TheSyllabus

Postfeminism is a term that is most frequently used in academic disciplines such as cultural studies and sociology, although it has also seeped into the public domain. People take different meanings from the word, but the two scholars who have written the most about postfeminism are Angela McRobbie and Rosalind Gill. It is their conceptual work I draw on when looking at postfeminism’s impact on how young women make sense of the world.

One common understanding of postfeminism is that it is a form of feminism that has been influenced by other “post" theories, such as poststructuralism and postcolonialism. Another understanding, found more often in the media, corresponds to the idea that we in “Western” countries have achieved feminist goals, like equal pay, and now no longer need feminism. Yet another understanding of postfeminism – the one informed by the work of cultural studies scholars – is that it demarcates an era where feminism is partly taken into account and, on this basis, regarded or treated as no longer necessary. 

Here, the key is that feminism’s being taken into account may have undermined feminist critique. It’s this familiar idea: “We’ve already had the discussion, so now feminists can be quiet.” Angela McRobbie first described postfeminism in this way back in the 2000s. In that era, feminism as an identity was fiercely contested even though the aims of feminism as gender equality were quite widely shared. But feminism really did come back onto the public stage in the 2010s. Politicians are again wearing T-shirts saying “This is what a feminist looks like.” Beyoncé is performing in front of giant screens that bear the word. There is #MeToo, of course.

But is this a gain for feminist aims? Does it mean that feminism itself is no longer such a dirty word? Postfeminism comes into play as we try to understand how the increased visibility of feminism in the media and public sphere actually relates to the feminist project. The answers to those questions seem to have changed, and have also left us with new questions. What does all this mean for gender equality? And, how does gender equality intersect with racial and socioeconomic justice?

Rosalind Gill has recently theorized postfeminism as a gendered form of neoliberalism. One way in which neoliberalism and postfeminism address young women in the Global North context is as capable, responsible subjects – subjects who can make their own informed choices. And what's interesting, if we think about recent challenges, is that although there’s now much more awareness of ongoing gender inequalities in the public domain, there isn’t always much that women can do about it in their own lives. 

My research is often based on interviews with women between the ages of 18 and 35. What I have seen is that, in the early 2010s, women were finding it difficult to talk about how gender inequalities had affected them personally. But the #MeToo campaign raised a lot awareness around sexual harassment, for example. There is now much more awareness of how something like sexual harassment in the workplace can impact one’s life. But my research participants still felt that there was very little they could do about it. 

They had to take it upon themselves to deal with sexual harassment, because there weren't many structures in their places of work that would make it easy for them to raise issues of sexual harassment. These were often precarious, freelance workers whose careers depended on contacts. They felt that, at the end of the day, it was on them to defend themselves against it. This is a very interesting twist. On the one hand, there is the acknowledgment that there's something structural going on that affects women as a group. But on the other hand, there was still a sense that they had to cope with it themselves. That's one way in which postfeminism as a gendered form of neoliberalism affects how young women deal with gender inequalities.

In 2019, I interviewed young female musicians who work in the classical music industry. I asked them about their views on gender inequality, and many of them did say that it affected them personally. Much of the inequality they mentioned had to do with sexual harassment, which is very prevalent in the classical music sector. But then they also said that they had to deal with it on their own. I then brought this into dialog with the #MeToo movement’s talk of inequality and empowerment. I'm not saying that #MeToo is just disempowering; that would be too simplistic. I do think it's been an important movement in many ways. But one of the tricky things is to observe how the acknowledgment of structural issues either does or doesn’t translate into actual social change. 

#MeToo is an example of how – at least in the context of my research – more talk about wider, structural inequalities does not necessarily lead to social change. The #MeToo movement railed against sexual harassment as a structural issue, but this acknowledgment did not translate into a process where structural change was sought. Instead, individuals had to take it upon themselves to deal with the problem. This is very neoliberal: you put responsibility on individual actors, on individual women, to deal with wider issues that occur beyond the self. What then happened is that my research participants couldn't deal with sexual harassment appropriately. Surprise, surprise, many of them felt that if they spoke out, they would lose their job, or would be seen as carrying a chip on their shoulder. 

At the same time, there was also a very interesting individualizing dynamic at play. If they felt that they didn't deal with it appropriately, they often blamed themselves. They were absolutely seeing this as a political issue. There was nobody who said, “Oh, it's just a few cases, there's no gender dimension to it.” What they said, very clearly, was that this was a structural issue, a feminist issue, and it affected their lives. And yet the individualized way in which they dealt with it often left them feeling ashamed. It's in this respect that I argued that #MeToo can have disempowering effects: it doesn't give these women a sense of empowerment, but actually makes them feel inadequate when they can't deal with a structural issue such as sexual harassment on their own.

