by Andi Zeisler
However, there was something different about the 2014 version of the “This is What a Feminist Looks Like” t-shirt. Created by Britain’s Fawcett Society, in partnership with Elle UK and the high-street women’s-clothing chain Whistles, the tees were part of a line that included sweaters, clutches, and phone cases emblazoned with the phrase. The slogan was no longer broadcast in big, blocky letters, but in arty, thin, hand-drawn type—a branding shift that involved making the words both less confrontational and more aesthetically attractive. “This is the vintage slogan tee to end all vintage slogan tees!” affirmed Elle in its September 2014 issue. “First worn by well-known feminists like Tracey Emin, Kirsty Wark, and Shami Chakrabarti, we have teamed up with the forward-thinking team at Whistles to reinvent the iconic tee for the modern feminist. Want one? Of course you do.” After decades of knee-slapping hilarity about unkempt gals in Birkenstocks and baggy pants, feminism was finally in fashion. Sure, it now seemed to take the form of trendy, consumable objects for women rather than that of an ethic concerned with human rights, but at least people were talking about it. Right?
“Be a Feminist, or Just Dress Like One”
Author and civil rights activist Angela Davis was not the first black woman to sport an Afro. The radical Communist Party leader, Black Panther, and prison-reform agitator became a household name in 1970 when, as a fugitive, she was named to the FBI’s Most Wanted List for her involvement in the assassination of a judge. Her hair, like that of many comrades and colleagues, was inherently political—an expression of the Black Pride movement that embraced natural hairstyles as part of a larger black-is-beautiful aesthetic—but hardly the most notable thing about her. So Davis was taken aback when, as she recalled in a 1994 essay, a woman “introduced me to her brother, who at first responded to my name with a blank stare. The woman admonished him: ‘You don’t know who Angela Davis is? You should be ashamed.’ Suddenly, a flicker of recognition flashed across his face. ‘Oh,’ he said. ‘Angela Davis—the Afro.’”3 “It is both humiliating and humbling to discover that a single generation after the events that constructed me as a public personality, I am remembered as a hairdo,” she wrote.
Twelve years later, Davis was among the icons celebrated in an issue of BUST magazine whose cover line announced “Be a Feminist, or Just Dress Like One.” The fashion spread inside, titled “Our Outfits, Ourselves”—a wink to classic women’s-health guide Our Bodies, Ourselves—featured models styled up to look like modern versions of Gloria Steinem, Bella Abzug, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Kathleen Hanna, Camille Paglia, and Angela Davis, along with inset photos of the actual “fashionable feminists.” BUST is an emphatically feminist magazine, and the feature was done in good faith; readers familiar with the magazine’s cheeky, referential tone knew that the copy wasn’t actually advocating for thoughtless co-optation. (The “Be a Feminist . . . ” cover line was a reference to a famously cheesy ad for New York’s Barbizon modeling school that promised, “Be a model . . . or just look like one.”) It also wasn’t the first time that BUST had paid homage to feminists with fashion sense; an earlier issue featured a two-page spread of real and fictional “feminists fatale” that included Frida Kahlo, Natalie Barney, Josephine Baker, and—you guessed it—Angela Davis.
Still, the fashion spread bothered me in a way I couldn’t name at the time. Maybe it’s as simple as this: there’s a difference between admiring the great style of feminists who came before (but really, though: Camille Paglia?) and including fashion credit and store details, commodifying the women as though their clothing is the most salient thing we can learn about from them, as though aping their style is tantamount to activism. That skeptical feeling hit even harder more recently after taking in a spread in the Spring 2015 issue of PORTER, the thick, high-end glossy that’s the house organ of the online luxury destination Net-A-Porter. “PORTER celebrates American feminist Gloria Steinem’s clarion call to women, her liberating agenda, and her iconic 1970s style that still inspires and resonates today,” announced the introduction to fourteen subsequent pages of color-saturated photos that featured a young Steinem manqué doing vaguely political-looking stuff like talking on the phone, kicking back in a lecture hall, and leaning against a wall with her mouth hanging open in front of handbills reading “MANIFESTO” while a long-haired male acolyte looked on. All clothing and accessories, from the $2,815 leather cape by Salvatore Ferragamo to the $10,610 Tom Ford suit—and, of course, the $1,300 aviators by Cartier for maximum Steinem verisimilitude—were available on Net-A-Porter.
