Because of the foundation’s self-imposed age limits, members are all forced out at thirty. One retiring member’s confusion over how to grow past her role at the organization reflected a major concern with age-based, generational focus. Foundation members were convinced that, after thirty, a woman had many more choices and chances at finding financial support for her projects. Yet, the retiring member’s choices were limited, and problematized because now that she had outgrown the third wave her goals lost focus. The problematic nature of locating a movement’s empowerment in a specific, contained, and temporal identity is clearly revealed through the ability to outgrow that identity. Also revealed was the challenge for the foundation to promote its contained empowerment without limiting that power so strictly that it becomes literally ineffective. However, the foundation, and those members who had outgrown this definition of third wave, insisted that the age focus must be maintained; asserting that young women aged fifteen to thirty had few options otherwise available to them, and little attention paid them other than through marketing and consumer culture. Foundation members have noted that young women have been cut off from political action. Further, they have highlighted the need to find issues illustrating how young women from different intersectional and social strata categories had more similarities than differences. This distinction helped the foundation team unify around specific age-based goals and agendas. Third Wave Foundation thus attempted to give young women a sense of empowerment that can be carried back into their normative, patriarchal, structural lives, as well as provide an impetus for change in those spaces. Thus, the ability to help young women change their own status was the foundation’s most clear ambition; exemplified by how the foundation’s ability to empower is contained, and contained in how that empowering ability was dependent upon a tightly defined identity construct. The experiences and concepts related to third wave feminism drew upon the history and generationalizing of the Third Wave Foundation members and grant recipients. These women cited how in the early 1990s when young women began organizing as feminist activists, they often rejected the feminist label because they saw it as referring to an older generation that did not represent them.60 Similarly, author Deborah Siegel explains that the era illustrated a “resurgence of grassroots student activism, young feminist conferences, and

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a host of new or newly revitalized social action organizations and networks led largely by young women.”61 The resulting loose collection of third wave feminist organizations and web spaces came into being primarily by promoting generational ideals regardless of race or ethnicity. However, third wave organizations did not all support the same sets of values. For instance, several such organizations in the 1990s and early 2000s placed a great deal of emphasis on sexuality and personal pleasure, while others emphasized economic concerns facing young women in the marketplace of the time. Thus, the lack of a clear definition for third wave feminism, and the often contrasting values espoused from within the movement, were far less significant to these activists than the labelling of practitioners as “young women.” Thus, the specific issues promoted by the Third Wave Foundation reflected the many varied goals associated with third wave, yet remained fixed on generational values and identities. Third wave feminism is associated with Generation X (people born in the 1960s and 1970s) and the youngest in the millennial generation (those born in the 1980s).62 Both of these generations are linked with growing up technologically savvy and in a society composed of nontraditional families. The significance of this generationalizing within the foundation and other third wave organizations is a social pattern revealing that Generations X and millennial children were often raised by two working parents or by a single working parent: thus, expectations of both working and having a family were a generational norm. In my interviews, foundation members discussed the challenges that women still face regarding the choice to work and work/life balance as major concerns for the third wave generation. Further, they associated their experience as having been silenced by their elders in feminism, and by patriarchy itself, thus they focused on the need and right to voice their concerns about other individual choices such as the right to choose abortion, the right to choose education, and the right to choose one’s sexual preferences, reflecting the values they associated with teenaged and twenty-something young women. A goal for the members of the Third Wave Foundation was to situate the organization as a social change agency. However, the foundation’s work highlighted a third wave identity rooted in improving the personal pleasure and personal empowerment of a young woman rather than an identity created to encourage social change. Thus, the focus of the foundation’s identity construct is as much individualized as it is generationalized. The empowered individual is the focus of their activism, and except for the restrictions on age and gender there are no other distinct characteristics required. However, a noticeable class issue dictated the foundation’s ideals: It takes money for many of these choices to be possible, so the goals of inclusiveness for all are challenged by financial status. Thus, the foundation provided money for young women who had no other access to financial aid.

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Because the focus of the organization was to provide potential for the individual practitioner within a particular generation of young women, further advocacy and activism relied on the individual’s ability to negotiate power for herself. The foundation provided only the tool of financial support which, naturally, would become a challenge when that individual young woman aged past the foundation’s demographic target, and was left without ongoing support and networking to further aid her. It was also a challenge, however, because it assumed that the young woman was equipped with the tools necessary to empower herself and maintain that power once she attained the funding granted by the organization. Yet, outside of the specific age group targeted by the organization, not even the tool of funding is available to interested parties, regardless of the work they are accomplishing. Thus, who the foundation decides to fund is more significant than what that person is doing or what third wave goals may or may not be met in funding this individual. Further complicating the constructed and contained third wave identity utilized by the foundation, the assumed third wave feminist standpoint implied a middle-class background. In situating itself in themes designed to reach a particular class status within a generation, the foundation contained its empowering potential and limited its activist NGO role to improving the lives of a relatively small group of people. Third wave writings call for the inclusion of multiplicities, not a masking of them. Third Wave Foundation’s practices could be used to mask differences behind an illusion of age unity, containing and limiting benefits and empowerment to a select group of individuals. PROMOTING AND FUNDING IDEALISM: ENACTING CONTAINED IDENTITIES Because the audience or target population of Third Wave Foundation was fixed and the issues and topics the foundation funds were limited by the age and gender of the young women practitioners, the lack of ability for the organization and its feminism to grow with the generation already present reinforced a “frozen-in-time” quality limited to temporary empowerment. The organization did not promote an individual empowerment that could grow with the practitioner, nor did it promote systemic change. This illustrates a consistent ineffectiveness of an NGO: as its activism is limited to a particular temporal or liminal quality.63 The foundation’s largest funding project was its Reproductive Health and Justice program. Through this program, the foundation provided two major types of grants: research grants that focused on training and educating about abortion and increasing young women’s access to abortions; and “emergency grants” for young women seeking abortions. The Reproductive

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Rights program director explained that this was seen as a triumph for the organization. Thus, the foundation carried the same attributes of many NGOs as an inward, rather than an outward looking entity, confined by a focus on specialized identity constructs. The nature of third wave feminism lent itself to contained empowerment; extremely localized empowerment rooted in the experiences of the locals. Therefore, the foundation itself maintained its funding focus on young women, while it attempted to incorporate as large a variety of issues as possible, but found its greatest success in its core abortion funding. This illustrates a conflict within the function of the foundation itself: while its ability to fund projects is strictly limited to an age group, there remains a desire to generate third wave ideals and values outside of that age group. The ability to encourage young women to participate in larger feminist organizations and ventures is an opportunity to encourage these young women to find empowerment tools in addition to the ones tied to the third wave identity. Thus, here is the opportunity for third wave empowerment to progress beyond its normative container. However, only one of the foundation’s 2003-era projects clearly illustrates this ability. The foundation’s “Reaching Out Across MovementS” program (ROAMS) was designed to help different feminist organizations network and “share movement building resources with organizations and individuals using a progressive social justice framework.”64 The ROAMS project involves funding young women’s organizations to travel and meet with other organizations. Again, the focus for the foundation was on young women aged fifteen to thirty. However, while they will not (cannot, as explained by the members) provide funding to organizations that are not primarily run by young women, they allowed participants in the funded projects the opportunity to build networks to and with other feminist organizations that do not meet the age requirements. While the networking and relationship building of projects like ROAMS provided global outreach, the foundation remained confined geographically, not networking outside of the United States, yet again intentionally limiting their outreach and potential. Members explained that Third Wave Foundation was an intentionally small organization focused on personal empowerment for young American women, in part because they didn’t feel they had the resources and capacity to expand or to go international. They also felt they could lose their accessibility to and comfortable dialogue with those with whom they already engaged. Members of the foundation believed that women can access the power structure and become personally empowered within it, but they could not directly affect the structure itself. This represents a type of “trickle-down” politics where, given the opportunity, individuals can find and claim the tools

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necessary to enact change. The challenge for this politic is, of course, that the patriarchal system does not make finding and understanding how to easily use these tools. Therefore, much of the foundation’s activism focused on actualizing women’s issues in small steps and in spaces not responsive to the system itself. This is why they focused on funding other organizations and individuals that are promoting change. They were helping them, financially, to locate and obtain the tools necessary to actuate change. Thus, the intentional containment of Third Wave Foundation by age is a tool, however problematic, that these activists used to empower young women. They, themselves, felt empowered through active participation in the decision-making processes for issuing grants and other funds for young women. Third Wave Foundation used a set of tools that they adapted from patriarchal norms and reconstructed utilizing third wave feminist ideologies in order to promote change. They funded multiple kinds of projects, from grassroots organizations run by young women, to abortions, to academic research. Because they resisted acknowledging a particular definition or history of third wave feminism, foundation members believed they had the freedom to choose to fund projects of any type, as long as the beneficiaries fit the required gender and age range. Given Third Wave Foundation’s relatively small target population, the contained nature of this organization’s empowerment cannot be ignored. While for that population the funding and support of Third Wave Foundation is a means of empowerment, the fact that such empowerment is denied to men and older (and younger) women challenges the potential that they can move from the margins. The organization and movement limited itself through its own rhetoric even as it attempted to avoid definition and, therefore, limited its potential. The result is, clearly, contained empowerment; it works for and because of a marginalized population and has a potential impact on the system itself, but the function of the organization is limited to its containment. Further, because the focus remains on the individual, the power structure itself is not so much affected as are young women’s positions within the structure. The hope that the foundation provides, ultimately, is that once these young women who are empowered within the foundation leave that space, through graduating or retiring out, or through successfully negotiating their positions within the normative structure, they will find a way to change the normative system from their new positions. Therefore, Third Wave Foundation, most significantly, provided a liminal space where particular experiences were valued and individual circumstances could be improved or altered. The experiences and ideals of the third wave itself are not restricted and can change, but the demographic the foundation targets does not. However, the foundation places the impetus for change upon the individual practitioner of the third wave to change how that

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individual functions within the system. Thus, while much of what Third Wave Foundation does is partially removed from patriarchy and systemic power, it is still providing hope and opportunity to young women who wish to improve their own circumstances. The confined nature of the organization, however, severely limits its ability to function as a means of feminist empowerment. DECOLONIZING CONTAINMENT IN NGO-BASED ACTIVISM In a 2020 interview celebrating the twentieth anniversary rerelease of Manifesta, Third Wave Foundation founder Amy Richards discussed how third wave and feminism have evolved since their early efforts. One of the key points highlighted is what they see as the ongoing role of NGOs as change agents. Richards explains, “I think as a consequence of this you’ve had this really robust non-profit sector that was holding the government accountable—and now change is happening everywhere. It’s in tech companies; it’s in big media companies; it’s sort of all over.”65 Third Wave Foundation was not unlike other NGOs in this era, both feminist and those focused on other forms of embodied activism, in that it sought to empower the individual rather than directly attack political systems. Many NGOs in this era were primarily constructed to be apolitical or depoliticized.66 Much like Third Wave Foundation’s focus on philanthropic funding for young women, NGOs in the 1990s and 2000s served as philanthropic agents of global development and sustainability.67 However, also as seen in the case of Third Wave Foundation’s ROAMS project, NGOs needed separate efforts, often ones tied to politics and political actors, to gain or disperse funding and efforts outside of their specified purviews. Such is the case with both international and transnational NGOs as well as those within countries that are deeply aligned with ruling governmental parties, so that they are NGOs in name only. One early example is Tunisia where, shortly after independence under President Habib Bourguiba, a “law on associations pushed a number of women’s groups to join the Union Nationale de la Femme Tunisienne (UNFT), an organization that the government used to spread its policies.”68 Both in regard to audience and constituent expectations, and in regard to fiscal necessity, such focus on essentialized womanhood reinforces the liminal, identity-restricted nature of feminist activism, and the resulting challenge for intersectional and nonreactive agency expansion. The “woman” focus would also, for the era associated with the 1990s and early 2000s, delegitimize the efforts of gender-based NGOs due to backlash against feminisms and feminist ideals in Europe, Oceana, and North America. The resulting challenge would be further reinforced by criticisms that Western

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feminisms and globally dominant gender-focused efforts were not relevant or intersectionally appropriate in regions like Southeast Asia and the Middle East and North Africa where violent activity focused on democratic, antiauthoritarian, and religious liberation movements cut across gender divides. In the 1990s and early 2000s, during the advent of North American third wave feminism, many NGOs featured outreach and advocacy via evolving digital processes. These processes have continued to gain in import within feminist and women’s movements. Recall that Kira O’Connor, EMEA Safety Outreach of Twitter Ireland, argued, “Social media is really a powerful tool.”69 However, in many cases involving women, its power is extremely limited. There are notable exceptions. For instance, Céline Miani and Yudit Namer, in their study, “Women’s Voices on Social Media: The Advent of Feminist Epidemiology?”70 present two cases for which social media served as mobilizing forces for collective action: In the first case, British women’s testimonies posted to Facebook on the side effects of vaginal mesh, supposed to treat urinary incontinence, which led to class action lawsuits and revised guidelines for the use of the devices. In the second, Twitter hashtags #payetonuterus [uterine pain] and #payetongyneco on sexism and gender-based violence enacted by gynecologists and obstetrics, led to an investigation and production of a 164-page report by the République Française Haut Conseil à l’Égalité entre les Femmes et les Hommes [French Government High Council for Equality between Women and Men] and the establishment of l’Observatoire des Violences Obstétricales et Gynécologiques [The Observatory of Obstetric and Gynecological Violence] to research, to bring the problem to the attention of the other governmental bodies and the national disciplinary chamber, and to provide guidance in policy making.71 The initiative also raised awareness about this type of gender-based violence in other countries such as Italy.72 Mina Baliamoune-Lutz, in her study on women’s NGOs in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA), argues gender equality and women’s “empowerment have, for the last several years, been an important topic for international agencies, many national governments and civil society. However, recent reviews of progress towards achieving Millennium Development Goal 3 (MDG3) note that progress has been ‘sluggish’ and that this goal remains unfulfilled.”73 One concern is the need for multi-constituent, transnational collaboration and coalition. In her work, “Stop Thinking Properly: Feminist Activism and Coalescing with History,” Kate Boyd argues for a “historically grounded, radical re-imagining of feminist coalition in the present moment.”74 Boyd highlights two salient concepts: “pain” and “the practice of coalescing with history.”75 Drawing from contemporary historical moments in Black feminist cultural imaginaries during the late 1970s and early 1980s, a historical moment arose

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as what feminist scholar Sonia Alvarez named the “NGO boom.”76 Alvarez argues, “NGOs became the subject of considerable controversy among feminist across the globe in the 1990s.”77 While nation-states, intergovernmental organizations (IGOs), and international financial institutions (IFIs) embraced NGOs, they did so to assuage their own responsibilities to their constituents and stakeholders, instead looking at the potential impact of NGOs as a “magic bullet” of which “nothing short of miracles” were to be expected.78 Since the “NGO boom,” the number of women-focused NGOs has continued to increase in regions such as the Middle East, North Africa, Afghanistan, and Pakistan (MENAP), generating what Islah Jad identifies as “a heated debate” about ties of these organizations to “their donors, their ideology, the utility of their roles in development and social change, and their links to their national states. In brief, they have been viewed as a new and growing form of dependency on the West, and as a tool for it to expand its hegemony.”79 Throughout the Global South and, in particular, the MENA, “the failure of Arab governments to meet the increasing economic, social, health, and cultural needs of their citizens was a primary driver behind the emergence of the NGOs which came to fill this gap.”80 This is illustrated, among other examples, by wives of governmental leaders founding and leading their own NGOs, in part to provide, or appear to provide services relinquished by national governments.81 More recently, “as a result of political developments over the past few years in the wake of civil wars and increasing violence and terrorism, civil society organizations have experienced a major decline,” reports Mohamed Abdelaziz in “The Hard Reality of Civil Society in the Arab World.”82 This is due, in part, as a result of “a number of laws passed by Arab governments restricting the operations of NGOs. As a result, their international and local funding has sharply declined, they have been subjected to systematic media campaigns distorting their image, and they have even been targeted by security forces.”83 Abdelaziz notes: Arab governments have employed a massive arsenal of specially-designed local laws against NGOs, particularly against those that advocate for human rights and democracy. These particular organizations were closely monitored by security apparatuses, which in turn provided the governments with detailed information on their sources of funding. Moreover, there are laws allowing the authorities to dissolve and investigate these NGOs, as well as sentence their employees to prison.84

These laws have led to the limitations or complete deterioration of NGO work and development. If NGOs attempted to continue their efforts, their work

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was thwarted by legal fees and time in court cases as they were charged with violating the new laws.85 While most of the laws restricting the operations of NGOs in the Middle East, North Africa, Afghanistan, and Pakistan (MENAP) come from governments within the region, there is an additional push from outside it. A consortium of NGOs in the region submitted a report to the UN secretary-general that identified “constraints and obstacles” to NGOs and “individuals active in the non-violent struggle for peace and the promotion and protection of human rights.”86 In 2005, Pax Christi International and member organizations, Arab Women Media Center in Jordan, Center for Conflict Resolution and Reconciliation, l’Association Justice et Misericorde in Lebanon, DarEmar in Syria, the Arab Educational Institute in Palestine, and the Library on Wheels for Non-violence and Peace alerted the UN that the US “war on terror” was “a major cause for tighter policies vis-à-vis NGOs and activists. In many cases the ‘war on terror’ and related ‘security’ laws and regulations have served as a legitimisation of existing policies negatively affecting civil society. ‘Anti-terror’ measures, often imposed under large pressure from the US and the EU, make the work of NGOs more difficult.”87 Similarly, NGOs spread in East Central and South Eastern Europe, many of which were funded and highly influenced by pro-democracy donors after the collapse of the Soviet Union.88 Post-communist/post-Soviet efforts in this region promoted Euro-centric national identity-building in order to disrupt and dislodge Soviet cultural tones.89 Women’s organizations in former Soviet nations echoed the focus on rape and gender-based violence seen in other global regions during the 1990s and early 2000s. These organizations were also, however, often tied to former, pre-Soviet gender-oriented entities, providing a reclaimative connection to former European national and regional identities and cultures. “Some argue that the social focus was partially a deliberate strategy in response to the experience of a totalitarian state and the current liberal ideology,”90 thus revealing the necessary pro-Western ideological foundation of post-Soviet women’s NGOs. The pro-democracy and pro-European identity focus of NGO funding in this region continues through the present and is particularly evident in the visibility of efforts associated with Ukrainian resistance and relief after Putin’s 2022 invasion.91 Thus, many NGOs must function as reconstructivist activism, reinforcing the hegemonic norms associated with the regions and nation-states within which they operate. Such reconstructionism allows them to function, and thus allows change to occur for individuals without disrupting normative power. Feminist and other embodied activist NGOs must therefore find a strategic politicization framed as apolitical, or hegemonically supportive, while still promoting embodied goals that may run counter to essentialist categorizations. When multiple marginalizations are applied within global discourses,

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this problem intensifies. In discussing the Romani women’s movement, Margareta Matache explains, “Human rights frameworks put the emphasis on individual, fixed situations of rights violation, isolating a discriminatory event from the wider circumstances of the victim, but also from the structural and historical nature of a particular discriminatory phenomenon.”92 She explains how the human rights and sexual violations of Romani women and girls must be negotiated within human rights dogma oriented to individual cases, which “fail to incorporate the prevalent, collective nature of anti-Romani practices.” Thus, NGO work must negotiate between recognizing gender and other intersectional needs, as well as addressing wide-ranging goals for promoting systemic change opportunities. ​Other entities across the globe have also made the work of NGOs, advocates, and activists more difficult. For instance, in Pakistan, in the days leading up to, and including International Women’s Day, in March 2021, a counter-protest arose in response to a series of women’s marches and events known as the Aurat [Women’s March] rallies organized by prominent women’s NGOs including Women’s Democratic Front and the Women’s Action Front. Representing hegemonic, patriarchal concerns, an Urdu language daily newspaper launched a full-fledged campaign against the Aurat rallies. Such counter-protests reinforce the reconstructionist restrictions that NGOs face when they actively seek to work with existing institutional structures. NGOs cannot empower systemically as long as they focus on monetization and agency for individual recipients; thus they create empowerment that is contained. In “The Dangers of NGO-isation of Women’s Rights in Africa,” Hala Al-Karib, regional director of the Strategic Initiative for Women in the Horn of Africa (SIHA), argues, “The emancipation of women is one of the most significant aspects of social and cultural transformation around the world. Women are gradually moving to occupy more space in the public arena.” Across the African continent, however, she argues, “the history and current dynamics of women’s emancipation movements are off the radar and often poorly documented beyond women associated with political parties, liberation movements, or NGOs which receive funding from the global North.”93 The potential for empowerment is therefore limited to those who already have access to or the ability to mimic existing forms of power. The process of NGOization requires, by design, that agency be negotiated through the layering of activist efforts simultaneously as advocacy and in pursuit of structural power. Feminist NGOs, like the Third Wave Fund, are therefore limited to strategic promotion of an embodied status that is simultaneously visible and underrepresented. They must overtly engage with hegemonic institutions in order to maintain their funding streams and operational status. They must negotiate women’s identities and lives from

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a liminal position that seeks to constantly constrain them. Therefore, feminist NGOs serve to generate reconstuctionist change as a form of contained empowerment. NOTES 1. Walter R. Fisher, “Narration as a Human Communication Paradigm: The Case of Public Moral Argument.” Communications Monographs 51, no. 1 (1984): 1–22, 2. 2. Chantal Umuhoza, Barbara Oosters, Miranda van Reeuwijk, and Ine Vanwesenbeeck, “Advocating for Safe Abortion in Rwanda: How Young People and the Personal Stories of Young Women in Prison Brought about Change.” Reproductive Health Matters 21, no. 41 (2013): 49–56. 3. See We Will End Femicide (WWWF), “2021 March Report of We Will End Femicide Platform.” kadincinayetlerinidurduracagiz.net/veriler/2960/2021-marchreport-of-we-will-end-femicide-platform, 2021; Caroline Warrick, “The Istanbul Convention: Turkey’s Withdrawal.” The Borgen Project, September 3, 2020. borgenproject.org/tag/we-will-stop-femicide/. 4. Kasonde Mwaba, Gamze Senyurek, Yeşim Işıl Ulman, Nicole Minckas, Peter Hughes, Sharli Paphitis, Shazana Andrabi, et al., “‘My Story is Like a Magic Wand’: A Qualitative Study of Personal Storytelling and Activism to Stop Violence against Women in Turkey.” Global Health Action 14, no. 1 (2021): 1927331. 5. Walter Fisher, Human Communication as Narration: Toward a Philosophy of Reason, Value, and Action (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2021; Original work published in 1987), 187 (Emphasis in original). 6. Mwaba et al., “‘My Story is Like a Magic Wand.’” 7. Joseph S. Nye, “Soft Power.” Foreign Policy 80 (Autumn 1990): 153–71; Joseph S. Nye, Soft Power: The Means to Success in World Politics (New York: Public Affairs, 2004). 8. Cathy Campbell and Jeneviève Mannell, “Conceptualising the Agency of Highly Marginalised Women: Intimate Partner Violence in Extreme Settings.” Global Public Health 11, no. 1–2: 1–16. See, also, Jacqueline Banks, Stuart Howard Sweeney, and Wendy Meiring, “The Geography of Women’s Empowerment in West Africa.” Spatial Demography. Published online January 21, 2022. doi.org/10.1007/ s40980-021-00099-2. 9. Mwaba et al., “‘My Story is Like a Magic Wand.’” 10. Kelly Clarke, “Hashtag for Empowerment.” Khaleej Times, February 23, 2016. 11. Cited in Clarke, “Hashtag for Empowerment,” par. 4. 12. Cited in Clarke, “Hashtag for Empowerment,” par. 10. 13. Cited in Clarke, “Hashtag for Empowerment,” par. 11. 14. For scholarly work on nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) that focus on women’s rights, see Natasha Bingham, “Gendering Civil Society: The State of Women’s NGOs in the Former Soviet Region.” Women’s Studies 46, no. 5 (July 2017): 478–94. doi:10.1080/00497878.2017.1324445; Fae Chubin, “Glocalizing Women’s Empowerment: Feminist Contestation and NGO Activism in Iran.”

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Journal of Contemporary Ethnography 49, no. 6 (December 2020): 715–44. doi: 10.1177/0891241620947135; Amrita Basu, Introduction. Women’s Movements in the Global Era: The Power of Local Feminisms, edited by Amrita Basu, 1–28 (Boulder, CO: Westview); Ola Abouzeid, Projects of Arab Women Empowerment: Current Status and Future Prospects (Cairo, Egypt: Arab Women Organization, 2008). 15. Saba Bahar, “Human Rights Are Women’s Right: Amnesty International and the Family.” Global Feminisms Since 1945 (2000): 265–89. 16. Victoria A. Newsom, Catherine Cassara, and Lara Lengel, “Discourses on Technology Policy in the Middle East and North Africa: Gender Mainstreaming vs. Local Knowledge.” Communication Studies 62, no. 1 (2011): 74–89. doi.org/10.108 0/10510974.2011.534973. 17. The United Nations (UN) definition of gender mainstreaming can be found at the United Nations, Office of the Special Advisor on Gender Issues and Advancement of Women, “Gender Mainstreaming: Strategy for Promoting Gender Equality.” August 2001. www​.un​.org​/womenwatch​/osagi​/pdf​/factsheet1​.pdf​/. 18. Newsom, Cassara, and Lengel, “Gender Mainstreaming vs. Local Knowledge,” 83. 19. Newsom, Cassara, and Lengel, “Gender Mainstreaming vs. Local Knowledge,” 83. 20. Newsom, Cassara, and Lengel, “Gender Mainstreaming vs. Local Knowledge,” 83. 21. For more on the limitations of gender mainstreaming, see Itziar Mujika Chao and iker zirion landaluze, “Development and Foreign Aid.” In Routledge Handbook of Feminist Peace Research, edited by Tarja Väyrynen, Swati Parashar, Élise Féron, Catia Cecilia Confortini (London: Routledge); Serene J. Khader, Decolonizing Universalism: A Transnational Feminist Ethic (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019); Gemma Carney, “Communicating or Just Talking? Gender Mainstreaming and the Communication of Global Feminism.” Women and Language 26, no. 1 (2003): 52– 60; Paul Chaney, “Civil Society and Gender Mainstreaming: Empirical Evidence and Theory-Building from Twelve Post-Conflict Countries 2005–15.” World Development 83, (2016): 280–94; Hilary Charlesworth, “Not Waving but Drowning: Gender Mainstreaming and Human Rights in the United Nations.” Harvard Human Rights Journal 1, no. 18 (2005): 1–18; Nina Gjoci and Lara Lengel, “Gender Difference and Transnational Feminism: Cross-National Gender Mainstreaming Policies to Address Structural Inequality.” Anonymously peer-reviewed paper presented at the 85th annual convention of the Central States Communication Association, Milwaukee, April 7, 2018; Sabine Lang, “Women’s Advocacy Networks: The European Union, Women’s NGOs and the Velvet Triangle.” In Theorizing NGOs: States, Feminisms and Neoliberalism, edited by Victoria Bernal and Inderpal Grewal, 266–84 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014); Lara Lengel, Victoria A. Newsom, and Catherine Cassara, “Transcender l’Essentiel et les Stratégies Discursives d’In/Visibilité: Politique d’Intégration du Genre et des Femmes du Moyen-Orient et Afrique du Nord dans les Médias.” [“Transcending Essentialisation and Discursive Strategies of In/ Visibility: Gender Mainstreaming and MENA Women in the Media”]. French Journal for Media Research no 11 (2019). ISSN: 2264–4733. frenchjournalformediaresearch.

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com/lodel-1.0/main/index.php?id=1777/; Senoriah Wendoh and Tina Wallace, “Re-Thinking Gender Mainstreaming in African NGOs and Communities.” Gender and Development 13, no. 2 (2005): 70–9; Helen Elsey, Rachel Tolhurst, and Sally Theobald, “Mainstreaming HIV/AIDS in Development Sectors: Have We Learnt the Lessons from Gender Mainstreaming?” AIDS Care 17, no. 8 (2005): 988–98; Caroline Moser and Annalise Moser, “Gender Mainstreaming Since Beijing: A Review of Success and Limitations in International Institutions.” Gender and Development 13, no. 2 (2005): 11–22; Hillary Standing, “Gender, Myth and Fable: The Perils of Mainstreaming in Sector Bureaucracies.” In Feminisms in Development: Contradictions, Contestations and Challenges, edited by Andrea Cornwall, Elizabeth Harrison, and Ann Whitehead, 101–11 (London: ZED Books, 2007); Rebecca Tiessen, Everywhere/Nowhere: Gender Mainstreaming in Development Agencies (Bloomfield, CT: Kumarian Press, 2007); Senoriah Wendoh and Tina Wallace, “Re-Thinking Gender Mainstreaming in African NGOs and Communities.” Gender and Development 13, no. 2 (2005): 70–79. 22. Newsom, Cassara, and Lengel, “Gender Mainstreaming vs. Local Knowledge,” 81, 84. 23. Susan Franceschet, “‘State Feminism’ and Women’s Movements: The Impact of Chile’s Servicio Nacional de la Mujer on Women’s Activism.” Latin American Research Review (2003): 9–40; Sonia E. Alvarez, Elisabeth Jay Friedman, Ericka Beckman, Maylei Blackwell, Norma Stoltz Chinchilla, Nathalie Lebon, Marysa Navarro, and Marcela Ríos Tobar, “Encountering Latin American and Caribbean Feminisms.” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 28, no. 2 (2003): 537– 79; Lisa Markowitz and Karen W. Tice, “Paradoxes of Professionalization: Parallel Dilemmas in Women’s Organizations in the Americas.” Gender & Society 16, no. 6 (2002): 941–58; and Karen Beckwith, “Beyond Compare? Women’s Movements in Comparative Perspective.” European Journal of Political Research 37, no. 4 (2000): 431–68. 24. Proshant Chakraborty, “Rethinking NGOization as Postfeminist Practice: Interstitial Intimacies and Negotiations of Neoliberal Subjectivity in Violence Prevention.” Frontiers in Sociology 6 (2021, May 31): 654909. doi:10.3389/fsoc.2021.654909/, par. 1. 25. Chakraborty, “Rethinking NGOization as Postfeminist Practice.” 26. Further details about these historical moments in the development of NGOs are beyond the scope of this chapter. For more on La Conferencia Mundial del Año Internacional de la Mujer, see Tracey JeanBoisseau, “Jocelyn Olcott. International Women’s Year: The Greatest Consciousness-Raising Event in History.” American Historical Review 124, no. 4 (2019): 1437–38. doi:10.1093/ahr/rhz373. 27. United Nations, “ONU Mujeres, Conferencias Mundiales Sobre la Mujer” (no date). www​.unwomen​.org​/es​/how​-we​-work​/intergovernmental​-support​/world​ -conferences​-on​-women​#mexico​/. 28. United Nations, Report of the World Conference of the International Women’s Year, Mexico City, 19 June–2 July 1975 (New York: United Nations), 4.

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29. United Nations, “World Conference of the International Women’s Year 19 June–2 July 1975, Mexico City, Mexico.” Background. www​.un​.org​/en​/conferences​/ women​/mexico​-city1975, par. 5. 30. United Nations, Report of the World Conference of the International Women’s Year, 9. 31. For more on the NGO boom and NGOs more broadly, see Aziz Choudry and Dip Kapoor, “Introduction: NGOization: Complicity, Contradictions and Prospects.” NGOization: Complicity, Contradictions and Prospects (Zed Books, London, 2013); For analyses and critiques of NGO efforts in specific global regions, see, for instance, Dina Afrianty, Women and Sharia Law in Northern Indonesia: Local Women’s NGOs and the Reform of Islamic Law in Aceh (London: Routledge, 2015); Alvarez, “The Latin American Feminist NGO ‘Boom’”; Sedef Arat-Koç, “(Some) Turkish Transnationalism(s) in an Age of Capitalist Globalization and Empire: ‘White Turk’ Discourse, the New Geopolitics, and Implications for Feminist Transnationalism.” Journal of Middle East Women’s Studies 3, no. 1 (2007): 35–57; Joanna Pares Hoare, “Doing Gender Activism in a Donor-Organized Framework: Constraints and Opportunities in Kyrgyzstan.” Nationalities Papers 44, no. 2 (2016): 281–98. doi:10.1080/ 00905992.2015.1007344; Kathleen O’Reilly, “Resolving a Gendered Paradox: Women’s Participation and the NGO Boom in North India.” In Theorizing NGOs, edited by Victoria Bernal and Inderpal Grewal, 143–65 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014); Katja M. Guenther, “The Possibilities and Pitfalls of NGO Feminism: Insights from Postsocialist Eastern Europe.” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 36, no. 4 (2011): 863–87; Millie Thayer, Making Transnational Feminism: Rural Women, NGO Activists, and Northern Donors in Brazil (London: Routledge, 2010); Sonia E. Alvarez, “Beyond NGOization? Reflections from Latin America.” In Theorizing NGOs, edited by Victoria Bernal and Inderpal Grewal, 285–300 (Duke University Press, 2014); Eva-Maria Hardtmann, “Transnational Dalit Feminists in between the Indian State, the UN and the Global Justice Movement.” In Social Movements and the State in India, 75–92 (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016). 32. Katie Gilbert, “Why Well-Meaning NGOs Sometimes Do More Harm than Good.” Kellogg Insight, August 7, 2020. Kellogg School of Management, Northwestern University. insight.kellogg.northwestern.edu/article/ international-aid-development-ngos-crowding-out-government/. 33. Mark Anderson, “NGOs: Blessing or Curse”? The Africa Report, November 29, 2017. www​.theafricareport​.com​/777​/ngos​-blessing​-or​-curse​/. 34. Paula Lobato Gonzalez, “‘NGOization’: From Activism to Advocacy.” E-International Relations, July 15, 2021. www​.e​-ir​.info​/2021​/07​/15​/ngoization​-from​ -activism​-to​-advocacy​/, par. 2. 35. Lobato Gonzalez, “‘NGOization’: From Activism to Advocacy,” par. 6. See, also, David Paternotte, “The NGOization of LGBT activism: ILGA-Europe and the Treaty of Amsterdam.” Social Movement Studies 15, no. 4 (2016): 388–402. 36. Trevor Morris and Simon Goldsworthy, Public Relations for the New Europe (London: Springer, 2008), 125–26. 37. Lobato Gonzalez, “‘NGOization’: From Activism to Advocacy,” par. 6. See, also, Theerapat Ungsuchaval, “NGOization of Civil Society as Unintended

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Consequence: Premises on the Thai Health Promotion Foundation and its Pressures Toward NGOs in Thailand.” Presented at the International Society for Third-Sector Research (ISTR) conference, Stockholm, 2016, 4. 38. Lobato Gonzalez, “‘NGOization’: From Activism to Advocacy,” par. 6 39. Alvarez, “The Latin American Feminist NGO ‘Boom’”; Boyd, “Feminist Activism and Coalescing with History,” 42–43. 40. The outcome oriented approach is also evident in the neoliberalizing efforts in higher education. See, for instance, Emily Danvers, “Individualised and Instrumentalised? Critical Thinking, Students and the Optics of Possibility within Neoliberal Higher Education.” Critical Studies in Education 62, no. 5 (2021): 641–56; Daniel B. Saunders and Gerardo Bianco Ramirez, “Resisting the Neoliberalization of Higher Education: A Challenge to Commonsensical Understandings of Commodities and Consumption.” Cultural Studies ↔ Critical Methodologies (2017, April 27). doi. org/10.1177/1532708616669529; Gaile S. Cannella and Mirka Koro-Ljungberg, “Neoliberalism in Higher Education: Can We Understand? Can We Resist and Survive? Can We Become without Neoliberalism?” Cultural Studies ↔ Critical Methodologies (2016, September 21). doi.org/10.1177/1532708617706117; Zachary Kaiser, “School’s Back: How the Neoliberal ‘Privatization of Risk’ Explains the Deadly Decision to Re-Open Campuses.” LSE Impact Blog, London School of Economics, October 8, 2020. blogs.lse.ac.uk/impactofsocialsciences/2020/10/08/ schools-back-how-the-neoliberal-privatization-of-risk-explains-the-deadly-decisionto-re-open-campuses/; Beth Mintz, “Neoliberalism and the Crisis in Higher Education: The Cost of Ideology.” American Journal of Economics and Sociology 80, no. 1 (2021, January): 79–112. 41. Susan Franceschet, “‘State Feminism’ and Women’s Movements: The Impact of Chile’s Servicio Nacional de la Mujer on Women’s Activism.” Latin American Research Review (2003): 9–40. 42. Lisa McIntosh Sundstrom, “Women’s NGOs in Russia: Struggling from the Margins.” Demokratizatsiya 10, no. 2 (2002): 207–18, 218. 43. Gilbert, “Why Well-Meaning NGOs Sometimes Do More Harm than Good,” par. 2. 44. Gilbert, “Why Well-Meaning NGOs Sometimes Do More Harm than Good,” par. 6. 45. Mark Anderson, “NGOs: Blessing or Curse”? 46. Roman Povzyk, “Eight Problems that Regional NGOs Face.” Vox Ukraine, December 7, 2014. voxukraine.org/en/eight-problems-that-regional-ngos-face/. 47. In our study, “Discourses on Technology Policy in the Middle East and North Africa: Gender Mainstreaming vs. Local Knowledge,” we argue that programs and practices that situate local knowledge as an alternative strategy to gender mainstreaming are often more successful. Victoria A. Newsom, Catherine Cassara, and Lara Lengel, “Discourses on Technology Policy in the Middle East and North Africa: Gender Mainstreaming vs. Local Knowledge.” Communication Studies 62, no. 1 (2011): 1–16. doi.org/10.1080/10510974.2011.534973. 48. Pamela Aronson, “Feminists or ‘Postfeminists’? Young Women’s Attitudes toward Feminism and Gender Relations.” Gender & Society 17, no. 6 (2003): 903–22.

