“We bleed for female empowerment”: mediated ethics, commodity feminism, and the contradictions of feminist politics

ABSTRACT

Discourses of female empowerment are increasingly prominent within ethical capitalism, which seeks to remedy global crises with private-sector solutions and their commodities. This article examines the intersecting manifestations of female empowerment, commodity activism, and ethical capitalism with case studies on Born Free Africa, a fashion collection combatting mother-to-child HIV transmission, and THINX, which sells “period-proof” panties. Each company articulates empowerment through a binary between the Western feminist savior and “in-need” woman of the global south. This article argues that this iteration of empowerment not only reinforces logics of neo-colonial capitalism, but also masks disciplinary regimes for individual feminine subjects.

KEYWORDS:

• commodity activism
• female empowerment
• ethical capitalism
• White-Savior Industrial Complex
• postcolonial feminisms

Notes

1. The term doubly oppressed has been used by a range of scholars to signal the intersecting forms of oppression and their particular material and ideological effects. Within Marxist feminism, these sets of oppressions primarily focus on a class and gender analysis, such as in Sheila Rowbotham’s work, such as Women’s Consciousness, Man’s World (London: Pelican Books, 1973). However, within black and global south feminisms (many of which also incorporate Marxism), related terms integrate the analysis of race, which is crucial to my own use of the term. This double oppression, then, is the added oppressions historically faced by black and brown women. The term should further consider the ways in which it has historically excluded transgender and nonbinary people as well. Also see: Angela Davis, Women, Race, and Class (New York: Random House, 1981); Claudia Jones, “An End to the Neglect of the Problems of the Negro Woman!,” reprinted in Words of Fire: An Anthology of African American Feminist Thought (New York: The New Press, 1995), 108–125. Within the same anthology, also see Deborah K. King, “Multiple Jeopardy, Multiple Consciousness: The Context of Black Feminist Ideology,” 294–318. Also see: Denise Lynn, “Socialist Feminism and Triple Oppression: Claudia Jones and African American Women in American Communism,” Journal for the Study of Radicalism 8, no. 2 (2014): 1–20.

2. See more on neoliberal feminism: Nancy Fraser, “How Feminism became Capitalism’s Handmaiden—and How to Reclaim It,” The Guardian, Monday, October 14, 2013, https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/oct/14/feminism-capitalist-handmaiden-neoliberal (accessed January 12, 2017). Also see: Catherine Rottenberg, “The Rise of Neoliberal Feminism,” Cultural Studies 28, no. 3 (2014): 418–437; Nicole Aschoff, “Sheryl Sandberg and the Business of Feminism,” in The New Prophets of Capital (New York: Verso, 2015), 17–41; and Rosalind Gill, “Post-Postfeminism?: New Feminist Visibilities in Postfeminist Times,” Feminist Media Studies 16, no. 4 (2016): 610–630.

3. Especially influential is the work of Kalpana Wilson, Raka Shome, Radha S. Hedge, Rosalind Gill and Ofra Koffman, Jo Littler, Lilie Chouliaraki, Sarah Banet-Weiser, and Lisa Ann Richey. Please see citations throughout article.

4. The primarily material of THINX and Born Free Africa analyzed within this article regularly conflates the terminology of “woman” and “female,” wherein there is no difference between the social constructedness of gender and biological sex. This is especially true when discussing the body, which is often the site of empowerment regardless of biological sex. As I’ll discuss, however, both companies also situate some forms of empowerment strictly to the female body and do not consider gender, such as motherhood, HIV-transmission, and menstruation. In this article, I primarily use the word “woman” or “feminine” in reference to the social and cultural constructions of gender, although often this term is insufficient, not accounting for nongender conforming people. I do employ the term “female” when referencing the ways in which the term is invoked by others, particularly the phrase of “female empowerment,” which stands in for empowerment of both females and women.

5. Teju Cole, “The White-Savior Industrial Complex,” The Atlantic, March 21, 2012, https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2012/03/the-white-savior-industrial-complex/254843/ (accessed June 7, 2019).

