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I call it marketplace feminism. It’s decontextualized. It’s depoliticized. And it’s probably feminism’s most popular iteration ever.
Andi Zeisler • We Were Feminists Once: From Riot Grrrl to CoverGirl®, the Buying and Selling of a Political Movement
but it seems worth questioning whether this is feminism, or just a new twist on the age-old concept of selling products and ideas with gender essentialism.
Andi Zeisler • We Were Feminists Once: From Riot Grrrl to CoverGirl®, the Buying and Selling of a Political Movement
The feminist uncanny valley is the result of a larger neoliberal framework that over the past five decades has come to unite politics, economics, and culture in a web of individualism, privatization, and decreasing focus on both community and compassion.
Andi Zeisler • We Were Feminists Once: From Riot Grrrl to CoverGirl®, the Buying and Selling of a Political Movement
We Were Feminists Once: From Riot Grrrl to CoverGirl®, the Buying and Selling of a Political Movement
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Instead of teaching girls actual self-advocacy and confidence, a shift toward increasingly gendered capitalism turned Girl Power into little more than a cute, chauvinist retail fad.
Andi Zeisler • We Were Feminists Once: From Riot Grrrl to CoverGirl®, the Buying and Selling of a Political Movement
It shouldn’t be a radical notion that the experiences of women have the potential to be as universal and as broadly felt as those of men.
Andi Zeisler • We Were Feminists Once: From Riot Grrrl to CoverGirl®, the Buying and Selling of a Political Movement
Feminism as a product, as a discrete measure of worthiness or unworthiness, as a selling point for products that have no animate capabilities, is a deeply imperfect way to assess whether feminism is “working” or not because it’s less about feminism than about capitalism.