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49. Jessica K. Taft, “Girl Power Politics: Pop-Culture Barriers and Organizational Resistance.” In All About the Girl, edited by Anita Harris, 95–104 (London: Routledge, 2004). 50. Third Wave Fund. “Third Wave History,” n.d. www​.thirdwavefund​.org​/history​ -​-past​-initiatives​.html​/. 51. Third Wave Foundation blog, 2008. thirdwavefoundation.blogspot.com/. 52. Julie Shah, “Third Wave Foundation Seeks an Associate Director.” Women’s Funding Network, 2004. Accessed September 14, 2005. www​.wfnet​.org​/news​/story​ .php​?story​_id​=192​/. 53. Joanie M. Schrof, “Feminism’s Daughters.” U.S. News and World Report 115, no. 12 (1993, September 27): 68–72. 54. Rebecca Walker, “Becoming the Third Wave.” Ms., Spring 2002, 86–87. 55. Jennifer Baumgardner and Amy Richards, Manifesta: Young Women, Feminism, and the Future. See, also, Richards’s most recent books, We Are Makers: Real Women and Girls Shaping Our World (New York: Viking, 2019), and Make Your Mark: A Journal for Capturing Big Dreams (New York: Penguin Workshop, 2019). 56. Caralyn Green, “Foundation Leaders to Take On Third Wave Feminism in Talk.” The Collegian, November 2, 2001. www​.collegian​.psu​.edu​/arts​_and​_entertainment​ /foundation​-leaders​-to​-take​-on​-third​-wave​-feminism​-in​-talk​/article​_c2048dab​-240e​ -5d7f​-b432​-33d671be4c6c​.html​/. 57. Green, “Foundation Leaders to Take On Third Wave Feminism in Talk.” 58. Victoria A. Newsom, “Theorizing Contained Empowerment: A Critique of Activism and Power in Third Wave Feminist Spaces” (Doctoral dissertation, Bowling Green State University, 2004). 59. Joanie M. Schrof, “Feminism’s Daughters.” U.S. News and World Report 115, no. 12 (1993, September 27): 68–72, 70. 60. Newsom, “Contained Empowerment.” 61. Siegel, “Generating Theory in Feminism’s Third Wave,” 47. 62. William Strauss and Neil Howe, Generations: The History of America’s Future, 1584 to 2069 (New York: Morrow, 1991). 63. See, for instance, Jelena Cupać, and Irem Ebetürk, “Backlash Advocacy and NGO Polarization Over Women’s Rights in the United Nations.” International Affairs 97, no. 4 (2021): 1183–1201. doi.org/10.1093/ia/iiab069/. 64. Third Wave Foundation, Final Report, 2000–2002: ROAMS (New York: Third Wave Foundation, 2002), 1. 65. Baumgardener and Richards, cited in Shaw, “The Ms. Q&A.” 66. Kevin Edmonds, “Beyond Good Intentions: The Structural Limitations of NGOs in Haiti.” Critical Sociology 39, no. 3 (2012): 439–52. doi. org/10.1177/0896920512437053; Lata Narayanaswamy, “NGOs and Feminisms in Development: Interrogating the ‘Southern Women’s NGO.’” Geography Compass 8, no. 8 (2014), 576–89. doi.org/10.1111/gec3.12150/. 67. Melissa Meade, Rye Young, and Christine Keating, “Queering the Feminist Dollar: A History and Consideration of the Third Wave Fund as Activist Philanthropy.” In LGBTQ Politics, 563–79 (New York: New York University Press, 2017).

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68. Lilia Labidi, “The Arab Uprisings in Tunisia: Parity, Elections, and the Struggle for Women’s Rights.” In The Arab Uprisings. Catalysts, Dynamics, and Trajectories, edited by Fahed Al-Sumait, Nele Lenze, and Michael Hudson (Lanham MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2015), 175–203. 69. Cited in Clarke, “Hashtag for Empowerment.” 70. Céline Miani and Yudit Namer, “Women’s Voices on Social Media: The Advent of Feminist Epidemiology?” Emerging Themes in Epidemiology 18, no. 1 (June 16, 2021): 1–3. doi:10.1186/s12982-021-00097-1/. 71. Danielle Bousquet, Geneviève Couraud, and Margaux Collet,“Les Actes Sexistes Durant le Suivi Gynécologique et Obstétrica” [“Sexist Acts during Gynecological and Obstetric Follow-up”]. Report n°2018-06–26-SAN-034, voté le 26 Juin 2018. République Française Haut Conseil à l’Égalité entre les Femmes et les Hommes. www​.haut​-conseil​-egalite​.gouv​.fr​/IMG​/pdf​/hce​_les​_actes​_sexistes​_durant​_le​_suivi​ _gynecologique​_et​_obstetrical​_20180629​.pdf​/, 42, 116. 72. Danielle Bousquet, Geneviève Couraud, and Margaux Collet, “Les Actes Sexistes Durant le Suivi Gynécologique et Obstétricale,” 74. 73. Mina Baliamoune-Lutz, “The Effectiveness of Foreign Aid to Women’s Equality Organisations in the MENA.” Journal of International Development 28, no. 3 (April 2016): 320–41. 74. Kate Boyd, “Stop Thinking Properly: Feminist Activism and Coalescing with History.” Feminist Formations 30, no. 2 (2018): 40–64, 40. 75. Boyd, “Feminist Activism and Coalescing with History,” 40. 76. Sonia E. Alvarez, “Advocating Feminism: The Latin American Feminist NGO ‘Boom.’” International Feminist Journal of Politics 1, no. 2 (1999): 181–209. 77. Sonia E. Alvarez, “Beyond NGOization? Reflections from Latin America,” 285. 78. Sonia E. Alvarez, “Beyond NGOization? Reflections from Latin America,” 285. 79. Islah Jad, “The ‘NGOization’ of the Arab Women’s Movements.” Al-Raida xx, no. 100 (Winter 2003): 39–47. See, also, Sari Hanafi and Linda Tabar, “NGOs, Elite Formation and the Second Intifada.” Between the Lines II, no.18 (October 2002). www​.between​-lines​.org. 80. Mohamed Abdelaziz, “The Hard Reality of Civil Society in the Arab World.” Fikra Forum, The Washington Institute for Near East Policy, December 11, 2017. www​.washingtoninstitute​.org​/policy​-analysis​/hard​-reality​-civil​-society​-arab​-world, par. 2. 81. Islah Jad, “The ‘NGOization’ of the Arab Women’s Movements,” 39. See, also, Hosn Abboud, “Women and NGOs: Lebanese Women between Doing Justice to Themselves and Serving Others by Azza Sharara Baydoun.” Review, Al-Raida xx, no. 100 (Winter 2003): 142–43. 82. Abdelaziz, “The Hard Reality of Civil Society in the Arab World,” par. 2. 83. Abdelaziz, “The Hard Reality of Civil Society in the Arab World,” par. 2. 84. Abdelaziz, “The Hard Reality of Civil Society in the Arab World,” par. 3. 85. Abdelaziz, “The Hard Reality of Civil Society in the Arab World,” pars. 7–9. 86. Pax Christi International, “Restrictions on NGOs in the Mideast—CHR— NGO Statement. Civil and Political Rights, Including Questions of: Freedom of

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Expression.” United Nations, February 15, 2005. www​.un​.org​/unispal​/document​/auto​ -insert​-178083​/. 87. Pax Christi International, “Restrictions on NGOs in the Mideast,” par. 10. 88. Stefan Toepler and Lester M. Salamon, “NGO Development in Central and Eastern Europe: An Empirical Overview.” East European Quarterly 37, no. 3 (2003): 365–78. 89. JoAnn Carmin, “NGO Capacity and Environmental Governance in Central and Eastern Europe.” Acta Politica 45, no. 1 (2010): 183–202. 90. Amanda Sloat, “The Rebirth of Civil Society: The Growth of Women’s NGOs in Central and Eastern Europe.” European Journal of Women’s Studies 12, no. 4 (2005): 437–52, 439. 91. For more on NGO response to Putin’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine see Olga Byrska, “Civil Crisis Management in Poland: The First Weeks of the Relief in Russian War on Ukraine.” Journal of Genocide Research (2022): 1–8, and Elżbieta Ociepa-Kicińska and Małgorzata Gorzałczyńska-Koczkodaj, “Forms of Aid Provided to Refugees of the 2022 Russia–Ukraine War: The Case of Poland.” International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health 19, no. 12 (2022): 7085. 92. Margareta Matache, Foreword to The Romani Women’s Movement: Struggles and Debates in Central and Eastern Europe, edited by Angéla Kóczé, Violetta Zentai, Jelena Jovanović, and Enikő Vincze, xvi–xx (London: Routledge, 2019). 93. Hala Al-Karib, “The Dangers of NGO-isation of Women’s Rights in Africa.” Al Jazeera, 2018, 13 December. www​.aljazeera​.com​/opinions​/2018​/12​/13​/the​-dangers​ -of​-ngo​-isation​-of​-womens​-rights​-in​-africa​/, par. 1. .

SECTION III

Contemporary Activisms, Polarizations, and Problematic Containments

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The Containment of Digital Celebrity and Fan Activisms

In January 2022, in response to a devastating fire in a Bronx apartment complex in New York City, rap music icon Belcalis “Cardi B” Almánzar announced she would pay the funeral costs for the 17 victims.1 The fire displaced hundreds in addition to the seventeen killed, many of whom were expected to find it challenging to secure affordable new housing. This added to the complications of the COVID-19 pandemic already faced by the survivors, many of whom had previously qualified for the city’s Section 8 low-income housing vouchers, and would now face the challenge of rising housing costs exacerbated by the pandemic and supply chain issues.2 Cardi B’s philanthropy was well received in initial responses,3 but the challenges facing survivors would persist long after the funerals of their late neighbors, friends, and family members. Certainly, no one would expect a single celebrity to address all the challenges, and Cardi B deserves gratitude for her actions. The natural limits of philanthropic efforts, however, need to be understood. A self-identified former stripper,4 Cardi B is a self-proclaimed feminist, activist, celebrity, and creative director of Playboy.5 Her gendered experience and personal empowerment reflect the ideals espoused in the third wave and power feminisms she encountered as part of a generation of young women born in the 1990s, a generation who grew up when these feminisms had become visible through mediated girl power. Her feminist identity is tied to her sense of personal empowerment, and the successes of her personal choices. She explains, “Being a feminist is real simple; it’s that a woman can do things the same as a man. . . . Anything a man can do, I can do. I can finesse, I can hustle. We have the same freedom. I was top of the charts. I’m a woman and I did that. I do feel equal to a man.”6 That Cardi B’s power and influence are real, and systemic, are not questionable truths, her individual successes are not reflective of the majority of 201

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women who feel the effects of the wage gap and glass ceiling, nor the majority of women of color in the United States, nor the majority of women who grow up with immigrant parents, with a low-income lifestyle, nor with gang experiences in their childhoods.7 She is a celebrity, and her activism, like all celebrity activism, is tied to her celebrity identity. Celebrity activism is therefore also dependent on the understood popularity and worth of the celebrity’s mediated self. It is also reciprocal, reliant on the cultural capital assigned by the fandom itself. Thus, celebrity activism is a form of contained empowerment, both for the celebrity, and for their fans. Celebrity activism such as evidenced by Cardi B is part of a celebrity industry that is strategic, marketed, formulaic, and perpetuates a fandom driven by consumptive appeals to emotional belonging. Contemporary celebrity feminist activism echoes many of the contained and limited aspects of third wave feminist empowerment. Among the most visible celebrity activists are a number of former girl power heroines, such as Queen Latifah, Rose McGowan, Alissa Milano, Missy Elliott, and Angelina Jolie, and younger, millennial celebrity feminists mimic the hyperfeminine attributes associated with the girl power characters these women portrayed. Celebrity activism often centers empowerment and emancipation on individual practitioners and identities, rather than on intersectional experience. By highlighting the characteristics of belonging within fan communities, activism generated for and by these communities is driven by liminally situated shared identity and status within those group spaces. Celebrity activism is further consumptive in drive, ambition, and procedure, requiring product-based attributes associated with celebrity identity construction. Fan-based consumption is rooted in a perceptual closeness to celebrity, particularly in terms of exclusive information and products. Finally, celebrity activism also poses a potential danger, particularly when paired with media agenda setting and media effects on passive audience consumption. Celebrities, and fans, can harm their own cause, dilute the message, or disrupt the production mechanism. The success of celebrity activism requires either hypervisible performance, as well as the clarity of the message presented to the audience, or reports of actions attributed to a celebrity. When Colin Kaepernick first refused to stand for the national anthem prior to NFL games in 2016, his actions went largely unnoticed until he explained his actions, “I am not going to stand up to show pride in a flag for a country that oppresses black people and people of color.”8 It wasn’t until that quote, shared to NFL news reporter Steve Wyche, was shared out in relation to the Black Lives Matter movement that a large percentage of people understood and paid attention to Kaepernick’s actions.9 Kaepernick’s convictions and actions led to him becoming a polarizing figure in US culture, and, many claim, to the loss of his NFL career. He gained further recognition through a Nike campaign meant to appeal to US progressives

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and Black Lives Matter supporters.10 Kaepernick’s story illustrates both the risks and inherent security accorded those of celebrity status when engaging in activism. TWENTY-FIRST-CENTURY CELEBRITY FEMINISM Scholars have analyzed the feminist activist potential of Instagram.11 Like all social media in the late 2010s and early 2020s, the digital platform both aids in promoting the work of established celebrities, and also is a place where celebrity arises in the form of social media influencers (SMIs). SMIs primarily developed as third-party product endorsers, a performative career option based on presenting messages within rhetorically constructed frameworks intended to appeal to particular audiences as a form of self- and topic-promotion.12 While the majority of influencers focus on product promotion, activist and feminist influencers have also become visible in recent years. Presenting a professional form of blogging as activism, these SMIs serve as both an influencer and a public intellectual.13 Like all SMIs they are dependent, in part, on marketing strategies tied to corporate backers14 and thus serving in a type of commodified feminism. In addition to overt forms of activism among SMIs, neoliberal activist performances have also taken shape. “Mom” bloggers, for example, are SMIs who create Instagram, Pinterest, and other accounts aimed at sharing stories of motherhood—thus participating in a type of marketization of motherhood and femininity.15 In her study of what she identifies as “overtly feminist” Instagram accounts, Cat Mahoney, in her article “Is This What a Feminist Looks Like? Curating the Feminist Self in the Neoliberal Visual Economy of Instagram,” notes, “Social media, particularly image sharing platforms such as Instagram, has changed the nature of what it means to be ‘visible’ in the contemporary political climate. The accessibility of Instagram offers hitherto unimaginable opportunities for users to perform their political beliefs.”16 The visibility afforded by social media comes at a cost, however.17 Carolina Are argues that, “Initially, social media platforms seemed to aid activists and their cause, becoming an opportunity for change in the face of institutional failure.”18 Movements including #MeToo, and #BlackLivesMatter “painted these platforms as heralding freedom of expression.”19 In 2020, however, Are attests that the infrastructure and algorithmic bias of social networks tend to harm women, girls, and other vulnerable users. She notes, “Offline vulnerabilities have followed women online. Even celebrities are being drawn off social media by repetitions of offline gendered and racial hatred.”20 One example is Leslie Jones, a Black actor featured in the Ghostbusters remake. Are reports

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that Jones deleted her Twitter account after being the target of a myriad of racist and misogynist comments.21 Unlike the online posts that lead Maedah Hojabri to be arrested in Iran, and women and girls to be targets of online abusers, others promote their embodied ideals in intentionally safe spaces and to safe communities. In the United States, the majority of embodied activists participate in these more safe communities. Online versions of these movements exist in conjunction with offline activity, though coordination is not present across all groups involved in the topic. Embodied activists in both safe and unsafe situations are predominantly issue-based in their goal-orientation, echoing third wave’s issues-based containment. Celebrity activists are among those who participate in embodied activism. Beyoncé’s 2013 Super Bowl performance invoked both gender-based and black diaspora imagery, intentionally raising consciousness regarding Black identities and female sexuality.22 Critics claimed her performance was too sexy;23 consumers generated memes showing men imitating her dance moves.24 CELEBRITY AS INDUSTRY At the 2018 Academy and Grammy Awards, dozens of celebrities proudly wore the color white, in solidarity, as they walked the red carpet to illustrate their commitment to the #MeToo and #TimesUp movements. Similarly, at the Golden Globes, they wore black. However, how many of these celebrities were walking away from their multi-million dollar contracts with the production companies and industry strongmen who had long supported the misogynistic, hypersexualized, and hypermasculine attitudes of the perpetrators accused by the hashtag movements being espoused? Some did, certainly, donate salaries and walked away from lucrative deals. For example, in January 2018, amid reports that he had been paid 1,500 times more than his female costar Michelle Williams, Mark Wahlberg announced he was donating his reshoot payments for the film All the Money in the World to the Time’s Up Legal Defense Fund. The agency—William Morris Endeavor—that represents both actors reported: The current conversation is a reminder that those of us in a position of influence have a responsibility to challenge inequities, including the gender wage gap . . . In recognition of the pay discrepancy on the All the Money in the World reshoots, WME is donating an additional $500,000 to the Time’s Up Legal Defense Fund in Michelle Williams’ name, following our $1 million pledge to the organization earlier this month. It’s crucial that this conversation continues within our community and we are committed to being part of the solution.25

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While actions like Walhberg’s give a symbolic substance to the movement, the impact on victims of harassment and discrimination are not always direct, nor substantive. Further, the problem persists: the highest earning woman in Hollywood in 2018, Scarlett Johansson, earned $198.5 million less than the highest earning man, George Clooney, and half what her highest paid Avengers film franchise colleague Robert Downey Jr. earned that year.26 Two years later, Forbes magazine’s report on the highest earning celebrities once again pointed out the impact of the wage gap in Hollywood, “Hollywood’s earning elite remains a boys’ club. This year’s list has just two actresses: Sofia Vergara who earned half from endorsements and licensing, and Angelina Jolie, who slips on at No. 99.”27 Johansson’s later dispute with Marvel and Disney Studios for breach of contract over the 2021 release of Black Widow on Disney + simultaneously with the theatrical release, which Johansson argued cheated her out of box office bonuses, was driven, in part, by the difference associated with the studio’s other male-led Marvel releases during the pandemic. The culture industry promotes the activism of its female celebrities, while simultaneously perpetuating their struggles. The gender wage gap in the culture industry has a long history that reflects both patriarchal norms and the studio system, unionization, agency system, and other institutional components of the industry as a whole. In the forward to the third edition of Molly Haskell’s groundbreaking From Reverence to Rape: The treatment of women in the movies, Dargis states: Yet one of the great paradoxes of the movies—and perhaps its saving grace—is that even while women were being kept out of the studio front offices and director’s chair, the star system was producing immortals like Pickford, Greta Garbo, Jean Harlow, Bette Davis, Katharine Hepburn, Barbara Stanwyck, Rosalind Russell, Joan Crawford, Grace Kelly, Audrey Hepburn, Doris Day, Marilyn Monroe—and on and on and on. Women were shut out of the power corridors of an industry that they were helping to build, creating art and beauty, obscuring sexism and racism.28

Haskell’s arguments are built around the inherent misogyny of the Hollywood system. In her third edition, she examines how Mulvey’s male gaze has been turned back on men in contemporary twenty-first-century film. However, the challenge for women to enter and maintain high-level careers throughout Hollywood history still impacts women in today’s culture industry. Celebrities are products of the culture industry,29 shaped by the values and ideals that permeate the notoriety of the public eye. Prominent identities are therefore cultural texts produced, mediated, branded by the machinery of a celebrity industry to be consumed by audiences. As luminaries and influencers, these identities function as valuable capital within the processes of mass

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production and consumption that drive the industry itself. And that industry continually strives to find new means of selling these products to fan bases who, themselves, become a reciprocal aspect of celebrity capital. Through this process, celebrities also become elements of media agenda setting, their narratives shaped and framed within the gatekeeping mechanisms of social media digital flow. Consider how the culture industry uses Twitter, Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube celebrity packaging to shape social media activism, using multiple platforms to increase visibility and, therefore, marketing exposure. For example, the 2017 #MeToo movement dominated the culture industry with reports of sexual harassment and misogynistic attitudes toward women and is a direct reflection of the history of the industry including the repression of women. #MeToo, however, was contained in its architectural framework, and served as a liminal motivator for activist engagement. #MeToo itself also minimized the recognition of an earlier use of the phrase, one that focused on intersectional concerns in relation to gender-based experiences. Tarana Burke initiated the original incarnation of “Me Too” in 2005 as a movement focused on changing the status of abuse survivors in minority communities. Burke created this movement prior to hashtag activism, yet Alyssa Milano’s 2017 tweet and the subsequent global social media trend quickly overshadowed Burke’s efforts. While the more popular media version helped issues of sexual harassment and abuse gain recognition, it simultaneously essentialized some of the complexities of identity and intersectional concerns for women in a variety of global and local settings. This erasure30 serves as a form of violence itself, and can revictimize survivors who do not have the access and ability to personalize their own narratives in the way that celebrities and others with privilege are able. It also functions as a type of contained empowerment, where survivors carry the same privilege with themselves in and out of the hashtag space. Burke herself argued that the hashtag movement needed to continue both online and off, and that women of color must become recentered in the movement. She explains, “If you let mainstream media define who the ‘survivors’ are[,] then we will always only hear about famous, white, [cisgender] women. But they don’t own the movement.”31 Burke’s critique highlights the lack of race in the popular hashtag iteration of the movement, but also highlights the influential role institutional media structures can play within social movements, as well as the impact of the participation of highly visible celebrities and media icons. In contrast, the #MeToo movement in other parts of the world is much more working- class focused, rather than visible primarily through celebrity. Emergent worldwide movements such as #MeTooIndia, Italy’s #QuellaVoltaChe [the time that], Arabic-speaking countries’ #AnaKaman

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[you too], and Spain’s #YoTambien [I also], of necessity, interpret their activist positions in relation to their own hegemonic and patriarchal oppressions, and their own dangerous positionality. In Mexico the movement set itself apart from the US movement by focusing on everyday women who work in journalism, academia, film, politics, law, and other creative industries, with higher levels of government and industry backlash than seen in the United States.32 Similarly, in China, #WoYeShi [rice bunny], a Chinese label to expose sexual harassment while evading censorship, faces similar challenges.33 Two key ways the North American #MeToo movement supported intersectional concerns remain focused on celebrity activity. Male victims of sexual harassment gained celebrity voice when Terry Crews, Michael Gaston, and Alex Winter, among others, added their stories as part of the movement.34 This helped encourage other male victims to come forward. Indigenous women’s movements were also tied to #MeToo when a white woman gained celebrity through her own disappearance. Feminist researcher Alison Phipps explains, “the cultural power of mainstream white feminism partly derives from the cultural power of white tears.”35 The role of celebrity in an advocacy movement can heighten the ability for noncelebrity voices to also be heard, but there is also the risk that noncelebrity voices will be absorbed within the more dominant celebrity narratives. While celebrity acknowledgment of feminism as neofeminism heightens awareness, it also heightens the role of feminism itself as a commodity and thereby adds to its nature as contained empowerment. Keller and Ringrose examine the commodified nature of celebrity endorsed feminism, arguing that female consumers recognize the contradictions inherent in the resultant media representation, particularly as a hyperfeminine, objectified version of empowerment.36 In this way, contemporary celebrity feminism reflects the contained nature of girl power in third wave, it is a feminism situated in a liminal space for an otherwise empowered practitioner to claim feminist empowerment. Celebrity activisms are a form of propaganda and a marketing mechanism that constructs strategic narratives via social media to generate stories aimed at gaining support from carefully selected audience groups. This acts as a form of consumptive soft power, ideally situated to influence ideologically polarized constituencies. Such power is affective power associated with consumptive influence that generates emotional resonance. Similarly strategic narratives functioning as soft power highlight pathos-driven ideologies and utilize emotional audience appeals. However, this power is also limited by the bias of the audience, and those outside of that target group may not have any inclination to respond to the messaging. Audiences also often assume the celebrity is in control of the messaging and its results, not aware of the

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gatekeeping mechanisms of the culture industry along with the social media technologies. Further, much of the visibility of celebrity activism is driven by audience consumptive production, as audience members reproduce and reshape the messages of both the celebrity and fellow fans. Consumers of soft power must also be consistently nudged to maintain their focus on the ideological concerns promoted within the embraced strategy. Algorithms aimed at predicting consumer behavior play a large role in strategic narrative maintenance, as do the propagandists and agents seeking to reinforce their own support structures. Thus, celebrity activists serve as characters within the strategic narratives they endorse. Their personal identities are positioned to highlight a type of political embodiment that reflects their advocacy but also places them within larger political and institutional constructs. Their characters are also designed to appeal to the target audience to which they are sold and gain increased exposure with prospective audience members; as such they function as commodities. MILLENNIAL GIRL POWER: HYPERFEMININE, HYPERSPEED FANDOM Media and the internet have also had an impact on participation in social movements by youth in the millennial and postmillennial generations. Fan-based activism for followers of media icons such as Lady Gaga,37 Angelina Jolie,38 and Misha Collins39 of TV’s long running Supernatural series have been encouraged to participate in civic engagement by these celebrities through their social media interactions. Social media allows fans to participate in celebrity-inspired activism as an interactive community, which builds on earlier, pre-digital examples of US celebrity activism. Hollywood and music icons, for example, were a notable presence in the civil rights movement, with participation in the August 28,1963, March on Washington by Harry Belafonte, Ossie Davis, Sammy Davis Junior, Ruby De, and Sidney Poitier, and allies Paul Newman, Joanne Woodward, Marlon Brando, and Burt Lancaster, among others.40 The interactive nature of social media, rooted in its multidirectional and consumer-production qualities, encourages a more communal style of celebrity by encouraging consumers to act simultaneously as editors of and producers of celebrity media. The viral speed of information also plays a role, encouraging much more instant action on the part of a celebrity’s fans. Thus, the involvement of Alyssa Milano in promoting the hashtag #MeToo and encouraging fans to share their own sexual assault survival stories is a type of celebrity activism and celebrity feminism. Further, Milano’s involvement illustrates how feminist activism from the third wave, Generation X era has

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been translated for the millennial and postmillennial generations. Millennials grew up consuming 1990s girl power icons and these series maintain their popularity with that consumer audience.41 Postmillennials, or Generation Z, are also consumers of these programs and girl power character icons, as they have become viewers through online streaming services, and revisions of the original media have brought new attention to the properties.42 Girls and those claiming non-binary status in these generations often cite these programs as highly influential in their own identity construction. In fact, many of these shows have been rebooted, some with new, younger, and more intersectional casts.43 Alyssa Milano is a celebrity who holds status as a girl power icon due to her role in the original incarnation of the TV show Charmed. Her Charmed girl power icon costar Rose McGowan’s aggressive narratives of Hollywood sexual harassment and abuse have also centered her within the #MeToo celebrity community.44 Contemporary feminisms in the United States have become a part of popular culture. On the one hand, this is reflective of the inclusion of feminism in popular culture in previous eras. It is also reflective of the rise of girl power as both a feminist ideology and a marketable consumer product. Along with Milano and McGowan, many of the outspoken celebrity leaders of contemporary feminist and activist movements are actors who portrayed girl power heroes of the 1990s and early 2000s. Among these are Angelina Jolie who has portrayed Lara Croft, and Natalie Portman from the Star Wars prequels, and musicians who enacted various forms of girl power in the same era such as Queen Latifah, Jennifer Lopez, Beyoncé, Tori Amos, and Lauryn Hill. These Generation X girl power icons were joined by business and political leaders, as well as millennial generation counterparts. Feminist scholar Rottenberg notes: All of a sudden, many high-profile women in the United States were loudly declaring themselves feminists, one after the other: from the former director of policy planning for the US State Department Anne-Marie Slaughter, the former president of Barnard College Debora Spar and Facebook COO Shery Sandberg, to young Hollywood star Emma Watson and music celebrities Miley Cyrus and Beyoncé.45

This bridging of popular media, political, and business leaders, as well as across generations of women is a key difference from how third wave girl power was enacted, with its focus on hyperfeminine characteristics and youthful experience. However, many of the ideals associated with girl power are present within this neoliberal, fourth wave movement. There are also notable international examples from the girl power era, several of which include celebrities who reached acknowledged levels of

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stardom in the United States as well as abroad. One example is Colombian singer Shakira who founded Pies Descalzos (Barefoot) Foundation in 1997 to help develop schools in impoverished areas of her home country.46 The foundation was named after her first album. Shakira explains her advocating choice, stating, “Investing in education and offering equal opportunities to our boys and girls is the way to continue paving the way for peace.”47 Shakira additionally serves as a Unicef Goodwill Ambassador focused on educational developments. Shakira’s ongoing activism, like that of other girl power figures from the era illustrates how metaphor remains active in social movements. It is also a continuing presence in mediated feminism and gender constructs. Charmed has been remade for a millennial and postmillennial generation, and Milano and McGowan’s activisms have evolved from 90s-style girl power and Generation X. Millennials and postmillenials/Generation Z are capable of assuming a liminal identity in the form of a hybrid self, one that simultaneously exists on- and offline. This hybridity is a core aspect of activist activity among those in these generations. While the third wave feminists of Generation X created a similar construct, for millennials and Generation Z their hybridity is perceived as substantive identity boosted by developments in digital media technologies. Thus, millennials identify themselves with a “betwixt and between” normative status where values, ideals, and experiences are in flux. When this is juxtaposed with ideological siloing tied to cultural, religious, and politicized values that have become commonplace in US culture, it leads these youth to perceive knowledge through mediated as well as physical spaces and experiences. The activisms of these generations are therefore grounded in a belief in flexible identities impacted by both nature and nurture, affecting both digital and physical transcendence beyond traditional identity constructs. For example, non-binary gender acceptance and a rejection of traditional gender roles is far more common for these generations than their predecessors. Further, for many millennial and Generation Z activists, experiential knowledge is as imperative as incorporating scientific and scholarly understandings. Further, communal and shared experiences act as rhetorical constructions in the understanding of reality, without consistent knowledge of how and why those messages are impacted by media gatekeeping. For these reasons, these generations are able to lean into ideologically polarized identities and activisms that can lead to simultaneously de- and reconstructive forms of contained empowerment. Celebrity activisms are also resistant to the notion of fixed boundaries, particularly in terms of the digital migration of ideas and content. This plays out in a reluctance to recognize variable legal, social, and political parameters unless they are interpreted through personal experience. This generates

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a transient and collaborative form of trans-identity knowledge production among celebrity fan groups that can encourage expanded world views and progressive empowerment constructs, while simultaneously allowing for misinformation due to a presumption of cultural awareness limited to experiential tourism for fans. Thus, the potential for empowerment-based activisms is restricted and contained by a disconnect with those outside of the shared experiential knowledge base, in a pattern reminiscent of third wave digital activisms as illustrated within Sexing the Political. The third wave journal served as an echo chamber due primarily to a required prior knowledge of the existence of the journal and/or third wave feminism as a movement and aesthetic sense in order to find and access the space. Gatekeeping practices in some cases restrict celebrities and their fans through the same necessity of knowledge and expectation when individuals seek connection. Significantly, the viral speed of information flow in social media and the process of peer-to-peer transfer of transmission does allow for faster growth among contemporary audiences than in the earlier internet existence of Sexing the Political. The echo chamber aspect of celebrity advocacy remains, however, not only due to the personal interest and decision-making processes previously required, but also due to the role of social media’s marketing algorithms in spreading information to audiences. Additionally, social media gatekeepers are empowered by controlling the narrative architecture of digital and convergent media, and these forces influence the identities of all users regardless of generational patterns or celebrity status. While convergent and social media encourage media institutions and their celebrities to respond more directly to consumer wishes than previous forms of media, the micro-targeting of audience groups also allows the media industry to market to and more aggressively promote consumer action. The speed of social media also allows mis- and disinformation to flow more fully, and consumers of all generations are challenged by a lack of digital information literacy and the overwhelming speed, flow, and volume of information without time for fact-checking. The result is ideologically polarized consumer groups who respond to a large variety of special interest and advocative topics. Celebrity activism is also often promoted as a type of consumer function by social media influencers, who present strategically constructed messages aimed at specific target audiences. The role of influencers as activists is to market or sensationalize the event, action, or ideals they espouse or are paid to promote through the same processes and propaganda styles used to reach audience consumers with branding. Thus, their activism functions as self-promotion. Then, their message spreads as viral media through both normative and polarized media channels and consumer practices. Social media influencers therefore act as a type of celebrity activist, alongside the

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traditional media personalities who use their status to promote their choice in social issues. Celebrity activism promotes a type of contained empowerment that is reconstructive in nature, as it highlights social issues and goals from the perspective of someone with systemic power. Social media influencers, many of whom gained their celebrity through product promotion may imply a deconstructive ability, however, they are simultaneously reconstructing their economic status and representation, as well as that of their corporate sponsors, through their personal success. This is also a reciprocal process, as the production of identity in these spaces is fed by fandom and consumptive reproduction. However, this reciprocity also provides a basis for reading canon with flexibility and poaching mediated products and characters within fan-made reproductions. Thus, a celebrity identity may be shaped by fan-made narratives, and the celebrity themselves may shape their identities to meet those audience goals. For example, women labeled “celebrity feminists” have been accused of using the feminist label as a commodity to generate more attention. “[Feminism] was a word female celebrities would probably be advised to sidestep, allowing them to capitalize on the amorphous concept of female ‘empowerment’ without actually having to get political.”48 Another critic suggests, “I would argue that Sheryl Sandberg, Beyoncé, and even Wonder Woman, all sell a glamorized view of empowerment that excludes many women who would arguably benefit the most from it.”49 The ensuing criticism was comparable to that for “slacktivism,” a social media term highlighting people posting social critiques and activist ideals online on Facebook and Twitter, but never actually taking direct action to generate change. Other celebrities, however, are seen as having direct impact through their celebrity-status, and often through a philanthropic ability to use their status, wealth, and recognition to create agency and influence. Consider the role of Black American celebrities in reaching out to Black communities to get vaccinated during the pandemic, or Dolly Parton’s work in funding vaccine development.50 Parton further participated in pandemic aid by posting a video of herself receiving the vaccine and encouraging supporters to get vaccinated. She even performed a parody of her hit Jolene with pandemic appropriate lyrics: “Vaccine, vaccine, vaccine, vaccine / I’m begging of you please don’t hesitate / Vaccine, vaccine, vaccine, vaccine / ’cause once you’re dead then that’s a bit too late.”51 Singer Rihanna also joined in the celebrity action, donating $5 million in 2020 to fight food insecurity and aid refugees, as well as donating personal protective equipment (PPE) to New York State at the height of its medical crisis.52 Like Parton, the singer’s work was quietly presented, and other’s acknowledgments of the donations brought it to public attention.