To put this into a temporal context, I conducted this research almost 20 years ago, in the mid-2000s. This was a study of how a diverse group of young women based in Germany and the UK thought and felt about feminism. They were diverse in terms of class backgrounds, racial identity, and sexuality, but one discourse that came up frequently contrasted their experience as women in the “West” with that of Muslim women. It was something along the lines of, “Well, here in the West we are fine, it's all good. Women have equal opportunities and we can make our choices. We are individuals. That's all that matters." Then they would say, “Oh, but you know, it's really bad in Muslim countries. Those poor Muslim women who have to wear the veil are so oppressed, and don't have any rights.”

I looked at this discourse very critically. I don't subscribe to it at all. I'm a sociologist by training, so what I wanted to understand was what this discourse was doing rhetorically. And it does several things. It constructs, portrays, and represents the women in the interviews as empowered. They have rights; they are free individuals. And, I argued, it does so through the figure of the “other” – the oppressed Muslim woman who is positioned as a victim of patriarchal oppression by contrast. 

This kind of neocolonial discourse has some historic precedents. What it also does is construct Muslim women in a very problematic light, as not having any agency, as being disempowered, as not being full, rights-bearing individuals. And the two figures – the figure of the empowered Western woman and the figure of the oppressed, othered Muslim women – exist in tandem. One figure comes into existence by not being the other figure. We must be critical of that dynamic.

Writing with Rosalind Gill and Ana Sofia Elias, I was interested in long-standing feminist discourses and debates on women and beauty. Why, for example, is it that many women – and increasingly also men, although they weren't our focus – aspire towards having a certain body shape? We coined the concept of aesthetic entrepreneurship to make sense of, on the one hand, women freely choosing to subscribe to certain looks and invest a lot of money into attaining them – and therefore becoming entrepreneurs. There is nobody chaining women to an operating table to undergo cosmetic surgery, as it were. They do this of their own free will. We need to take this seriously in order to take women's agency seriously. 

But, on the other hand, there's also the issue that the sought-after looks are often the same. When the procedures are very similar – in terms of breast augmentation, for example – the idea of individual choice stops making much sense. The looks that are being sought are also very much shaped by racial and class politics, in terms of the kinds of selves and bodies that are seen as desirable. The concept of aesthetic entrepreneurship allowed us to make sense of this idea that women are agents – that they choose to do something – but also to explore how these choices are nevertheless shaped by wider social structures, including neoliberalism. It is a form of neoliberalism that pushes women to take it upon themselves to pursue a particular aesthetic. 

That's where this notion of entrepreneurship comes in, informed by a Foucauldian approach to neoliberalism, which explores how the self becomes constituted in and through power – by taking on responsibility, by desiring certain things. Rather than thinking about neoliberalism primarily  in terms of private property rights and free markets, a sociological understanding sees neoliberalism as governing by encouraging individuals to take responsibility for their own lives.

I've been interested in how neoliberalism is lived out on the psychic level. I've studied this through interviews with young female artists – who are positioned as neoliberal entrepreneurs twice over – and the way they talked about competition was fascinating. First of all, they would say that they were trying to not compete with others so much. At first glance, this goes against our understanding of how neoliberalism works in society, which presumes that because everybody is made to feel responsible for their own lives, people are going to start competing with each other. We can surely find evidence of that – it’s more prevalent in discourses among men, for example – but this wasn't reflected by what these women were saying. 

Instead, they were saying that they competed against themselves. They didn't quite put it in those terms, but they talked about the ways they were constantly trying to optimize themselves. In this case they were musicians. So, could they practice more? Could they get physically stronger in order to play their instrument better? Could they be more present mentally, more focused, in order to concentrate better and perform better in auditions? The competition was very much on the level of the self, against the self. 

This means that there is then no limit to competition. It's not like entering into a competition where one person wins and the other doesn't; you can always try to outperform yourself. We can see this working not just in relation to the musicians I interviewed, but also in all kinds of things that we do in our daily lives – be it checking our fitness targets or calorie intake, we can always improve on ourselves. The limitlessness ties into the constant work of self-optimization that so many of us are caught in. Neoliberalism works on this deeper level because it works at the level of the self, not just against others; and because this constant competition against the self can go on indefinitely.