6. Nigel Thrift, Knowing Capitalism (London: Sage Publications, 2005), 3.

7. Ronald Reagan, “Executive Order 12329—President’s Task Force on Private Sector Initiatives,” October 14, 1981, https://www.reaganlibrary.gov/research/speeches/101481d (accessed December 12, 2015). Also see: Ronald Reagan, “Remarks at the Annual Meeting for the National Alliance of Business,” October 5, 1981, https://www.reaganlibrary.gov/research/speeches/100581a (accessed December 12, 2015).

8. John Mackey and Raj Sisodia, Conscious Capitalism: Liberating the Heroic Spirit of Business (Boston, MA: Harvard Business Review Press, 2013). As an aside, the August 2017 sale of Whole Foods Market to the Amazon-empire of Jeff Bezos certainly calls into question the supposedly holistic ideology of Conscious Capitalism™ as an evolutionary transcendence of the prevailing capitalist system to date.

9. Aschoff, “Sheryl Sandberg,” 12.

10. Gavin Fridell and Martijn Konings, eds., Age of Icons: Exploring Philanthrocapitalism in the Contemporary World (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2013).

11. See Kalpana Wilson’s scholarship, especially: “Reclaiming ‘Agency’, Reasserting Resistance,” IDS Bulletin 39, no. 6 (2008): 83–91; “‘Race’, Gender and Neoliberalism: Changing Visual Representations in Development,” Third World Quarterly 32, no. 2 (2011): 315–31; and “Towards a Radical Re-Appropriation: Gender, Development and Neoliberal Feminism,” Development and Change 46, no. 4 (2015): 803–832. Also see: Lilie Chouliaraki’s work, such as The Ironic Spectator: Solidarity in the Age of Post-Humanitarianism (Cambridge, UK: Polity, 2013); Ofra Koffman, Shani Orgad, and Rosalind Gill, “Girl Power and ‘Selfie Humanitarianism,’” Continuum: Journal of Media & Cultural Studies 29, no. 2 (2015): 157–168; and Ofra Koffman and Rosalind Gill, “‘The Revolution Will Be Led By a 12-Year-Old Girl’: Girl Power and Global Biopolitics,” Feminist Review 105, no. 1 (2013): 83–102.

12. Wilson, “Toward a Radical Re-Appropriation,” 808. Also see: Barbara Cruikshank, The Will to Empower (New York City: Cornell University Press, 1999), 68–69.

13. Wilson, “Toward a Radical Re-Appropriation,” 809. Also see: Michelle Murphy, “The Girl: Mergers of Feminism and Finance in Neoliberal Times,” The Scholar and Feminist Online 11.1–11.2 (2012–2013); and Koffman and Gill, “The Revolution.”

14. Adva Saldinger, “Girl Effect’s first CEO brings brand strategy to development,” Devex, October 11, 2016, https://www.devex.com/news/girl-effect-s-first-ceo-brings-brand-strategy-to-development-88894 (accessed May 12, 2019).

15. Girleffect, “The Girl Effect,” May 24, 2008, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WIvmE4_KMNw (accessed February 28, 2019).

16. Anandi Ramamurthy and Kalpana Wilson, “‘Come and Join the Freedom-Lovers’: Racism, Appropriation and Resistance in Advertising,” in Colonial Advertising & Commodity Racism, eds. Wulf D. Hund, Michael Pickering, and Anandi Ramamurthy (Zurich: Lit Verlang, 2013), 87.

17. Koffman and Gill, “The Revolution,” 86.

18. Koffman, Orgad, and Gill, “Girl Power and ‘Selfie Humanitarianism,’” 157. Also see: Lilie Chouliaraki, The Ironic Spectator.

19. This also relates to Angela McRobbie’s notion of the “better economic subject” in The Aftermath of Feminism: Gender, Culture and Social Change (London: Sage, 2009); and Sarah Banet-Weiser, “‘I’m Beautiful the Way I Am’: Empowerment, Beauty, and Aesthetic Labour,” in Aesthetic Labour: Rethinking Beauty Politics in Neoliberalism, eds. Ana Sofia Elias, Rosalind Gill, and Christina Scharff (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017), 265–282.

20. Calls of empowerment are also pervasively aimed at girls in the global north through consumerism. See: Banet-Weiser, 2017; and Sarah Banet-Weiser, “‘Confidence You Can Carry!’: Girls in Crisis and the Market for Girls’ Empowerment Organizations,” Continuum: Journal of Media and Cultural Studies 29, no. 2 (2015): 182–193; and Sarah Banet-Weiser, Empowerment: Popular Feminism and Popular Misogyny (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2018).