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Thus, some scholars and activists, including celebrity practitioners, argue that celebrity and similar philanthropic traditions of activism are necessary, as people with positions of authority and resources are key to generating systemic change. Such philanthropy is also systemically recognized as well as accepted by audiences and participants both within and outside of systemic standards. Take the words of Cher in support of her celebrity activism in seeking to get people in low-income areas vaccinated during the COVID-19 pandemic, “What are you going to use your celebrity for?”53 Such philanthropic and social media–based examples illustrate contained empowerment as a type of power discourse limited to the identities and activities engaged in liminal spaces of idealized rhetorical constructs and dialog. These contemporary examples of celebrity activisms do provide empowerment within fandoms where their celebrity power is seen and experienced as legitimate. However, these definitions do not directly impact and change hegemonic power norms. In fact, contained empowerment reflects and reconstitutes hegemonic structures in some cases by widening the gap between the marginalized who are often those found in spaces of contained empowerment, and the powerful who remain largely outside of those spaces. Yet, current feminist movements in the United States continue to reflect many of the goals and elements of third wave. IDENTITIES IN THE FANDOM: ACTIVISM IN COMMUNITIES OF BELONGING Activisms in social media fan bases can engage voices and bodies across intersectionalities, yet simultaneously tempered by intersectional challenges. The emergence of digital technologies has enhanced the ability for activists and propagandists to disseminate messages, but it also allows the same messages to be conscripted, reframed, and disseminated by oppositional agencies. Digital activisms can provide opportunities for individual and collective voice, yet the narrative architecture of digital media serves as a gatekeeping agent in this process. Digital celebrity generates opportunities for fans to examine their own shifting identities and actions in relation to fan communities, and to sculpt identity within that framework and in connection to their celebrity idol. The ability to share these constructed fan and celebrity identities with a variety of audiences is clear, as is the ability to promote issues of critical, political, economic, and social impact in relation to the fandom. Activists assuming mutable identities within celebrity activism are critically placed to promote change to a wide audience but face the challenge of not becoming consumed by larger political and hegemonic, strategic narratives. Strategic narratives are used by institutions and political agents to shape

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and influence public attitudes and create shared meanings.54 Studies in this area are primarily focused on the ability for political institutions to generate narratives that inspire public opinion and cohesion and drive international narratives of power. However, nonpolitical agents also use this propaganda technique to promote action. Both political and apolitical strategic narratives are often promoted through the narrowcasting and targeted marketing of social media, where consumers are likely to engage with these stories due to the constructed appeal to their own biases and personal preferences. In her critique of contemporary digital feminisms, Hester Baer explains, feminisms online “emerged in tandem with the global hegemony of neoliberalism”55 and also “in tandem with the rise of street-based protest actions.”56 Problematizing the relationship, she questions if neoliberalism co-opts online protests and reduces their efficacy. She further critiques neoliberal understandings of feminist embodiment and body politics, “with its emphasis on self-optimization personal responsibility, and individual choice, neoliberalism recasts the body as a key site of identity, empowerment, and control,”57 reflecting similar critiques of power feminism, third wave, and mediated girl power. Neoliberalism therefore challenges both the embodiment of feminists and their ability to shape knowledge production and dissemination due to neoliberal “co-optation of collective politics.”58 Thus, celebrity activism is limited by the need to maintain narrative form that appeals to a specified consumer, fan-based group. Not unlike the challenge seen within Sexing the Political as a journal marketed to and recognized by those who were already aware of and biased toward its messages, celebrity activism faces limits due to the preferences of the fans who purchase and in other ways consume the celebrity’s identity and products. While some celebrities can encourage their fans to learn more about a topic or advocative goals, whether the celebrity is willing to deviate from their narrative and risk losing fans can serve as a problematic form of containment. Celebrity fandoms and the celebrities they admire have evolved with the expansion of digital activism, evolving as a type of social justice mechanism.59 Utilizing narratives associated with the ideal of the fandom, either fictional or to a celebrity’s real-life, fan activisms connect those narratives to systemic and individual real-world experiences. Discussing social justice activisms produced within Harry Potter fandom, Henry Jenkins explains this process as “cultural acupuncture”60 wherein a fan base maps “fictional content worlds onto real-world concerns” and using elements of that content “as metaphors for making sense of contemporary issues.”61 Jenkins analyses the Harry Potter Alliance, a fan-based activist organization aimed at encouraging fans of the book and film series to engage in activism related to human rights, equality, and literacy, themes at the core of the Harry Potter narrative.

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Celebrities can similarly function as motivators for their fans, in some cases encouraging or challenging them to become politically active or to participate in protest movements through their performances, or through direct fan engagement.62 For example, actor and musical performer Lady Gaga uses social media to construct “communiqués to fans about her positions on a range of issues. Gaga’s use of social media is partly responsible for the strength of her relationship with fans, who call themselves ‘Little Monsters,’ and her ‘Mother Monster.’”63 Thus, Gaga encourages activism related to her ideological concerns, and simultaneously encourages participatory culture that reaffirms the fan community itself. Celebrities can also participate in activism as part of their fan base. Consider how quickly Cardi B’s 2019 Instagram video wherein she critiqued then president Donald Trump for refusing to fund the government without funds for his border wall went viral.64 Political tweets, Facebook and Instagram posts, and celebrity blogs are all ways individuals use their celebrity to spread a message quickly among their own fans. Popular activisms, like popular feminism, work well within this framework because they are, themselves, consumer products of wide appeal.65 Other fan groups empower themselves via their fandom and the sense of community and belonging in that community.66 That sense of belonging, then, becomes a motivator for engagement from a participatory, grassroots style base. Using the same techniques as fans who seek to promote the icon-object of their adoration by building hype about a product or celebrity action, collective identity-based fan activism builds a connection between the icon and the issue of choice, regardless of the celebrity’s intent. For example, the BTS ARMY, a fan group dedicated to Korean popular music (K-pop) phenomenon Bangtan Boys (BTS), participated in a variety of fan activisms including fundraising for Black Lives Matter after the murder of George Floyd and “overtaking” hashtags such as #AllLivesMatter and #WhiteLivesMatter to spread their own counter-narratives to those movements.67 This fan base has also been credited with disrupting a Donald Trump campaign rally during the COVID-19 pandemic by encouraging people to register but not attend.68 The members of BTS themselves neither participated in the efforts nor invited the engagement,69 unlike in previous examples where the fandom reacted after their idols had actively engaged in charity.70 The entrepreneurial aspects of social media are a productive means of acquiring and enhancing personal and economic power, as seen through the activities of social media influencers. Feminist researcher Red Chidgey explains, “celebrity is the very embodiment of a marketable commodity.”71 For social media influencers, the process of identity construction within advocating narratives can be more challenging than for traditionally understood celebrity that appeals to larger audience masses. Influencers are often studied as examples of “micro-celebrity”72 which is maintained through

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constant social media interaction with narrowly targeted audience groups. Micro-celebrity is also more dependent on the construction of interactive fan communities. This type of celebrity is also shaped by consumer notions of authenticity, framed both in terms of identity and assumptions of truth in messaging due to these celebrities being “real” people. The identities and advocacies of influencers are also challenged by their roots as product marketers, as their label is derived from their role as users who earned recognition by marketing corporate brand products and perceptions. Norman Booth and Julie Ann Matic explain, “Consumers are now the individual broadcasting personal or second-hand stories to their social networks and the world. They are a brand’s storytellers and the new brand ambassadors.”73 As such, their stories are marketed as part of a brand-based campaign, and when shifted to advocacy these same stories must be remarketed within the advocating strategic narrative. Thus, social media influencers acting in advocating roles are simultaneously consumed as products within corporate and social justice narrative constructs. Yet another layer of complication within celebrity and social media influencer activisms is how these are enacted within gender-based and feminist frameworks. The constraints of marketing gender roles within strategic narratives adds yet another storytelling layer to the construction of activist identity. Celebrity feminists face challenges related to balancing women’s needs with larger political goals, as well as challenges in solidifying arguments for women’s and gender-based rights reflective of multiple ideological conflicts about gender existent within larger and non-gender-based narratives. The label of “woman” is unable to address the needs of all individuals within that category, and unable to address multiple intersectionalities which those using the label experience. However, legal and political rhetorics insist that the category is necessary to promote potential change for women without categorization, and therefore feminist strategic narratives about women and gender function as a tool of essentialism, and as codes within the digital narrative architecture of online activisms. CONSUMPTION AND RECIPROCITY IN FANDOM While celebrity and social media influencer activisms are challenged by liminal containment in their ability to promote social change on a large scale, they can provide spaces for empowerment for individual fans and consumers. The reciprocal nature of social media communication plays a role in how this type of empowerment may be consumed by an individual fan, and then re-promoted and shared to their community. For example, consider the layered narratives involved in the development of one girl power icon Tori Amos

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fan’s personal advocative identity. The millennial-generation fan begins by explaining his identity construction in response to his early Tori Amos fandom experiences: But why was I so obsessed? What was happening? Let me paint the picture. At this point in my life, I was 14. A young gay boy, in the closet, growing up in Mississippi. I was clearly way more feminine than all the other boys at school which was brought to my attention constantly. I couldn’t tell anyone about my sexuality because I was terrified about what everyone would think or say . . . I was yearning to express myself but I didn’t know how. It wasn’t until the live show in New Orleans that I felt like I was part of something.74

The fan goes on to explain how his idol’s identity and the activist ideals she promoted through her music during the girl power era inspired him, “Ultimately, Tori taught me that it was okay to be myself . . . She was the example of self-expression that I needed to see at that time in my life.”75 Significantly, this fan wrote these messages in a blog in December 2020, as a response to Tori Amos herself promoting a potato salad and other recipes found in that fan’s Mississippi Vegan76 cookbook in one of her own celebrity interviews. The fan, Timothy, is a social media influencer and entrepreneur, advocating for vegan lifestyles, native plant pollination, and promoting his merchandise. While his own advocacy in his products and blog is not centered on gender equity, the story of his Tori Amos fan experience uses a non-binary gender advocacy narrative to both advocate as a fan, and promote his own products. This single blog entry would appeal to the Tori Amos fan base along with his own vegan cooking and native plant followers. In an act that highlights this reciprocal and strategic process, he explains he is renaming one of the recipes she discussed “Tori’s Potato Salad.”77 The perception of reciprocity within social media fandom is a characteristic feature of celebrity activism. It is also rooted in a human desire for assurance and reciprocity within social interaction and decision making. Anthropology, feminist, and cultural studies scholarship has criticized the role of reciprocity in serving to encourage the reproduction of the same ideas within scholarly communities and blocking the influx of additional ideas. Reciprocity within economics has also been critiqued as encouraging the reproduction of status quo within social strata. At the same time, however, reciprocity is valued for its association with interconnectedness and the potential for expanding on the values and truths within a community.78 Reciprocity is also a requisite of fandoms, in terms of the perception of a relationship between the icon and the fan base, between the fans within a community, and between interacting fan bases.79 Fandom can serve as a type of transformative activism in an individual’s life,80 wherein fans debate and

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challenge each other as well as the celebrities, creators, and copyright holders of their idols. Media fandom has also become a site of activist identity construction, particularly for youth in the past decade, as it aids in bringing activist ideals to the fan base, and encourages fans to connect with each other in response to the stated goal.81 The relationship between celebrity and fan can also be impacted in a visible fashion. Consider the role of fandoms and other social media groups in navigating the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic in a shared, community setting.82 One example is the relationship that developed between Foo Fighters front man and former Nirvana drummer Dave Grohl, and his young fan Nandi Bushell after they engaged in a “playful online drum battle amid the pandemic.”83 Citing the young fan as his “archnemesis,” due to her exceptional drumming skills, Grohl used his celebrity to showcase the young prodigy after she challenged him to a “drum-off” as a means of “spreading joy and love all across the world” during the pandemic.84 The process of adding activist messaging to existing frameworks, particularly in response to virus concerns and stay-at-home challenges shared by so many, was a simple task for advocates and existing members of the fan base. Product placement, however, is core to the reciprocity expected of fans to the culture industry. Companies selling products seek celebrity and influencer-reviewer endorsements in order to capture the attention of a fan base. “The companies target the fans of these artists as they are aware that, out of loyalty, fans would either end up liking the product, buying it, or at least spreading the world about it through word of mouth or social media. Social media is glorified with celebrity endorsements more than ever because it can reach the masses in no time.”85 Similarly, activists both from within and outside of the fan base seek endorsement as part of growing their advocative brand. Thus, fan activism functions as contained empowerment, guided by structural processes and restricted through gatekeeping mechanisms that are designed to reinforce hegemonic influence. The reciprocity of social media, however, also blurs normative standards of ownership, asset use, and production itself. Thus, social media communities constantly reinterpret their intellectual and advocative properties.86 Further, the intertextual nature of these spaces generates hyperactive forms of pastiche that encourage reiterations of celebrity and character identities, as well as backward referencing to older versions of both the celebrity, and past celebrities and characters who they invoke. Celebrities are products of multiple media forms, as well as multiple mediated communities, and often are created based on the success of or resistance to another media product. Thus, fandom serves as a type of homage to an idealized version of celebrity and can function with multiple versions of that celebrity acting as layers of a consumer-produced self, while maintaining liminal space within the celebrity industry.

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In the age of polarization such communal reciprocity can be further problematized as a producer of cognitive bias and groupthink likely to generate consumption of mis- and disinformation. Yet for many in advocacy communities, it remains a needed space to generate perceptions of safety and acceptance. These group identities are particularly necessary for individuals fearful of revealing their status, as evidenced by Tori Amos fan Timothy’s story about being a young, gay man in the US South. For global activists and those advocating for social justice concerns amid rising violent extremisms, these safe spaces become a valuable means of promoting expression. In this way, fan-based and advocacy communities are examples of contained empowerment where individual power and agency are promoted, yet remain separate from larger, institutional power. Celebrity feminism and mediated hyperfeminine performative versions of feminism serve to construct a type of branded identity for the celebrity, and a named group identity for the fan. This identity is further influenced by social media, as both consumer practice and media institutions play a role in shaping these identities.87 Combined with how media proliferation leads to ideological siloed consumer markets, production of these activist identities is not aimed at large, mass audiences, nor to the limited audience of already active third wave practitioners who read e‑journals like Sexing the Political. Audiences are now targeted by social media architecture with a goal of spreading variable versions of messages to multiple targeted groups. Activist identities are similarly shared via social media’s narrative architecture; thus they are marketed to target audiences with characteristics aimed at those consumer groups. Even negative coverage can increase visibility and notoriety of celebrities, fans, and causes, including negative activity by internet trolls and flamers. Consumers’ own biases then influence their readings of “feminist” and “activist” identities. Some, like the young female consumers discussed by Keller and Ringrose, read conflicts between their own understandings of feminism and activism with the identities presented.88 Others, particularly those targeted as conservative consumers, are confronted with an identity presented as antithetical to their ideological values.89 Yet there are those who can find potential for personal empowerment and choice through emulating those presented as feminist and activist icons. Feminist action as a commodity is not the only way the hypervisibility of femininity is shaping current public awareness. Hyperfeminine embodied activisms are another form of liminally contained feminist empowerment.90 Celebrities and other activists promoting gender-based and women’s rights in relation to their bodies, free expression, and financial success provide a challenge to patriarchal norms, but one that is limited by their re-creation of hyper/visible gendered oppressions.91 Hyper/visible feminine or other

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embodied identity stereotypes can either resist or be oppressed by systemic standards.92 These performances are limited by their essentialized nature and contained by dominant, hegemonic and patriarchal narratives. They are also limited by their fandoms through the prospect of losing credibility with fans and experiencing “cancel culture.” These performances can also reinforce the very misogynistic actions they were designed to critique. CELEBRITY AND FAN EFFECTS: REVISITING MEDIA’S “HYPODERMIC NEEDLE” In 2020, girl power era country band “The Dixie Chicks” changed its name to “The Chicks.” After Taylor Swift endorsed the Women’s March that formed predominantly as a response to the election of Donald Trump, her celebrity-self became tied to feminist activism. Swift did not attend the January 2017 march, yet she encountered scathing backlash from angry fans who felt she had betrayed their fan community values. Her experience reflected country music fans turning against the Dixie Chicks in the girl power era, Swift struggled to separate that association with activism from her celebrity status, eventually shifting the expectations of who would be maintained among her fan base. Like the Dixie Chicks before her, Swift would eventually rebuild her celebrity, and her fandom, with appeals to a more liberal fan base. Swift herself became more directly political, engaging in more direct actions such as endorsing Democratic candidates and speaking out on sexism in the music industry. Swift’s need to rebuild her celebrity exemplifies how individual beliefs in authorization and liberty can be practiced as leadership for those sharing in their beliefs and ideals through a process of contained empowerment. Celebrity activists, whether starting from a highly visible celebrity status or gaining status because of their activism, such as Sweden’s climate change activist Greta Thunberg, Alicia Garza and other leaders of the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement, and US school shooting survivors David Hogg and Emma González, use their visibility to maintain focus on vital issues of importance to progressive and liberal audiences. Not all audiences are neutral or supportive of celebrity activism, which can encourage backlash that may bring more notoriety than intended celebrity or attention to the advocative cause. And appealing to aggressive behaviors among fandoms can lead to dangerous extremisms. An example of an attempt at celebrity construction with devastating results was aimed at US conservative extremist audiences. In August 2019, a gunman murdered 22 primarily Latinx shoppers in an El Paso, Texas, Walmart as he claimed it was in response to what he perceived as a “Hispanic invasion of

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Texas.” Using the techniques associated with social media influencers seeking micro-celebrity status, the shooter93 promoted his goals in alt-right media and dark web spaces. His attempt at gaining celebrity and notoriety illustrate a shift toward generating power and visibility for individuals as a form of ethnonationalistic, extremist activism. These “activists” build to action through their antagonistic rhetoric, using the same patterns of rhetorical critique as human rights, climate change, gender and feminist, and other activisms from groups and individuals traditionally marginalized by hegemonic norms. Media effects research in the early twenty-first century has looked at how the impact of celebrity on fans in social media reflects early twentieth-century studies of the impacts of propaganda on audiences during the First World War. In particular, contemporary research has revived Harold Lasswell’s long-challenged model,94 popularly known as the “hypodermic needle theory” or the “magic bullet.” This model suggests audience exposure to media influences the characteristics illustrated by those audience members, that media products can be used like a hypodermic syringe to inject ideological and ontological concerns directly into audiences.95 This theory, which fell out of favor after media scholars such as Paul Lazarsfeld96 and Herta Herzog97 claimed the theory was too simplistic and did not count for enough diversity among audience members. Yet, the narrowcasting models associated with social media flow, in contrast to the broadcasting of mediated messages studied by Lazarsfeld and Herzog, indicate behavior patterns among targeted audience groups that reflects the impacts of Lasswell’s model.98 The interconnectedness of media and political institutions within the culture industry is a significant factor in the actualization of celebrity activism. The consumptive nature of celebrity and political activisms makes them a form of soft power,99 a type of strategically consumptive power that influences consumer identities. This type of activism is intended to change or influence hegemonic structure in and of itself. Soft power occurs between and within global economies as a means of allowing institutions and nations to self-promote through consumer- and follower-driven ideologies. Soft power was originally conceptualized as a direct contrast with “hard” or military power.100 Because it is focused on consumers, it generates emotional response via pathos-driven narratives and ideological claims. Aggravated by people in positions of structural power using a soft power fan base to generate structural change, this can turn into a form of hard power, as occurred when followers of then president Donald Trump on January 6, 2021, marched on and eventually attacked the US Capitol to subvert the lawful transfer of power to the next president’s administration. Soft power has become a major aspect of digital media consumption, particularly due to algorithms aimed at “knowing” the consumer or follower. Feminists, activists, and movement organizers serve as consumptive icons to reinforce the political, patriarchal, religious,

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and other systemic mechanisms that gain from their presence. They become icons both of the opposition to hegemony they present, and to prescriptive narratives provided by the hegemonic forces themselves. In her discussion of fandom and radicalization during the COVID-19 pandemic, Penny Andrews explains, “What makes a fan part of a fandom rather than just the fan base . . . is the sense of community and identity that comes from purposefully joining in. Social media acts as an intensifier, and the fans are the people you hear most often.”101 The process Andrews describes is how the BTS ARMY’s activism became highly visible due to the veracity of their fans,102 and how the Harry Potter Alliance grew to engage in long-term advocacies.103 It is also, however, a more problematic version of the same process utilized by Trump supporters to justify their attack on the US Capitol,104 and by the El Paso and New Zealand mass murderers to justify their actions.105 This rejection of history and reworking of narratives of power has led to what US Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer called a “Conspiracy Caucus” of alt-right extremists, Q-Anon followers, and Trump supporters.106 This “caucus” functions as a type of self-selected and insulated fandom liminally situated within an echo chamber. Schumer further argued that this conspiracy includes members of Congress who have attempted to utilize the mis- and dis-information circulating within alt-right and right leaning media to encourage voter participation and argue during the COVID-19 pandemic for their support of Trump as a legitimate leader, their refusal to follow health guidance and wear masks, and to argue against health- and welfare-based restrictions on economic activity. Conspiracy fandom is rooted in the construction of a community of belonging for those who doubt authority and challenge mainstream culture. Fan cultures and fandom, by definition, reflect fanaticism whether or not all fans within a group are themselves fanatics. However, all members share in and espouse at least some of the ideals promoted by extremists within the group. Fan cultures also generate a sense of egalitarianism within the liminal spaces they claim, yet simultaneously these spaces serve as consumer products. Sandvoss explains, “Fan cultures are commonly situated between spaces of mass and niche communication, between top-down and bottom-up content creation, and between large-scale marketing campaigns and fan enthusiasm.”107 For those participating in conspiracy culture, this is a key aspect of their attraction to their collective culture, as their voices are presented as legitimate, valued, and valuable to the creation and maintenance of the fandom. However, as witnessed when activists from within this conspiracy caucus attacked the US Capitol building as part of an attempted coup d’état on January 6, 2021, the legitimacy within the fandom is a form of contained empowerment that does not grant them legitimate authority or access to the

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actual systems of power in the US government. Thus, actions of this fandom remain contained empowerment. This example does, however, highlight how the belief in their own legitimacy translates into literal action against hegemonic norms that serves as a legitimate threat to the system. As such, it also implies that the contained nature of feminist and other identity-based activisms, while examples of liminal prospects for systemic change, nonetheless remain potentially empowering. NOTES 1. Lisa Respers France, “Cardi B Pledges to Pay Funeral Costs for Bronx Fire Victims.” CNN, January 19, 2022. www​.cnn​.com​/2022​/01​/19​/entertainment​/cardi​-b​ -bronx​-fire​/index​.html​/. 2. Laurel Wamsley, “NYC High-Rise Fire Displaces Hundreds. How Do They Find Affordable Housing?” January 13, 2022, NPR. www​.npr​.org​/2022​/01​/13​/1072678618​ /nyc​-high​-rise​-fire​-displaces​-hundreds​-how​-do​-they​-find​-affordable​-housing​/. 3. France, “Cardi B Pledges.” 4. Bardi Gang, “Bio.” 2022. www​.cardibofficial​.com​/bio​/. 5. Ashley Iasimone, “Cardi B on Being a Feminist: ‘Anything a Man Can Do, I Can Do.’” Billboard, February 11, 2018. www​.billboard​.com​/music​/rb​-hip​-hop​/cardi​ -b​-feminist​-stripping​-interview​-i​-d​-magazine​-8099087​/. 6. Cited in Iasimone, “Cardi B on Being a Feminist,” para 3. 7. Bardi Gang, “Bio.” 2022. www​.cardibofficial​.com​/bio​/. 8. Steve Wyche, “Colin Kaepernick Explains Why He Sat during National Anthem.” NFL News, August 27, 2016. www​.nfl​.com​/news​/colin​-kaepernick​-explains​-why​-he​ -sat​-during​-national​-anthem​-0ap3000000691077​/. 9. Jules Boykoff and Ben Carrington, “Sporting Dissent: Colin Kaepernick, NFL Activism, and Media Framing Contests.” International Review for the Sociology of Sport 55, no. 7 (2020): 829–49. 10. Joon Kyoung Kim, Holly Overton, Nandini Bhalla, and Jo-Yun Li, “Nike, Colin Kaepernick, and the Politicization of Sports: Examining Perceived Organizational Motives and Public Responses.” Public Relations Review 46, no. 2 (2020, June) [101856]. doi:10.1016/j.pubrev.2019.101856. 11. Magdalena Olszanowski, “Feminist Self-Imaging and Instagram: Tactics of Circumventing Sensorship.” Visual Communication Quarterly 21, no. 2 (2014): 83–95. 12. Karen Freberg, Kristin Graham, Karen McGaughey, and Laura A. Freberg, “Who Are the Social Media Influencers? A Study of Public Perceptions of Personality.” Public Relations Review 37, no. 1 (2011): 90–92. 13. Veronika Novoselova and Jennifer Jenson, “Authorship and Professional Digital Presence in Feminist Blogs.” Feminist Media Studies 19, no. 2 (2019): 257–72. doi.org/10.1080/14680777.2018.1436083.

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14. Liselot Hudders, Steffi De Jans, and Marijke De Veirman, “The Commercialization of Social Media Stars: A Literature Review and Conceptual Framework on the Strategic Use of Social Media Influencers.” International Journal of Advertising 40, no. 3 (2021): 327–75. 15. Catherine Archer, “Social Media Influencers, Post-Feminism and Neoliberalism: How Mum Bloggers ‘Playbour’ is Reshaping Public Relations.” Public Relations Inquiry 8, no. 2 (2019): 149–66. 16. Cat Mahoney, “Is This What a Feminist Looks Like? Curating the Feminist Self in the Neoliberal Visual Economy of Instagram,” par. 1. See, also, Sonja Vivienne, Digital Identity and Everyday Activism—Sharing Private Stories with Networked Publics (Basingstoke: Palgrave MacMillan, 2016). 17. See, for instance, Susanna Paasonen, Kylie Jarrett, and Ben Light, #NSFW: Sex, Humor, and Risk in Social Media (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2019). 18. Carolina Are, “How Instagram’s Algorithm Is Censoring Women and Vulnerable Users but Helping Online Abusers.” Feminist Media Studies 20, no. 5 (2020): 741, doi:10.1080/14680777.2020.1783805. 19. Carolina Are, “How Instagram’s Algorithm Is Censoring Women,” 741. 20. Carolina Are, “How Instagram’s Algorithm Is Censoring Women.” 741. 21. See, also, Caitlin E. Lawson, “Platform Vulnerabilities: Harassment and Misogynoir in the Digital Attack on Leslie Jones.” Information, Communication & Society 21, no. 6 (2018): 818–33. doi:10.1080/1369118X.2018.1437203. 22. Noel Siqi Duan, “Policing Beyoncé’s Body: ‘Whose Body is this Anyway?’” In The Beyoncé Effect: Essays on Sexuality, Race and Feminism, edited by Adrienne Trier-Bieniek, 55–74 (Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Co., 2016). 23. Duan, “Policing Beyoncé’s Body”; and Janelle Hobson, “Black Beauty and Digital Spaces: The New Visibility Politics.” Ada: A Journal of Gender, New Media, and Technology 10 (2016). doi:10.7264/N39C6VQK. 24. Hobson, “Black Beauty and Digital Spaces”; and Janelle Hobson, “Feminists Debate Beyoncé.” In The Beyoncé Effect: Essays on Sexuality, Race, and Feminism, edited by Adrienne Trier-Bieniek, 11–26 (Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Co., 2016). 25. Chris Barton, “Michelle Williams Responds to Mark Wahlberg Offer to Donate $1.5 Million after Pay Discrepancy Revealed.” Los Angeles Times, January 13, 2018. www​.latimes​.com​/entertainment​/tv​/la​-et​-mn​-mark​-wahlberg​-times​-up​-20180113​ -story​.html​/. 26. Natalie Robehmed, “The World’s Highest-Paid Actors 2018: George Clooney Tops List with $239 Million.” Forbes, August 22, 2018. www​.forbes​.com​/sites​/ natalierobehmed​/2018​/08​/22​/the​-worlds​-highest​-paid​-actors​-2018​-george​-clooney​ -tops​-list​-with​-239​-million​/​?sh​=fa91b157dfdc​/. 27. Zack O’Malley Greenburg and Rob Lafranco (eds). “The World’s Highest Paid Celebrities 2020.” Forbes (2021). www​.forbes​.com​/celebrities​/. 28. Manohla Dargis, “Foreword.” In From Reverance to Rape: The Treatment of Women in the Movies, edited by Molly Haskell, third edition (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2016), ix.

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29. Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, “The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception.” In The Cultural Studies Reader, third edition, edited by Simon During, 405–15 (New York: Routledge, 2007; Original work published 1944). 30. Judy Battaglia, Paige Edley, and Victoria A. Newsom, “Intersectional Feminisms and Sexual Violence in the Era of Me Too, Trump, and Kavanaugh.” Women and Language 42, no. 1 (2019): 159–71. 31. Tanara Burke, Tweet: “This is a movement for and about survivors . . . ” March 21, 2018. mobile.twitter.com/taranaburke/status/976621459534688256/. See, also, Daisy Murray, “‘Empowerment Through Empathy’—We Spoke to Tarana Burke, the Woman who Really Started the ‘Me Too’ Movement.” Elle, October 23, 2017. www​ .elle​.com​/uk​/life​-and​-culture​/culture​/news​/a39429​/empowerment​-through​-empathy​ -tarana​-burke​-me​-too​/ 32. Maria T. Nicolas-Gavilan, Maria P. Baptista-Lucio, and Maria A. Padilla-Lavin, “Effects of the #MeToo Campaign in Media, Social and Political Spheres: The Case of Mexico.” Interactions: Studies in Communication & Culture 10, no. 3 (2019): 273–90. 33. See, also, Jing Zeng, “You Say #MeToo, I Say #MiTu.” 34. Laura Bradley, “‘I was Terrified, and I was Humiliated’: #MeToo’s Male Accusers, One Year Later,” Vanity Fair, October 2018. www​.vanityfair​.com​/hollywood​ /2018​/10​/metoo​-male​-accusers​-terry​-crews​-alex​-winter​-michael​-gaston​-interview​/. 35. Alison Phipps, “White Tears, White Rage: Victimhood and (as) Violence in Mainstream Feminism.” European Journal of Cultural Studies 24, no. 1 (2021): 81–93, 81. doi.org/10.1177/1367549420985852. See, also, Alison Phipps, “Every Woman Knows a Weinstein: Political Whiteness and White Woundedness in #MeToo and Public Feminisms around Sexual Violence.” Feminist Formations 31, no. 2 (2019): 1–25. 36. Keller and Ringrose, “‘But then Feminism Goes Out the Window!’” 37. Lucy Bennett, “‘If We Stick Together We Can Do Anything’: Lady Gaga Fandom, Philanthropy and Activism through Social Media.” Celebrity Studies 5, no. 1–2 (2014): 138–52. 38. Oluwadamilola Ayeni, “The Dynamics of Circuit of Culture Model in Promoting Angelina Jolie’s Humanitarian Activities.” Studies in Media and Communication 6, no. 2 (2018): 12–19. 39. Alex Xanthoudakis, “Mobilizing Minions: Fan Activism Efficacy of Misha Collins Fans in ‘Supernatural’ Fandom.” Transformative Works and Cultures 32 (2020). doi.org/10.3983/twc.2020.1827. 40. Paul Thomas Atkinson, “Stars for Freedom: Hollywood, Black Celebrities, and the Civil Rights Movement by Emilie Raymond.” Film & History: An Interdisciplinary Journal 47, no. 1 (2017): 97–99; Sean Redlitz, “The Hollywood Stars Who Marched With MLK.” Medium, January 13, 2017. theredlitz.medium.com/ the-hollywood-stars-who-marched-with-mlk-de2b216ccd5c/. 41. Shaun Scott, Millennials and the Moments that Made Us: A Cultural History of the US from 1982–present (Alresford, Hants, UK: John Hunt Publishing, 2018).

