postfeminism – Millennialisms

Before I begin this blog post, I would like to acknowledge something that I find incredibly frustrating: whilst I understand that university-level study is part of academia, and engaging with academic writings obviously requires a high level of knowledge, and understanding of a wide variety of concepts and terms (particularly English studies, as it often borrows from other specific schools like sociology, psychology, linguistics, history, art history and criticism, performance studies, etc), writing about feminism in this high academic style feels counter-productive to me. The style is exclusionary, the bibliography of referenced works is often almost as long as the essay itself, suggesting that a reader cannot fully appreciate the academic’s argument without also having read each of these listed pieces, and it does very little to encourage a non-academic to participate in thinking about feminism as something that relates to them. I often feel as though I’m being spoken down to, almost ridiculed, for not having made the writer’s connections between works before, and I do understand or recognise around half of their references. In my opinion, many academics writing about feminism, or post-feminism, or the importance of intersectionality would do more for education by reminding themselves that those who may not have had access to archives of academic writing are still a valuable readership.

However, ‘popular feminism’ is so repetitive, cyclical, and insubstantial that it does little to fill the void that exists between non-university-educated people and ‘feminist theory’. The reason why I believe that this is such a problem, is that it leaves generations of young people with very little accessible information about feminism, and leaves them at the mercy of media outlets’ bias against and – at times – total demonisation of feminists. It is also vital to note that we cannot simply assume that these young people will get to university and automatically engage with high theory about feminism because a) they may study a subject that never crosses paths with feminism, b) their views may have been so skewed by misinformation by the time they reach university that they have lost all open-mindedness towards feminism, and c) they may never go to university, the financial and standard-of-education reasons for which are the subject of a whole debate of its own.

To stray into the personal on what, I am aware, is intended to be a blog dedicated to a set of academic readings of contemporary popular culture, I would like to illustrate the above point with an account of the affect taken on by sections of society under the rise of ‘popular feminism’. This is an example of the situation described by Gill in ‘Post-postfeminism?: new feminist visibilities in postfeminist times’ as being complexly characterised as: ‘for every uplifting account of feminist activism, there is another of misogyny; for every feminist “win”, an out-pouring of hate, ranging from sexual harassment to death threats against those involved; for every instance of feminist solidarity, another of vicious trolling.’.

I am lucky that my sixth-form education took place at a Grammar School in Shropshire that was so saturated with misogyny, toxic masculinity, and casual sexual harassment that I became irrepressibly angry at the school’s complacency towards the breeding ground of upper-class entitlement over which the Senior Leadership presided, and thus sought refuge with the two feminist female teachers who still remained. They introduced me to what my parents had sheltered me from: the world is fucked up, but there are other people who are as angry about it as you are.

I actually do count myself lucky that I had the awful experiences I had at that school. Despite the fact that even as I studied Government and Politics under one of the aforementioned teachers, every expression of horror, revulsion or anger that I showed towards sexism, racism, classism, ableism, homophobia, transphobia, or any incarnation of the discrimination that dominated the current media stories, political precedent and historical records we analysed was met with taunting, trolling, and commands for me to ‘shut [my] left-wing, queer-loving, hairy-feminist mouth’. Even from the only two other girls in a class of twenty-three. The backlash and internalised misogyny were everywhere: in history, in the news, and in my classroom. I applied for and won the position of Deputy House Captain in my Upper Sixth year, and yet every decision I made was overruled by the six other male members around the table. No member of staff stepped in, although they were fully aware. I see stories of discrimination against girls in school dress codes across social media every week, and I relate: I was pulled up for wearing a red scarf because ‘wearing red would give the boys the wrong idea’ about me.

I could go on for thousands and thousands of words about the horrors I myself have experienced, the victim-blaming from other women, and about the sexist questions female actors like Scarlett Johansson are asked by journalists, the exploitation and abuse of the French actresses Adèle Exarchopoulos and Léa Seydoux during the filming of Blue is the Warmest Colour, and the stories of harassment and assault that every one of my female friends is forced to remember. So studying what popular feminism looks like is a little difficult for me, because to me it just looks hollow. I don’t know if it can be classed as a failure of society in general, a failure of parents, or separated and held at arms’ length as a failure of the education system and, by extension, the Government. But I do know that the occasional magazine-cover about “fem-powerment” and “choosing to do something about your own low self-esteem” isn’t cutting it.

Tag: postfeminism

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