Postfeminism™: celebrity feminism, branding and the performance of activist capital

ABSTRACT

This article contributes to postfeminist media debates by interrogating an emerging configuration of celebrity feminism; one in which authenticity, entrepreneurial subjectivities and intersectionality mark the uneasy contours of a new political subject. Coining the term “activist capital”, this paper moves beyond the impasse of celebrity feminism debates (where branding and commerce = bad, grassroots organising = good) to establish the uneven conditions through which celebrity feminist activisms are accepted, even deferred to, in media and activist accounts. Drawing on an illustrative case study of the high-profile Amber Rose SlutWalk (2015–2018), a Los Angeles-based monetised and branded edition of an existing political movement against sexual violence, this paper employs a discourse analytical approach to argue that celebrity and activist cultures condition each other. Aided by digital media, a celebrity activism nexus is now emergent that is mediated by practices of individualised consumer capitalism and oriented by explicit social justice frameworks, troubling dominant narratives of depoliticised postfeminist sensibilities. These ambivalences, where commodification no longer holds the power of disavowal it once did, and where grassroots activism and celebrity culture collide, condition the emergence of new activist arrangements in this late capitalist moment.

KEYWORDS:

• Celebrity feminism
• postfeminist brand culture
• #MeToo
• SlutWalk
• celebrity activism nexus

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. Within academia, pains have been made to consider both the affects and effects of fame-based feminisms as a form of social action. The spectacular image of Beyoncé performing at the 2014 MTV Video Music Awards in front of the word “FEMINIST”, as a popular example, is captured and remediated in recent academic texts including Emergent Feminisms: Complicating a Postfeminist Media Culture (Jessalynn Keller and Maureen Ryan 2018) and Empowered: Popular Feminism and Popular Misogyny (Sarah Banet-Weiser 2018). The feminist journal Signs hosts a digital archive of articles related to “Celebrity Feminism” as part of their Public Intellectual project, and the long-standing feminist publication, Ms magazine, assembled a sympathetic timeline of popular celebrity feminisms “From Y2K to Today” (Janell Hobson 2018). Whether seen as regressive, positive, or as highly ambivalent, celebrity feminisms clearly matter for contemporary feminist politics.

2. The activist use of “me too” originated with the African-American social justice activist Tarana Burke who founded a “me too” grassroots programme in 2006 to help survivors, particularly Black women and girls from low wealth communities, to heal from sexual violence (https://metoomvmt.org/about/#history). The #MeToo hashtag went viral globally eleven years later in 2017, after the American actor Alyssa Milano posted a tweet encouraging survivors of sexual assault to post a #MeToo status to challenge silencing around sexual violence, following public allegations against Hollywood producer, and now convicted rapist, Harvey Weinstein. The celebritisation and white-centric narratives associated with the #MeToo movement has generated increasing critical commentary from activists and academics (see Alison Phipps 2020).

3. Time’s Up launched in the autumn of 2017 with an open letter against sexual harassment in Hollywood and wider US workplaces, signed by over 300 women in the entertainment industry. The open letter was published in the New York Times on January 1 2018 (https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/01/01/arts/02women-letter.html). The initiative has since formalised into a non-profit charitable organisation and legal defence fund, fighting for policy and legislation gains within the entertainment, advertising, tech and healthcare industries (https://timesupnow.org).

4. Rather than being rejected for its self-promotion or capitalist intentions, the branding and commodification practices behind the Amber Rose SlutWalk are re-imagined as an activist gesture in the following account from the feminist blogosphere: “Perhaps the most radical thing Amber Rose could have done to the already far-left movement was to brand it, to put her face and name all over it. To do so is in direct protest of not only our rape culture, which stigmatizes and victimizes women of color and queer and trans women, in unique and nuanced ways, but all the prior organizing around it—which is widely criticized as white-centric” (Carmen Rios 2015).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Red Chidgey

Red Chidgey is Lecturer in Gender and Media at the Department of Culture, Media & Creative Industries, King’s College London. Her research interests include feminist histories, everyday activisms, brand culture politics, and cultural memory. She is co-investigator of the Afterlives of Protest Research Network (AHRC) and co-chair of the Memory & Activism working group of the Memory Studies Association. She is author of Feminist Afterlives: Assemblage Memory in Activist Times (2018) published by Palgrave Macmillan. Email: [email protected]. Twitter: @protestmemory.