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42. Giulia Taurino, “Exploring Nostalgic Reconfigurations in Media Franchises.” In Netflix Nostalgia: Streaming the Past on Demand, edited by Katryn Pallister, 9–24 (Lanham, MD: Lexington, 2019), 9. 43. Megan Henesy, “‘Leaving My Girlhood Behind’: Woke Witches and Feminist Liminality in Chilling Adventures of Sabrina.” Feminist Media Studies (2020): 1143–57. doi.org/10.1080/14680777.2020.1791929. 44. Verity Trott, “Networked Feminism: Counterpublics and the Intersectional Issues of #MeToo.” Feminist Media Studies 21, no. 7 (2021): 1125–42. doi.org/10.1 080/14680777.2020.1718176. 45. Rottenberg, The Rise of Neoliberal Feminism, 4. 46. Pies Descalzos Fundacion, “Who Are We?” Pies Descalzos Fundacion, 2021. fundacionpiesdescalzos.com/en/about-us/. 47. Leila Cobo, “Shakira’s Pies Descalzos Foundation Will Build Two New Schools in Colombia: Star Places First Stone in Hometown.” Billboard, November 3, 2018. www​.billboard​.com​/articles​/columns​/latin​/8483078​/shakira​-pies​-descalzos​ -foundation​-new​-schools​-colombia​/. 48. Emma Gray, “In The 2010s, Celebrity Feminism Got Trendy. Then Women Got Angry.” Huffington Post, December 26, 2019. https://www.huffpost.com/entry/ celebrity-feminism-2010-taylor-swift_n_5dfbdc44e4b006dceaab16a7, par. 5. 49. The Kenan Institute for Ethics, “The Problem with Empowerment.” October 20, 2017. https://kenan.ethics.duke.edu/the-problem-with-empowerment/, par. 5. 50. Carlie Porterfield, “Dolly Parton Gets the Moderna Coronavirus Vaccine Her $1 Million Donation Helped Fund.” Forbes, March 2, 2021. www​.forbes​.com​/sites​/ carlieporterfield​/2021​/03​/02​/dolly​-parton​-gets​-the​-moderna​-coronavirus​-vaccine​-her​ -1​-million​-donation​-helped​-fund​/​?sh​=b14012e2ee8d 51. Kristin Salaky, “Dolly Parton Got A COVID-19 Vaccine and Announced It by Singing a ‘Jolene’ Parody Called ‘Vaccine.’” delish, March 3, 2021. www​.delish​.com​ /food​-news​/a35711638​/dolly​-parton​-covid​-19​-vaccine​/ 52. Alyssa Bailey, “Rihanna Donates Personal Protective Equipment to New York for COVID-19 Outbreak.” Elle, March 27, 2020. www​.elle​.com​/culture​/celebrities​/ a31953110​/rihanna​-new​-york​-covid​-19​-equipment​-donation​/. 53. Cher, “What Are You Going to Use Your Celebrity For?” MSNBC Nicole Wallace interview regarding Cher’s Vaccine advocacy and efforts, June 17, 2021. 54. Alister Miskimmon, Ben O’Loughlin, and Laura Roselle, Strategic Narratives: Communication Power and the New World Order (London: Routledge, 2014). 55. Hester Baer, “Redoing Feminism: Digital Activism, Body Politics, and Neoliberalism.” Feminist Media Studies (2016): 17–34, 18. 56. Baer, “Redoing Feminism,” 22. 57. Baer, “Redoing Feminism,” 19. 58. Baer, “Redoing Feminism,” 22. 59. Henry Jenkins and Sangita Shresthova, “Up, Up, and Away! The Power and Potential of Fan Activism.” Transformative Works and Cultures 10, no. 1 (2012). journal.transformativeworks.org/index.php/twc/article/view/435/305. 60. Henry Jenkins, “‘Cultural Acupuncture’: Fan Activism and the Harry Potter Alliance.” In Popular Media Cultures, edited by Lincoln Geraghty, 206–29 (London:

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Palgrave Macmillan, 2015). doi.org/10.1057/9781137350374_11. See, also, Melissa Brought and Sangita Shresthova, “Fandom Meets Activism: Rethinking Civic and Political Participation.” Transformative Works and Cultures, 10, no. 1 (2012). doi:10.3983/twc.2012.0303. 61. Henry Jenkins, “Fan Activism as Participatory Politics: The Case of the Harry Potter Alliance.” DIY Citizenship: Critical Making and Social Media, edited by Matt Ratto and Megan Boler, 65–74 (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2014), 66. 62. Bennett, “Lady Gaga Fandom, Philanthropy and Activism through Social Media.” 63. Melissa A. Click, Hyunji Lee, and Holly Willson Holladay, “‘You’re Born to Be Brave’: Lady Gaga’s Use of Social Media to Inspire Fans’ Political Awareness.” International Journal of Cultural Studies 20, no. 6 (2017): 603–19, 604. 64. Josephine Lukito, Luis Loya, Carlos Dávalos, Jianing Li, Chau Tong, and Douglas M. McLeod. “Chiming In: A Computer-Assisted Analysis of Popular Musicians’ Political Engagement on Twitter.” Social Media + Society 7, no. 2 (2021): 1–13. 65. Red Chidgey, “Postfeminism™: Celebrity Feminism, Branding and the Performance of Activist Capital.” Feminist Media Studies 21, no. 7 (2020): 1055–71. doi. org/10.1080/14680777.2020.1804431. 66. John Fiske, “The Cultural Economy of Fandom.” In The Adoring Audience: Fan Culture and Popular Media (first edition), edited by Lisa A. Lewis, 30–49 (London: Routledge, 2002). 67. Rubal Kanozia, and Garima Ganghariya, “More than K-pop Fans: BTS Fandom and Activism Amid COVID-19 Outbreak.” Media Asia 48, no. 4 (2021): 338–45. See also Linda Kuo, Simone Perez-Garcia, Lindsey Burke, Vic Yamasaki, and Thomas Le, “Performance, Fantasy, or Narrative: LGBTQ+ Asian American Identity through Kpop Media and Fandom.” Journal of Homosexuality 69, no. 1 (2022): 145–68. doi: 10.1080/00918369.2020.1815428. 68. Julia Hollingsworth, “K-pop Fans Are Being Credited with Helping Disrupt Trump’s Rally. Here’s Why That Shouldn’t Be a Surprise.” CNN, June 22, 2020. www​.cnn​.com​/2020​/06​/22​/asia​/k​-pop​-fandom​-activism​-intl​-hnk​/index​.html​/. 69. Raisa Bruner, “How K-Pop Fans Actually Work as a Force for Political Activism in 2020.” Time, July 25, 2020. time.com/5866955/k-pop-political/?amp=true/. 70. Rubal and Ganghariya, “More Than K-pop Fans.” 71. Chidgey, “Postfeminism™,” 2. 72. Susie Khamis, Lawrence Ang, and Raymond Welling, “Self-Branding,‘MicroCelebrity’ and the Rise of Social Media Influencers.” Celebrity Studies 8, no. 2 (2017): 191–208. 73. Norman Booth and Julie Ann Matic, “Mapping and Leveraging Influencers in Social Media to Shape Corporate Brand Perceptions.” Corporate Communications: An International Journal 16, (2011): 184–191. https://doi. org/10.1108/13563281111156853, 185. 74. Timothy Pakron, “Tori’s Potato Salad.” Mississippi Vegan Blog. Accessed July 12, 2022. www​.mississippivegan​.com​/toris​-potato​-salad, paras. 6–7/. 75. Pakron, “Tori’s Potato Salad,” para. 8.

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76. Timothy Pakron, Mississippi Vegan: Recipes and Stories from a Southern Boy’s Heart (New York: Avery). 77. Pakron, “Tori’s Potato Salad,” para. 27. 78. Avery E. Holton, Mark Coddington, Seth C. Lewis, and Homero Gil De Zuniga, “Reciprocity and the News: The Role of Personal and Social Media Reciprocity in News Creation and Consumption.” International Journal of Communication 9 (2015): 2526–47. See also Edson C. Tandoc, Alice Huang, Andrew Duffy, Rich Ling, and Nuri Kim, “To Share Is to Receive: News as Social Currency for Social Media Reciprocity.” Journal of Applied Journalism & Media Studies 9, no. 1 (2020): 3–20. 79. Jiwon Kang, Jina Kim, Migyeong Yang, Eunil Park, Minsam Ko, Munyoung Lee, and Jinyoung Han, “Behind the Scenes of K-pop Fandom: Unveiling K-pop Fandom Collaboration Network.” Quality & Quantity (2021): 1–22. 80. Tracy Deonn Walker, “Narrative Extraction, #BlackPantherSoLit, and Signifyin’: ‘Black Panther’ Fandom and Transformative Social Practices.” In Fans of Color, Fandoms of Color, edited by Abigail De Kosnik and andré carrington, special issue, Transformative Works and Cultures, no. 29 (2019). doi.org/10.3983/twc.2019.1643. 81. Briony Hannell, “Fandom and the Fourth Wave: Youth, Digital Feminisms, and Media Fandom on Tumblr.” PhD thesis, University of East Anglia (UK), 2020. 82. Boria Majumdar and Souvik Naha, “Live Sport During the COVID-19 Crisis: Fans as Creative Broadcasters.” Sport in Society 23, no. 7 (2020): 1091–99. 83. Scott Huver, “Foo Fighters’ Dave Grohl Performs On Stage with Prodigy ‘Arch-Nemesis’ 11-Year-Old Nandi Bushell.” People, August 27, 2021. people.com/ music/foo-fighters-dave-grohl-performs-with-nandi-bushell/. 84. Dave Grohl, cited in Huver, “Dave Grohl Performs with Prodigy ‘Arch-Nemesis,’” par. 9. 85. Rubal and Ganghariya, “More Than K-pop Fans,” par. 6. 86. Chen Lou, “Social Media Influencers and Followers: Theorization of a Trans-Parasocial Relation and Explication of Its Implications for Influencer Advertising.” Journal of Advertising (2021): 1–18. 87. Ignus Kalpokas, A Political Theory of Post-Truth (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018); Pramod K. Nayar, Essays in Celebrity Culture: Stars and Styles (London: Anthem Press, 2021); Liane Tanguay, “Reality TV ‘Gets Real’: Hypercommercialism and Post-Truth in CNN’s Coverage of the 2016 Election Campaign.” In Neoliberalism and the Media, edited by Marian Meyers, 21–38 (New York: Routledge, 2019). 88. Keller and Ringrose, “‘But then Feminism Goes Out the Window!’” 89. Judy L. Isaksen and Nahed Eltantawy, “What Happens When a Celebrity Feminist Slings Microaggressive Shade? Twitter and the Pushback against Neoliberal Feminism.” Celebrity Studies (2021): 1–16; Emma Tennent and Sue Jackson, “‘Exciting’ and ‘Borderline Offensive’: Bloggers, Binaries, and Celebrity Feminism.” Feminist Media Studies 19, vol. 2 (2019): 225–38. 90. See Meg Tully, “Constructing a Feminist Icon through Erotic Friend Fiction: Millennial Feminism on Bob’s Burgers.” Critical Studies in Media Communication 35, no. 2 (2018): 194–207. 91. Lara Lengel and Victoria A. Newsom, “Contested Border Crossings in Shifting Political Landscapes: Anti-invasion Discourses and Human Trafficking

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Representations in US Film and Politics.” iMex: México Interdisciplinario / Interdisciplinary Mexico 9, no. 18 (2020): 61–82. doi:10.23692/iMex.18.5; Victoria A. Newsom, Lara Lengel, and Michelle Yeung, “Alt-right Masculinities: Construction and Commodification of the Ethno-nationalist Anti-hero.” Women & Language 43, no. 2 (2020) 253–88; Nathaniel Ainley, “50 Female Photographers Give the World a Window into #girlgaze.” The Creators Project, 2016. www​.vice​.com​/en​/article​/ z4qa49​/50​-female​-photographers​-relish​-their​-gaze​/. 92. Ann Kowalski, Lara Martin Lengel, and Victoria A. Newsom, “Visualisation and/as Failed Boundary Crossings: Oxana Shachko’s Disruptive Visual Rhetoric and Aesthetic Grammar of Activism.” Peer-reviewed paper presented to the Feminist Scholarship Division at the 69th annual conference of the International Communication Association, Washington, DC, May 2018. 93. Given the nature of the actions used to increase celebrity status by ethnonationalist and other mass shooters, I avoid using such murderers’ names to avoid increasing that goal of celebrity. See, also, Newsom, Lengel, and Yeung, “Alt-right Masculinities”; and Lengel and Newsom, “Contested Border Crossings in Shifting Political Landscapes.” 94. Harold D. Lasswell, Propaganda Technique in World War I (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner, 1927); Harold D. Lasswell, Psychopathology and Politics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1930); and Harold D. Lasswell, World Politics and Personal Insecurity (New York: Free Press, 1935). 95. Alice E. Marwick, “Why Do People Share Fake News? A Sociotechnical Model of Media Effects.” Georgetown Law Technology Review 2, no. 2 (2018): 474–512. See, also, Jafar Mehrad, Zohre Eftekhar, and Marzieh Goltaji, “Vaccinating Users against the Hypodermic Needle Theory of Social Media: Libraries and Improving Media Literacy.” International Journal of Information Science and Management (IJISM) 18, no. 1 (2020): 17–24. 96. Paul F. Lazarsfeld, “Communication Research and the Social Psychologist.” In Current Trends in Social Psychology, edited by W. Dennis, 218–73 (Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1948). 97. Herta Herzog, “Listener Mail to the Voice of America.” Public Opinion Quarterly 16, no. 4 (1952): 607–11; and Herta Herzog, “Radio and Television: Radio—The First Post-War Year.” Public Opinion Quarterly 10, no. 3 (1946): 297–313. 98. Marwick, “Why Do People Share Fake News?” 99. Nye, “Soft Power”; Nye, Soft Power. 100. Nye, “Soft Power”; Nye, Soft Power. 101. Penny Andrews, “Receipts, Radicalisation, Reactionaries, and Repentance: The Digital Dissensus, Fandom, and the COVID-19 Pandemic.” Feminist Media Studies 20, no. 6 (2020): 902–7, 903 (Emphasis in original). 102. Kanozia and Ganghariya, “More than K-pop Fans.” 103. Jenkins, “Fan Activism as Participatory Politics.”

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104. Soobum Lee and Won-Ki Moon, “New Public Segmentation for Political Public Relations Using Political Fandom: Understanding Relationships between Individual Politicians and Fans.” Public Relations Review 47, no. 4 (2021): 102084. 105. Richard W. Mansbach and Yale H. Ferguson, “Nationalist-Populism, Its Causes, Content, and Consequences.” In Populism and Globalization, 47–88 (Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2021). 106. Cited in Marianne Levine, “Schumer to ‘Conspiracy Caucus’ GOP: Stop Probe into Origins of Russia Investigation.” Politico, May 29, 2020. www​.politico​ .com​/news​/2020​/05​/29​/schumer​-dubs​-republicans​-as​-the​-conspiracy​-caucus​-russia​ -investigation​-289566​/. 107. Cornel Sandvoss, “The Politics of Against.” In Anti-Fandom, edited by Melissa A. Click, 125–46 (New York University Press, 2019), 127.

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An irony of US feminist history exists in the continuing influence of Phyllis Schlafly1 in political rhetoric and engagement. Her influence is dramatized in the 2020 BBC2//FX/Hulu channel miniseries, Mrs. America, starring Cate Blanchett who portrays Schlafly in her antifeminist role in stopping the ratification of the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA). The series highlights her very ability to gain public sphere voice and power in which she argued against for women. Blanchett’s portrayal focused on the feminist-empowered identity Schlafly took on to argue against feminism and women’s empowerment and rights.2 Blanchett took the role specifically because “it is a sign of our dire times.”3 The Motion Picture Academy Award winning Australian actor argues: Phyllis Schlafly represents a whole way of thinking in America that really has to be acknowledged—that there’s a whole stepping back. I think it’s a resonant pocket of history that we’re still living through the failures and successes of. It’s something that makes me incredibly sad, but has also galvanised me. To me, that is the importance of the series—to keep that conversation alive. What is so frightening about equality?

Schlafly places her arguments of gender and sexuality within family values constructs and religious traditionalism, but her activist style is at odds with feminist ideologies. And, for many feminist and political theorists, her mimicry and appropriation of feminist practices provided a groundwork for contemporary grassroots religious [Christian], antifeminist, and gun-rights “conservatism,” as well as the radical shifting of the US Republican Party— once, in its early days, the Republican Party was associated with women’s and civil rights leadership in North America—toward a far-right, neo-fascist identity.4 231

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In her 1970s efforts to attack reproductive rights and women’s professional advancement, foundational aspects of the ERA, Schlafly “taught wives to submit to their husbands” arguing that women should, in accordance with legalistic and misogynistic interpretations of Scripture, be subservient to men. Schlafly’s Eagle Forum has therefore been critiqued as promoting misogyny. “When these women would picket at feminist rallies, one protest sign read: ‘My husband said I could picket.’”5 “So much for girl power,” writes Nadja Sayej in her analysis of Mrs. America.6 Given the recent efforts to kill reproductive rights in states like Texas, Sayej could make this statement for the present, as well. Neoconservative populism is a rising global issue that, particularly as it is enacted in the United States and Europe, utilizes a form of grassroots activist masquerade backed by a legitimized, systemic, yet contained empowerment. Mimicking feminist action while seeking to deconstruct, redefine, and misrepresent those same arguments, populism exhibits an aggressive re-patriarchalism by claiming reverse racism, sexism, and elitism. It is an extension of the efforts of Schlafly, the John Birch Society,7 and the Moral Majority, and thus grounded in a drive to spread antifeminism and male and white supremacist ideology. Conservative political movements of recent decades in North America have shifted to a focus on local politics and arenas, taking on grassroots characteristics and, like Schlafly herself, masking elite roots and intelligentsia experience with conservative marketing agendas disguised as personalized, grassroots issues, such as school board involvement and education reform movements, town hall participation, conservative radio markets, and, more recently, digital story banking.8 Schlafly and other conservative women leaders in Europe, Australia, and North America have served to legitimize a form of masculine extremist hegemony, reinforcing hypermasculine characteristics as narrative means of rejecting feminism, socialism, abortion and reproductive rights, immigration, and homosexuality9 that would come to be referenced as the “culture wars.” Schlafly’s grassroots, housewife mimicry is also made evident in her 2016 endorsement of Donald J. Trump for US president. Trump’s identity contrasted with the “family values” traditions espoused by Schlafly and her Eagle Forum organization. Her endorsement, therefore, illustrates a strategic power-grab with ongoing efforts to mobilize conservative, white women voters.10 The localization of conservative11 politics is strategic, and therefore takes a different form than the local and personal empowerment strategies of North American third wave feminism. Schlafly’s mechanics were similar: empower herself by claiming a distinctively feminine identity and using that to gain systemic status. However, Schlafly’s claim was intentionally meant to reinforce patriarchal norms and standards, and claim a feminine power rooted in

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patriarchy. In a discussion regarding the relevancy of her own past work in today’s feminist experience, feminist author Susan Faludi explained in 2020 that the Trump era illustrates an even more overt form of backlash than when she originally wrote her work; one containing resurgent misogyny and using the insecurities associated with racism, classism, and sexism to disrupt and overturn feminist gains.12 Further, abortion law historian Mary Ziegler, in discussing what was then the approaching overturning of Roe vs. Wade after the appointment of Amy Coney Barrett, argues that “the American anti-abortion movement contributed far more to the rise of Donald Trump and the transformation of the GOP than we often think.”13 Contemporary embodied activisms and feminisms echo both third wave’s intentional individual-only contained empowerment and antifeminism’s intentional counter-advocacy as another form of contained empowerment. There is a key distinction, however, in that third wave style’s individual focus can gain temporal power for individuals with little systemic change, while antifeminism’s counter-advocacy is designed to re-empower hegemonic agency and maintain structural norms. As contemporary counter-advocacies have also absorbed the “individual power and rights” strategies of third wave (and lipstick/postfeminisms) they have created a fandom-style, false grassroots form of activism. The “culture wars” have come to represent efforts by conservative actors to reverse the successes of progressive and liberal political arguments encouraging multicultural, intersectional acceptance and representation. Also sometimes referenced as “identity politics,” these labels represent a clash of personal-political choice, freedom, and empowerment attributes between conservative activists and advocates seeking to reinforce hegemonic norms, including norms perceived as long since destabilized, and progressive and liberal actors seeking to continue to destabilize and change hegemonic institutions. One example of the impact of culture war identity politics occurred in August 2017, when then Google engineer James Damore authored and shared a document entitled, “Google’s Ideological Echo Chamber”14 wherein he critiqued Google’s corporate culture for being too driven to include women. Damore justified his argument by arguing what he claimed were scientific facts about men’s and women’s biological and psychological differences that made women poor choices to lead or work alongside men in large numbers, particularly in technological, engineering, and science-based fields. Damore warned that Google would fail for not adhering to patriarchal business traditions by hiring too many women. Damore further critiqued Google for silencing people like him who wished to “speak truth to power.”15 Damore was fired from Google because of his critical speech against the company’s policies. The situation rose to prominence in US national and international news16 because it highlighted

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conflicts between ideals of free speech and the need for public argument to be grounded in fact and data, something that was becoming increasingly problematic in what would come to be recognized as the early “Trump” or “Post-truth” era. THE POLITICS OF DISLIKE: BACKLASH AS CONSTRUCTED DESTRUCTION Feminist movements around the world have and continue to suffer backlash from patriarchal and often fundamentalist religious efforts, examples of which vary from political lobbying to violence. This backlash, sometimes labeled “anti-feminism” is often centered around a perceived destabilization of patriarchal traditions and power, and public arguments that feminism and the promotion of women’s rights are subversive ideologies that promote abortion, antifamily values, and threaten the well-being of children. Global antifeminist arguments are also often framed to promote the idea that feminism threatens women themselves, particularly traditional understandings of womanhood. Many of these antifeminist arguments encompass racist, supremacist, fascist, classist, and anti-LGBTQIA+ ideals and backlash as well as being grounded in sexism. The often aggressive manner of antifeminist backlash serves as a type of spectacle meant to stir public concern and generate sympathy or fear. Consider, for example, comments made by conservative, sometimes supremacist, GOP senators in questioning US Supreme Court nominee Katanji Brown Jackson around the issues of Critical Race Theory (CRT) backlash, transgender rights, abortion, child pornography, and criminal sentencing. In an attempt to highlight talking points focused on an upcoming midterm election cycle, multiple GOP senators questioned Jackson’s personal values, rather than focusing on questions about the high Court and its jurisprudence.17 Most of the topics of choice for these GOP voices echoed the fearmongering of Trumpism and promoted racist, even fascist ideological views. Political analyst and writer Chauncy DeVega explains, “Republicans on the Senate Judiciary Committee (and their boosters in right-wing media) pounced on Jackson with a series of insidious lies and allegations drawn from the QAnon conspiracy theory. According to this narrative, she is a pedophileprotecting, criminal-coddling ‘anti-white’ Black supremacist who embraces ‘critical race theory’ and seeks to destroy the ‘traditional family.’”18 The intentional conflation of racism into antifeminism is a longstanding occurrence, one that seeks to link progressive movements as a means of delegitimizing unique needs. Activists have been seeking to highlight these dualistic attacks for decades. In an April 1967 interview for NBC News, just

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under one year prior to his assassination, the Reverend Doctor Martin Luther King, Jr. explained why his arguments had shifted from civil rights discourse to incorporate opposition to the Vietnam War and support for economic justice and women’s rights. King explained, “We are in a new era, a new phase in the struggle where we have moved from a struggle for decency . . . to a struggle for genuine equality.”19 King goes on to explain that this push was more disruptive to hegemonic norms than some of his earlier advocacies because it would involve dismantling institutional norms that reinforced personal comforts, and personal justifications for people to maintain systemic power. “And this is where we are getting the resistance because there was never any intention to go this far.”20 What King outlined here is the mechanisms by which systemic inequalities are reinforced and reified by allowing advocacies and systemic power shifts within localized, limited spaces. The resulting contained empowerment reconstructs a means for the appearance of empowerment without alteration to institutional structures. King also points out, significantly, that real equity cannot happen within individual institutions of power, but must simultaneously cross through the interrelated systems of oppression. In May of 1967, King further explained his evolving philosophy at a meeting of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), “We have moved from the era of civil rights to the era of human rights, an era where we are called upon to raise certain basic questions about the whole society.”21 In this speech, King was outlining his goals for what would become the 1968 March on Washington known as the “Poor People’s Campaign.”22 Unlike many of the previous marches associated with King and his advocacies, this movement was to improve the status of all impoverished persons, of all races and genders. King’s argument would later be echoed by Canadian author and feminist Margaret Atwood. In an opinion piece published in Globe and Mail in 2018, Atwood explains, “I believe that in order to have civil and human rights for women there have to be civil and human rights, period, including the right to fundamental justice, just as for women to have the vote, there has to be a vote. Do Good Feminists believe that only women should have such rights? Surely not.”23 Atwood goes on to critique the potential for the #MeToo movement to focus too much on promoting women’s stories without focusing on protecting human rights and legal justice. She further warned against bypassing the legal system because of its perceived ineffectiveness, warning that “new power brokers” would rise in the place of feminist efforts, a prediction of the conservative successes in reclaiming and redesigning gender rights through the court system and the US Supreme Court. King’s analysis, and Atwood’s warning, continue to resound in US politics and social justice efforts. In 2020 the impacts of a global COVID-19

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pandemic on multiple hegemonic institutions highlighted the truths espoused by King in his 1967 interview. It also illustrated prophetic qualities of a speaker who knew that institutional changes would not be quick, and that there would remain a continuing influence of hierarchical structures that Black feminist Patricia Hill Collins referred to as the “matrix of domination.”24 King’s warning addressed how attempts to deconstruct and dismantle this matrix have historically been aimed at one hegemonic system at a time. Building on this, Collins explains that gender and sexuality have often been overlooked or intentionally left out of race and income-based equity reform movements. Further, the system reinforces itself by allowing accommodation to one marginalized group, which can serve to reinforce tensions between different advocates rather than encouraging overall systemic change. True change, therefore, requires change outside of liminal accommodations, and within multiple aspects of the matrix simultaneously. King’s own words reinforce this necessity, “We must see now that the evils of racism, economic exploitation and militarism are all tied together. And you can’t get rid of one without getting rid of the other.”25 Present day identity-based activisms are generally centered around both current progressive and conservative understandings of polarized topics, many of which have been debated in public discourse for decades. Among the most common of these topics are abortion rights and gun rights narratives, both of which have become more contentious and visible in recent years. These topical advocacies are structured within strategic narratives that often serve as reconstructive tools for reinforcing existing political structures and agency. Other common present-day advocative narratives are more clearly defined as deconstructive critiques of and attempts to reshape institutional inequities. Among these narratives are racial justice advocacies and movements promoting stories of police and other institutional violations, such as the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement. However, all of these advocacies incorporate both deconstructive and reconstructive elements. As US society’s ideological polarization has increased, consumption of social media and alternative and “independent” news sources visibly situated along the right- and left-wing political spectrum—such as right-wing Brietbart and the left-wing Foundation for National Progress, which publishes Mother Jones—has also increased. Research indicates consumers are unaware or uncaring of the corporate ownership and standard agenda setting goals evident within these supposedly “alternative” sources.26 The result is news and information designed to appeal to specific and limited audiences within echo chambers, with little focus on facts and forensic process, or the connection between the information provided and institutional, hegemonic forces. The “limited and skewed presentation and consumption of online information”27 associated with social media echo chambers reflect many of the

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same challenges I associate with the contained empowerment of third wave feminism’s Sexing the Political online journal discussed in chapter 5, and provides an ideologically sound location for the proliferation of acts of discursive amnesia. Contemporary advocacy requires careful navigation within, between, and around ideological echo chambers. If we consider a key goal for advocacy as effectively reaching an audience through helping them become marginal participants in the process of change-making and consciousness raising, then ensuring uniformity of messaging is a necessary step. However, uniformity can and often does lead to the avoidance of possible counter-narratives or alternate goals. Practices of discursive amnesia28 within this era of disinformation are often aimed at destabilizing notions of progress associated with identity politics. Arguments against perceived gains by minority and marginalized groups are designed and promoted in order to encourage and justify anger, fear, and outrage on the part of targeted audience groups who have not benefited, or don’t see themselves as having benefitted, from such progressive gains. Aggressive calls for action against and attempts to dismantle Critical Race Theory in 2021 highlight this pattern. Similarly, backlash against the #MeToo movement and pushes to reenergize efforts to eliminate the gender pay gap have become politicized efforts.29 The impact of these efforts on women reflects a repeating history of progress met with conservative pushback that we see in the story of Phyllis Schlafly’s efforts to reject the ERA. Gender-based reform has long been complicated by the fact that women are not always seen as a minority group, and thus those legal protections applied to minorities are often not, or separately, applied to women, as in the case of voting rights in the United States. Add to this the notion of the invisibility of women in history, and the ability to destabilize women’s and gender-based histories takes on traumatic potential. Dorothy McBride and Janine Parry question whether the necessity for gender and sexuality categories must always be given special consideration within institutional concerns. The authors argue “For each area of importance to women’s lives, such as education, family, or work, there are questions, or issues, about the relation of gender to the subject and what actions—if any— government should take.”30 The ability to destabilize or create effective backlash against sex and gender-based progress is highly politicized in contemporary US politics. Consider the impact and public outcry of the replacement, by Donald Trump and GOP Senate leadership, of Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg with Amy Coney Barrett in relation to abortion concerns. The major policy and legal changes that impact gender and sex are therefore seldom made with sex and gender as the primary focus or concern. Instead, these changes are made through court decisions, state agencies, and political actions that focus

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on related issues, but not directly sex or gender. Gender and gendered narratives are often removed from legislation and court rulings, in favor of arguing over the rights of privacy and welfare that can be applied to men. Consider, for example, the US Supreme Court decision legalizing birth control. This decision was centered on rights to privacy arguments31 that favored heterosexual marriage and married men, rather than women’s rights.32 WELL-FUNDED BACKLASH: THE RISE OF THE NEW RIGHT The rise of the “Moral Majority”33 in the late 1970s and throughout the 1980s within the GOP is rooted in backlash to the spread of multicultural, intersectional ideology. Americans were becoming increasingly pro-choice, leading those involved in anti-abortion advocacy to seek to reframe the domestic agenda by gaining influence within the Republican party.34 Prior to the middle of the first decade of 2000, the majority of conservative political lobbyist organizations and Political Action Groups (PACs) such as the Christian Coalition had avoided abortion as a key issue, predominantly due to the acknowledgment that anti-abortion views were politically and culturally unpopular. While right-to-life activists and conservative groups like Phyllis Schlafly’s Eagle Forum actively sought to reverse Roe, they were unable to directly, monetarily influence the marketing of political candidates due to campaign finance standards.35 Thus, a key factor in the ability for anti-abortion advocates to gain stronger footing within US politics and to advance their legislative goals came with the campaign finance changes resulting from the 2010 Citizens United vs. Federal Election Commission decision by the United States Supreme Court. That decision allowed populists and those outside of the traditional or “Establishment” political party structures to gain influence through large campaign donations. Wealthy donors such as the conservative Koch brothers had been dedicating funds to loosen campaign finance limits since the late 1980s, but prior to Citizens’ United there had been active work on both sides of the US political divide to both reinforce campaign limits, and to loosen them. By late in the first decade of 2000, however, the strongest voices in support of lighter restrictions on campaign funding were centered in the Libertarian movement, and in self-identified “conservative” media. The money followed: by 2005, one of Charles Koch’s efforts, the libertarian public interest law group Institute for Justice had successfully lobbied for the attention of congressional GOP members.36

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In her analysis discussing how anti-abortion proponents and other populists took control of the GOP from the Republican Establishment, Mary Ziegler explains: Issue-based and ideological groups had always been able to push their own candidates, but they could never hope to dominate the party. In the old world of campaign finance rules, when populists ran for office, the Republican establishment spent them out of the race. In the world of Citizens United, populists had more than enough to win.37

Ziegler goes on to explain that the focus of anti-abortion proponents also shifted in recent years to “a new mission: control of the Supreme Court.”38 Ziegler’s argument echoes King’s concerns that systems seek to reinforce themselves, as well as Atwood’s warning that “power brokers” always seek ways to control institutional structures as a means of growing and enforcing their authority. Discussing the GOP’s focus on replacing Sandra Day O’Connor with another conservative Justice, Ziegler continues, “the prospect of controlling the Court could (at least temporarily) heal almost any fracture in the Republican Party. For the first time in history, business conservatives . . . prepared to campaign officially for the confirmation of a Supreme Court nominee.”39 The focus on the Court resonated with voters, and abortion was centered as one of the cornerstones for the GOP’s arguments about the Court. These arguments, however, were not solely aimed at generating means of overturning Roe. GOP and GOP-aligned lobbyists also worked to undermine standards applied under the Voting Rights Act of 1965, such as States’ preclearance requirements, the ability to enforce voter identification rules which would favor their constituencies, and to loosen redistricting limits.40 Further, the focus on the courts reinforced the GOP’s interest in preserving and expanding its influence and authority. In his analysis of the “Courts in the Age of Dysfunction,” legal economic theorist Johnathan Zasloff explains that the GOP moved, in the post-Reagan era, from a party that would compromise to achieve its goals to one set on blocking the successes of their opponents. Zasloff calls this “grand partisanship,” a political inclination derived from “a deeply-felt and long-held vision about the nature and purpose of the American Republic and the other party’s threat to that vision.”41 Lobbying and campaign efforts to sway the courts such as those espoused by the GOP in order to ensure their authority require funding. Legal scholar David Barnhizer offers a pointed critique of this type of funded influence, describing the image of Lady Justice with “blindfold askew, seeking glances to see who places the most money or other tribute onto her scale”42 before making her judgment. This shift toward funding the judiciary was further

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increased by the Citizens United decision, which resulted in the ability of lobbyists to gain the ear, and direct the financial goals, of political actors.43 It also lessened standards for transparency and disclosure by candidates and lobbyists.44 The antiestablishment takeover of the Republican Party effectively employed this judicial lobbying model to market their candidates and values to a jaded American public. In doing so, and through their efforts of social justice mimicry, a growing Tea Party movement would echo Marxist ideals associated with Occupy Wall Street as a means of promoting their own antiauthority brand of authoritarianism. Abortion and the push to overturn Roe continued to be a marketable factor for the neoconservative movement. Building on earlier successes, political strategists worked to ensure placement of anti-abortion advocates strategically in local, state, and federal legislative and executive positions, as well as to appoint conservative judges who would be open to their goals. Prior to Citizens United anti-abortion funding after Roe was predominantly focused on limiting access to abortion.45 One early victory for the anti-abortion movement was the 1976 Hyde Amendment which limited Medicaid funding for abortions.46 The first March for Life event in 1981 helped to publicize the pro-life movement and connected it to a Reagan-era neoconservative shift in the GOP power structure. This march mimicked civil rights-era marches, focusing on the personhood of the fetus, and reinforcing the effort to appeal with a broad, human-rights focus. Conservative Christian leader Pat Robertson ran for president in 1988. He failed to win, but rising “from the ashes”47 of his campaign came the Christian Coalition, which initially sought to avoid publicizing attempts to directly undermine or repeal Roe, instead working to stop individual women from having abortions by generating and funding lobbying and legal structures and creating Crisis Pregancy Centers (CPCs).48 These centers were designed to present limited options and choices to a pregnant woman, provide lectures and education on the “harmful consequences of abortion,”49 and recommend alternatives and options such as adoption. Many CPCs filled this role while advertising themselves as legitimate abortion clinics. The lobbying efforts funded by the Christian Coalition included the creation of federations and networks such as Care Net, Option Line, Heartbeat, and The National Institute of Family and Life Advocates, which worked to fund, train, and provide legal defense for CPCs.50 They also worked to restrict the funding of clinics providing legal abortions, such as Planned Parenthood.51 Another tactic continued a process started in the 1970s, working through educational boards and structures to include anti-abortion education as part of sex education curricular standards.52 The goals of limiting access to abortion and eventually overturning Roe became central to a broader argument to

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protect moral structures and preserve the traditional, heteronormative family unit. As LGTBQIA+, women’s and gender rights movements continued to gain momentum, the idealized family model values were echoed around the world as part of neoconservative politics.53 The mimicry espoused within neoconservative rhetorics would also influence the expansion of neoliberal response54 that both pushed back against the need for continued gender reform movements and promoted the individualism and personal expression freedoms associated with third wave feminism, while rejecting the need for government oversight. It is through this process that the concerns and warnings of King and Atwood become clear, and how we see the feminist movement contained both by neoconservativism, and through neoliberal pushback and dismissal. As neoconservative successes drew more funding in the United States, the GOP, along with continuing to court anti-abortion conservatives, made efforts to develop and fund a number of Political Action Committees (PACs) focused on getting individuals elected at the local, state, and federal levels. Multiple questions arose around the sourcing of these funds, as well as the ways in which the fund could be spent. Interest groups took advantage of the existence of PACs by providing financial backing for candidates in which these organizations could encourage particular behaviors and legislative and executive action. After Citizens United, the functionality of the campaign finance system encouraged shifting funds and resources from formal political party actors to outside organizations, leading to the formation of super PACs. These large, well-funded political action organizations “exist primarily because partisans have the motive and means to create party-like structures to offset constraints on party committees.”55 Able to run campaign events, ads, and fundraisers without the limitations associated with the formal parties, super PACs have the ability to take on unlimited amounts of donations and use those to promote their values, candidates, and lobbying. Pro-life super PACs would use these sources of virtually unlimited funding to mobilize and continue their efforts to restrict abortion access, promote pro-life candidates on all levels, and promote their choices in judicial candidates. The efforts to limit access to abortion continue to be criticized by reproductive justice proponents, particularly as these efforts failed to address the lived needs of women seeking abortion. Consider the criticism of essayist, poet, and social critic Katha Pollitt: There are already plenty of women unable to get the abortions they want because of anti-abortion victories. The Hyde Amendment, which bans federal Medicaid funding for abortions, has been in place since 1976. Hundreds of clinics have closed in the past 10 years; six states have only one at the time of this writing. And what about the women who end pregnancies they’d keep if they

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had a helping hand? . . . Real charities don’t spend their lives trying to make a situation worse with a promise to remedy it later.56

Such criticism illustrates how the anti-abortion, pro-woman political movement does harm to women by limiting choice and access, including access to needed medical aid and childcare should a mother choose to keep the child. There is an irony in the anti-abortion movement that highlights how anti-abortion rhetoric is self-containing while it aggressively seeks to limit and contain the abortion rights. In the United States, anti-abortion political discourse has focused predominantly on the right to life of the fetus in contrast to the right to choice for the mother. Such “rights” create a “natural” conflict between identities for the pregnant woman, and between the assumed rights of individuals. This sets up all abortion rhetoric based around “rights” as promoting a type of contained empowerment: limiting the rights of one individual due to the rights of another. However, because the original Roe decision had been based on the right to privacy, centering the right to life for the unborn child birthed a powerful strategic narrative that held appeal beyond the traditional Catholic constituency associated with anti-abortion ideology.57 Because Roe and other pro-choice arguments had been grounded on privacy and personal choice, “pro-life” anti-abortion rhetoric could assume a feminist positionality, by banning “sex-selective” abortion, and promoting the psychological damage to women who obtained abortions. The mimicry and incorporation of feminist and liberation “rights-based” rhetorics used by anti-abortion proponents thus increased the range of their messaging, and their appeal beyond a religious minority. Amanda Roberti, in her study, “Empowering Women by Regulating Abortion? Conservative Women Lawmaker’s Cooptation of Feminist Language in US Abortion Politics,” interrogates the attempts at feminist framing of anti-abortion bills by women legislators on the political right. She argues that these women’s “words signify a rise in the cooption of feminist language by conservative women and challenge the notion of representation.”58 By framing their arguments as “pro-life, pro-woman,” anti-abortion advocates gained authority both inside and outside of elected office in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Ziegler explains that the anti-abortion, pro-woman movement was grounded on “claims that abortion harms rather than helps women.”59 Arguing that abortion is physically and emotionally damaging to women, pro-life women activists thus sought to “challenge the authenticity of what it actually means to be pro-woman, wresting the label from conservative women’s progressive counterparts.”60 In the United States and Canada, anti-abortion activism also began focusing on getting more “pro-woman” women in office who were also pro-life and pro-motherhood.61 Functioning as a form of neoliberalism, pro-woman

