Critical feminist hope: the encounter of neoliberalism and popular feminism in WWE 24: Women’s Evolution

Abstract

Scholarship has pointed to contemporary feminism’s popularity and cultural “luminosity.” While this research has highlighted the limitations of feminist politics in a context of neoliberal individualism, this paper seeks to ask what possibilities for critiques and transformation of gender inequalities might be enabled by feminism’s visibility in neoliberalism. Using a framework of critical feminist hope, we highlight that capitalism’s embrace of feminism inarguably limits its political scope, but it may also open up opportunities for new forms of representation. To illustrate this, the paper analyses WWE 24: Women’s Evolution, a “brandcasting” documentary made to mark the rebrand of the sport entertainment promotion’s women’s division in 2016. While never naming it directly, the documentary draws heavily upon the signifiers of popular feminism. Although this mobilisation is often highly limited, a critically hopeful feminist reading allows us to move beyond dismissing this text as an example of feminism’s “co-optation” by neoliberalism. We highlight the documentary’s scathing critique of past failings in the representation and treatment of women performers, and, more importantly, the way feminism is used to make the case for corporate re-structure and change.

Keywords:

• Neoliberalism
• popular feminism
• postfeminism
• WWE
• women in sport

Acknowledgements

Thank you to Matt Hills and Rosalind Gill for providing feedback on a draft of this paper, and Rob Arcangeli for his comments from the perspective of a wrestling fan.

Notes

1. Such articles have tended to focus on texts from more straightforwardly feminine media fields, such as women’s magazines (Gill 2016), body confidence advertising campaigns aimed at women (Gill and Orgad 2015), or the advice book for women in the (corporate) workplace Lean In (Rottenberg 2014; Williams 2014).

2. This is not to say that girls and women do not watch wrestling. For an examination of the historical importance of women wrestling fans see Chad Dell The Revenge of Hatpin Mary: Women, Professional Wrestling and Fan Culture(2006). For an analysis of how contemporary female fans can subvert texts, see in Catherine Salmon and Susan Clerc, “Ladies Love Wrestling, Too: Female Wrestling Fans Online” in Nicholas Sammond (ed.), Steel Chair to the Head: The Pleasure and Pain of Professional Wrestling, (2005).

3. Whilst the narrative of the documentary seems poised for Hillary Clinton’s success, the WWE itself has significant connections to Donald Trump. Trump appeared as a WWE character in 2007 and 2009 (C. Kelly 2016). After his election win Linda McMahon, former CEO and President of the WWE, was announced by Trump as leader of the Small Business Administration, having been one of Trump’s biggest financial supporters, donating approximately $6 m (J. Martin, B. Buckley, A. Chozick, and M. Haberman 2016).

4. For simplicity in our analysis, we will limit our discussions of women in professional wrestling to WWE. There are a variety of women’s professional wrestlers, in North American independent promotions, and other national contexts, where women’s roles are different and worthy of analysis in their own right.

5. Most notably, female wresters Chyna and AJ Lee, both well-known and regarded among fans, are almost entirely absent from the documentary due to the WWE’s desire to distance themselves from those performers (Chyna appeared in pornography and died of a drug and alcohol overdose; AJ Lee’s husband CM Punk’s WWE contract termination was acrimonious).

6. For further exploration of ‘hashtag feminism’ see Feminist Media Studies Commentary and Criticism edited by L. Portwood-Stacer and S. Berridge (2014).

7. For example, the WWE has targeted international markets including the UK, Japan, China, and India through strategies such as local live events and hiring wrestlers from these countries. WWE Network subscription is key to this strategy, as the corporation aims to offer a holistic streaming service in the Netflix model.