21. Catherine Rottenberg, The Rise of Neoliberal Feminism (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2018), 5.

22. Catherine Rottenberg, “Feminists must Reject Neoliberalism if We Want to Sustain the MeToo Movement,” Independent, May 28, 2018, https://www.independent.co.uk/voices/neoliberalism-colonised-feminism-metoo-sheryl-sandberg-hollywood-a8367326.html (accessed March 29, 2019).

23. In particular, see Erika Hart’s speech, “Who is this For?” from the Women’s March in Philadelphia, January 21, 2017, in Aly Spengler, “The Women’s March,” January 25, 2017, https://vimeo.com/201046598 (accessed February 7, 2017).

24. Ben Ellery, “62p AN HOUR: What Women Sleeping 16 to a Room Get Paid to make Ed and Harriet’s £45 ‘This is what a Feminist Looks Like’ T-shirts,” Daily Mail, November 1, 2014, http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2817191/62p-HOUR-s-women-sleeping-16-room-paid-make-Ed-Harriet-s-45-Feminist-Looks-Like-T-shirts.html (accessed November 15, 2015).

25. Ibid.

26. Robert Goldman, Robert, Heath, Deborah, and Sharon Smith, “Commodity Feminism,” Critical Studies in Mass Communication 8 (1991): 336.

27. Sarah Banet-Weiser, Authentic ™: The Politics of Ambivalence in a Brand Culture (New York City: New York University Press, 2012), 16.

28. Cole, “The White-Savior Industrial Complex.”

29. The ways in which a feminist “we” is articulated commonly does not consider transgender and gender nonconforming identities. In the language of female empowerment, it assumes that gender and sex are the same.

30. Born Free Africa, “Born Free Fashion Campaign,” http://bornfreeafrica.org/fashion-campaign/ (accessed March 17, 2017).

31. Born Free Africa, “Introducing Born Free Africa,” November 20, 2013, https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=226&v=hPezwZBzwAA (accessed March 17, 2017).

32. Ibid.

33. Ibid.

34. Raka Shome, Diana and Beyond: White Femininity, National Identity, and Contemporary Media Culture (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2014), 135.

35. Ibid., 130.

36. Ibid., 121–131.

37. For more on Angelina Jolie, see Spring-Serenity Duvall, “Celebrity Travels: Media Spectacles and the Construction of a Transnational Politics of Care,” in Circuits of Visibility: Gender and Transnational Media Cultures, ed. Radha S. Hedge (New York: New York University Press, 2011), 140–156; and Alison Trope, “Mother Angelina: Hollywood Philanthropy Personified,” in Commodity Activism: Cultural Resistance in Neoliberal Times, eds. Roopali Mukherjee and Sarah Banet-Weiser (New York: New York University Press, 2012), 154–173.

38. “Photo Diary: Victoria Beckham Travels to South Africa in the Fight Against Mother-to-Child HIV Transmission,” Vogue, April 23, 2014, http://www.vogue.com/866343/victoria-beckham-born-free-fight-against-hiv/#1 (accessed May 12, 2016).

39. Annabel Elliott Fenwick, “Inside Victoria Beckham’s Visit to Africa to Meet Children with HIV as She Lends Support to Born Free Foundation,” Daily Mail, April 23, 2014, https://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-2611479/Inside-Victoria-Beckhams-visit-Africa-meet-children-HIV-lends-support-Born-Free-Foundation.html (accessed May 12, 2016).

40. Ibid.

41. For more on celebrity politics, commodity activism, and humanitarianism, see: Trope, “Mother Angelina”; and Ariella Horwitz, Celebrity Politics and the Cultivation of Affect in the Public Sphere (PhD diss., George Mason University, 2016).

42. Born Free Africa (@bornfreeafrica), Instagram photo, November 14, 2106, https://www.instagram.com/p/BMzUN7TBow9/ (accessed June 9, 2019).

43. Horwitz, Celebrity Politics, 191.

44. Jo Littler, “‘I Feel Your Pain’: Cosmopolitan Charity and the Public Fashioning of the Celebrity Soul,” Social Semiotics 18, no. 2 (2008): 239.