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conservative women elected officials used their status to further restrict abortion access. This style of feminist mimicry serves as a “strategic tactic”62 to appear in support of women’s rights and women’s issues while simultaneously arguing, as Margaret Atwood aptly explains, “that women’s reproductive organs do not belong to the women who possess them. They belong only to the state.”63 Thus, the pro-woman movement, constructed through feminist mimicry, actively seeks to contain the empowerment of women, by “empowered” women reinforcing patriarchal norms. Abortion rhetoric also lends itself to mimicry through its association with the ERA and concepts of “equality.” Saurette and Gordon explain that the “equality frame” has long been re-appropriated by hegemonic forces, with a “long history of being redefined and redeployed by conservative movements.”64 Critics explain that abortion rhetoric grounds its mimicry through claims that abortion clinics, including Planned Parenthood, fail to provide the full information necessary for “informed consent.”65 Saurette and Gordon explain, “The core of this anti-abortion choice frame the charge that, even if women have a ‘formal’ choice, they are not presented with enough legitimate and informed choices to have a ‘real’ choice.”66 This rhetoric resonated with legislative efforts, resulting in at least thirty-three “informed consent” abortion laws in the US between 1992 and 2005.67 Other aspects of hegemony, including whiteness, cisgender normality, and capitalism are also reinforced through the feminist mimicry of anti-abortion rhetoric in North America. A number of critics suggest the focus of the “pro-choice” movement on “equality” and “choice” played as large a role in these forms of hegemonic reinforcement as the pro-woman mimicry itself.68 With the rise of the Tea Party, vice presidential nominee Sarah Palin became a symbol of pro-woman ideology. In an attempt to frame the understanding of the Tea Party as grassroots in 2010, Sarah Palin explained, “The Tea Party is not a top-down operation. It’s a ground-up call to action that is forcing both parties to change the way they’re doing business, and that’s beautiful.”69 The motivators for the rise of the Tea Party included appeals to white, suburban, and working class Americans who felt displaced by perceptions of American success, and displaced from understandings of white, male privilege. This fit within the framing sought by the GOP to increase its constituency, particularly after the historic, winning presidential campaign of Barack Obama. Ziegler explains, “The Conservative Caucus spoke the Tea Party’s language. It asserted that Obama would ‘redistribute wealth,’ ‘engineer a government takeover of the healthcare industry,’ ‘engage in out-of-control deficit spending,’ and ‘create entitlements that lead to government dependency,’ which in turn would damage the ‘moral fabric’ of the country.”70 Early comments from Tea Party actors indicated they would break away as a separate party. However, after a clash between business-friendly Republican National

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Committee leadership including chair Michael Steele and political commentators and celebrities like Rush Limbaugh, the influx of the 2010 Tea Party wave with its antiestablishment fervor began to shift party leadership toward opportunistic means of capturing a constituency. ANTIFEMINISM, ANTI-INTELLECTUALISM, (ANTI)AUTHORITARIANISM A highly visible shift toward ideological polarization in the 2010s resulted in a type of rejection of fact and histories by far-right and right-leaning pundits and politicians as a response to the perception that multicultural, non-binary and trans persons, and other minority groups were gaining political, economic, and social influence at the expense of those who see themselves as heirs to nostalgic power constructs. The ideological polarization of this era is centered around a divisiveness rooted in an attempt to normalize a radical rejection of science, fact, data, and history. This occurs through the construction of a type of discursive amnesia which attempts to normalize through the “collective forgetting”71 of people, events, science, data, and promote instead a “collective remembering that constructs histories to be pure, homogeneous, and devoid of shifts and discontinuities.”72 This process encourages particular historical and scientific narratives to be accepted and remembered, regardless of fact, data, and evidence, in order to “perpetuate privilege and interest in a particular economic and political context.” Those activists encouraging this type of collective forgetting utilize strategic narratives to shape understandings of empowerment and encourage systemic adherence to their preferred histories by encouraging people to forget or devalue conflicting narratives. Technological shifts of the twenty-first century led to the personalization of internet searches and social media as well as an ability for corporate and ideologically-based entities to collect and log information about users. It has also increased the frequency with which messaging and identity constructs reflective of political strategic narratives are built. The ability for targeted marketing of messages has led to the proliferation of online echo chambers, or spaces of social interaction built around a shared ideological or political concept. Members of these echo chambers contribute and consume information in a cycle that reinforces their attitudes and, in many cases, shuns or outright bans information that does not align to the local narrative. This definition is what Damore argued occurred with Google’s public spaces, in his complaint that the company silenced conservative voices in favor of progressive and what would come to be called “woke” voices. The polarization that has been witnessed in recent years has heightened public awareness of deconstructively oriented activists’ concerns as a

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response to rising authoritarianisms and legislative attempts to hinder notions of progress and what conservatives see as attempts to disrupt or dismantle traditionally understood norms. Women’s movements and feminists within the United States have been sounding alarms regarding the continuing efficacy of Roe vs. Wade, ongoing misogynistic structural norms, and wage and childcare inequities which disproportionately impact women. The past several years have further heightened these concerns. Sexual harassment and assault cases brought against highly visible figures such as Harvey Weinstein, Bill Cosby, R. Kelly, and Karry Nassar placed structural misogyny prominently in news coverage. The COVID-19 pandemic heightened awareness of structural and economic gender gaps related to employment. And the passing of Supreme Court Justice and Roe v. Wade attorney Ruth Bader Ginsberg and her subsequent replacement on the Court by conservative, antifeminist Amy Coney Barrett, along with the passage of anti-abortion legislation in Texas and Mississippi, among others, has brought abortion rights arguments back into the center of US political rhetoric. Collective forgetting has become a key element within contemporary politics, particularly among those identifying as Conservatives in North America and Europe, as well as within other conservative regimes. It is of particular value in hegemonic perspectives as essential conservatism by nature rejects notions of progress and change in favor of privileging a central ideology containing historical, ethical, moral, and religious truths as a means of legitimizing power.73 Collective forgetting is also easily encouraged in digital communities and through digital organizing as digital formats allow interest groups to set up unique arguments, present data and facts regardless of verification, and construct strategic narratives aimed at specific, targeted audiences. This information is also often presented as unique to the source, behind-the-scenes, or exclusive to the presenter in a form that reinforces a rejection of expertise and institutional validation. A dominant strain of anti-intellectualism has long been present in North American popular culture,74 and arisen in US political polarization and rhetoric in recent decades.75 Hofstadter’s 1963 analysis of anti-intellectualism presents several forms of resistance to science, academia, and knowledge production rooted in a belief in American, small town common sense. He explains, of the “heartland of America” that it is “filled with people who are often fundamentalist in religion, nativist in prejudice, isolationist in foreign policy, and conservative in economics.”76 In particular, Hofstadter highlights religious antirationalism and populist antielitism, both of which are present in contemporary conservative political strategies and ideological polarization. He also noted the links between conspiracy and a cultural loss paranoia77 that could be manipulated through fear propaganda. Critiques of American popular culture have made similar arguments, from Adorno and Horkheimer’s

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1944 “culture industry”78 challenge that popular music’s formulaic attributes would ruin the ability for authentic culture to emerge, instead producing manufactured copies that could only replicate hegemonic values. Thus, anti-intellectualism became a byproduct of the mass production of popular culture, as ideas became replicated without the needed use of critical thinking skills for audiences to consume the products. Anti-intellectualism can be replicated and adapted to political messaging, including messaging about abortion rights and climate control which would otherwise privilege scientific knowledge and understanding. Added to this is the constancy of pastiche, whereby popular culture constantly self-references, and the expanded ability for mimicry and parody to disrupt and destabilize institutions, or to reassert hegemonic norms.79 Popular culture then is a tool for propagandist ideological expansion and control, and one used readily by conservative agents. Conservative political efforts in the United States aligned with anti-intellectualism as a form of pushback to the “culture wars” of the 1960s and 1970s and legacy of the New Deal: The original GOP conservative critique against the New Deal legacy was an economic argument, but as socio-morals gained importance in the 1960s and 1970s, the conservative critique of contemporary times became primarily one of culture—combining a larger government role in socio-morals affairs (for example, abortion and gay marriage), with a more hands off government approach in economic affairs.80

Thus, political conservative arguments’ reclaimative mimicry of progressive “kitchen table issues” such as a family’s economic stability and right to unionize, were reframed in the context of the culture wars, anti-intellectualism, and family values. The evolving political conservative pushback would also come to align with a religious Evangelical American conservatism, highlighted by Hofstadter as “evangelical spirit” in the heartland, which emitted a distrust in intellectual authority and expertise that could challenge their spiritual knowledge base, and would come to “practice a rhetoric that privileges values over facts.”81 Schlafly’s anti-intellectual arguments used that same “values over facts” narrative to address the need for conservative revisionism of American education systems and schools. Her arguments wove neatly into the kitchen table discussions of the evolving GOP, allowing for a recentering of GOP political goals around anti-abortion messaging and a reclamation of the court system.82 By framing anti-abortion and education reform within notions of motherhood and patriarchal family structures, Schlafly and conservatives directly

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appealed to the Evangelical American mindset and its anti-intellectual core. Within this same appeal are appeals to nationalism and white supremacy.83 Anti-intellectualism appeals, in part, through emotional argument. The rise of “tea-party” or “conservative feminism”84 as a type of anti-intellectual, antifeminism coupled with third wave feminist foci on individual, hyperfeminine empowerment is evident through the appropriation of second wave and earlier feminist arguments by women of the US political right in the later part of first decade of 2000 and throughout the 2010s and early 2020s. This conservative reclamation of feminism, associated with white, suburban motherhood illustrates women who can speak from an emotional perspective that, prior to Donald Trump’s ascendency in the GOP, was unavailable to male conservatives. Consider Naomi Wolf’s 2011 description who she calls two, conservative, feminist celebrities: Palin is free to talk about “death panels”—a wholly invented threat of President Barack Obama’s health-care reform—and Bachmann can summon the spirit of McCarthy to raise the equally bizarre spectre of socialism’s tentacles infiltrating the highest levels of government. Both can issue homespun appeals as “hockey moms” or “soccer moms”—precisely the type of emotionalism that more cut-and-dried professional male politicians, even (or especially) at the top of the party, cannot manage to deliver.85

By pushing back against progressive and socialist connotations of feminism, conservative feminists argued that women’s empowerment did not have to include the loss of traditional femininity, or the loss of white male privilege, nor the import of motherhood and childbirth to conservative constituencies. Anti-abortion narratives have long played a role in anti- and contemporary feminisms, as well as within historical nationalisms, where they posed a clear mantra for women’s identities as contained by the necessity of motherhood within Nazi history. Consider the “Principles and Organizational Guidelines” provided by the National Socialist Women’s League in 1933, after the Nazi Party rose to power: We want an awakening, a renewal, and a reeducation of women to equip them for the task as guardians of the nation’s source of life: sexual life, marriage, motherhood and family, blood and race, and youth and nationhood. A woman’s entire education, development, vocational pursuit, and position within Volk and state must be directed toward the physical and spiritual task of motherhood.86

As another example, in 1933, the acting head of the Association of German Women, Paula Siber, articulated the role and duty of white mothers in the Nazi regime: “To be a woman means to be a mother . . . the highest calling of the National Socialist woman is not just to bear children, but consciously

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and out of total devotion to her role and duty as mother to raise children for her people.”87 Yvonne Lindgren explains, “women’s role in nationalism requires both child-bearing and child-rearing, and restriction on abortion is directly linked to the preservation of the nation.”88 For US conservatives in recent decades, this mantra plays out as the necessity of white, Christian motherhood in the maintenance and defense of a white, Christian nation. The motherhood narrative would become a focus not only for anti-abortion arguments, but also in connection with antigay marriage rhetoric and the promotion of Christian-influenced homeschooling and religion-sponsored charter schools.89 The appeal to motherhood is not, necessarily, separated from a woman’s right to work, a political position designed to attract working mothers. Again, this reflects moral arguments espoused by the National Socialist Women’s League’s 1933 “Principles and Organizational Guidelines”: We recognize that the great transformational process of women’s lives over the last fifty years, due to the machine age, has brought about a certain necessity, and we accept the education and official integration of the female workforce in the interest of the nation, unless this prohibits them from performing their duty within the Volk, in terms of marriage, family and motherhood.90

The focus on birthrates in Germany was also matched by rhetoric from the US Religious Right and contemporary nationalist efforts in the 2010s, one that is particularly visible in responses to the release of a Pew Research study in stages throughout 2015 and early 2016, which served as a catalyst for immigration related discussions related to shifting US religious and cultural populations. In May of 2015 Pew released its report discussing shifting religious populations worldwide. It included the following key argument: “In the United States, Christians will decline from more than three-quarters of the population in 2010 to two-thirds in 2050.”91 For many populist-leaning ideologists, this statement acted as a warning that non-Christian faiths, Islam and Judaism most notably, would become a major religious population in the not-so-distant future. The consistency of motherhood and white nationalist influence is evident in the impact of Schlafly’s and other Religious Right messaging patterns upon Trump’s 2016 electoral college victory; particularly of the 52 percent majority of white women who voted for him in that election.92 Not only does this highlight the very same antifeminist use of feminist engagement tactics that Schlafly espoused, but reinforces the irony of empowered women voting against women’s empowerment, and for male and white supremacist rhetorics.

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Barack Obama, commenting on the rise of Trumpism in the US political right, argued that Sarah Palin was an early sign: “I see a straight line from the announcement of Sarah Palin as the vice-presidential nominee to what we see today in Donald Trump, the emergence of the Freedom Caucus, the tea party, and the shift in the center of gravity for the Republican Party.”93 RIDING THE BACKLASH: THE COUNTER-CULTURE CARNIVAL The ideological polarization of US culture that permeates pandemic-era political rhetoric is at the core of this antifeminist vs. feminism argument that once again became dominant in the latter half of the 2010s. The polarization is also a result of the contained nature of activisms and advocacies within the echo chambers that result from political and ideological silos. The many advocacies seen during 2020 and 2021 reflected the perceptions of power and oppression among and between different ideologically polarized groups, as well as those among and between different political agencies. Pandemic-era activisms were thus impacted by the effects of the pandemic on social welfare, education, health, and economic institutions, as well as on individuals. The impact of polarized ideology and politics upon the rhetoric and action of the pandemic-era is immense, and the complicity of social media organizations in heightening the polarization themselves must be recognized. In an article discussing the role of social media organizing and use by those using grassroots mimicry to stir the assault on the US Capitol building on January 6, 2021, New York Times authors Thompson and Warzel explain, “Facebook’s algorithms have coaxed many people into sharing more extreme views on the platform—rewarding them with likes and shares for posts on subjects like election fraud conspiracies, Covid-19 denialism and anti-vaccination rhetoric.”94 The authors go on to examine the interrelationship between digital activism and social media influencers, particularly in terms of marketing and propaganda techniques: “The influencers amass followers, enhance their reputations, solicit occasional donations and maybe sell a few T-shirts. The rest of us are left with democracy buckling under the weight of citizens living an alternate reality.” Thus, the protests of 2020 and 2021 utilized traditional media attention-grabbing strategies combining physical marches and place-based activities, along with leveraging social media for organizing and disruption. These attention-grabbing acts play out as both political activism and publicity stunts, and thus also act both as activism from within and from outside of structural hegemonies. However, while present day activisms are actualized outside of the liminal spaces of confinement that we saw with 1990s digital

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activisms such as the feminist third wave, their impact beyond a politically polarized audience is questionable and must be determined based on whether hegemonic norms are shifted as a result of the activisms. The worldwide health as well as global and localized political tensions of 2020 and 2021 allow for an in-depth analysis of multiple contrasting, overlapping, and coalitive activisms that arose and were reclaimed during the rise of the COVID-19 pandemic and its multiple political, social, and economic impacts in the United States and around the globe. Discourses surrounding the pandemic itself, as well as heightened emotions related both to the direct and indirect effects of the pandemic, as well as how it engendered reactions to specific events that spurred polarized responses acted as a catalyst for multiple forms of social, environmental, and political activisms. As in the third wave feminist examples discussed in prior chapters, these tensions reinforced the contrasting epistemologies driving arguments of individual empowerment within existing systems vs. arguments for systemic change. These arguments would play out in regard to masking and economic restrictions and shutdowns during the pandemic, voter restrictions and electoral rights, and policing reforms and the militarization of the police. In a visible return to the activisms that dominated feminist and other social movements prior to the third wave era, the protestors of the pandemic era would become part of an active and ongoing series of political marches and action that are among the largest protest movement in US history, and would see their protest movements echoed throughout the world. The mimicry of these activities by counter-activists and movements illustrates the ongoing nature of combined deconstructive and reconstructive containment. The role of essentialization and intersectionality from liminal positions is challenging, particularly when layered with the potential for focusing on one aspect of self or one form of oppression over another. Backlash to the perception of “identity politics” has become a rising concern within US political and social justice arguments as perceived “wins” by those representing marginalized groups, including race-based, ethnic, immigrant, and sexuality constructs have become publicized. This is due, in part, to how categories of intersectional concern are addressed in policy making and media coverage. For some, this order continuously reinforces the patriarchal and racist norms of the matrix of domination. Amber Johnson explains, “Of the recent intersectionality studies published, theorists tend to focus on race, class, gender, and (sometimes) sexuality, almost unanimously, in that order, resulting in a mantra that excludes other types of identities.”95 For others, a series of progressive, socialist, antiwhite, and antimale progressions is aimed at removing white men from access to power. Consider Patricia Hill Collins’s discussion of alt-right activism placed in opposition to intersectional reform. She explains, “Ironically white

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nationalists also draw upon a variation of intersectional analysis in defending their claims that white working-class American men constitute a neglected minority.”96 While the alt-right itself was originally seen as a fringe movement, the inclusion of racism and sexism appeals to a number of white men and others who feel displaced from contemporary notions of progress, particularly leading up to and during the Trump era. While the visibility of this problem has been elevated since noteworthy news events such as the elections of Donald Trump, Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil, Narendra Modi in India, and the pattern of ethno and patriarchal nationalism has been building for decades. Ethnonationalist narratives of violence further build upon this platform through the proliferation of mis- and dis-information, echoing patterns historically present in supremacist and ethnonationalist organizations like the United Daughters of the Confederacy, who were connected covertly to the KKK, and have worked to rewrite history to remove slavery as a primary reason for the Civil War. The re-creation of tradition espoused by ethnonationalists becomes a foundation for justifying public action, including terrorist activity. The rejection of authentic history also allows for ethnonationalism to critique institutions that do not represent their ideal histories, religiosities, ethnic and racial determinisms, and goals. Thus, disinformation campaigns function as an attempt to actualize liminally constrained beliefs by attempting to spread the ideals beyond the limits of an echo chamber. REPRODUCTIVE JUSTICE: REFRAMING THE AGENDA FOR A POST-ROE WORLD As of the time of this writing, reproductive rights and the rights of LGBTQIA+ individuals, as well as the rights of indigenous, poor, and other marginalized people are under attack around the world. The maintenance and reinforcement of systemic inequities has become a hypervisible goal among ethnonationalist, patriarchal totalitarian and authoritarian populists, who perform their arguments as a mimicry of progressive activisms before audiences who conflate affective shame with stigma97 while simultaneously valuing an ill-founded shamelessness. This has led to a separation of equity from embodied experience in the rhetoric of social movements. In places where embodied rights and equities were once protected, by law and judicial jurisprudence, individual freedoms have been replaced by a type of false, nostalgia-driven interpretive hegemony, and activist-mimicry performed by individuals unaware of their own privilege and therefore claiming their own freedom and rights at the expense of others. In response, progressive activism must not stagnate, and it must reflect the calls by Martin Luther King and Margaret Atwood by rooting itself in true intersectional

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understanding. This must go beyond the coalition-building of prior generations that allowed conservatives to break down collective action, as well as overcome the complacency that arises after victories have been achieved. Intersectional, justice-oriented action is required to move past the oppressions that continually reinforce themselves as part of the process of containing and re-containing empowerment. Can embodied rights and equity exist as empowerment outside of containment? As nation-states, legislatures, and authoritarian regimes construct laws and standards claimed as traditional (though earlier and historic examples of these laws and standards are not always supported), should we expect ongoing redefinitions of what rights, privileges, and equities exists, and to whom can they be afforded? Consider, for example, the contrast between the US State of Colorado passing a law in April 2022 to ensure a woman’s right to choose abortion98 within days of Kentucky passing a law that essentially ended a woman’s ability to obtain an abortion in the state.99 Both these laws were created as preemptive attempts to address the newly conservative majority Supreme Court of the United States reexamining what had been considered the settled matter of Roe v. Wade. Should the political alignment change in either State, will the right to an abortion, or lack thereof, for women in each State continually shift as well? Justice Samuel Alito claims in the Dobbs majority decision that the original Roe decision was “remarkably loose in its treatment of the constitutional text. It held that the abortion right, which is not mentioned in the Constitution, is part of a right to privacy, which is also not mentioned.”100 This indicates what the late Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg had earlier pointed out as problematic, that rights, granted through judicial process, are not guaranteed and can be taken away as easily as they are granted. Alito’s majority opinion also, as he explains, “allows women on both sides of the abortion issue to seek to affect the legislative process by influencing public opinion, lobbying legislators, voting, and running for office,”101 and that women “register to vote and cast ballots”102 at consistently higher rates than men. These are statements reflecting the mimicry and carnivalesque attributes of granting power, only to take it away. The dissenting opinion points out this carnivalesque quality, explaining that the creators of the US Constitution, none of them women or capable of carrying a child, “were not perfectly attuned to the importance of reproductive rights for women’s liberty.”103 They go on to critique the Dobbs majority opinion, arguing that “it consigns women to second-class citizenship.”104 The liminal, temporality implied by this dynamic signifies how the right to an abortion under Roe existed as a form of women’s contained empowerment. In her 2021 analysis, “Understanding the Violation of Directive Anti-abortion Counselling [and Cisnormativity]: Obstruction to Access or Reproductive Violence,” Jabulile Mary-Jane Jace Mavuso uses an

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“Afro-feminist” approach to interrogate the history of consent rhetorics and what she considers the coercive enforcement of (anti)abortion counselling. Mavuso uses a framework that arose in response to pro-woman mimicry and white feminist complacency to argue that the decentering and de-anchoring of cisgender is necessary for recognizing the impact of abortion restrictions on marginalized individuals; her argument is grounded in “reproductive justice” rather than pro-choice rhetoric.105 The “reproductive justice” movement is intended to incorporate the lived experiences of women from multiple backgrounds and positionalities into abortion dialogue. Weary of “choice” rhetoric that implied the privilege and access to abortion options, the reproductive justice movement was founded in 1994 by a group of Black feminists. Brittany Leach explains: Constructed as an alternative approach for theorizing and organizing for reproductive freedom, reproductive justice is a human rights-based, social justice framework that posits that individuals and communities have the right to control their bodies, sexuality, labor, and reproduction free from control, coercion, or exploitation.106

Similarly, during a Senate Judiciary Committee discussion after the Dobbs decision, Berkeley Law professor Khiara Bridges explained, “Many women, cis women, have the capacity for pregnancy. Many cis women do not have the capacity for pregnancy. There are also trans men who are capable of pregnancy as well as non-binary people who are capable of pregnancy.”107 Reproductive rights must be conceived of in this greater framework, and as part of a larger standard for human rights. A shift to reproductive justice rhetoric can help remove some of the categorical framing that limits and restricts women’s rights when tied to a right to privacy and thus a means of restricting and containing embodied empowerment. NOTES 1. For more on Schlafly’s influence on the ERA and antifeminism, please see discussions in chapters 2 and 3 of this book. See, also, Reva B. Siegel, “Abortion and the Woman Question: Forty Years of Debate.” Indiana Law Journal 89, no. 4 (2014): 1365–80; Reva B. Siegel, “Equality and Choice: Sex Equality Perspectives on Reproductive Rights in the Work of Ruth Bader Ginsburg.” Columbia Journal of Gender & Law 25 (2013): 63; Leigh Ann Wheeler, “Women at War: Feminists and Antifeminist Christians in the 1970s.” Reviews in American History 48, no. 1 (2020): 144–51; Mary Ziegler, “Women’s Rights on the Right: The History and Stakes of Modern Pro-life Feminism.” Berkeley Journal Gender Law & Justice 28 (2013): 232.

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2. Nadja Sayej, “‘What Is so Frightening about Equality?’ Cate Blanchett on Playing a Historic Anti-feminist in Mrs America.” The Independent (UK), July 7, 2020. www​.independent​.co​.uk​/arts​-entertainment​/tv​/features​/mrs​-america​-cate​-blanchett​ -interview​-bbc​-drama​-feminism​-true​-story​-phyllis​-schlafly​-a9605601​.html​/. 3. Sayej, “‘What Is so Frightening about Equality?’” par. 2. 4. Andrew F. Lang, “Trump Betrays the Party of Lincoln.” Atlantic, January 5, 2021. www​.theatlantic​.com​/ideas​/archive​/2021​/01​/trump​-betrays​-party​-lincoln​ /617547​/. 5. Sayej, “‘What Is so Frightening about Equality?’” par. 3. Sayej provides important historical contexts to Schlafly’s efforts in the 1970s: “Second-wave feminists rallied for the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) since the idea was born in 1923. That meant free will on abortion, the same divorce rights as men, as well as property rights and equal pay. The ERA was finally passed by congress in 1972—but it needed to be ratified (given formal consent) by at least 38 states in order to make it into the constitution. It had managed 30 when Schlafly launched her campaign against it, blocking women’s lib for the rise of far-right Christians. Its ratification was extended to 1982, but it still lost. The deadline expired. It has still not made it into the constitution” (par. 6). 6. Sayej, “‘What Is so Frightening about Equality?’” par. 4. 7. Schlafly is linked to the John Birch Society, though it is claimed she hid her affiliation as the Society was considered far too extreme and conspiracy-theory driven. See Donald T. Critchlow, “Chapter Six: The Establishment Purges Schlafly.” In Phyllis Schlafly and Grassroots Conservatism, 137–62 (Princeton University Press, 2018). 8. Michelle M. Nickerson, Introduction. Mothers of Conservatism: Women and the Postwar Right (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2012). See, also, Filippo Trevisan, Bryan Bello, Michael Vaughan, and Ariadne Vromen, “Mobilizing Personal Narratives: The Rise of Digital ‘Story Banking’ in US Grassroots Advocacy.” Journal of Information Technology & Politics 17, no. 2 (2020): 146–60. 9. Owen Worth, “Reasserting Hegemonic Masculinity: Women’s Leadership within the Far Right.” International Affairs 97, no. 2 (2021): 503–21. See, also, Michelle Arrow, “‘How Much Longer Will We Allow This Country’s Affairs to be Run by Radical Feminists?’Anti-feminist Activism in Late 1970s Australia.” Australian Historical Studies 52, no. 3 (2021): 331–47; and Elizabeth S. Corredor, “Unpacking ‘Gender Ideology’ and the Global Right’s Antigender Countermovement.” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 44, no. 3 (2019): 613–38. 10. Amélie Ribieras, “La Militante Conservatrice Phyllis Schlafly et le Candidat Donald Trump: Convergence ou Croisée des Chemins?” [“Conservative Activist Phyllis Schlafly and Candidate Donald Trump: Convergence or Crossroads?”]. L’Ordinaire des Amériques 226 (2021). See also Mary Ziegler, Abortion Law in America: A Legal History, Roe v. Wade to the Present (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 2020); Mary Ziegler, After Roe: The Lost History of the Abortion Debate (Harvard University Press, 2015); and Mary Ziegler, Beyond Abortion: Roe. v. Wade and the Fight for Privacy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2018).

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11. The label “conservative” applies to Schlafly’s arguments as noted in chapter 2 of this book as well as the political strategies associated with contemporary forms of right-leaning politics. In earlier decades when the label was applied to and by Schlafly and her Eagle Forum the terms “progressive” and “conservative” were sometimes conflated or reversed, but by the early first decade of 2000 the term conservative in the US was aligned with Evangelical Christianity and the Tea Party movement in the GOP. For more information see Susan Marshall, “Confrontation and Cooptation in Antifeminist Organizations.” Feminist Organizations: Harvest of the New Women’s Movement (1995): 323–35; Donald T. Critchlow, Phyllis Schlafly and Grassroots Conservatism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2018); and Alexa Bankert, “Let’s Talk about Sexism: The Differential Effects of Gender Discrimination on Liberal and Conservative Women’s Political Engagement.” American Politics Research 48, no. 6 (2020): 779–91. 12. Susan Faludi, Shauna Shames, Jennifer M. Piscopo, and Denise M. Walsh, “A Conversation with Susan Faludi on Backlash, Trumpism, and #MeToo.” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 45, no. 2 (2020): 336–45. 13. Mary Ziegler. Dollars for Life: The Anti-abortion Movement and the Fall of the Republican Establishment (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2022) (no page number in e‑book). 14. Cited in Peter Kalina, “Echo Chambers and Confirmation Bias.” Journal of Human Resource Management 23, no. 2 (2020): 1–3. 15. Cited in Ben Little and Alison Winch, “Patriarchy in the Digital Conjuncture: An Analysis of Google’s James Damore.” New Formations 102, no. 102 (2020): 44–63. 16. Sam Levin, “James Damore, Google, and the YouTube Radicalization of Angry White Men.” Guardian (UK), August 13, 2017. www​.theguardian​.com​/technology​ /2017​/aug​/13​/james​-damore​-google​-memo​-youtube​-white​-men​-radicalization​/; Paul Lewis,“‘I See Things Differently’: James Damore on His Autism and the Google Memo.” Guardian (UK), November 17, 2017. www​ .theguardian​ .com​ /technology​ /2017​/nov​/16​/james​-damore​-google​-memo​-interview​-autism​-regrets​/. 17. Jackson herself resisted contributing to the spectacle behaviors, instead focusing on responses tied to her judicial role. At one point she clarified “I address disputes . . . people make arguments, and I look at the law and I decide.” Ginger Gibson, “Blackburn Asks about Transgender Issues.” NBC News, March 22, 2022, par. 9. www​.nbcnews​.com​/politics​/supreme​-court​/blog​/ketanji​-brown​-jackson​-confirmation​ -hearings​-live​-updates​-rcna20973​/. 18. Chauncey DeVega, “Ted Cruz Earns His ‘Whiteness’: The Republican Attack on Ketanji Brown Jackson.” Salon, March 31, 2022. www​.salon​.com​/2022​/03​/31​/ted​ -cruz​-earns​-his​-whiteness​-the​-on​-ketanji​-brown​-jackson​/, para 5. 19. Martin Luther King, Jr. “Interview with NBC News Sander Vanocour at Atlanta’s Ebenezer Baptist Church.” NBC News, May 8, 1967. 20. King, “Interview with NBC News.” 21. Martin Luther King, Jr., “Speech to Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC),” unpublished. Penn Center, Frogmore, South Carolina, May 2, 1967, KCLA, 32.

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22. Robert Hamilton, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and the Poor People’s Campaign of 1968 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2020). 23. Margaret Atwood, “Am I a Bad Feminist?” Special to the Globe and Mail (UK), January 13, 2018, para. 5. www​.theglobeandmail​.com​/opinion​/am​-i​-a​-bad​ -feminist​/article37591823​/. 24. Patricia Hill Collins, Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment (New York: Routledge, 1990). 25. King, Jr., “Speech to Southern Christian Leadership Conference.” 26. Eirikur Bergmann, Conspiracy & Populism: The Politics of Misinformation (Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave MacMillan, 2018). 27. Cornelia Sindermann, Jon D. Elhai, Morten Moshagen, and Christian Montag, “Age, Gender, Personality, Ideological Attitudes and Individual Differences in a Person’s News Spectrum: How Many and Who Might be Prone to ‘Filter Bubbles’ and ‘Echo Chambers’ Online?” Heliyon 6, no. 1 (2020, January): e03214. doi. org/10.1016/j.heliyon.2020.e03214/. 28. Wenshu Lee and Philip Wander, “On Discursive Amnesia: Reinventing the Possibilities for Democracy through Discursive Amnesty.” The Public Voice in a Democracy at Risk (1998): 152–72. 29. Andrea M. Smith and Rebecca R. Ortiz, “#MeToo Social Media Engagement and Perceived Hypersensitivity in the Workplace.” Communication Studies 72, no. 4 (2021): 531–46. 30. Dorothy E. McBride and Janine A Parry, Women’s Rights in the USA: Policy Debates and Gender Roles (New York: Routledge, 2016), 4 (Emphasis of the authors). 31. For more on judicial interpretation and review of the right to privacy and its relationship to gender and sexuality rights, contraception, and abortion, see the discussion in chapters 2 and 3 of this volume. See, also, Louis Brandeis and Samuel Warren, “The Right to Privacy.” Harvard Law Review 4, no. 5 (1890): 193–220; Jed Rubenfeld, “The Right of Privacy.” Harvard Law Review (1989): 737–807; Dorothy J. Glancy, “The Invention of the Right to Privacy.” Arizona Law Review 21 (1979): 1–39; Joanna Wuest, “A Conservative Right to Privacy: Legal, Ideological, and Coalitional Transformations in US Social Conservatism.” Law & Social Inquiry (2021): 1–29; Allyson Haynes Stuart, “A Right to Privacy for Modern Discovery.” George Mason Law Review (2022), ISSN: 1068–3801. works.bepress.com/ allyson_haynes/20/. 32. Ellen Alderman and Caroline Kennedy, In Our Defense: The Bill of Rights in Action (New York: Harper Perennial, 2002; Original work published 1991). 33. The “Moral Majority” was founded in 1979 by Jerry Falwell Sr. as a political lobbying and funding mechanism to push back against “liberal” ideals. For a feminist critique of the “Moral Majority” see Carol Virginia Pohli, “Church Closets and Back Doors: A Feminist View of Moral Majority Women.” Feminist Studies 9, no. 3 (Autumn 1983), 529–58. See, also, Doug Banwart, “Jerry Falwell, the Rise of the Moral Majority, and the 1980 Election.” Western Illinois Historical Review, vol. 5 (Spring 2013): 133–157. www​.wiu​.edu​/cas​/history​/wihr​/pdfs​/Banwart​ -MoralMajorityVol5​.pdf​/.

