Abstract
In Empowered: Popular Feminism and Popular Misogyny, Sarah Banet-Weiser attends to the significant intersections between feminism and misogyny in contemporary popular culture. Taking the ubiquity of feminist ideas and concepts in the realm of the popular as a jumping off point, she charts the relationship between the rise of feminism and the rise of misogyny in the context of ‘economies of visibility’. Paying close attention to the role of neoliberal capitalism, the author identifies what she describes as a ‘response and call’ (p. 113) dynamic between the two, demonstrating that wherever we find popular feminism, misogyny is never far behind. With a precision and clarity in writing and engaging contemporary examples – from the rise of male ‘seduction communities’ to the 2017 Women’s March – this book effectively makes the argument that there is something ‘crucial at stake in popularising feminism’ (p. 170).
Visibility is a central concern of this book, and Banet-Weiser expands Robyn Wiegman’s (1995) concept of ‘economies of visibility’ (p. 21), and valuably applying it to the current era of advanced capitalism and networked multiple media platforms. Here, she demonstrates how popular feminism and popular misogyny compete for visibility in an economic marketplace, in which media frames work to erase overtly politicised feminist goals, in favour of simpler, depoliticised narratives. Under these conditions, more radical critiques of structural sexism and racism are lost, which function to foreclose the political salience of feminism. Furthermore, the author argues that, within this economy, there appears to be a move towards visibility as an end in itself (p. 23) rather than as a means to any tangible political or social transformation.
The chapters are organised into the themes of shame, confidence and competence, as terrains where popular feminism and popular misogyny ‘engage in a battle for dominance’ (p. 64). Through an exploration of these conceptual domains, it elucidates the ways in which popular misogyny is often reactive to popular feminism, through the ‘twinned discourses of capacity and injury’ (p. 4). Here, the continued activism for the rights of minorities and women is experienced or understood by dominant groups as ‘a series of repeated injuries’ (p. 62), and in this misogynistic environment, any such rights are cast within a zero-sum framework whereby women’s gains are necessarily men’s losses. The metaphor of the ‘funhouse mirror’ is put to good effect in Chapter 1 to explain one of the most effective political tactics of popular misogyny; the mirroring, subversion and transfiguration of popular feminist discourse. Chapter 2 outlines how online shaming ‘shapes and frames the relationship between popular feminism and popular misogyny’ (p. 66), illustrating how its ever-present threat functions as a ‘disciplinary mechanism in perpetuity’ (p. 69) for women. In popular feminism, self-esteem becomes legible as a response to shame ‘by becoming part of the discourse’ (p. 69) and maintaining the feminised body as a site of struggle, as evidenced by the ‘love your body’ movement which dominates popular representations of feminism in women’s magazines and ad campaigns.
The increasingly prevalent popular feminist mandate to ‘be confident’ ignores the wider societal forces at play and implies that women injure themselves by not being confident enough. In this way, we can see how self-determination is co-opted by capitalist industries (p. 77), and, as the author notes, ‘shaming women is indeed a big business’ (p. 67). In Chapter 3, we see an examination of the ways in which confidence is positioned within both popular feminism and popular misogyny as a commodity, which gains its value through a constructed sense of scarcity. Thus, like sexual empowerment and self-esteem, confidence is made to become part of a zero-sum game between popular feminism and popular misogyny. Using the pseudo-feminist memoirs-turned-mantras of Sheryl Sandberg’s Lean in and Sophia Amoruso’s #GirlBoss as examples, Banet-Weiser demonstrates how, in popular feminism, entrepreneurialism and capitalist accomplishments become ‘the only routes to feminist political identity’ (p. 95) as well as to equality.
Drawing on Catherine Hakim’s (2011) theory of erotic capital, she outlines how popular misogyny constructs an injury narrative, where the erotic capital of men has been diminished through an increase in women’s sexual confidence. In this environment, an industry of recuperation has emerged in the form of ‘seduction communities’ and men’s rights organisations for whom it is precisely the ‘breaking down of women’s confidence that gives men sexual confidence’ (p. 113). Crucially, these projects are not recognised as misogyny, ‘but merely as the recuperation of traditional masculinity’ (p. 126). The most compelling example of the relationship between popular feminism and popular misogyny appears in Chapter 4, where the author traces the genesis of ‘geek masculinity’ against a backdrop of technological change. While it was once ‘seemingly at odds with other hegemonic constructions of masculinity’ (p. 55), a malicious form of geek masculinity has now emerged on social media. Using the toxic technocultures of #GamerGate and Reddit as examples, she outlines how a space of refuge for ‘geeks’ is constructed by demonising and objectifying women. Drawing on her previous work, she encourages the reader to ask why, if digital culture has ushered in ‘new forms of expressing and feeling the human experience’, (Banet-Weiser and Castells, 2017: 18) that we see this ‘violent reaction to feminism and women in general by geek masculinity?’ (p. 155).
The conception of ‘popular’ is described as that which ‘generally materializes as a kind of media’ (p. 9), and that relies on ‘specific exclusions’ (p. 13). Here is where the book tends to fold together popular representations of feminism with the increased circulation of feminist ideas within digital communications networks, in ways that might themselves obscure the possibilities and potentialities of different kinds of feminist visibility. This might be particularly the case when it comes to the inclusion of feminist hashtags since, as others have noted, their diffuse and ephemeral nature can make them difficult to address in any one register (Boyle, 2019). While the book does recognise the ambivalent potential of visibility, the risk remains that its overall arguments about the deficiency of popular feminism might unfairly place the onus on feminists and activists as not doing enough, or not doing things in the ‘right’ way, rather than on popular misogyny as a powerful and institutionally backed regime.
In digital feminist counterpublics, visibility can be a by-product of the networked mobilisation of mass sentiment and anger, such as with #YesAllWomen or #MeToo (see Jackson et al., 2019; Thrift, 2014). These might point us towards other kinds of potential that virality and visibility could hold for feminism, and different possibilities for forging new modes of collectivity. The tendency to collapse both commodified feminism and grass-roots feminism under the rubric of the ‘popular’ might risk overlooking the processes of mediation that shape both, and leaves the reader with the question: are all visible forms of feminism popular? This tension between the depoliticising tendencies of visibility, on the one hand, and its more radical potential, on the other, might illuminate a path for generative and lively debates about feminism’s futures.
Empowered is a timely contribution to our understanding of this contradictory moment, in which we see the rise of toxic technocultures, the rolling back of women’s rights and the increasing visibility of violent misogyny at the same time as feminist discourses have become more visible, and popular, than ever. With an engaging style and wit, the author convincingly unpacks the ways in which feminist logics are rerouted through popular misogynistic frames, which ultimately works to ‘shore up, rather than challenge, structural sexism and racism’ (p. 172, emphasis in original). The book provides a compelling critique of commodity feminism and an incisive analysis of the political tactics of popular misogyny. It will be useful for scholars interested in post-feminism, digital media and specifically for those interested in how gender is constructed in contemporary popular culture, particularly within online communities. As the forces of neoliberal capitalism work to dampen and disavow the political clout of the feminist movement in myriad ways, misogyny, from the institutional to the memetic, is flourishing. This book makes the case that the study of popular misogyny is more relevant than ever.