Yes, thank you for raising the class dimension. It's present even in the question of who can afford to put in the time and effort to pursue a certain appearance, to go back to the concept of aesthetic entrepreneurship. Class also comes up in the context of competition. In interviews, I observed people looking down on others who they deemed to be lazy, not trying hard enough, not aspirational enough, not really putting themselves out there. These are often class discourses that draw a distinction between Us and Them, where the issues at stake are socioeconomic inequalities that then remain unacknowledged. And this serves to reinforce those inequalities.

In 2022, I conducted interviews with feminist activists who are mainly active online. Most of them were on Instagram, in that case. #MeToo is one well-known example of feminist activism taking place in the digital sphere, but a lot of the mobilization, consciousness raising, networking, and even planning of marches is increasingly happening online. By bringing questions about gender equality and racial justice to the fore, online activism has already made a massive difference. But I was interested in the simple question of what difference it makes if feminism takes place offline versus on a platform owned by Meta, or whichever corporation. I think it does matter. If feminism were being conducted from the Goldman Sachs headquarters, we would know to ask some critical questions. And yet I fear that when it's online, too many of us take the context for granted.

What I found, in short, is that the selves that are formed and performed in these online spaces are still shaped by neoliberalism. They are often self-branding, self-promoting, going after visibility, checking metrics and analytics. My research participants were aware of all of this; in no way am I suggesting that they suffered from false consciousness or were duped. They were incredibly aware that they conducted their activism on platforms that were very capitalist and neoliberal in nature. And yet it's very difficult to extract oneself from those dynamics and processes. 

It’s in that sense that I struggle with the notion of post-neoliberalism. Neoliberalism works in different ways, but I think it increasingly works on the level of affect and the psyche. I personally think it's too soon to talk about a post-neoliberal era, if we understand neoliberalism in this sociological, Foucauldian way – as a way of conducting the self, which describes to us how subjectivities are formed in line with economic principles of optimization, entrepreneurialism, and self-responsibility. The talk of competition of the self against the self is one illustration of that process. But platforms and social media themselves exacerbate this way of conducting the self. They add to the formation of neoliberal subjectivities, rather than undermine it – even when their users might be critical of neoliberalism in the very things that they write.

I wish I knew the answer. I haven't grappled with this question so much in my research, but thinking spontaneously, I think it would require a rather radical solidarity – a move away from the focus on the individual towards something much wider. And it would have to come from a deep understanding of how gender, race, class, sexuality, and all other axes of difference are interlinked. But it's so hard to make this move in practice. 

Leaving behind marketization is an important part of that, but it's not everything. It doesn't necessarily move us away from competition against the self – we could always still compete over who is less caught up in market principles, which would itself be a form of maximization. Maybe that’s too cynical, but I don’t think marketization is the only thing we ought to tackle. It will take trying to radically rethink the makeup of our selves – away from competition, away from optimization, away from personal responsibility, towards an understanding of how we are interconnected as individuals, how we are dependent on each other, and how we are all vulnerable and lead precarious lives in ways that are, of course, shaped by inequalities. I'm aware of how fluffy that sounds, but I believe it will take something along those lines.

The concepts of postfeminism and neoliberal feminism are not necessarily opposed at all. They have slightly different theoretical provenances, but they mean very similar things. Neoliberal feminism, if you wanted to call it that, is very much on the rise. Catherine Rottenberg has written about this extremely well. There's all this talk about gender inequalities, and yet it's on women themselves to figure it out – indeed by leaning in, for example. This discourse is also focused on incredibly privileged women, who are often white and upper-middle-class. I see that as working along the same lines as postfeminism.

We have to come up with structural solutions to structural problems. Neoliberal feminism, for example, would promote egg freezing as a way for women to have it all: you can have your career and then have your children at age 50. An alternative solution would be to create a society where you can meaningfully combine care work with wage labor, for example; or where we perhaps wouldn't have to depend on wage labor because we all had an income. Instead, the onus is put on the individual woman to focus on her career. And this is of course a classed and racialized discourse, because many women have historically not had the choice as to whether or not they want to work, and many still do not have the choice to pursue a career that comes with doing something you love. 

So, a path of action would be to first acknowledge the classed and racialized exclusions in such proposals, and then try to create a society where this question is not left up to individual women to decide. This would be a society that acknowledges the work of care that goes into raising children and looking after the vulnerable and elderly, and that guarantees a living for the people who do provide that care while ensuring that the burden of doing so doesn't rest predominantly on women.