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34. Michele McKeegan, “The Politics of Abortion: A Historical Perspective.” Women’s Health Issues: Official Publication of the Jacobs Institute of Women’s Health 3, no. 3 (1993): 127–31. 35. Stacie Taranto, “Ellen McCormack for President: Politics and an Improbable Path to Passing Anti-abortion Policy.” Journal of Policy History 24, no. 2 (2012): 263–87; Abby K. Wood, “Learning from Campaign Finance Information.” Emory Law Journal 70 (2020): 1091–142; Ziegler, Dollars for Life. 36. Ziegler, Dollars for Life (n.p.). 37. Ziegler, Dollars for Life (n.p.). 38. Ziegler, Dollars for Life (n.p.). 39. Ziegler, Dollars for Life (n.p.). 40. Terri L. Peretti, Partisan Supremacy: How the GOP Enlisted Courts to Rig America’s Election Rules. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2021. 41. Jonathan Zasloff, “Courts in the Age of Dysfunction.” Yale Law Journal Forum 121, Online 479 (2012). yalelawjournal.org/forum/courts-in-the-age-of-dysfunction/. 42. David Barnhizer, “On the Make: Campaign Funding and the Corrupting of the American Judiciary.” Catholic University Law Review 50, no. 2 (Winter 2001): 361–427. scholarship.law.edu/lawreview/vol50/iss2/4/. 43. Boyea, Brent D. Boyea, “Citizens United and Independent Expenditures in State Supreme Court Elections.” Justice System Journal 41, no. 4 (2020): 323–43. 44. Tara Malloy, “A New Transparency: How to Ensure Disclosure from Mixed-Purpose Groups after Citizens United.” University of San Francisco Law Review 46, no. 2, Article 5. repository.usfca.edu/usflawreview/vol46/iss2/5 425. 45. Mary Ziegler, “Contesting the Legacy of the Nineteenth Amendment: Abortion and Equality from Roe to the Present.” University of Colorado Law Review 92, no. 3 (2021). lawreview.colorado.edu/printed/volume92/contesting-the-legacy-ofthe-nineteenth-amendment-abortion-and-equality-from-roe-to-the-present/; Ziegler, Dollars for Life. 46. For more on the Hyde Amendment, see Dena Levy, Charles Tien, and Rachelle Aved, “Do Differences Matter? Women Members of Congress and the Hyde Amendment.” Women & Politics 23, no. 1–2 (2001): 105–27. 47. Ziegler, Dollars for Life (n.p.). 48. For more on the role of Crisis Pregnancy Centers (CPCs) as a means of discouraging abortion and limiting women’s health options, see Aziza Ahmed, “Informed Decision Making and Abortion: Crisis Pregnancy Centers, Informed Consent, and the First Amendment.” The Journal of Law, Medicine & Ethics 43, no. 1 (2015): 51–58; Brittany A. Campbell, “The Crisis Inside Crisis Pregnancy Centers: How to Stop These Facilities from Depriving Women of Their Reproductive Freedom.” Boston College Journal of Law & Social Justice 37, no. 73 (2017). lawdigitalcommons.bc.edu/jlsj/vol37/iss1/3/; Alice X. Chen, “Crisis Pregnancy Centers: Impeding the Right to Informed Decision Making.” Cardozo Journal of Law & Gender 19, no. 3 (2012): 933–60; and Laura S. Hussey, “Crisis Pregnancy Centers, Poverty, and the Expanding Frontiers of American Abortion Politics.” Politics & Policy 41, no. 6 (2013): 985–1011. 49. Campbell, “The Crisis Inside Crisis Pregnancy Centers,” 77.

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50. Rory McVeigh, Bryant Crubaugh, and Kevin Estep, “Plausibility Structures, Status Threats, and the Establishment of Anti-abortion Pregnancy Centers.” American Journal of Sociology 122, no. 5 (2017): 1533–71. 51. Sharmila Devi, “Anti-abortion Groups Target Funding of Planned Parenthood.” The Lancet 386, no. 9997 (2015): 941. doi: 10.1016/S0140-6736(15)00113-0. 52. Amanda Roberti, “‘Women Deserve Better’: The Use of the Pro-woman Frame in Anti-abortion Policies in US States.” Journal of Women, Politics & Policy 42, no. 3 (2021): 207–24. 53. See Andre Beláňová, “Anti-abortion Activism in the Czech Republic and Slovakia: ‘Nationalizing’ the Strategies.” Journal of Contemporary Religion 35, no. 3 (2020): 395–413; Ayse Dayi, “Neoliberal Health Restructuring, Neoconservatism and the Limits of Law: Erosion of Reproductive Rights in Turkey.” Health and Human Rights 21, no. 2 (2019). www​.hhrjournal​.org​/2019​/12​/neoliberal​-health​-restructuring​ -neoconservatism​-and​-the​-limits​-of​-law​-erosion​-of​-reproductive​-rights​-in​-turkey​/; James B. Rule, “Neoconservatism á la Française.” Dissent 54, no. 1 (2007): 104–6; Juan Marco Vaggione and José Manuel Morán Faúndes, “Neoconservative Incursions into Party Politics: The Cases of Argentina and Chile.” In Abortion and Democracy: Contentious Body Politics in Argentina, Chile, and Uruguay, edited by Barbara Sutton and Nayla Luz Vacarezza, 93–113 (London: Routledge, 2021). 54. Jenny Gunnarsson Payne and Sofie Tornhill, “The Enemy’s Enemy: Feminism at the Crossroads of Neoliberal Co-optation and Anti-gender Conservatism.” Journal of Political Ideologies (2021): 1–21; Jessica L. Ferguson, The Battle for Birth Control: Exploring the Lasting Consequences of the Movement’s Early Rhetoric (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2022). 55. Raymond J. La Raja, “Why Super PACs: How the American Party System Outgrew the Campaign Finance System.” In The Forum 10, no. 4 (2012): 91–104, 93. 56. Katha Pollitt, “Friends Like These.” Nation 314, no. 3 (February 7, 2022): 7–8. 57. Zeigler, “Contesting the Legacy of the Nineteenth Amendment.” 58. Amanda Roberti, “Empowering Women by Regulating Abortion? Conservative Women Lawmakers Cooptation of Feminist Language in US Abortion Politics.” Politics, Groups, and Identities 10, no. 1 (2022): 139–45, 139. 59. Mary Ziegler, “Women’s Rights on the Right: The History and Stakes of Modern Pro-life Feminism.” Berkeley Journal Gender Law & Justice 28 (2013): 233. 60. Roberti, “Empowering Women by Regulating Abortion?,” par. 7. 61. Mary Ziegler, “Women’s Rights on the Right,” 232. 62. Amanda Roberti, “‘Women Deserve Better’: The Use of the Pro-woman Frame in Anti-abortion Policies in US States.” Journal of Women, Politics & Policy 42, no. 3 (2021): 207–24, 207. 63. Margaret Atwood, “I invented Gilead. The Supreme Court Is Making It Real.” Atlantic, May 13, 2022.  www​.theatlantic​.com​/ideas​/archive​/2022​/05​/supreme​-court​ -roe​-handmaids​-tale​-abortion​-margaret​-atwood​/629833​/, par. 7. 64. Paul Saurette and Kelly Gordon, The Changing Voice of the Anti-abortion Movement: The Rise of “Pro-Woman” Rhetoric in Canada and the United States (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2015), 246.

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65. The concept of “informed consent” is drawn directly from fears about human subjects being exploited for medical research. Informed consent was developed as an ethical and legal requirement for human subject research after infamous studies including the Tuskegee medical trial, and were often focused on participants from marginalized communities. For more, see Michele Goodwin, “Vulnerable Subjects: Why Does Informed Consent Matter?” Journal of Law, Medicine & Ethics 44, no. 3 (2016): 371–80. For more on the notion of “informed consent” as a concept within anti-abortion rhetoric, see Alesha E. Doane and Corinne Schwarz, “Father Knows Best: ‘Protecting’ Women through State Surveillance and Social Control in Anti-abortion Policy.” Politics & Policy 48, no. 1 (2020): 6–37; Jabulile Mary-Jane Jace Mavuso, “Understanding the Violation of Directive Anti-abortion Counselling [and Cisnormativity]: Obstruction to Access or Reproductive Violence?” Agenda 35, no. 3 (2021): 69–81; Saurette and Gordon, The Changing Voice of the Anti-abortion Movement; Scott Woodcock, “Abortion Counselling and the Informed Consent Dilemma.” Bioethics 25, no. 9 (2011): 495–504; Amanda Roberti, “Empowering Women by Regulating Abortion? Conservative Women Lawmaker’s Cooptation of Feminist Language in US Abortion Politics.” Politics, Groups, and Identities 10, no. 1 (2022): 139–45. 66. Saurette and Gordon, The Changing Voice of the Anti-abortion Movement, 251. 67. Michael J. New, “Analyzing the Effect of Anti-abortion US State Legislation in the Post-Casey Era.” State Politics & Policy Quarterly 11, no. 1 (2011): 28–47. 68. Brittany R. Leach, “At the Borders of the Body Politic: Fetal Citizens, Pregnant Migrants, and Reproductive Injustices in Immigration Detention.” American Political Science Review 116, no. 1 (2022): 116–130; Kimala Price, Reproductive Politics in the United States (Abington, Oxon, UK: Routledge, 2021); Roberti, “Empowering Women by Regulating Abortion?”; Zeigler, “Contesting the Legacy of the Nineteenth Amendment.” 69. Sarah Palin, keynote address to National Tea Party Convention, Nashville, 2010. 70. Ziegler, Dollars for Life (n.p.). 71. Wenshu Lee and Philip Wander, “On Discursive Amnesia.” See, also, Gary Alan Fine, “Reputational Entrepreneurs and the Memory of Incompetence: Melting Supporters, Partisan Warriors, and Images of President Harding.” American Journal of Sociology 101 (1996): 1159–93; Gladys Lang and Kurt Lang, Etched in Memory: The Building and Survival of Artistic Reputation (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1990). 72. Lee and Wander, “On Discursive Amnesia.” 73. Aysu Mutlutürk, Ali İ. Aysu Tekcan, and Aysecan Boduroglu, “The Structure and Organization of Collective Memory Representations.” Memory Studies (2020). doi.org/10.1177/1750698020988778; David C. Williard, “Criminal Amnesty, State Courts, and the Reach of Reconstruction.” Journal of Southern History 85, no. 1 (2019): 105–36; Jeremy K.Yamashiro, Abram Van Engen, and Henry L. Roediger III, “American Origins: Political and Religious Divides in US Collective Memory.” Memory Studies (2019). doi.org/10.1177/1750698019856065. 74. Richard Hofstadter, Anti-intellectualism in American Life (New York: Knopf, 1963).

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75. Matthew Motta, “The Dynamics and Political Implications of Anti-intellectualism in the United States.” American Politics Research 46, no. 3 (2018): 465–98; David C. Barker, Ryan Detamble, and Morgan Marietta, “Intellectualism, Anti-intellectualism, and Epistemic Hubris in Red and Blue America.” American Political Science Review (2021): 1–16; Eric Merkley, “Anti-intellectualism, Populism, and Motivated Resistance to Expert Consensus.” Public Opinion Quarterly 84, no. 1 (2020): 24–48. 76. Hofstadter, 42. 77. Sean Wilentz, ed., Richard Hofstadter: Anti-intellectualism in American Life, The Paranoid Style in American Politics, Uncollected Essays, 1956–1965 (New York: Library of America, 2020). 78. Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, “The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception.” In The Cultural Studies Reader, third edition, edited by Simon During, 405–15 (New York: Routledge; Original work published 1944). 79. Kate Kenny, “‘The Performative Surprise’: Parody, Documentary and Critique.” Culture and Organization 15, no. 2 (2009): 221–35. 80. Michael Espinoza, “Donald Trump’s impact on the Republican Party,” Policy Studies 42, no. 5–6 (2021): 563–79; Toby S. James, “The Effects of Donald Trump.” Policy Studies 42, no. 5–6 (2021): 755–69. doi.org/10.1080/01442872.2021.1980114. 81. Mark Ward Sr., “‘Knowledge Puffs Up’: The Evangelical Culture of Anti-intellectualism as a Local Strategy,” Sermon Studies 4, no. 1 (2020): 1–21. 82. Jean Hardisty, “Kitchen Table Backlash: The Antifeminist Women’s Movement.” In Unraveling the Right: The New Conservatism in American Thought and Politics, edited by Amy E. Ansell, 103–25 (New York: Routledge, 2019). 83. Yvonne Lindgren, “Trump’s Angry White Women: Motherhood, Nationalism, and Abortion.” Hofstra Law Review 48 (2019): 1–46. 84. Ronnee Schreiber, “Is There a Conservative Feminism? An Empirical Account.” Politics & Gender 14, no. 1 (2018): 56–79; Leslie Dorrough Smith, “Is Feminism Still Another Dirty ‘F’ Word? The Case of Code-Switching and Conservative Feminism.” Religion and Theology 25, no. 3–4 (2018): 161–74. For an analysis of this type of “feminism” outside the US see, for instance, Malliga Och and Rina Verma Williams, “Feminism, Identities, and the Substantive Representation of Women on the Right—Crafting a Global Dialogue.” Politics, Groups, and Identities (2021): 1–4. 85. Naomi Wolf, “America’s Reactionary Feminists.” Al Jazeera, August 4, 2011. www​.aljazeera​.com​/opinions​/2011​/8​/4​/americas​-reactionary​-feminists​/. 86. Facing History and Ourselves, “Women and the National Community,” Holocaust and Human Behavior, 2021. www​.facinghistory​.org​/holocaust​-and​-human​ -behavior​/chapter​-6​/women​-and​-national​-community. 87. Cited in Lindgren, “Trump’s Angry White Women.” 88. Lindgren, “Trump’s Angry White Women,” 11. 89. Jennifer Lois, “Homeschooling Motherhood.” In The Wiley Handbook of Home Education, edited by Milton Gaither, 186–206 (Chichester, West Sussex, UK: John Wiley & Sons, 2017). See, also, Benjamin Siracusa Hillman, “Is There a Place for Religious Charter Schools?” Yale Law Journal 118 (2008): 554–99; Stephen D.

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Sugarman, “Is It Unconstitutional to Prohibit Faith-Based Schools from Becoming Charter Schools?” Journal of Law and Religion 32, no. 2 (2017): 227–62. 90. Facing History and Ourselves, “Women and the National Community.” 91. Pew Research Center, “The Future of World Religions: Population Growth Projections, 2010–2050: Why Muslims are Rising Fastest and the Unaffiliated are Shrinking as a Share of the World’s Population.” Pew Research Center Religion and Public Life, 2015. www​.pewforum​.org​/2015​/04​/02​/religious​-projections​-2010​-2050​/. 92. Yvonne Lindgren’s discussion of Trump’s notorious “p**sy” remark and other anti-woman actions and remarks, and his stated “staunch opposition to legal access to abortion” and the ability for family values and education reform arguments to influence white, suburban women is remarkable. Lindgren, “Trump’s Angry White Women,” 3. 93. Cited in Jonathan Chait, “Five Days that Shaped a Presidency: Barack Obama shares with Jonathan Chait a very Early Draft of his Memoirs.” New York Magazine, October 2016. nymag.com/intelligencer/2016/10/barack-obama-on-5-days-thatshaped-his-presidency.html. 94. Stuart A. Thompson and Charlie Warzel, “They Used to Post Selfies. Now They’re Trying to Reverse the Election.” New York Times Opinion, January 14, 2021. www​.nytimes​.com​/2021​/01​/14​/opinion​/facebook​-far​-right​.html​/. 95. Amber Johnson, “Antoine Dodson and the (Mis)Appropriation of the Homo Coon: An Intersectional Approach to the Performative Possibilities of Social Media.” Critical Studies in Media Communication 30, no. 2 (2013): 152–70. 96. Patricia Hill Collins, Intersectionality as Critical Social Theory (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2019), 22. 97. Tressie McMillan Cottom, “What’s Shame Got to Do with It?” New York Times, April 12, 2022. www​.nytimes​.com​/2022​/04​/12​/opinion​/whats​-shame​-got​-to​-do​-with​ -it​.html​/. 98. Joe Hernandez, “The Right to an Abortion in Colorado Is now Guaranteed under State Law” NPR. April 5, 2022. www​.npr​.org​/2022​/04​/05​/1091041608​/ colorado​-abortion​-law​/. 99. Veronica Stracqualursi and Amanda Musa, “Kentucky Legislature Overrides Governor’s Veto of Sweeping Abortion Bill.” CNN, April 14, 2022. www​.cnn​.com​ /2022​/04​/13​/politics​/kentucky​-abortion​-bill​-legislature​-override​-veto​/index​.html​/. 100. Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, 597 US ___ (2022) (Samuel Alito, Concurring). 101. Dobbs v. Jackson (Alito, Concurring). 102. Dobbs v. Jackson (Alito, Concurring). 103. Dobbs v. Jackson (Stephen Breyer, Sonia Sotomayor, and Elena Kagan, Dissenting). 104. Dobbs v. Jackson (Breyer, Sotomayor, and Kagan, Dissenting). 105. Jabulile Mary-Jane Jace Mavuso, “Understanding the Violation of Directive Anti-Abortion Counselling [and Cisnormativity]: Obstruction to Access or Reproductive Violence?” Agenda 2021 35, no. 3, 69–81, https://doi.org/10.1080/10130950.20 21.1949692. 106. Price, Reproductive Politics in the United States, 11.

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107. Cited in Scott Gleeson, “Josh Hawley Called Transphobic by Law Professor for his Pregnancy Views in Senate Hearing.” USA Today, July 13, 2022, par. 4. www​ .usatoday​.com​/story​/news​/politics​/2022​/07​/13​/josh​-hawley​-called​-transphobic​-law​ -professor​-hearing​/10046037002​/.

Chapter 9

Activism to Breach Containment

In her recent book, Feminist Trouble: Intersectional Politics in Post-Secular Times, Éléonore Lépinard, announces: Feminism is in trouble. Antagonisms, conflicts, and disputes abound in many liberal democratic countries around pop culture, neoliberalism, and postfeminism, around sex work and pornography (yes, still), and trans* politics, around race and postcolonialism.1

Given such conflicts and antagonisms, feminist activisms need to focus on the complex intermingling of systemic and counter-structural efforts to challenge continued and increasing inequities and power dynamics. Thus, the relationship between feminist activism and empowerment needs deeper and ongoing investigation. Activists, feminists, and scholar-practitioners need to critique the understanding of identities within activism, and the essentialist requirements for altering the status of identities within systems of silence, power, and oppressions. Contemporary activisms must both empower individuals and seek to change the status of groups of individuals in ways that often counter each other. We must therefore theorize the location of activism in relation to empowerment because activists and their identities are simultaneously contained and empowered within and outside of systemic norms. Progressive change agents are attempting to refocus activism on systemic change efforts. Contained empowerment is the 2021 preferred form of embodied activism: the site of struggle and power is the body. However, contemporary efforts to misinform newer and developing efforts have created a stagnation in the movement. The activism community as a whole was seen as declining prior to current pushback against extremisms and supremacist regimes, and is still negotiating its place between a materialistic, selfish form of empty rhetoric and “slacktivism” and limited but potentially empowering forms of directed activism. However, many of these continue to masquerade as highly political or extremely sensationalized forms of entertainment. 263

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The placement of gendered activism as the site of investigation for the theory of contained empowerment is rooted in the liminal status of femininity and feminist action throughout history. Gloria Anzaldúa provides a grounding basis for the potential of feminine embodied liminality: “La conciencia de la condición femenina: navegamos dentro y fuera de la liminalidad” [The consciousness of the female condition: we navigate within and outside liminality].2 Anzaldúa’s words suggest that feminine empowerment must evolve from both of these positions: within and outside of liminality; thus, gender-based and embodied empowerment must be framed by liminal positionalities. The evolution of feminisms as a response to systemic and structural inequities reveals the continuing relationship between individual identities and legitimized or powerful statuses, and how individual empowerment does not equate systemic realities. As such, we must continue to investigate how personal and political objectives are both necessary forms of activism. This book was designed to interrogate how the development of US feminisms is intrinsically tied to both personal and political empowerment, and how feminisms continue to respond to changing definitions and inclusions of gender, intersectionalities, womanhood, girlhood, and sexualities. Through the lens of contained empowerment, I have outlined how contemporary and digital activisms reflect situational and liminal goals, often seeking to change individual statuses rather than focusing on direct systemic change. Third wave author and scholar Adela C. Licona furthers Anzaldúa’s message from her own Generation X perspective: “Sun setting in brilliant hues of pink and orange and yellow, / Transgressions released, all mystery resolved, / And for a moment, we are (im)pure once again . . . ”3 Licona’s poem, “(B) Orderlands’ Lullaby: the Song of the Entremundista,” outlines the border experiences from her “nepantlera worldview” and outlines her ability to be “spiritually transported to the realm of the sacred while being materially situated in a space of inequity and injustice.”4 Her argument penetrates the liminality of the border, and of her own experience, much as was seen in her earlier “La Mira” in Sexing the Political. Thus, Licona expresses a third wave “migra” feminist perspective that, for many practitioners, was unattainable in earlier feminisms, and is continually contained within multiple matrices of domination. In this book, I have investigated how feminist empowerment enacted as both reconstructive and deconstructive forms of engagement are constrained. I examined how feminist and activist successes emerge in a liminal, temporal form and how hegemonic forces continually seek to dislodge these successes. This book provides an examination of how activist and social justice successes are limited as “contained empowerment.” My lens is focused on third wave and other contemporary forms of feminism as they evolved from

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clashes between historical feminist and antifeminist efforts. I also investigate how feminisms are restricted and countered by ongoing postfeminist, neoliberal feminist, white supremacist, and other normalizing efforts designed to limit and repress women’s gendered, and reproductive rights. The underlying hope and potential of contained empowerment and evolving forms of feminism should not be ignored. Contained empowerment provides hope because it provides potential for power that is not necessarily subject to hegemonic norms. It allows reconstituted ideals of power to flourish within liminal, temporal, restrictive spaces, and although these spaces themselves are restricted by their hegemonic constructs, the power within them can operate even in a limited fashion in spite of hegemony. For example, third wave feminism in the 1990s and the early first decade of 2000 attacked the patriarchal system by striving to make femininity itself powerful, regardless of the fact that these attacks were constrained by the disempowered nature of femininity, itself always defined and objectified within the confines of patriarchy. Third wave operated within spaces where femininity was encouraged; however, these spaces were always contained by the patriarchal system in which they operate. This reconstituted “feminism,” however, resulted in generations of women who claim power through their femininity, irrespective of systemic restraints. Thus, in US feminist history the “third wave” illustrates empowerment within the liminal position. It is the “first wave,” however, that remains the most lasting example of achieved systemic feminist empowerment outside of liminality: suffrage and voting rights. Yet, some might argue even those rights are in jeopardy, along with other, racial, ethnic, and class-based aspects of voting rights masked within party-line frameworks. And the passing of Ruth Bader Ginsberg, as well as that of bell hooks and other feminist and activist voices for civil rights, illustrates the loss of a “historical legacy and the invaluable perspective on law and society that it cultivated”5 in each of them, and in ourselves. Identity-based activist ideals after the era of “women’s liberation” and the “second wave” are often self-contained within sites of activism distinct from the power structures that feminisms seek to change. Therefore, any impact on patriarchy is indirect. This book provides an examination and critique the negotiation between the rise in personal autonomy within the movement and the way this essentializes who practitioners should be. This reinforces how these activisms function as contained empowerment, situated both within and outside of mainstream systems of power in the liminal space betwixt and between two modes of critical engagement. Liminal, temporal action is powerful because, while it is constrained within established systems of power, it offers hope by creating alternative ways of defining the self and the

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self’s relation to others. It is subversive even as it works within hegemonic structures. Contained empowerment is, by nature, simultaneously resistant to and shaped by the hegemonic and institutional forces that generate activist goals. The rhetorical and communication processes by which activisms that exist within limited spaces seek to obtain a larger audience base are also shaped by hegemonic and institutional forces, thereby restricting opportunities for systemic change. In this way, activisms in liminal and temporal spaces are challenged by the same restrictive and oppressive mechanisms that limit strategic essentialisms. For contained empowerment to function as a method of social change, practitioners need to balance personal with political empowerment, and local with global voices. Otherwise, it is obvious that such empowerment is often limited to changing individual status within the system rather than altering the system itself. CONTEMPORARY CONTAINMENT IN INTERSECTIONAL FEMINISMS As the cognitive dissonance created by polarization increases, the challenge of getting activism to function outside of ideological echo chambers is growing. Jennifer Baumgardner and Amy Richards, founders of the Third Wave Foundation and authors of the third wave Manifesta, argue that the COVID-19 pandemic may play a key role in allowing a blended personal and political form of feminism to rise in prominence. They ground their argument in the structural inequities that the pandemic has highlighted, and how localized efforts are not enough to create a necessary permanence for gender-based change. Early on, during the COVID-19 pandemic, Baumgardner explained: And I think what’s becoming really clear with Coronavirus, what a patchwork we have and how that’s hurting us right now. And we have to solve the big issues that affect women directly too. Like every state has different rape laws. Every state has different laws around abortion rights. We think within each state the way we do things is best, and we really hold onto that, and this Coronavirus might be shaking that.6

Baumgardner and Richards return to core arguments of a third wave based in the intersectional needs of women. In doing so they also stress the need to recognize how ongoing gender biases and misogynistic paradigms must be addressed both wholistically and individually. Examples of gender- and sex-based violence, harassment, and aggression have long flourished in US culture, and multiple minority statuses have

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always been among the most affected by these challenges. Intersectional need has, unfortunately, taken a back seat to activisms focused on an essentialized category of identity.7 A long history of dominant narratives reinforcing minority oppressions in the United States also reinforces the dehumanization and disempowerment of intersectional voices. The role of feminist theory and action, as argued by many third wave and other contemporary feminist voices, should be to address how these narratives disempower, dehumanize, and restrict the rights of all women and those of minority status. However, the essentialized nature of second wave feminism made it difficult for those of minority status to locate a platform for their voices and stories. Third wave attempted to address this, yet the focus on youth and “girl”-based activism served to reinforce the containment and essentialization of the movement. Global movements like #MeToo, #TimesUp, #IndigenousWomenRise, #NiUnaMenos, #UrgentAction4Women, #YesAllWomen, #OrangeTheWorld, and #SayHerName, have increased awareness of gender-based violence and harassment, yet once again the focus has most visibly been on women and girls, with the highest in regard to high profile and white women’s cases.8 US audiences read other hashtag and social movements, such as #BlackLivesMatter, #OscarsSoWhite, and #TakeAKnee are received as separate entities by US audiences rather than as having overlapping intersectional concerns.9 In fact, some argue that the narrative architecture10 of social media actually helps reinforce the distinctions and divide between intersectional differences, by targeting specific minority statuses through messaging processes.11 Most visible contemporary digital and feminist movements in the United States are framed around the hashtag activism model of outreach and grounded in responsiveness to the current and ongoing oppressive behaviors and actions associated with patriarchal standards and norms. There is no monolithic “wave” or “era” label that can be applied to contemporary movements with a focus on women’s and gender-based rights and empowerment. Echoes of earlier waves are present in these contemporary activisms, particularly echoes of second-wave feminist style political engagement coupled with third wave personal empowerment. Some are calling this a fourth wave of feminism, but there is no clarity of distinction between the third, fourth, and other perceived contemporary forms of feminist action and theory. While this book has focused on historical contextualizations of feminisms through the present, more work is needed to examine how fourth wave, neoliberal, and digital feminisms function as overlapping labels regarding a feminism that is focused on personal choice, highly reflecting the values and themes argued within the third wave. The label digital feminism is applied specifically to gender and identity-based movements that are organized and promoted through digital and social media. Neoliberal feminism is described as efforts to highlight inequalities without acknowledging their

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core institutional oppressions, thus like third wave favoring individualized personal empowerment over political systemic change.12 These activisms function as reconstructive, reinforcing systemic narratives and norms while encouraging individuals to find personal empowerment and personal freedoms within those structures. What some label “fourth wave feminism” is also sometimes labelled “neoliberal feminism” and described as a pushback to assumptions within progressive cultures that feminism is/was no longer necessary and already enacted.13 Still others refer to this as “digital feminism” with a focus on how feminist protest movements make use of digital technologies to promote ideals and organize protest activities.14 The most visible aspect in public recognition is that the terms “feminism” and “feminist” are being reclaimed through the application of all of these labels, though to what participatory degree remains in doubt. However, there are some distinctions as well as commonalities between these contemporary feminist categories that require further interrogation and study. The bodies of theory and activism to which the label feminism has or could be applied have evolved globally with multiple and contradictory characteristics. Controversies over the identities involved (and needed to be involved) in feminisms are among the most visible. Non-gender and female specific identities have been treated as categories of resistance to both feminism and heteronormative patriarchal ideologies in past feminist discourses. This essentialization is a form of marginalization that removes these identities from access to empowerment.15 Newer feminisms, including some versions of third wave, instead seek to highlight how intersectional needs are not exclusive and do not imply isolated categories of identity with their own, isolated goals.16 While intersectional feminisms do not assume all needs are shared across categorical boundaries, it does establish these categories as fluid and capable of bleeding within and between perceived barriers. Kimberlé Crenshaw explains, “When feminism does not explicitly oppose racism and when anti-racism does not incorporate opposition to the patriarchy, race and gender politics often end up being antagonistic to each other and both interests lose.”17 The continuing significance of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s intersectional arguments is evident when applied to media institutions and the ability for social media to serve as an echo chamber reinforcing both systemic and liminal arguments which can then play out as narrative accounts of perceived conflicting realities. Contemporary activisms and feminisms have enhanced the visibility of intersectional narratives. Hashtag activisms allow these stories to reach a larger public and therefore can aid in the partial normalization of intersectionality in dominant media. The narrative architecture of social media also encourages the ability for these narratives to reach across and

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between intersectionalities.18 Those in the millennial and Z generations are likely to have experienced intersectional and liminal interpretations of social categorizations as normative constructs. This has impacted their understanding of difference, with greater tendencies to have collaborated across boundaries and ideological divides than earlier generations. However, the ability to cross those divides also impacts consumption of intersectional messages as more and more ideological targeting has become dominant in digital architecture. Millennials and younger participants in digital discourses are likely to sort through and ignore or block some correspondence due to a desire for cursory previews designed to eliminate items outside of their cognitive biases. The increased visibility of intersectionality has lessened the need for continuing public argument in multiple facets of US life since the 1990s. However, while institutional agents in fields like social work, counseling, and public health in many regions have worked to address intersectionality, other regions and fields are less open to the ideological and systemic shifts required. Further, pushback from conservative and alt-right groups reinforces the liminal and contained nature of intersectional empowerment.19 Additionally, while contemporary activisms and feminisms have highlighted a variety of intersectional issues, multiple cases of violence have not risen to the high levels of visibility and celebrity of those tied to the most highly visible US #MeToo examples. Consider, for example, the following report from Amnesty International: Sexual violence against Indigenous women in the USA is widespread. According to US government statistics, Native American and Alaska Native women are more than 2.5 times more likely to be raped or sexually assaulted than other women in the USA . . . Though rape is always an act of violence, there is evidence that Indigenous women are more likely than other women to suffer additional violence at the hands of their attackers. According to the US Department of Justice, in at least 86 percent of the reported cases of rape or sexual assault against American Indian and Alaska Native women, survivors report that the perpetrators are non-Native men.20

The lack of visibility and voice of the multiple marginalized within contemporary activisms also reflects conflicts between those striving to make their marginalities visible, and conflicts between all those in the margins and hegemonic power and narratives.21 Because of this, many intersectional movements, like the original Me Too movement started by Tanara Burke, have become adjunct to more mainstream, visible movements. This not only highlights the containment of these activisms to powerful individuals and those with systemic visibility, but it also echoes the very concerns highlighted

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by third wave and postfeminisms that traditional and mass movements erase too many non-white cisgender identities and voices. The continued categorization and essentialization of identity further restrict progress toward awareness and recognition of intersectional need.22 Gender labeling is predominantly limited to binary categorizations, limiting the potential for identity discourses. Narratives that can appeal to a wide audience, most often ones that motivate an audience, therefore, reduce the visibility and recognition of alternatives to mainstream identity categorizations. While some within the entertainment industry have worked to provide alternative narratives, these offerings are themselves limited by consumer choice preferences. Efforts to intertwine various intersectional narratives do act as consciousness-raising but are subject to the likelihood of erasing the differences between the stories. WHERE NEXT? In her work, “Communicating Third-Wave Feminism and New Social Movements: Challenges for the Next Century of Feminist Endeavor,” Amanda Lotz argues, “Feminist innovation requires shared conversations and theory building.”23 She also suggests we deconstruct narratives “as part of the history of the simplification and containment of feminism in the popular sphere.”24 Lotz further suggests, “we should be vigilant in preventing anti-feminist voices from hijacking popular discourse on feminisms in contemporary societies and the necessary endeavors of feminist activism.”25 This is particularly relevant at present, given the recurring and relentless backlashes against feminism from the days of the first/second wave, through the third wave, through the present. Systemic change requires vigilance, as we see in regard to the threat to US abortion rights and rising fear of gun and other forms of right-wing violence. As such, embodied activists and feminists must work in hypervisible frames as policy advocates as well as for personal advocacies. Further, activisms cannot function removed from each other, limited to only one identity construct or essentialism. Without overlapping effort, consistent coalition, and vigilance, lasting effective change cannot be achieved. To achieve a lasting state of empowerment, we must nourish the systemic apparatuses that provide progress and stability, and also the multiple and intersecting identities of those who depend on and flow within those institutions. The global COVID-19 pandemic and its associated crises elevate the need for far-reaching, sustainable nourishment and the removal of impediments to peaceful, healthful coexistence.26 Thus, nourishing a new type of embodied activism that promotes a peaceful status and recognition, and a pathway for bringing multiple voices to the table to address the pandemic and

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its impacts, must continue and progress. Many intersecting activisms are happening across age, race, and class spectrums. Is this, then, a potential fourth wave? Coalition and coming together may be the path to negate the “forces of violent oppression and the immediate elimination of unbearable violations and to simultaneously create forces and infrastructure which can ensure the presence of basic human entitlements such as health, safety, education, food, water and dignity,”27 all of which are threatened by pandemic conditions. We must therefore nourish a new embodied activism that aims to transform both global and local spaces toward providing fulfillment and substance for persons in need. Take, for example, the call for individuality in response to mask mandates during the COVID-19 pandemic, focused for this discussion within the framework of suburban, mostly white, mothers’ voices at school board meetings. In January 2022, days after the inauguration of Republican governor Glenn Youngkin and his immediate subsequent removal of school mask mandates by executive action, some Virginia school boards held open meetings with their communities to make decisions on whether to continue masking policies. One mother attending such a school board meeting in a mountainous, rural Virginia community expressed her belief that individual choice matters more than a structural concern, “No mask mandates—my child, my children will not come to school on Monday with masks on.”28 Her vocalization of choice illustrated the challenge for school boards navigating between constituencies driven by conservative individualism and more progressive, and in the case of the pandemic, public health grounded concerns. The mother, Ameila Ruffner King, went on to further widen the conservative-progressive divide, “And I will bring every single gun loaded and ready to . . . ” before being cut off for going over the public comment three-minute time limit. Here we see how the rhetorics of individualism in regard to pandemic response, and in regard to gun rights rhetoric, fused together as part of the appropriation of social justice arguments by the political right. Feminists and embodied activists must continue efforts of consciousness raising to bring awareness of inequitable body statuses while also striving to produce action that addresses the needs of individuals outside of the movement. They must also avoid appropriation by the political right, and avoid reproducing self-mimicry through their tactics and ideals. Otherwise, we run the risk of continuing our efforts in isolation, failing to acknowledge how and why counterarguments and antifeminisms gain cultural footholds. We must also avoid the role of performative activisms that can shout loudly but are detached from change agency. Embodied activisms must also find their narrative centers: they must be framed to address the possibilities of “anti-” and find means of appealing beyond the echo chambers. We must continue to examine and reexamine

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how and why we are visible, and how our visibility encourages participation within and beyond the choir to whom we consistently continue to preach: otherwise, we will continue to reinforce the status quo rather than destabilize and change hegemony. And we must find a means to bridge from our liminal, temporal placement betwixt and between reconstructive and deconstructive change goals into impactful, lived realities. We must find a way to empower beyond the container. NOTES 1. Éléonore Lépinard, Feminist Trouble: Intersectional Politics in Post-Secular Times (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020), 1. 2. Taken from the essay, “La Conciencia de la Mestiza: Towards a New Consciousness,” by Gloria Anzaldúa, first published in Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza (San Francisco: Aunt Lute Books, 1987). 3. Adela C. Licona, “(B)Orderlands’ Lullaby: The Song of the Entremundista.” Trivia: Voices of Feminism 5 (2007). www​.triviavoices​.com​/b​-orderlands​-lullaby​ .html​/. 4. Adela C. Licona, “Working Notes.” Trivia: Voices of Feminism 5 (2007), par. 1. www​.triviavoices​.com​/b​-orderlands​-lullaby​.html​/. 5. Tomiko Brown-Nagin, “In Memoriam: Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, the Last Civil Rights Lawyer on the Supreme Court.” Harvard Civil Rights-Civil Liberties Law Review 56 (2021): 15–25, 15. 6. Baumgardener and Richards, cited in Shaw, “The Ms. Q&A.” See, also, Sabrina Campanella, “The Relentless Disruption Provoked by COVID-19: The Need for an Intersectional Gender Equality Pandemic Recovery Plan” (Dana Lana School of Public Health, The University of Toronto, 2020), 12. www​.dlsph​.utoronto​.ca​/wp​-content​ /uploads ​ / 2020 ​ / 12 ​ / COVID​ - 19​ - and​ - Gender​ - Equality ​ - Webinar​ - Final ​ - articleEDR​ -SCEDR​-SC​-Final​.pdf​/. 7. See Lisa A. Flores, “Reclaiming the ‘Other’: Toward a Chicana Feminist Critical Perspective.” International Journal of Intercultural Relations 24, no. 5 (2000): 687–705; Leandra Hinojosa Hernández, and Sarah De Los Santos Upton. “Critical Health Communication Methods at the US-Mexico Border: Violence against Migrant Women and the Role of Health Activism.” Frontiers in Communication 4, no. 34 (2019). doi.org/10.3389/fcomm.2019.00034; Sarah J. Jackson, “(Re)Imagining Intersectional Democracy from Black Feminism to Hashtag Activism.” Women’s Studies in Communication 39, no. 4 (2016): 375–79; Julia R. Johnson, “Cisgender Privilege, Intersectionality, and the Criminalization of CeCe McDonald: Why Intercultural Communication Needs Transgender Studies.” Journal of International and Intercultural Communication 6, no. 2 (2013): 135–44; and Adela C. Licona, “La Migra.” Sexing the Political: A Journal of Third Wave Feminism on Sexuality 3, no. 1 (2004). www​.sexingthepolitical​.org​/2004​/lamigra​.html​/.