There are some material differences between this fashion spread and BUST’s, as well as, say, Davis’s inclusion in an online slideshow called “19 Moments in Hair History That Changed the World,” which, while still leading with the world’s most famous Afro, acknowledges right up front why its owner is legendary. The title of the PORTER fashion spread, meanwhile, is “The Way We Were,” and, after its aforementioned introduction of Steinem, goes on to say literally nothing else about her. The copy is either clothing and styling credits or hackneyed instructional babble straight out of the Big Book of Fashion Cliché. (“Vamp up a buttoned skirt with knee-high boots to reveal just a flash of skin”; “Function meets femininity in a single-shade cape and skirt duo.”)
But it’s the subtext of “The Way We Were” that revealed its marketplace-feminist aim: here was a fashion magazine reclaiming a thing its industry never wanted to be associated with until that thing was both mainstream enough to be acceptable and vintage enough to be cool. The spread takes a movement that was in large part about liberating women from constricting societal representations and recasts it as a retro-chic magic hour of long, shiny hair and sharp pantsuits. And however unsettling the BUST fashion spreads were, they at least acknowledged feminism as an ongoing, collective movement that encompassed multiple figures, voices, and issues; for PORTER, the fight for women’s liberation is presented as the work of a single person. This last thing is particularly relevant, both because Steinem herself caught so much flak for the way she was singled out by mainstream media as a spokesperson, and because she has since been outspokenly frustrated by the tendency to frame contemporary feminism solely in terms of palatable icons. (When asked by the New York Times in 2012 whether there can be “another Gloria Steinem,” she answered, “I don’t think there should have been a first one.”)
I like fashion magazines. I buy and subscribe to fashion magazines. On early-morning flights, I am that person who looks like she ran straight from a house fire to the airport, but is nevertheless face-first in Marie Claire reading about new coat silhouettes. What I’m saying is that I don’t have any illusions about what goes into a fashion magazine. I get that their makers are in the aspirational-fantasy business, not the social justice one, and I would not expect a magazine like PORTER (or even BUST, for that matter) to be, like, “If you want to dress like Gloria Steinem, try the jeans and black turtleneck that are already in your closet.” That said, the most discomfiting thing about the “The Way We Were” was what it was showcasing: not smarts, not women’s leadership, but something that’s currently far more powerful than any of those—feminist branding.
Branding—the series of stories, images, and vocabularies associated with a company and its products—is a concept whose importance has grown, as neoliberalism has grown, to become what’s arguably a global orthodoxy of success. We’ve come to talk and write not of the successes of people or their companies, but of their successes as brands. Everything is a brand: Oprah (obviously) and the Kardashians (inescapably); Apple and Microsoft; Hillary Clinton and Carly Fiorina; and even you, the everyperson, to whom the 1997 Fast Company article “The Brand Called You” addressed itself. “It’s time to give some serious thought and even more serious effort to imagining and developing yourself as a brand,” wrote branding expert Tom Peters at the time. And so we did.
Nicki Lisa Cole, a scholar who’s currently at work on a book about the worldwide dominance of Apple, notes that branding has become more
important as the labor that creates actual products is increasingly outsourced. “Companies used to stand on their product,” she explains. “That was your name, the product that you made. But when you don’t actually make the product, you have to create something else to sell to people.” What becomes valued is the brand.
Until fairly recently, the idea of branding social movements probably would have seemed hideously cynical. Sure, political and social struggles including civil rights and gay pride had their attendant stories, images, and vocabularies, but they weren’t considered products; that would suggest a motive that was purely mercenary, rather than about humanity and justice. But the language of branding is no longer native to companies: building your personal brand, branding yourself to appeal to employers and romantic partners, and “leveraging” your brand through social media are actual things people discuss constantly with a straight face. And with everything from Barack Obama’s presidential campaign to one-for-one TOMS shoes to #BlackLivesMatter, social movements as branded entities have begun to seem far less cynical than they once might have.
So while previous backlashes against feminism have generally been called what they were—fearful responses to an ideology perceived as threatening to a status quo that works great for those it benefits—in the past several years that narrative has changed. It’s not a backlash; it’s a “branding problem.” In 2013, British Elle partnered with three advertising agencies and three feminist organizations to “rebrand” feminism as something cooler and more relevant to young women than they perceived it to be—a sort of makeover for “a term that many feel has become burdened with complications and negativity,” as Elle put it. Stateside, the women-in-advertising group The 3% Project, along with Vitamin W Media and Miss Representation, sponsored a similar contest shortly afterward, seeking creative visual “rebrands” and urging, “Give feminism some love. Make it relevant and meaningful to everyone.” The Elle partnerships resulted in three graphically snappy posters: two that were specifically about the act of identifying as feminists, and one that urged women to draw attention to wage gaps by asking their male coworkers what they make. The winning entry of the 3%/Vitamin W contest was a set of posters that proclaimed “Feminism is Human Rights.” And . . . that was it. That was the extent of the efforts to rebrand. People who already knew about the rebranding initiatives were encouraged to share the graphics that resulted from them, but there seemed to be no larger plan for spreading the good word of a new-and-improved, quick-dry, lemon-fresh feminism.
