“A very basic view of feminism”: feminist girls and meanings of (celebrity) feminism

ABSTRACT

Feminist scholarship has richly critiqued the burgeoning of popular feminism across multiple media platforms in recent years. Representing a particular visibility of popular feminism, celebrity feminism has re-ignited questions about what constitutes a “legitimate” feminist. But what might the mediated visibility of celebrity feminism mean and make possible for media audiences? Observing the dearth of audience studies, several scholars highlight the need to investigate audience meanings of mediated feminisms. Given that young celebrities such as Amandla Stenberg often (re)present the popular “fresh face” of feminism and that media provide a key resource for girls to learn about feminism, such investigation is particularly salient for teenage girls. This paper draws on research with young feminists to explore ways they make sense of celebrity feminism in relation to their own understandings of feminism and feminist subjectivity. Analyses show how celebrity feminism functions as a discursive tool for girls’ negotiation of the borders that constitute self and others as feminist subjects (or not). Although girls constructed celebrity feminists as potentially useful in drawing people into feminism, they also critiqued celebrity feminism as “trendy”, apolitical and “basic”, offering little more than a rhetoric of equal rights, devoid of intersectional values and lacking political activism.

KEYWORDS:

• Teenage girls
• feminism
• celebrity feminism
• popular feminism
• audience studies

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Sue Jackson

Sue Jackson is an Associate Professor in the School of Psychology at Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand. Her key research interests are in the area of gender, sexuality and media in relation to the lives of pre-teen and teenage girls. Her recent projects include investigating feminism in schools and ways young people are responding to #MeToo and related sexual harassment media, the latter project receiving a prestigious Royal Society of New Zealand Marsden Fund funding award in 2019. E-mail: [email protected]