45. Born Free Africa, “The Artist,” http://bornfreeafrica.org/fashion-campaign/ (accessed June 9, 2019).

46. Born Free Africa, “About Us,” http://bornfreeafrica.org/about-us/ (accessed May 12, 2017).

47. Born Free Africa, “About Us, The Board Members,” http://bornfreeafrica.org/about-us/ (accessed June 9, 2019).

48. Born Free Africa, “The Designers,” http://bornfreeafrica.org/fashion-campaign/ (accessed June 9, 2019).

49. See the work of Lisa Ann Richey for more on “brand aid” and links with commodified humanitarian development work regarding AIDS: Celebrity Humanitarianism and North-South Relations: Politics, power, and place (London: Routledge, 2016); Lisa Ann Richey and Stefano Ponte, Brand Aid: Shopping Well to Save the World (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2008).

50. Ginia Bellafante, “The Bohemian Capitalist,” The New York Times, February 26, 2016, https://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/28/nyregion/thinx-underwear-underground.html (accessed March 1, 2016).

51. “Help Us Help Them” was the correlating text to a set of two side-by-side images previously featured on the THINX website: that of an African woman seemingly working with AfriPads and another image of young African children looking over a brightly covered package—seemingly a package of reusable menstrual pads. This image, among others, are a part of my personal digital archives, which include screenshots primarily of advertising images from websites and social media. These images are organized and stored according to company, keywords, and date. The archive begins in 2013 and continues today. Originally archived May 27, 2015, https://www.shethinx.com/pages/giveback

52. As of March 2017, Agrawal has stepped down as the CEO of THINX. There is speculation that this resignation comes following numerous employee complaints against Agrawal. See: Anna Merlan, “Sources: Period Underwear Visionary and Thinx Co-Founder Miki Agrawal Is Out as CEO,” Jezebel, March 10, 2017, https://jezebel.com/sources-period-underwear-visionary-and-thinx-co-founde-1793139058 (accessed June 15, 2018).

53. Bellafante, “The Bohemian Capitalist.”

54. For more information, visit her website: http://www.mikiagrawal.com/about-miki/.

55. Dan Schawbel, “Alexander McCorbin: How this Millennial Became the CEO of Conscious Capitalism,” Forbes, June 29, 2017, https://www.forbes.com/sites/danschawbel/2017/06/29/alexander-mccobin-how-this-millennial-became-the-ceo-of-conscious-capitalism/#47b153cc48f1 (accessed June 9, 2019).

56. AfriPads states regarding its for-profit status: “Rather than establishing a charity, the founders decided to take a new approach to addressing development problems, and in late 2009 AFRIpads Ltd. was incorporated as a social business. By blending the power of business with the social objectives of charity, AFRIpads is utilizing the power of the market to provide the best and most sustainable menstrual product solution,” http://afripads.com/blog/theissue/history/ (accessed February 12, 2017).

57. Ibid.

58. The image discussed here was created in my personal archives on November 21, 2016, but it is from late 2014-early 2015, www.shethinx.com. Image is still available online: Isha Jalan, “Everything you’ve Wanted to Know about Period-Proof Underwear Straight from the Makers,” ScoopWhoop, June 24, 2015, https://www.scoopwhoop.com/inothernews/thinx-period-panties-faq/ (accessed June 9, 2019).

59. THINX, “Home,” http://www.sheTHINX.com (accessed June 10, 2015). Image a part of personal archives, created June 10, 2015.

60. Personal THINX Archives, May 30, 2015.

61. Ibid.

62. Personal THINX Archives, May 27, 2015.

63. Cole, “The White-Savior Industrial Complex.” Also see: Jenna N. Hanchey, “All of Us Phantasmic Saviors,” Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 15, no. 2 (2018): 144–160.

64. E. Ann Kaplan. Looking for the Other: Feminism, Film, and the Imperial Gaze (New York: Routledge, 1997), 78. Also see: Anne McClintock, Imperial Leather: Race, Gender, and Sexuality in the Colonial Conquest (New York: Routledge, 1995).