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8. Loubna H. Skalli, “Young Women and Social Media against Sexual Harassment in North Africa.” The Journal of North African Studies 19, no. 2 (2014): 244–58; V. Jo Hsu, “(Trans)forming# MeToo: Toward a Networked Response to Gender Violence.” Women’s Studies in Communication 42, no. 3 (2019): 269–86; Sarah J. Jackson, “(Re) Imagining Intersectional Democracy from Black Feminism to Hashtag Activism.” Women’s Studies in Communication 39, no. 4 (2016): 375–79; Rebecca Leung and Robert Williams, “#MeToo and Intersectionality: An Examination of the #MeToo Movement through the R. Kelly Scandal.” Journal of Communication Inquiry 43, no. 4 (2019): 349–71. 9. Hsu, “(Trans)forming# MeToo.” 10. Henry Jenkins, “Game Design as Narrative Architecture.” In First Person, edited by N. Wardrip-Fruin, and P. Harrigan, 118–30 (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004). 11. Siva Vaidhyanathan, Anti–Social Media: How Facebook Disconnects Us and Undermines Democracy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018). 12. Stéphanie Genz, “‘I Have Work . . . I Am Busy . . . Trying to Become Who I Am’: Neoliberal Girls and Recessionary Postfeminism.” In Reading Lena Dunham’s Girls: Feminism, Postfeminism, Authenticity, and Gendered Performance in Contemporary Television, edited by Meredith Nash and Imelda Whelehan, 18–34 (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017); Jessalynn Keller and Jessica Ringrose, “‘But then Feminism Goes Out the Window!’: Exploring Teenage Girls’ Critical Response to Celebrity Feminism.” Celebrity Studies 6, no. 1 (2015): 132–35; Catherine Rottenberg, “The Rise of Neoliberal Feminism”; Catherine Rottenberg, “Neoliberal Feminism and the Future of Human Capital”; Catherine Rottenberg, The Rise of Neoliberal Feminism; Catherine Rottenberg, “Neoliberalism on Steroids.” 13. Hester Baer, “Redoing Feminism: Digital Activism, Body Politics, and Neoliberalism.” Feminist Media Studies 16, vol. 1 (2016): 17–34; Jessalynn Keller and Jessica Ringrose, “‘But then Feminism Goes Out the Window!’: Exploring Teenage Girls’ Critical Response to Celebrity Feminism.” Celebrity Studies 6, no. 1 (2015): 132–35; Kaitlynn Mendes, Jessica Ringrose, and Jessalynn Keller, “#MeToo and the Promise and Pitfalls of Challenging Rape Culture through Digital Feminist Activism.” European Journal of Women’s Studies 25, no. 2 (2018): 236–46; Nicola Rivers, “Concluding Remarks: Looking Forward to the Fourth Wave.” In Postfeminism(s) and the Arrival of the Fourth Wave: Turning Tides, edited by Nicola Rivers, 133–56 (Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017); Catherine Rottenberg, “The Rise of Neoliberal Feminism.” Cultural Studies 28, no. 3 (2014): 418–37; Catherine Rottenberg, “Neoliberal Feminism and the Future of Human Capital.” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 42, no. 2 (2017): 329–48; Catherine Rottenberg, The Rise of Neoliberal Feminism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018); Catherine Rottenberg, “Trumping It Up: Neoliberalism on Steroids.” Common Dreams, 2016. www​ .commondreams​.org​/views​/2016​/12​/20​/trumping​-it​-neoliberalism​-steroids​/; Thorpe, Toffoletti and Bruce, “Sportswomen and Social Media”; Kalpana Wilson, “Towards a Radical Re‐appropriation: Gender, Development and Neoliberal Feminism.” Development and Change 46, no. 4 (2015): 803–32. 14. Baer, “Redoing Feminism.”

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15. Gust A. Yep, Karen E. Lovaas, and John P. Elia, “Introduction: Queering Communication; Starting the Conversation.” In Queer Theory and Communication: From Disciplining Queers to Queering the Discipline(s), edited by Gust A. Yep, Karen E. Lovass, and John P. Elia, 1–10 (Abington, Oxon, UK: Routledge, 2014). 16. Crenshaw, “Mapping the Margins.” 17. Crenshaw, “Whose Story Is It, Anyway?” 405. 18. Sarah J. Jackson, “(Re)Imagining Intersectional Democracy from Black Feminism to Hashtag Activism.” Women’s Studies in Communication 39, no. 4 (2016): 375–79. 19. Patricia Hill Collins, Intersectionality as Critical Social Theory (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2019), 21–22. .amnestyusa​ .org​ / 20. Amnesty International, “Maze of Injustice,” 2011. www​ reports​/maze​-of​-injustice​/, para. 1. See, also, Indian Law Resource Center, “Ending Violence against Native Women,” n.d. indianlaw.org/issue/ending-violence-againstnative-women; National Congress of American Indians, “Violence against American Indian and Alaska Native Women,” Research Policy Update, 2018 February. National Congress of American Indians Policy Research Center. www​.ncai​.org​/policy​-research​ -center​/research​-data​/prc​-publications​/VAWA​_Data​_Brief​_​_FINAL​_2​_1​_2018​.pdf​/. 21. Jackson, “(Re)Imagining Intersectional Democracy.” See also Ayesha Vemuri, “Talk to Me: Towards a Politics of Transnational Feminist Solidarity.” Gender, Place & Culture 29, no. 1 (2022): 1–25. 22. See Vrushali Patil, “From Patriarchy to Intersectionality: A Transnational Feminist Assessment of How Far We’ve Really Come.” Signs 38, no. 4 Intersectionality: Theorizing Power, Empowering Theory (Summer 2013): 847–67. doi. org/10.1086/669560. 23. Amanda D. Lotz, “Communicating Third-Wave Feminism and New Social Movements: Challenges for the Next Century of Feminist Endeavor.” Women and Language xxvi, no. 1 (2003): 2–9, 7. 24. Lotz, “Communicating Third-Wave Feminism and New Social Movements,” 7. 25. Lotz, “Communicating Third-Wave Feminism and New Social Movements,” 7. 26. Metin Ersoy and Tamar Haruna Dambo, “Covering the Covid-19 Pandemic Using Peace Journalism Approach.” Journalism Practice (2021). doi.org/10.1080/17 512786.2021.1945482. 27. Victoria A. Newsom and Wenshu Lee, “On Nourishing Peace: The Performativity of Activism through the Nobel Peace Prize.” Global Media Journal 8, no. 15 (2009). www​.globalmediajournal​.com​/peer​-reviewed​/on​-nourishing​-peacethe​ -performativity​-of​-activism​-throughthe​-nobel​-peace​-prize​-35260​.html​/. 28. Jessica Glenza, “Virginia Woman Charged for Threats to ‘Bring Every Gun’ Over School Mask Rule.” The Guardian (UK), January 22, 2022. www​.theguardian​ .com​/us​-news​/2022​/jan​/22​/virginia​-mother​-charged​-school​-mask​-rule​/.

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Index

A abortion, 7, 11n22, 21–22, 27, 29–30, 51–52, 59, 61, 68–73, 76b40, 80n85, 86, 155, 171, 182, 184, 191n2, 232– 48, 252–61; access to, 184, 241; activism for, 11n22, 37n4, 41n23; and anti-feminist backlash, 234; and reproductive rights, 86, 232; and the fight for privacy in the US, 68, 254n10; and the history of abortion regulation in the US, 29–30, 47n67, 254n10; and the Third Wave Foundation, 179, 185; anti- movements, 233, 238; arguments about, 29, 51, 68; challenge to Roe v. Wade, 47n69; criminalization of, 21; debates about, 76n40; efficacy of Roe v. Wade, 72, 245; Ginsberg, Ruth Bader, on, 47n70, 51–52, 73n1, 245; history of 29–30, 46–57n67; ideology and politics, 7; law, 22, 171;

overturn(ing) of Roe v. Wade, 7, 11n22, 15, 37n4, 51, 69n47, 233, 252; protections, 52; protests after the overturn of Roe v. Wade, 11n22, 15, 37n4, 41n23; protests against, 70; Republican hypocrisy about, 38n8; reform, 47n68, 171; restrictions, 253; rights, 21, 27, 37n4, 41n23, 45n55, 52, 59, 69–70, 73, 155, 182, 236, 245, 246, 252; in Rwanda, 171, 191n2; US Supreme Court arguments and decisions of, 51, 68. See also Roe v. Wade Abrams, Stacey, 11n19 action(s): calls for action to dismantle Critical Race Theory, 237; collective, 252; feminist, 264, 267; liminal, 265; intersectional, 252; justice-oriented, 252; temporal, 265 333

334

Index

activism(s), ix–x, xii, 3, 5–7, 9n12, 11n22, 15–36, 46n59, 51–81, 74n25, 75n25, 83–105, 115, 125–26, 134–36, 141n45, 143–65, 171–91, 196n58, 201–23, 263–72, 272n7, 273n8; abortion rights, 41n23; affective embodied, 79n81; antifeminist, 7; “Astroturf,” 38n8; celebrity, 8, 201–30; climate, 79n81; contained empowerment in, 7, 106n10; contemporary, 7, 15, 16, 19; deconstructionist and reconstructionist, 6; digital, x, 38n6, 44n33, 82n109, 142n61, 143–65, 166n9, 166n10, 166n11, 167n13, 167n14, 169n44, 273n13, 274n18; during the COVID-19 pandemic, 38n8; early feminist, 3; embodied, 5, 9n12, 11n20, 15, 16, 18, 45n53, 49n86, 77n53, 79n81, 91, 98, 105, 139n34, 186, 204, 219, 229n89, 233, 263, 270–71; essentialized categorization in, 19; everyday, 224n16; fan, 201–23, 225n37, 226n57, 227n58, 227n59, 227n60, 227n65, 227n66, 227n67, 229n100; feminine-of-center, 6; feminist, 3, 6, 19, 38n6, 51–81, 77n54, 79n75, 83–105, 106n6, 111n66, 111n67, 111n68, 111n69, 115, 122, 126, 134, 136, 143–65, 171–91, 196n58, 229n89; -from-within, 122, 126, 134; -from-without, 134;

gender-based, 55; hashtag, 273n13, 274n18; historical contexts, 197n73, 197n74; hyperfeminine embodied, 219; hypervisible, 77n53; identity-based, 16, 19, 223, 236; identity-restricted nature of feminist activism, 186; in global and transnational contexts, 171–91, 191n4, 191n14, 193n23, 194n31, 194n33, 194n34, 194n35, 194n37, 195n38, 195n39, 195n41; in/visible, 171–91; juxtaposition of deconstructionist and reconstructionist, 6; limited nature of, 5; mediated, 166n10; online, x, 38n6, 44n33, 166n9, 166n10, 166n11, 167n13, 167n14, 273n13, 274n18; performativity of, 274n27; pop, 11n22, 42n23; postfeminist, 19; practices, 7; reproductive rights, 11n22, 15; social media, 206; third wave, 7, 19, 51–81, 83–105, 115, 120, 141n52, 196n58, 196n60; third wave feminist forms of, 7; traditional notions of, 16; youth, 18. See also Colin Kaepernick activist(s), xii embodied, 5, 9n12, 11n20, 15, 16, 18, 45n53, 49n86, 77n53, 79n81, 91, 98, 105, 139n34, 186, 204, 219, 233, 263, 270–71; engagement, 6; feminist, 3, 6, 19, 38n6, 51–81, 77n54, 79n75, 83–105, 106n6,

Index

111n66, 111n67, 111n68, 111n69, 115, 122, 126, 134, 136, 143–65, 171–91, 196n58; practice, 5 Adorno, Theodor, 225n29. See also culture industry/ industries advocacy/advocacies, 6; aesthetic, 89 aesthetic(s), 109n34, 229n89 aesthetic advocacies, 89 aesthetically pleasing, 88 affect/affective, 79n81, 207, 251; power, 207 Afghanistan, 189 agency, 33–34, 59, 68, 92, 146, 165; activist, 17–19, 105, 271; feminist, 16–17, 27, 89, 103, 105; girl power agency, 116–22, 126–30, 134; individual, ix, 5–6, 17, 116–22, 126–30, 212, 219; institutional, 134, 172–73, 182, 186, 190–91; lack of, 65, 116–22; systemic, 92, 172–73, 190– 91, 233, 236 agency-based empowerment, 33–34 Agricultural Workers’ Organizing Committee, 3. See also Dolores Clara Fernandez Huerta Ahmed, Sara, 77n22, 78–79n75. See also politics of emotion AIDS/HIV, 193; awareness, 89 “Ain’t I a Woman” speech, 92. See also Sojourner Truth Allen, Brenda, 139n36 alt-right, 222, 250–51, 269; authoritarianisms, 165; ethnonationalisms, 165; extremists, 222; masculinities, 228n88, 229n90; media, 221

335

Amendment, Hyde, 257n46 Amendment(s), US Constitutional: Eighteenth, 56; Equal Rights (ERA), 18, 52, 57–62, 75n34, 75n36, 75n37, 76n41, 76n44, 231, 254; First, 257n48; Fourteenth, 28, 45n55, 51–52; Ninth, 29; Nineteenth, 28, 47n67, 55, 56, 71, 257n45, 258n57, 259n68; Twenty-First, 57 American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), 51; Women’s Rights Project at the ACLU, 51 American Indian and Alaska Native women, 269, 274n20 amnesia, discursive, 28, 237, 244, 256n28, 259n71 Amnesty International, 192n15, 269, 274n20 Amos, Tori, 209, 217, 219 #AnaKaman, 206 angry white men, 255n16 Antebellum America, 92. See also Black women in Antebellum America anti-abortion: advocacy, 238–44; advocates, 238, 240; arguments, 248; bills, 242; funding, 240; legislation, 245; messaging, 246; movement, 47n67, 233, 240, 242; narratives, 247; proponents, 239, 241–42; rhetoric, 242–43 antifeminism, 7 antifeminist, 36. See also Phyllis Schlafly anti-intellectualism, 244–47

336

anti-invasion discourses and human trafficking representations in US politics, 221, 228n88 anti-masking and anti-vaccine protests during the COVID-19 pandemic, 20 anger, 237 anos de silencio [years of silence] (South America), 62 Anzaldúa, Gloria, 31, 35, 47(n74), 49(n89), 139(n36), 141(n53), 166(n3), 173, 272(n2) artistic creations, 1 Arab Educational Institute in Palestine, 189 Arab Women Media Center in Jordan, 189 “Arab Spring,” 38n7 Argentina, 62 Asian Journal of Women’s Studies, 109n34 Asian American Trans Femme, 139; Asociación de Trabajo y Estodio Sobre la Mujer [Association for Work and Study of Women], (Argentina), 63 Association Rwandaise pour le BienÊtre Familial [Rwandan Association for Family Welfare], 171 “Astroturf” activism, 38n8 Atwood, Margaret, 235, 239, 241, 243, 251, 256n23, 258n63 authoritarian/authoritarianism: denials of femininity, 64 authority: figures, 132, 213, 239; individualized, 2–4, 27, 92, 99; intellectual, 246; moral, 165; patriarchal and systematic forms of legitimized, 4, 29, 39, 64, 98, 222–23, 239–42 B Babes in Toyland, 115 backlash:

Index

against celebrity activists, 220, 237; against Critical Race Theory, 234; against the ERA, 59; against feminists/ feminisms, 147, 187; against progressive movements, 59, 237–38; against women, 166n2, 220; against women’s rights, 143; against working women, 143, 207; and mimicry, 231–53; and Trumpism, 165n1, 223; pro-woman, 7. See also Susan Faludi Barrett, Amy Coney, 15, 30, 37n2, 47n69, 51, 237, 245 Baumgardner, Jennifer, 30, 76n44, 89, 102, 107n14, 108n28, 111n63, 118, 138n17, 140n46, 141n47, 141n50, 141n52, 167n15, 168, 177, 266 Belafonte, Harry, 208 Berry, Ellen, xii Beyoncé, 107n11, 204, 209, 212 Bhabha, Homi, 168n23, 168n24, 168n25 Bikini Kill, 115, 136 bio-politics, 78n72. See also Michel Foucault bio-power, 68. See also Michel Foucault The Bionic Woman, 95, 132 Birzescu, Anca, 38n8 Black: actor(s), 203; American celebrities, 212; audiences, 117; celebrities, 225n40; and the Civil Rights Movement, 225n40; communities, 212; diaspora imagery, 204; feminism, 66, 84, 107n13, 273n8, 274n18; feminist, 139n36, 236; feminist activists, 143;

Index

feminist cultural imaginaries, 188; feminist standpoint analysis, 139n36; feminist thought, 90, 141n53, 256n24. See also Patricia Hill Collins; feminists, 83, 253; identity/identities, 204; Panther movement, 22, 43n27; third wave Black feminism, 107n13, 169n51; woman, 139n36; womanhood, 139n36; womanism, 66, 84; women, 73n3, 83, 94; and other women of color, 94; in Antebellum America, 92–93; writing about gender in the 19th century, 157; women’s identity, 73n3. See also Black Lives Matter movement Black Lives Matter movement, 202–3, 215, 220, 236, 267 #BlackLivesMatter, 267 BlackPanther, 228n77 #BlackPantherSoLit, 228n77 Black woman/women, 5, 73n3, 157; identity, 73n4 Black Widow release on Disney + (2021), 205 Blanchett, Cate, 231 Blank, Hanne, 170n61. See also Sexing the Political body/bodies: and girl power, 115–36; as a site of identity, 214; as a site of struggle, 263; -based feminine containment, 53–55; choice(s), 51–52, 66; control over one’s, 52, 91; feminist theorizing of, 169n46; gendered, 74n16, 91–93, 118; hystericization of the female, 60;

337

image, 42n30; marginalized, 5; politics, 82n109, 142n61, 214, 226n53, 258n53, 273n13; type(s), 100, 117–18, 122 Bolsonaro, Jair, 251 Bourmatnov, Laura, xii Brando, Marlon, 208 Brietbart, 236 Breyer, Steven, 15 Brooks, Meredith, 115 Bushell, Nandi, 218. See also Dave Grohl Buffy the Vampire Slayer, 103, 118, 122–35, 139n33, 140n38, 140n40 Bundesverdienstkreuz [Federal Cross of Merit], 2. See also Lotte Reiniger Burton, Tim, 1 Butler, Judith, 81n108, 141n53 C Calamity Jane (band), 115 Cambridge Analytica, 165 “cancel culture,” 220 capitalism, 69, 86, 98, 127 Cardi B, 201–2, 215, 223n1, 223n2, 223n3, 223n5, 223n6 Carlip, Hillary, 129, 138n14, 138n19, 140n41 Carter, Lynda, 95 celebrity, 100; activism, 7, 19; digital, 201–29; endorsements, 218; feminism, 19, 82n109; feminism, 87, 142n61; studies, 107n11, 142n61 celebrities: motivators for their fan activisms, 215 Center for Conflict Resolution, 189 Centro da Mulher Brasileira (Brasil), 63

338

change, 131, 134, 152, 154–55, 162, 166n5, 166n9, 167n13, 167n14, 171–91; politics of, 138n11; social, 164; systemic, 27, 136, 146, 163 Charlie’s Angels, 95, 132 Charmed, 118; witches on, 118 Chávez, César, 3. See also Dolores Clara Fernández Huerta Chávez, Karma, 105n2 Cher, 213 Chile, 62–63 Christian Coalition (Political Action Group; PAC), 238 Círculo de Estudios de la Mujer [Women’s Study Circle] (Chile), 63 Citizens’ United vs. Federal Election Commission (2010), 238 civic engagement, 8n11, 166n10, 175, 208 Civil Rights (US), 22, 29, 41n24, 75n32, 225n40, 235, 265, 272n5; and Anti-War Movements civil society, 187–89, 191n14, 192n21, 197n79, 198n89 civil society organizations, 188. See also organization(s), civil society and nongovernmental Civil War (US), 251 climate change, xi, 79n81, 220, 246; activism, 79n81 Clinton, Hillary Rodham, 4 Clooney, George, 205 Coalition-building, 19, 252 Cold War, 64 collective identity-based fan activism, 215 collective memory, 259–60n73 Collins, Misha, 208

Index

Collins, Patricia Hill, 31, 47n74, 105n2, 109n35, 141n53, 225n39, 236, 256n24, 261n96, 274n19. See also “matrix of domination” colonial discourses, 79n76 colonial era (US), 64 colonialism, 55 Colombia, 62 Comstock Act of 1873/Comstock Laws, 27–29, 68 Comstockery, 27 communal and shared experience, 210; reciprocity, 219 community, xi, 17–18, 22–23, 30, 42n30, 43n32, 103, 145, 147, 153, 160, 168(n23), 204; activism, 263; celebrity, 209; fan, 215; ideals in, 147; interactive, 208; lack of, 6; LGBTQ+, 20; local contexts, 177; shared sense of, 144; truths within a, 218; values within a, 218 communities: Black, 212; fandom, 213–20; marginalized, 5 Conferencia Mundial del Año Internacional de la Mujer [World Conference on Women] (June 19 to July 2, 1975, Ciudad de México), 174 Congress (US), 4 Constitution, US, 51, 55 consciousness, 16, 31, 107n11, 131; and Black feminist thought, 47n74, 256n24; multiple forms of, 31; liminal border, 35; new, 272n2; raising, 204, 237, 271.

Index

See also Gloria Anzaldúa contained, xi; agency, 103; by the necessity of motherhood within Nazi history, 247; girl self, 129; nature of activisms and advocacies, 249; nature of feminist NGOization, 171–91; nature of intersectional empowerment, 269; nature of US third wave feminisms, 113; power, 117; spaces, 161; status, 145 contained empowerment, xi–xii, 2–7, 13, 15–19, 21, 23–26, 29, 31–36, 41, 51–52, 57, 59, 61, 72, 83–86, 90, 92–95, 99–102, 105, 106n10, 115–17, 119–27, 130–35, 138n20, 139n26, 139n27, 144–45, 147–54, 157–60, 162–65, 173, 177–79, 181–85, 191, 232–33, 235, 237, 242, 52, 263–66; in activism, 7; liminal, xii containment: breach of through activism, 263; feminist, 7; of the feminist movement, 241; of digital celebrity and fan activisms, 201–53 Coppola, Francis Ford, 1 Cosby, Bill, 245 Coronavirus. See COVID-19 counter-narratives, 23 COVID-19/COVID-19 pandemic, xx, xii, 222 Crawford Joan, 205 Crenshaw, Kimberlé, 31, 83, 92, 109n3, 268, 274n16, 274n17. See also intersectionality Crews, Terry, 207

339

Critical Race Theory, 237 Croft, Lara, 209 cult of domesticity, 57, 70 culture(s), 25, 31–33, 55, 68–69, 116, 205–10, 218, 225n29; -based oppressions, 31; collective, 222; consumer, 84, 181; counterculture/subculture(s), 25, 249–51; digital, 144, 160–61; dominant, 29, 53, 222; fan, 222; feminine, 131; industry/industries, 55, 68–69, 116, 205–10, 218, 225n29; Middle East North African (MENA), 64; national/regional, 87, 143, 158, 161, 189, 202, 266; of misogyny, 72; participatory, 215; patriarchal, 123, 126; popular, 2, 17, 68–69, 71–2, 85, 88, 95–97, 101–5, 116–19, 126, 131–36, 245–46; progresssive, 268; Western, 53 “culture war(s),” 232–33, 246 cultural, ix–x, 3–4, 17, 25, 31–33, 35, 66, 69, 74n25, 80n99, 81n108, 84, 90, 92, 94, 100n41, 147, 226, 248, 271; agenda(s), 173–75; boundaries/restrictions, 84, 92, 94, 147, 159–60; capital, 144, 202; change agency, 99, 188–90; criticism, 49n90; economy of fandom, 227; history, 22, 226n41; identities, 49n90, 158; ideologies, 68; inclusion, 91; -industrial complex, 4;

340

Index

interpretation(s), 160; logic, 17, 69; loss paranoia, 245; memory, 38n8; narrative(s), 67, 89; norms, 70, 152–53, 163; politics, 48n78; power, 207; production, 25; standards, 64, 238; structure(s), 33, 66; text(s)/representations, 32, 126, 205; traditions/values, 66, 210+211; trends, 96; understanding(s), 35 “cultural acupuncture,” 214 cultural-industrial complex, 4 cultural studies, 48n80, 82n108, 108n20, 142n61, 167n18, 195n40, 217, 225n29, 227n, 260n, 273n13 “culture wars,” 246 D danger, 5 DarEmar, 189. See also Syria Darraj, Susan Muaddi, 65–66 Das Ornament des Verliebten Herzens [Ornament of a Lovestruck Heart] (film, 1919), 1. See also Lotte Reininger Davis, Angela, 78n69, 139n36, 141n53, 143 Davis, Bette, 205 Day, Doris, 205 Davis, Ossie, 208 Davis, Sammy (Junior), 208 de Beauvoir, Simone, 25, 45n47, 79n82 De, Ruby, 208 de Certeau, Michel, 168n23, 168n24, 168n25 “Declaration of Mexico on the Equality of Women and Their Contribution

to Development and Peace, 1975,” 174–75 decolonial: feminism, 32, 48n81; voices, 66. See also intersectionality decolonizing gender, 48n76 deconstructive and reconstructive attempts to alter institutions and systems, 5 Destiny’s Child, 115 development discourse, 23. See also The World Bank; United Nations Die Abenteuer des Prinzen Achmed [The Adventures of Prince Achmed] (film), 1. See also Lotte Reiniger digital celebrity, 201–29 dis-information, 222, 251. See also mis- and dis-information discourse(s), ix, 21, 32–33, 120, 194n31, 213, 270; anti-abortion, 242; anti-invasion, 228n88; colonial, 79n76; civil rights, 235; democratic, 160; development, 23; digital, 92, 269; dominant, 160; empowerment, 173; feminist, 64, 67, 268; gender, 25; girl power, 134; global, 65, 190; identity, 19, 270; legal, 61; pandemic, 250; political, 27, 242; procreation, 53; public, 19, 54, 60–61, 64–66, 236; social, 91 discrimination, 51, 55, 61, 66, 70, 129, 205

Index

“discursive amnesia,” 237 disparity: gender, 4; in national politics, 4 Disney, Walt, 1–3 Disneyfication, 2 disruption, 249; systemic, 18 Dixie Chicks (aka The Chicks), 220 Diyab Antun Yusuf Hannă, 1 Dixon, Lynda (Dee), xii Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health, 51 dominance: of US popular culture, 2 Dominican Republic, 62 Donegan, Moira, 71–72. See also “Media Men List” “Don’t Say Gay” bill, 17 Downey, Robert, Jr., 205 Durham, Aisha, 90, 108n30 Dworkin, Andrea, 69, 80n93, 80n94 dystopia/dystopian. See Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale E East Central and South Eastern Europe, 189 Eastern Europe, and former Soviet states, 174 Eastern European Communist parties, feminist efforts of, 63 echo chamber(s), 6, 7 economic justice, 235 Edley, Paige, xii, 106n10, Egypt, 65 election integrity, 21 Electrawoman and Dynagirl, 95 Elliott, Missy, 202 El Paso, Texas mass murder, 221, 222 embodied: activism(s), 79n81. See also feminism(s) embodiment: feminine, 122, 129; feminist, 98, 214;

341

girl power, 133; within activism, vii, 208, 214–15 emotion, 9, 31, 53. See also affect/affective empowerment, ix, xi–xxi, 2–7, 13, 15–36, 38n7, 42nn30–33, 44nn35–42, 45n44; attempts to define, ix–xii, 16–19, 22–24, 25–30; collective, 41n22; community, 23; contained nature of feminine-ofcenter, 3–4; contained nature of feminist, 72; embodied, 25; individual, 5; personalized, 5, 23; self-, 7; strategic, 45n44; systemic, 5; visible icons of female, 2; youth, 40nn16–18. See also contained empowerment “Empowerment Task Force” of George Herbert Walker Bush, 23 engagement, 105; activist, 206; alternative means of, 173; audience, 171; civic, 166n10; critical, 34, 265; differential, 76n38; fan, 215; feminist, 248; feminist activist, 44n43; lack of, 174; political, 227n62, 267; social media, 256n29; tactics, 248 enslaved Africans, 28; En Vogue, 115 epistemology: feminist, 31–33, 47n72 Equal Rights Amendment, United States (ERA), 6, 18

342

Index

essentialism, strategic, 18–19, 173–74 essentialized categories/categorizations of identity, 16 ethic(s)/ethical, 41, 42, 55, 58, 61, 165 Euro-centric national identitybuilding, 189 Europe, 53, 56, 66, 91, 97, 137n8, 172; cultural memory of protest in, 38n8; East Central and Southeastern Europe, 174, 189, 198nn87– 89, 198n91; Eastern, 63–64, 78n66, 78n68, 174–76, 194n31; feminist activism in, 1066n6 Euro-centric national identitybuilding, 189 European, 38n7; feminisms, 64; national and regional identities and cultures, 189; Union, 40n13, 192n21 Extinction Rebellion (UK), 36n1 extremist audiences, 221 F Facebook, 165, 209. See also Cambridge Analytica Faludi, Susan, 143 fan(s): activisms, 201–29; as participatory politics, 227n59; activist identity construction, 218; belonging, 215; community/communities, 215–18; reciprocity, 218 Fantasia (film), 1 fascism/fascist, 15, 21 “fake news,” 222n92, 229n95 fandom, 212; anti-, 230n104; conspiracy, 222; consumption in, 216–20; media, 218; reciprocity in, 216–20

Fanon, Frantz, 73n8 Far-right, 231 Fawctt, Farah, 95 FEMEN, 79n81 female representation in national legislative and executive offices, 4; Iceland, 4; Norway, 4; Spain, 4; Sweden, 4 feminine: hyperfeminine embodied activisms, 219 feminine-of-center authority, 4 feminism(s): Black, 66, 84, 87; celebrity, 203, 207–8, 219; global, 67; Indigenous, 66; intersectional, 60, 266, 268; Islamic/Muslim, 66, 79n79; Latin(x), 63, 66, 143, 174; lesbian, 86, 143; Native American, 66; neoliberal, 66, 71, 85, 267–68; postfeminism, 19, 62, 66, 70–71, 84–85, 87–89, 104, 174, 233, 263, 265, 270; post-colonial, ix, 24, 64, 65, 79n78; transnationalist, 49n90, 62, 187, 194n31; waves of, 6, 60, 72, 88, 97, 103, 115, 149, 153 feminist: activism(s), 3, 6, 7, 16, 19, 34, 36, 52–53, 83–84, 85, 93, 99, 100–101, 103, 105, 115, 146, 186–87, 202–3, 208, 219–21, 223, 232, 241–42, 263–64, 268, 270; advocacies, 30, 66; approach(es), ix; argument(s), 22, 29, 64, 85, 99, 247;

Index

backlash, 233–34; celebrity, 212, 216; coalition, 176; containment, 7; criticism, 28; cyber-, 161; deconstruction, 102; digital, 149; discourse(s), 64, 67, 268; efforts of Eastern European Communist parties, feminist, 63; embodied/embodiment, 105, 214; empowerment, 23, 24, 26, 57, 72, 85, 87, 96, 98, 100, 115–18, 134, 174, 186, 202, 207, 219, 231, 264–65; epistemology, 31–33, 47n72; ethnography, 33, 49n87, 49n88; films, 3; fourth wave, 3; history, 22, 56, 86, 231, 265; identity, 94, 144, 154, 160, 203, 219; ideology(ies), 16, 25, 55, 84, 85, 87, 98, 99, 151, 181, 185, 209, 231; influencers (social media), 203; literature, 34; male-, 129; media studies, 116; metaphor, 119–36;; methodology, 31–34, 121; mimicry, 243, 253; moral philosophy, 29; movement(s), 21, 62, 66, 71, 85, 98, 172, 187, 209, 213, 234, 250, 267; narratives, 26, 216; Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs), 171–91; queer, 108n23; perspectives, 152, 264; politics, 82n108, 95, 100, 107n14, 231–32, 267;

343

post-, 108n20; poststructural, 133; publication(s), 144; rhetorical criticism, 145; scholars/scholarship, 1, 31, 66, 86, 176, 188, 207, 209, 215, 217; spaces, 100–101, 147, 158; standpoint, 183; theory, 31–32, 35, 61, 66, 69, 83, 91, 93, 126, 174, 267; unicorn, 129; voices, 61, 101, 143, 144, 267; waves of, 6, 60, 72, 88, 97, 103, 115, 149, 153; Western tradition of, 65. See also third wave; second wave feminism feminists, xii, 25, 27, 57, 59, 61–63, 65, 69, 72, 83, 85, 86, 87, 89, 92, 93, 96, 97, 99, 102, 125, 127, 129, 132, 135, 143, 146–47, 150–51, 153–57, 159– 63, 177–79, 181, 201–2, 210, 222, 233, 235–36, 245, 263, 268, 270–71 Fernández Huerta, Dolores Clara, 3 film industry: male-dominated, 2 first wave: activism, 36; contained empowerment, 36; feminist activism, 6; feminists, xi, 32, 35–36; of feminism, 57, 60; of south American feminism, 62 Fisher, Reverend Jonathan, 22 Fisher, Walter R., 171, 191n1, 191n5 Florida HB 1557, 17. See also “Don’t Say Gay” bill Floyd, George, 15, 215 Foo Fighters, 218. See also Dave Grohl (former) California statutory rape law, 68 Foucauldian theory of bio-power, 65, 87 Foucauldian theory of surveillance, 87

