Claiming feminism: commentary, autobiography and advice literature for women in the recession

Abstract

Feminist academics have grown accustomed to the disparagement and misrepresentation of our intellectual endeavours in a climate of antifeminist postfeminism. Yet, in recent years, the position of public feminism has shifted as it is increasingly invoked by celebrities for whom it often functions as a credential of entrepreneurial self-branding. This article identifies and conducts a preliminary analysis of a set of female-authored print texts published in the wake of the ‘Great Recession’ and marked by a distinctly emergent monetisation/corporatisation of feminism. It suggests that these books respond to and further a sense of fraught female aspirationalism in an era of economic contraction and growing signs of neo-patriarchalism.

Keywords::

• feminism
• recession
• aspirationalism
• self-branding

Notes

^1. For an account of one such initiative, see ‘Tackling Lad Culture at University – Live Updates from the NUS Summit’.

^2. These books stand in interesting relation to a cluster of male-centred, finance-related recessionary fiction written about by Hamilton Carroll. Carroll analyses the thematics of male disempowerment in a set of novels that include The Financial Lives of thePoets (2009), The Ask (2010) and Union Atlantic (2009). See his ‘Second acts: recessionary print fictions of crisis masculinity’.

^3. The New York Times has been particularly recently active in promulgating a discourse of anxiety about the marketability of humanities graduates. On 4 November 2013, it posed the question in an online article ‘Is it an unaffordable luxury to major in the humanities at college?’ This piece appeared on foot of an earlier article by Tamar Lewin, ‘As interest fades in the humanities, colleges worry’ on the decline of humanities provision in US public universities and a drop in enrolment in humanities majors in Ivy League institutions. Pieces such as ‘What's the Most Useless College Major?’ (CNN.com) take a cruder but nevertheless rhetorically consistent approach.

^4. Feminism has become a marked feature of recent celebrity discourse with a cluster of high-profile female pop stars including Beyonce, Shakira and Miley Cyrus identifying as feminists – sometimes in ambivalent, paradoxical or perverse ways. Cyrus has stated ‘I feel like I'm one of the biggest feminists in the world because I tell women not to be scared of anything’. See Silverman, ‘Miley Cyrus: I'm one of the world's biggest feminists.’

^5. As an expression of new naturalisations of privilege in the cultural landscape, the proliferation of advice from multimillionaire women with powerful brand identities is far from unique. A comparable manifestation for instance is the current prominence in both fictional and non-fictional realms of inheriting daughters who sustain the family brand. In addition to such high-profile examples as Chelsea Clinton, Ivanka Trump, and the four stars of acclaimed HBO series Girls, films such as Arbitrage (2012) in which Richard Gere's Robert Miller brings in his daughter Brooke as co-manager of his hedge fund and TV series such as CBS sitcom The Crazy Ones (2013–) in which Sarah Michelle Gellar's Sydney Roberts likewise takes up a place in a business founded by her father (Robin Williams) have brought this trope into the cultural foreground.

^6. Responses to Naomi Wolf's widely panned 2012 Vagina: A New Biography were indicative of the view that the contributions of such feminists are intellectually bankrupt, methodologically problematic and even ridiculous.

^7. See the following web link for a reproduction of the front cover of Frankel's book: http://cache1.bdcdn.net/assets/images/book/large/9781/4391/9781439186916.jpg.

^8. For a more expansive discussion of Frankel's celebrity positioning, see ‘After Ever After: Bethenny Frankel, Self-Branding and the New Intimacy of Work’.

^9. In addition to Liza Mundy's 2012 The Richer Sex: How The New Majority of Female Breadwinners is Transforming Our Culture, we may identify Kay Hymowitz's 2011 Manning Up: The Rise of Women That Has Turned Men into Boys and Kathleen Parker's 2008 Save the Males: Why Men Matter Why Women Should Care.

^10. Among those critiques is a particularly astute one by the social historian Stephanie Coontz who contends that ‘end of men’ discourse reflects but exaggerates a transformation in the distribution of power over the past half century. She maintains that ‘What we are seeing is a convergence in economic fortunes, not female ascendence’ (2012, n.p.) See ‘The myth of male decline.’

^11. In the ever-more convergent postfeminist media landscape, it was not surprising that Harvey's book was (rather awkwardly) adapted into ‘chick flick’ form in the 2012 release Think Like a Man.

^12. See the following link for Leibovitz's photograph of Sandberg: http://www.vanityfair.com/business/2013/04/michael-lewis-sheryl-sandberg-facebook.

^13. See the following link: http://theinspirationroom.com/daily/2008/tina-fey-on-american-express/. Both Facebook's Sheryl Sandberg and comedian Tina Fey are imaged as achieving work–life balance; in the former instance, this balance is coded as sensuous and serene, in the latter as challenging but fun.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Diane Negra

Diane Negra is Professor of Film Studies and Screen Culture and Head of Film Studies at University College Dublin. She is the author, editor or co-editor of nine books, the most recent of which is Extreme Weather and Global Media (with Julia Leyda, forthcoming, Routledge, 2015).