65. Kaplan, Looking for the Other, 78–79.

66. Quote from THINX, reprinted in, “These Women Have Invented Period-Proof Underwear, And The Results Are Pretty Amazing,” Marie Claire, June 4, 2015, http://www.marieclaire.co.uk/uncategorised/thix-invented-period-proof-underwear-and-the-results-are-pretty-amazing-74766 (accessed June 15, 2015).

67. THINX Documentary, “The Week,” December 2015 (accessed January 5, 2016). This documentary originally launched on the THINX website as linked from YouTube, and is no longer available online. Several online sources still discuss the documentary shortly after its release, such as Sara Coughlin, “This May Be the Realest Documentary about Periods Yet,” Refinery29, December 16, 2015, https://www.refinery29.com/en-us/2015/12/99688/thinx-period-documentary (accessed June 9, 2019).

68. Ibid.

69. Chouliaraki, The Ironic Spectator, 3.

70. Michael Cabanatuan, “BART Rejects Ad for ‘Pussy-Grabbing-Proof’ Underwear.” SF Gate, November 2, 2016, http://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/BART-rejects-ads-for-pussy-grabbing-proof-10541303.php (accessed February 16, 2017).

71. Christina Cauterucci, “Dear Thinx: Please Don’t Advertise Your Period Underwear as ‘Pussy-Grabbing-Proof,’” Slate, November 3, 2016, http://www.slate.com/blogs/xx_factor/2016/11/03/please_don_t_advertise_thinx_period_underwear_as_pussy_grabbing_proof.html (accessed February 16, 2017).

72. Amanda Hess, “The Trump Resistance Will Be Commercialized,” The New York Times, March 17, 2017, https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/17/arts/the-trump-resistance-will-be-commercialized.html?smprod=nytcore-iphone&smid=nytcore-iphone-share&_r=0 (accessed March 17, 2017).

73. Ibid. Also see: Nora Malone, “Miki Agrawal’s Panty Raid,” The Cut, New York Mag, February 2, 2016, http://nymag.com/thecut/2016/01/Thinx-miki-agrawal-c-v-r.html (accessed March 10, 2017).

74. Nora Caplan-Bricker, “Not-Very-Feminist Business Lady Successfully Co-Opts Feminism as a Marketing Gimmick. Hooray?” Slate, February 2, 2016, http://www.slate.com/blogs/xx_factor/2016/02/02/Thinx_founder_doesn_t_understand_feminism.html (accessed March 10, 2017). Also see Agrawal’s response, “An Open Letter to Respectfully Quit Telling Me How to ‘Do Feminism’ (And to Just Support One Another, Please!),” Medium, February 5, 2016, https://medium.com/@mikiagrawal/an-open-letter-to-respectfully-quit-telling-me-how-to-do-feminism-and-to-just-support-one-b8c138f32546 (accessed March 10, 2017).

75. THINX Blog, “For People with Periods,” November 13, 2014, https://www.shethinx.com/blogs/thinx-piece/25561473-for-people-with-periods (accessed December 14, 2015).

76. Sangeet Kumar and Radhika Parameswaran, “Charting an Itinerary for Postcolonial Communication and Media Studies,” Journal of Communication 68, no. 2 (2018): 348.

77. These arguments can be found throughout Mohanty’s work, but are explicit in “Under Western Eyes: Feminist Scholarship and Colonial Discourses,” Feminist Review no. 30 (1988): 61–88.

78. Mohanty, “‘Under Western Eyes’ Revisited: Feminist Solidarity through Anticapitalist Struggles,” in Feminism Without Borders: Decolonizing Theory, Practicing Solidarity (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003), 223.

79. Patricia Hill Collins, Black Feminist Thought (New York City; Routledge Classics, 2009), 296.

80. Ibid., 308. Also see 309.

81. Judith Orr, Marxism and Women’s Liberation (London: Bookmarks Publications, 2015), 196.

82. Ibid., 197.

83. See Fraser, “How Feminism became Capitalism’s Handmaiden”; Rottenberg, The Rise of Neoliberal Feminism; Rottenberg, “The Rise of Neoliberal Feminism”; Banet-Weiser, Empowerment; Aschoff, “Sheryl Sandberg”; and Wendy Brown, Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism’s Stealth Revolution (Brooklyn, NY: Zone Books, 2015).