344

Index

Foucault, Michel, 11n18, 46n57, 53, 68, 77n49, 79n73, 80n89, 80n90. See also bio-power; hysterization of women’s bodies Foundation for National Progress, 236 fourth wave: feminism, 60; feminist activism, 3; feminist movement, 66. See also wave(s) Friedan, Betty, 75n31 French, Christina, 169n39. See also Sexting the Political G Gajjala, Radhika, 43n33 The Gallant Little Tailor (film, 1954), 2 Garbo, Greta, 205 Garza, Alicia, 220 Gaston, Michael, 207 gaze: male, 87, 96, 110n45, 116– 17, 123, 205. See also Laura Mulvey Gaumont, Leon, 2 gender, 15–21, 25–33, 38n7, 40n15, 45n55, 49n90, 51–55, 60–62, 66, 72, 75n30, 78n75, 82n109, 83–91, 97–98, 100, 104–5; -affirming medical care for transgender youth, 17; and activism, 44n33, 71; and the body, 74n16; -based empowerment, 83; -based organizing, 71; -based social structures, 103; category, 90, 97; decolonizing, 48n76; discrimination, 766n38; disparity/disparities, 4, 15; equality, 58; essentializations, 93; hierarchy, 16; identity, 18, 39n13, 103; in Islam, 78–79n75, 79n78;

in the Middle East and North Africa, 44n33; and nationality, 8n4; oppressive religion, 65; politics, 45n44, 48n78, 76n44, 81–82n108, 92; and power, 48n82; relations, 76n47; resistance, 79n80; rights, xi, 18, 41n24, 67, 104; roles, 45n50, 46n58, 65, 67, 80n87, 97; -sensitive approach(es), ix; sex and, 67–68, 105; stereotypes, 9n14. See also Judith Butler gender-affirming medical care for transgender youth, 18 gender mainstreaming, 48n76, 49n86, 173 gendered power structures x Generation X, 72, 143, 152 genocide studies, 198n90 GenZ, 72 Gilead, 258n63. See also Margaret Atwood Gill, Rosalind, 76n44, 81n108, 88, 106n11, 107n14, 108n19, 108n20, 205 Gilligan, Carol, 47n72 Ginsburg, Ruth Bader, 15, 47n70, 51, 73n1, 75n34, 253n1 girl power, 6, 36, 87–88, 94, 100, 102, 103, 107, 110, 115–42; protagonist as feminist metaphor, 118–21 Girl Power: Self Defense for Teens, 118 Girl Power: Young Women Speak Out, 118 GLBTQIA+. See LGBTQIA+ global justice movement, 194n31 Global Women’s Forum, 172 González, Emma, 220 Gonzalez, Paula Lobato, 175–76 GOP, 18, 39, 229n103, 231–44;

Index

and patriarchal destabilizing of gender rights movements, 18 Greene, Marjorie Taylor: resistance to mask mandates, 41n25 Griffin, Rachel Alicia, 139n36 grassroots activism(s)/ activist(s), 52, 232 “grrl power,” 136 Guy-Blaché, Alice, 2 H Harlow, Jean, 205 Harry Potter: film series, 1; narrative, 215 Hall, Deidre, 95 Hall, Stuart, 117, 137n8. See also cultural studies Harding, Sandra, 31, 47n72 Harlow Jean, 205 Harris, Kamala, 5 The Handmaid’s Tale, 258n63. See also Margaret Atwood hashtag activism, 273n8 Haskell, Molly, 205 hegemonic: agency, 233; constructs, 265; counter-hegemonic advocacies, 67; forces, 236, 243, 264, 266; influences, x; institutional forces, 236, 266; institutions, 233, 236; narratives, 269; norms, 223, 233, 235, 246, 250, 265; nostalgia-driven, 251; perspectives, 245; power(s), 269; reinforcement, 243; structures, 266; system(s), 6, 7, 236 hegemony, 2, 243, 272;

345

and whiteness, 243; aspects of, 243; masculine extremist, 232; self-sustaining drive underlying, 2; structural, 250 Hepburn, Audrey, 205 Hepburn, Katharine, 205 Hering, Seville, xii heteronormativity. See patriarchy hijab, 65–66, 79n75. See also Arlene MacLeod Hill, Collins Patricia, 31, 47n74, 105n2, 109n35, 141n53, 225n39, 236, 256n24, 261n96, 274n19 See also “matrix of domination” Hill, Lauryn, 209 history: civil rights, 22; cultural, 22; feminist, 22; gender rights, 28; of the film industry, 1–3; of feminist engagement, 6; of sexuality, 11n18; of the suffrage movement, 8–9n11; of women in politics, 4–5; reproductive rights, 30; women’s, 9n13, 10n16 historicizing empowerment, 22–24 HIV/AIDS, 193; awareness, 89 Hogg, David, 220 Hojabri, Maedah, 204 Hollywood: masculinity, 2; patriarchy of, 2 hooks, bell, 32, 48n78, 48n79, 80n84, 100, 117, 137n7, 143, 265 Hopkins, Ellen, 169n48. See also Sexing the Political Horkheimer, Max, 225n29. See also culture industry/ industries

346

Index

Hottentot, 73n3 House of, Representatives, US, 4 human rights, 44n42,63, 70, 172, 175, 188–90, 192n15, 192n21, 215, 221, 235, 240, 253 human trafficking: representations in US politics, 228n88 hybrid self, 158, 210 hymenoplasty, 64–65 hypermasculine, 232 hypervisible; hyper/visible: activism, 7, 62; embodiment, 67; feminine identity, 220; focus of third wave feminism, 96; goal(s), 251 “hypodermic needle,” 220 hyperfeminine: embodied activisms, 219 hysteria, 54 hysterization of women’s bodies, 54. See also Michel Foucault I Iceland, 4 identity/identities, 153, 201–23; advocative, 217; activist, 216; and community, 168n23; and culture, 168n23; and difference, 168n23; body as a key site of, 214; border crossing, 147; Cardi B’s feminist, 201; celebrity, 202, 212, 214; collective, 215; commodified, 136; complexities of, 206; contained third wave, 178, 183; construction, 157, 179, 213, 215; construct(s), 120, 124, 136, 178, 181, 184, 210; cultural, 158; crisis, 158;

culture, power and, 141; demographically limited, 149; disembodied, 133; embodied, 124; essentialized categories/ categorizations of, 16; far-right, 231; feminist, 168n34, 201; feminist wave, 104; fluidity of, 132; generational feminist, 154; girl power, 122; liberate from the body, 132; liminal, 210; liminally situated shared, 202; millennial, 92; monolithic feminist, 160; multicultural, 157; neo-fascist, 231; nontraditionally feminine, 136; of the patriarchal figure, 148; of the Third Wave Foundation, 182; peripheral construction of, 148; politics, 108n31; pro-democracy, 189; production of, 212; pro-European, 189; religious, 158; stereotypical gender roles tied to, 149; third wave, 149, 151, 158, 160, 182, 184; multicultural, 157; trans-, 211; virtual, 161; white American, 158 ideological, 84, 92, 189, 215, 219, 221, 234, 244–66, 256n27, 256n30; bias, 28; conflicts, 216; conservatism(s), 45n52, 46n55; divisions between women’s activist groups, 56; echo chambers, 237, 266; forces, 32;

Index

framing of third wave feminism, 86; goals of third wave feminism, 35; messaging, 67; polarization(s), 144, 244– 45, 249, 269; siloing, 159, 210, 219; shifts in women’s and genderbased activism, 55 ideological polarization (in the US), 236. See also ideology/ideologies ideology/ideologies, 68, 70, 72, 84, 147, 181, 188–89, 209, 238, 254n9; anti-abortion, 7, 242; antifeminist, 143, 232; cost of, 195n40; empowerment, 151; gender, 10n14; of domination, 32; male, 232; polarized, 249; Tea Party, 243; third wave, 35, 91, 152; white supremacist, 232 implicit biases, 136 Indian Law Resource Center, 274n20 Indigenous: rights of, 251; women’s movements, 207 inequities, 15, 20, 56, 72, 105 influencer(s), 203–5, 211–16; as activists, 211–12. See also “micro-celebrity” injustice(s), 259n68, 264, 274n20 Instagram, 215; Cardi B’s critiquing Trump’s border wall, 215 institutional structures and norms, 2 insurrection (January 6), 37n3. See also January 6, 2021 insurrection (Washington, DC) intellectual property, 218 interconnectedness, 217, 221

347

International Women’s Year (UN, 1975), 174 International Women’s Year Tribune, 175 intersectional, 21, 31, 62, 65–67, 72, 83–85, 89–92, 233, 238, 250– 51, 261n95; activisms, 60; and justice-oriented action, 252; feminisms, 49n90, 60, 266–70; identities/identity, 89, 92; identities within feminisms, 7; identity categories, 60; needs, 19, 83, 93; oppressions, 52; participatory action, 32; politics, 108n24, 263, 272n1; reform, 250; subject positions, 33 intersectionality, 11n19, 83, 89, 90, 92, 105n2, 108n30, 108n31, 109n35, 141n53, 180, 261n96, 268–69, 272n7, 273n8. See also Kimberlé Crenshaw invisibility: and intentional exclusion of women in US history and politics, 4; of lesbians in public and legal discussions of homosexuality, 4–5 invisible: mechanisms for advocacy, 145; rendering, 83. See also in/visibility in/visible activism, 171–97 in/visibility, 3, 9n12, 15–36, 36n5, 67–70, 79n75, 192n21 Iran, 204 Irigaray, Luce, 169n46 Islam, 65, 248; contemporary, 108n25; gender in, 78n75, 79n75 Islamic: feminism, 66, 9n79;

348

Index

law, 65, 194n31; nations, 64; thought, 79n79 Islamobophia, 167n17 J Jackson, Kate, 95 Jackson, Ketanji Brown, 15, 18, 40(n15), 40(n18) Jacob, Krista, 144, 169n39, 169n47. See also Sexing the Political Jalalzai, Zubeda, 169n50. See also Sexing the Political January 6, 2021 insurrection (Washington, DC), 221 Jenkins, Henry, 167n16, 214–15, 226n57, 226n58, 227n59, 229n100, 273n10 Johansson, Scarlett, 205 Jolene (song, rewritten as Vaccine), 215. See also Dolly Parton Jolie, Angelina, 205 Queen Rania of Jordan 172 journalism: women in, 207 justice: economic, 235; global, 194n31; legal, 235; -oriented action, 252; racial, 236; reproductive, 241, 253; social, 235, 250, 257n48, 264, 271; right to, 235 Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg. See Ginsberg, Ruth Bader K Kaepernick, Colin, 202–3, 223n8, 223n9, 223n8 Kelly, Grace, 205 Kelly, R., 245 Khamis, Sahar, vii, ixx, 79n75 King, Jr., Dr. Martin Luther, 235

KKK, 251 knowledge, 7; access to, 160, 162, 211; archaeology of, 86; and power, 121; local, 31, 66, 98, 101, 121, 148, 161, 177; misuse of scientific and technical, 245–46; production, 210–11, 214, 245–46; perceived, 210. See also Michel Foucault Koch brothers, 238 Koch, Carl, 2 Kowalski, Ann, 79n81, 220n89 Korean popular music (K-pop); Bangtan Boys (BTS), 215; BTS ARMY, 215; fan activisms, 215; counternarratives to #AllLivesMatter and #WhiteLivesMatter movements, 215; fundraising for Black Lives Matter after the murder of George Floyd, 215; fandom, 215; fans, 215; phenomenon, 215 L La Casa de la Mujer [The House of the Woman] (Colombia), 63 Lady Gaga, 107n14, 208, 215, 225n37, 227n60, 227n61. See also “Little Monsters” Lamkemper, Judith, xii Lancaster, Burt, 208 Lasswell, Harold, 221 Lazarsfeld, Paul, 221 Latin America, 174 Lavine, E. Dimagiba, 169n50. See also Sexing the Political law(s), 17, 22, 27–30, 39n13, 40n13, 41n24, 45–46n55, 46n57, 46n65, 46–47n67, 47n74, 51–52, 58, 65;

Index

Indian Law Resource Center, 274n20. See also statutory rape law (former California); “Don’t Say Gay” bill Lee, Wenshu, ii, 274n27. See also “discursive amnesia” Lefèbvre, Henri, 168n24 Lengel, Lara (Martin), xii, 11n20, 38n8, 48n76, 49n86, 79n75, 192n16, 192n21, 228n88, 239n90 lesbian identities/identity, 92 LGBTQIA+: activisms, 21; anti-, 158; community, 17; education, 21; empowerment, 49n90; ideals, 234; initiatives, 20; movements, 84; rights, 17, 18, 251 Library on Wheels for Non-violence and Peace, 189 liminal, 2; nature of intersectional empowerment, 269; spaces, 222; temporal spaces, 2. See also Victor Turner liminality, 231, 264; carnivalesque, 231–53; of feminist waves, 232–33, 237, 241, 247, 250, 254n5. See also Victor Turner “Little Monsters,” 215. See also Lady Gaga Lopez, Jennifer, 209 Lorde, Audre, 99, 109n37, 111n58 M MacBeal, Ally (Ally MacBeal), 118 MacLeod, Arlene, 66 Madonna, 103

349

Madres de la Plaza de Mayo [Mothers of the Disappeared] (Argentina), 63 Manifesta, 102. See also Jennifer Baumgardner; Amy Richards Manson, Shirley, 116 marginalization: multiple, 2 marginalized: spaces, 5; status, 2 masculine: aggression, 118; extremist hegemony, 232; cultural norms, 25, 128; hero archetype, 119; power structures, 149, 151, 163; stereotypes, 132 masculinity: as empowerment, 144; hyper-, 204, 232; Hollywood, 2 mass murders, 221–22 “matrix of domination,” 236. See also Patricia Hill Collins McCaughey, Martha, 169n39. See also Sexting the Political McGowan, Rose, 202, 209–10 McRobbie, Angela, 81n108, 107n11 meaning, shared, 214 “Media Men List,” 71–72 #MeToo movement, 206–9, 267 metaphor: girl power protagonist as feminist, 118–21 metaphors of containment, 115–65 methodology: embodied, 31–34; feminist, 31–34, 47n72, 47n73; scholar-activist, 31–34 “micro-celebrity,” 216, 221 Middle East and North Africa, 43n33, 44n33, 48n76, 64–66, 89, 109n34, 173, 187–89, 192n16, 195n47; Gender mainstreaming in, 173

350

Middle East(ern), 65, 108n25, 172; folktales, 1 migrant farm workers’ rights, 4. See also Dolores Clara Fernandez Huerta Milano, Alyssa, 202, 206, 208–10. See also #MeToo movement millennial(s), 92, 116, 182, 202– 13, 217, 269; celebrities, 202–13; feminism, 228n87; generation, 202–13; girl power, 208–13; identity/identities, 92; women, 116. See also post-millennial(s) mimicry, 38n8, 231–53, 271 Minha, Trinh T., 52 mis- and dis-information, 222, 251 Mistral, Gabriela, 62 mobilizing/mobilization, 187, 225n39, 254n7 Modi, Narendra, 251 Mohanty, Chandra Talpade, 79n76 Monroe, Marilyn, 205 Montenegro, Desiree, xii, 9n12, 37n5, 45n53, 77n53, 86n49, 139n34 Moraga, Cherrie, 143 “Moral Majority,” 238 Morrisette, Alanis, 115 “Mother Monster,” 215. See also Lady Gaga motherhood, 26, 59, 64, 133, 243, 247– 48, 261n89; and femininity, 203; and white nationalist influence, 248; forced, 30; marketization of, 203; roles, 63–65; voluntary (history of), 29, 70 Mother Jones, 236 Ms. Magazine, 89 Mulvey, Laura, 116–17, 205 Muslim:

Index

feminism, 66, 109n34 women, ix, 65, 78n71, 78n74, 79n78, 89, 108n25 N narrative(s), xi, 2, 19–29, 38n7, 62, 64–65; architecture, 16, 36, 267; conflicting, 21; cultural, 67; dominant, 220; feminist, 26, 67; hegemonic, 52, 55, 220; historical, 52; of hystericization, 61; of individual empowerment promoted, 21; identity centered, 61; issues-based, 57; of power, 25, 61; of purity, 64; patriarchal, 25, 220; post-apocalyptic, 79; that reflected multiple intersectionalities, 21; related to procreation, 52, 72; resistance, 19; strategic, 67, 79n81; structural, 52; of “The Other,” 25; within westernized definitions of feminisms, 65. See also feminisms/feminist(s); ideological; ideology/ ideologies; political Nassar, Larry, 245 National Farm Workers’ Association, 4 National Women’s Party, 58 neoconservative: feminism, 143; US movement, 240; politics, 241; populism, 232 neo-fascist/fascism, 231 neoliberal, 195, 203, 209, 214, 224n16;

Index

feminism, 66, 176; postfeminism, 193; subjectivity, 193 New Deal, 246 Newman, Paul, 208 Newsom, Victoria A., ix, 9n12, 11n20, 37n5, 38n8, 43n33, 44n33, 45n53, 48n76, 49n86, 77n53, 79n75, 79n81, 106n8, 106n10, 138n11, 138n13, 138n20, 139n26, 139n27, 139n34, 141n57, 167n17, 192n16, 192n18, 192n19, 192n20, 192n21, 193n22, 196n58, 196n60, 225n30, 229n89, 239n90, 274n27 New Zealand, 222. See also mass murders New York City, 180. See also Third Wave Foundation New Zealand (Christchurch) mass murderer, 222 Nicaragua, 62 NGOization, 171–97 No Doubt (Band), 115 non-governmental organizations (NGOs), 171–97 “Non-Profit Industrial Complex” (NPIC), 175 non-violence/nonviolence, 189 Norway, 4 O Obama, Barack, 243, 247, 249 ontological concerns, 221 oppression(s): assumptions of, 65; hierarchies of, 31; hyper/visible gendered, 128, 220; indigenous, 62; intersectional dimensions of, 9, 52, 132, 180, 252; multiple vectors of, 32, 132, 250; patriarchal, 27, 118, 124, 146; systemic, 15, 20, 32, 235, 249, 263, 267–68; violence, 271

351

#OrangeTheWorld movement, 267 Orphan Black, 167n18 organization(s): civil society and nongovernmental, 171–98 #OscarsSoWhite, 267 The Other, 25, 45n46 P Pakistan, 189 Palin, Sarah, 249 pandemic, xii patriarchal storytelling mechanisms, 2. See also Hollywood patriarchy, 2 Parton, Dolly, 212 pastiche: hyperactive forms of, 218 Paul, Alice, 58. See also National Women’s Party Pax Christi International, 189 #payetonuterus [uterine pain], 187 Peaceful Streets Project, 189 phenomenology, 45n46 Pickford, Mary, 2, 205 Plant, Sadie, 168n27, 168n28 Poitier, Sidney, 208 polarization, 219, 249. See also ideological; ideology/ ideologies political, x, 4, 188, 190, 209– 11, 212–14; action(s), 181; agendas, 173; agents, 214; beliefs, 203; climate, 203; discourse, 27, 242; embodiment, 208; history, 3; rhetorics, 173; rights, 85n198; soft power, 44n34; strategic narratives, 214; systems, 186;

352

Index

variables, ix. See also Sexing the Political Political Action Groups (PACs), 238 politics, 83, 48n83, 161, 166n9, 229, 230; of abortion, 231–53, 257n34, 257n35, 258n48, 258n58, 258n58, 258n62, 259n65, 259n65, 259n68; and activism, 38n6; and the regulation of sexuality, 74n21. See also abortion; (a)politics of Girl Power, 107n14; Bio-, 77, 80, 11n18. See also Michel Foucault; body, 82n109, 142n61, 214, 226n53, 258n53, 273n13; of change, 138n11; collective, 214; conservative, 20, 76, 231–53; cultural, 48n78, 77n52, 81n108; fan activism as participatory, 227n59, 229n100; feminist, 82n108, 95, 107n14, 109n34, 141n57, 197n75, 274n21; gender, 92, 111n68, 137n3, 268; Girl Power, 196n49; gender stereotypes in, 9n14; identity, 47n74, 66, 90, 108n30; intersectional, 83, 105n1, 108n31, 263, 272n1; interrelationships between gender, politics, and economics, 45n44; hegemonic, 66; of emotion, 77n52, 80n99. See also Sara Ahmed; of empowerment, 47n74, 2566n24; of everyday life, 110n52, 207; environmental, 79n81; of gender, 76n44; of Islamic feminism, 66; Islamobophic, 167n17;

LGBTQIA+, 196n67; local, 232; of misinformation, 256n26; neoconservative, 241, 258n53; and Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs), 186; of popular culture, 82n108; of social change, 82n110, 82n111, 110n44; of third wave feminism, 106n8, 107n11, 107n14, 139n33; micro-, 76; personal, 75; polarizing, 41n24; populism/populist, 41n21, 256n26; progressive, 27; reproductive, 231–62, 259n68; right-leaning, 255n11; social media and, 166n11; and soft power, 191n7; state (US), 39n13, 259n68; subversive, 34; technology and, 254n8; “the personal is -,” 90; “trickle down,” 185; trans*, 263; US, 20, 76, 10n14, 10n15, 143, 231–62, 255n11; women and, 257n46; visibility, 224n23; women-centric, 69 pop culture: anti-intellectualism in US, 245–46, 263; consumer, 209, 215; generational, 85, 88, 95–97, 102, 104, 116–19, 132, 135–36; icons, 101, 103, 116–19; industry, 2, 17, 55, 68, 71, 116–19. See also celebrity; celebrities; fan(s); fandom populism, ix, 232, pornography, 66, 69, 263.

Index

See also Andrea Dworkin Portman, Natalie, 209 post-“Arab Spring” era, 166n10 post-colonial studies, 73n9 postcolonialism, 263 postcolonial feminism(s), 24, 64, 86–87 postfeminism, 66, 70–71, 84–89, 107n11, 233, 270; neoliberal and postfeminism, 66, 108 postmillennial(s), 92, 208–9; identity/identities, 92, 208–10. See also millennial(s) postmodernity, ix, 87 postsocialist feminisms in Eastern Europe, 64 post-truth media. See mis- and dis-information power, 6; systemic, 6 power feminism, 87–88, 214 Prince, Michael, xii Primrose Productions, Proshant, Chakraborty, 174 protest(s): Black Lives Matter, 215 Princess Leia (Star Wars), 132 Putin, Vladimir, 15 Q QAnon/Q-Anon, 222, 234 #QuellaVoltaChe (Italy), 206 Queen Latifa, 103, 209 Queen Rania of Jordan, 172 R racism, 53, 73n7, 92, 139n36, 232, 234; combatting, 179–80; Eurocentrism and, 66; evils of, 236; and misogyny, 151; and sexism, 9, 15, 162, 205, 233, 251 Radway, Janice, 137n9 Razzano, Kathalene, xii

353

Reconciliation, l’Association Justice et Misericorde in Lebanon, 189 Reiniger, Lotte, 1–3, 8(n1) representation(s), 4, 8n1, 10n16, 32, 52, 91, 116, 126, 140, 142n61, 155, 207, 212, 242, 259n73, 260; alternative, 176; of human trafficking in US film and politics, 228n88; intersectional, 233; hypersexual, 115; race and, 48n78, 137n7; of power, 117 reproductive injustice, 260n68 resistance, 34, 43n33, 44, 45, 55, 62–63, 66, 72, 78n70, 159, 172, 189, 196n49, 218, 235, 245, 268; to activist goals, 164; to gender-based legislation, 27; hegemonic, 18; movements, 95; narratives, 20; patriarchal, 18, 99; shared sense of, 157 revisionism, conservative, 216 rhetoric(s), 17, 29, 54, 57, 75n26, 138nn22–23, 157, 185, 229n89, 246, 248, 251, 253; antagonistic, 221; anti-abortion, 242–43; anti-vaccination, 249; COVID-19 denialist, 249; empty, 263; feminist, 62; gun rights, 271; neoliberal, 17, 38n7; of liberation, 134; political, 67–68, 73, 231, 245, 249; third wave, 84 rhetorical, 72, 96, 146, 203, 210, 213, 266; constructions, 15; of identity/ identities, xi, 19, 25; of influence, xi;

354

Index

criticism/critique, 145, 221; justifications for misogyny, 30; patterns of empowerment, 21 Richards, Amy, 30, 89, 102, 108n28, 111n63, 118, 138n17, 140n46,141n47, 141n50, 141n52, 167n15, 177, 266 right, US religious, 248 right(s): gender-based, 28–30, 51, 71, 104, 172–73, 216, 220, 241, 265, 267; human, 44n42, 63, 70, 172, 175, 188–90, 192n15, 192n21, 215, 221, 235, 240, 253; LGBTQIA+, 17–18, 251; women’s, ix, 3, 18, 20, 24, 28–29, 51–52, 58–61, 63–64, 68, 70–71, 86, 143, 175, 220, 231– 38, 241–43, 253, 265, 267. See also activism, reproductive rights; Civil Rights (US) Riot Grrrl movement, 89, 115–16, 131 Roe v. Wade: activism and, 11n22, 37n4, 41n23; and the fight for privacy in the US, 68, 254n10; and the history of abortion regulation in the US, 47n67, 254n10; challenges to, 47n69; efficacy of, 72, 245; Ginsberg, Ruth Bader, on, 47n70, 51–52, 73n1, 245; overturn of, 7, 11n22, 15, 37n4, 51, 233, 252; protests after the overturn of, 11n22, 15, 37n4, 41n23; protests against, 70; US Supreme Court arguments and decisions of, 51, 68 Roiphe, Katie, 85 Russell, Rosalind, 205 Rwanda, 171

S Sailor Moon (franchise), 106n9, 138n11 Sandberg, Sheryl (Shery), 209, 212 Sanger, Margaret, 29 #SayHerName movement, 267 Schlafly, Phyllis, 36, 59–61, 231–32, 246. See also antifeminism Schumer, Chuck (US Senate minority leader), 222 Seaman, Beccie, xii second wave feminism, 3, 60, 70–71, 83–94, 97–98, 102, 149–53, 156, 159–62, 177–79, 247, 265, 267, 270; essentialist nature of, 71 7 Year Bitch, 115 Sexing the Political, 6, 49n90, 144–70 sexism, 9n14, 15, 76n38, 88, 141n56, 141n57, 141n58, 162, 187, 205, 232, 234, 251, 255n11; in the music industry, 220 Shakira, 210 shared meaning(s), 214 Siber, Paula, 247 silence, 182, 244; systems of, 263. See also anos de silencio [years of silence] (South America) Skalli, Loubna, xii, 273n8 “slacktivism,” 212 slavery, 55, 156, 251 Smith, Jaclyn, 95 Snow White (film, 1939), 1 social change, 216, 266 social justice, 8n11, 15, 18, 63, 177, 184, 214, 219, 250, 253, 264, 271; activisms, 214; efforts, 225; mimicry, 240; movements, 179; narrative constructs, 216 social media, 7, 19–20, 44n33, 45n48, 82n109, 110n43, 144, 147, 165, 166n9, 166n11, 167n14, 187, 197n69, 203, 206–8, 211–19,

Index

221–22, 223n12, 224n14, 224n15, 224n17, 225n37, 227nn59–62 Soja, Edward, 168n21 soft power, 61, 191n7, 207–8, 221–2 Solax, 2 Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), 235; first “wave” of South American feminism, 62 Spain, 4; Spice Girls, 115 Spivak, Gayatri, 18–19 Star Wars (franchise), 132, 209 standpoint analysis/theory, 139n36, 154, 158. See also Brenda Allen; Nancy Hartsock Stanwyck Barbara, 205 stereotypes/stereotyping, 10n14, 101, 102, 116; feminist, 183; repressive, 116; Third wave, 163 Steinem, Gloria, 141 Strangis, Judy, 95 strategic narratives. See narratives statutory rape law (former California), 68 structural and systemic inequities, 15, 20, 56, 72, 105 student(s), 22, 39n13, 171, 195n40; Gay-Straight Alliances (GSAs), 18; activists, 18, 63 strategic essentialism, 18–19, 173–74 strategic narrative(s), 67, 79n81, 167n17, 208, 214–16, 226n52, 242–45 structural: change, 174; inequality, 192n21; limitations of NGOs, 196n66; power, 190 struggle: and ideology. 68; class, 63;

355

of essentialism, 63; of identities, 63; over the ERA, 67. See also Equal Rights Amendment, United States (ERA); Hillary Carlip subjectivity, 76n44, 174, 193n24 suffrage movement(s), women’s, 9n13, 55–58, 63, 74n22, 75n26, 265 suffrage movement(s) in Latin America, women’s, 63 suffragette(s), 18, 92 supremacist: argument, 52, 234; ideology, 232; institutionalization, 67, 251; movements, 263, 265; rhetoric, 247–48 surveillance, 87. See also Michel Foucault Sweden, 4 Swift, Taylor, 220 symbolism, 134 Syria, 189. See also DarEmar T tactics: embodied activists’, 248; feminist engagement, 248; feminists’, 270 #TakeAKnee, 267 Taylor, Anita, xii Taylor, Breonna, 15 temperance, 56–57, 165 temporal: action, 265; change goals, 272; feminist and activist successes, 264; power, 233, 265; spaces, 266 third wave: activism, 36; argument, 30, 84;

356

Index

contained empowerment, 36, 117– 18, 120–22, 130–36, 143–65; early years of, 65; feminism, 3, 6, 19, 34, 71, 84–105, 115, 143–65; feminist activism, 6, 84–86; feminist movement, xi, 66; feminists, xi, 32, 35–36, 143–44, 147–48, 150; global, 65; ideals, 7; ideology, 35; lack of awareness of Muslim feminism, 65; organizations, 172–73, 176–87, 190; personal experience and, 36 reclamation of traditional femininity as a source of power, 6, 19, 36, 85, 87–88, 90, 93, 97, 101, 116–36, 151, 164, 203, 219, 247, 265. See also feminism(s) Third Wave Foundation, 7 Third Wave Fund NGO, 7 Thunberg, Greta, 221 #TimesUp movements, 204, 267 Time’s Up Legal Defense Fund, 204 TLC, 115 Torrens, Val, xii toxic misogyny, 69 transgender rights, 18 transnational feminist solidarity, 274n21 transnationalism/transnationalist: feminism, 49n90, 194n31 Trump, Donald, 51, 71, 95, 215, 220, 221, 247; and white nationalism, 248 Trumpism, ix, 20, 234, 249 truth, 110n42, 127, 140n40, 168n32, 216; assumptions of, 216; post-, 228n84; post-truth era, 234; post-truth media, 333; to power, 233

Truth, Sojourner, 92 truths, 127, 217, 245; questionable, 201; systemic, 127 Tunisia, 166n10. See also, “Arab Spring” Turkey, 171–72 Turner, Victor, 24, 45n45, 90, 93, 108n29, 109n39 Tweet(s), 215 Twitter, 172, 206 U Uganda,176–77 Ukraine, 15 UN Beijing Platform (1995), 173 UNICEF, 210 Union Nationale de la Femme Tunisienne (UNFT), 186 United Arab Emirates (UAE), 172 United Daughters of the Confederacy, 251 United Farm Workers Association, 3 United Nations, 23, 24, 62, 173–75, 192n21, 193n27, 197–98n85; definition of gender mainstreaming, 192n17; development discourse, 23; women’s rights in, 196n63 United Nations Commission on the Status of Women, 175; United Nations, Office of the Special Advisor on Gender Issues and Advancement of Women, 192n17; United Nations Report of the World Conference of the International Women’s Year, Mexico City, 19 June–2 July 1975, 193n28, 194n30 United Nations International Women’s Year (UN, 1975), 174 United Nations World Conference of the International Women’s Year 19

Index

June–2 July 1975, Mexico City, Mexico, 194n29 US Civil Rights Movement, 4, 75n32, 225n40 UN WSIS, 173 V Vaidhyanathan, Siva, 170n62 Vergara, Sofia, 205 Victorian Era, 56, 110n49 violence, 180, 188–89, 234; domestic, 64; erasure as, 206; gender-based, 69, 89, 94, 174, 189, 266–70; girl power-based, 117; gun, 20; military, 63; narratives of, 251–52; reproductive, 89, 187, 252, 259n65; sexual, 89, 171, 225n30 voting rights, 15, 20, 265; -Act of 1965, 239; Indigenous, 35; registration efforts, 179; women’s, 55, 237 W Wagner, Lindsey, 95 Walberg, Mark, 204–5 Walker, Alice, 89, 143, 177, 179 Walker, Rebecca, 89, 177, 179 Walt Disney Studios, 1, 205 Wander, Philip, xii. See also “discursive amnesia” “war on terror,” 89, 189 Warren, John T., ii Washington (DC), 1963 March on, 208 wave model of feminisms (U.S.), 62, 84–91 wave(s): approach to feminism, 60, 71; feminist, 72, 109n40, 111n66, 111n68;

357

first, 270; fourth, 76n44, 82n109, 110n45, 228n78, 273n12, 274n23, 274n24, 274n25; future, 72; generational conflict and feminist, 111n68; liminality of feminist, 83–105; metaphor of, 84, 105n3, 107n12; second, 77n54, 83–88, 94, 111n64, 254n5, 270; theories of feminism, 60; third, 76n44, 79n76, 82n109, 83–91, 93–105, 105n3, 106n8, 106n9, 106n10, 107n11, 107n14, 108n27, 108n31, 109n32, 109n33, 109n34, 110n42, 110n43, 110n45, 110n54, 111n64, 111n68, 113, 115, 117–18, 120–22, 131–36, 138n11, 138n16, 138n20, 139n33, 139n35, 141n48, 141n49, 141n52, 141n56, 142n61, 144–65, 166n5, 166n6, 168n32, 168n35, 168n38, 169n39, 169n50, 169n51, 169n55, 169n57, 170n58, 172–73, 176–87, 196n50, 196nn52–53, 196n56, 196n58, 196n61, 201–4, 207–13, 214, 219, 232–33, 237, 241, 247, 250, 264–68, 270–71, 272n7 Weinstein, Harvey, 71–72, 245 Westworld, 167n18 white nationalism, 247–48, 251 white privilege, 137n1, 247, 251–53 white supremacy, 232, 247–48, 251 Willard, Frances, 56. See also Women’s Christian Temperance Union (WCTU) Williams, Michelle, 204, 224n25 Winter, Alex, 207 Wolf, Naomi, 85, 107n15 Womanhood:

358

“The Cult of True,” 56 women: 19th century Black, 157; Black woman/women, 5; category of, 58, 60–61, 90, 97, 143, 173, 176, 216; in Egypt, 64; in Iran, 64, 204; in national legislative and executive offices, 4; killed by police, 15; Muslim, ix, 65–66, 89, 257; pushed to the sidelines, 83; South Asian woman/women, 5; suffrage, 18, 55–60, 63, 92, 265; in/visibility of, 3–5, 15, 60, 61, 62, 65, 67–70, 91–92, 105, 189, 206–8, 219–21, 237, 268–72; political representation, 61; writers, 56, 95–96, 118, 132, 148–63; working class, 62, 161, 207–8. See also activism, reproductive rights Women’s Christian Temperance Union (WCTU), 56 Women’s March on Washington January 2017, 20

Index

Women’s Organization for National Prohibition Reform (WONPR), 57 Women’s Rights Convention, 58 Wonder Woman, 95, 132, 212 Woodhull, Victoria Claflin, 4 Woodward, Joanne, 208 working class women, 62, 161, 207–8 working class white American men, 92, 251 The World Bank: development discourse, 23 World Plan of Action for the 1976– 1985 United Nations Decade for Women, 174 #WoYeShi anti-sexual harassment movement (China), 207 X Xena (Xena: Warrior Princess), 118 Xscape, 115 Y #YesAllWomen movement, 267 Yeung, Michelle, xii #YoTambien (Spain), 207 YouTube: celebrity packaging, 206; radicalization of angry white men, 255n16

About the Author

Victoria A. Newsom, PhD is professor of communication studies and affiliate faculty in Social Justice and Diversity at Olympic College in Bremerton, Washington. Her research centers on the negotiation of gender, power, and identity in communication and performative contexts. Her current projects include work in media activism, peace studies, Islamophobia studies, postcolonial feminism(s), performative pedagogies, fan and media studies, and cultural studies–grounded analyses of transnational policy making. She has published articles in, among others, Journal of International Women’s Studies; Feminist Media Studies; FEMSPEC; Studies in Symbolic Interaction; Global Media Journal; International Journal of Communication, Language & Intercultural Communication; Communication Studies; Communication Yearbook; iMex: México Interdisciplinario / Interdisciplinary Mexico; French Journal for Media Research; Feminist Films for the Classroom; and Women & Language. She is coeditor of the Lexington volume Embodied Activisms: Performative Expressions of Political and Social Action. Dr. Newsom’s current research and activist interests focus on the preservation of human rights and human dignity, and the intersection of post-truth media and consumerism. She is also particularly dedicated to curriculum and pedagogy development and assessment in the areas of digital and critical literacies.

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