Branding as a new lingua franca aside, the idea that a single group or initiative can take a diverse social/political movement with no ownership and single-handedly “rebrand” it was fairly troubling. Rather than strengthening feminism from the inside—reiterating core values and amplifying the multiplicity of voices past and present that have contributed to feminist movements—a rebrand is outward-focused, a recruitment effort to make feminism appeal to as broad an audience as possible by distilling it down to an image and a few words.
That’s impossible in a time of pluralistic feminism—a time, in fact, when it’s no longer possible to refer to one feminism at all. But a brand, by design, is something of a club that attracts desirable buyers by communicating its unique value. (Mercedes-Benz doesn’t want the same customer as Jeep, for instance.) In the case of Elle’s rebranding project, the posters visualized feminism as the province of middle-class white women in mainstream industries who want everyone on their team—which even middle-class white women like me, for the most part, know is a woefully insufficient description of feminism’s lived realities. That brand of feminism is amply represented already. All the ostensible rebrand has done is reify the issues and images that have already lived in the mainstream for decades, making feminism more alluring only by continuing to erase its unsexy, uncomfortable complexities.
The Uncanny Valley
There’s a phenomenon in aesthetics known as “the uncanny valley,” which describes the sense of unease, revulsion, and even fear provoked by nonhuman bodies and features that move almost—but not quite—like human ones. Think of the soggy, long-haired girl-ghosts who lurch and scuttle through horror movies like The Ring and Shutter, or the computer-animated superhumans in films like The Hulk. It’s not alien enough to be legible as inhuman, but it’s not quite human enough to avoid giving you the willies. (Or, as 30 Rock’s Frank Rossitano once put it, “We like R2-D2, and C-3P0 . . . but down here [indicates valley] we’ve got a CGI Stormtrooper and Tom Hanks in The Polar Express.”) The Gloria Steinem PORTER spread is an example of feminism’s own uncanny valley, where images that are recognizable because we know what they are meant to be become deeply unsettling when examined up close. It’s not just that this ersatz version of a feminist isn’t Steinem, it’s that the magazine is urging us to see her as representing the whole of feminism past.
Marketplace feminism is in many ways about just branding feminism as an identity that everyone can and should consume. That’s not a bad thing in theory, but in practice it tends to involve highlighting only the most appealing features of a multifaceted set of movements. It kicks the least sensational and most complex issues under a rug and assures them that we’ll get back to them once everybody’s on board. And it ends up pandering to the people who might get on board—maybe, possibly, once feminism works its charm—rather than addressing the many unfinished projects still remaining.
Feminism’s uncanny valley brims with facsimiles of familiar ideas, objects, and narratives that are, on closer inspection, almost exclusively about personal identity and consumption. Sheryl Sandberg’s Lean In is so successful in part because of how seamlessly it leads women into what appears to be feminism in every way—except for the part where it asks those women to mold their individual selves to an existing, unequal corporate culture rather than collectively endeavoring to change that culture. Numerous news outlets, meanwhile, stumbled into the uncanny valley when they unquestioningly reported on the 2015 rebranding of Maxim magazine as “feminist” based on its new female editor putting a self-described feminist (Taylor Swift) on the cover and not even making her wear a bikini. In the uncanny valley, those granny panties are feminist because they say so on the butt.
The feminist uncanny valley is the result of a larger neoliberal framework that over the past five decades has come to unite politics, economics, and culture in a web of individualism, privatization, and decreasing focus on both community and compassion. As a theory, neoliberalism privileges free trade, corporate deregulation, and privatization; as a practice, it took specific hold in the 1980s, when Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher joined forces to enact policies that shifted economic power from the government to the private sector. Neoliberalism holds that we don’t need government because we’ve got the free market, in which we’re all theoretically equal and which will sort out what’s valuable and what’s not. Its social message, meanwhile, is that underclasses—the poor and economically disenfranchised—are not oppressed, but just insufficiently motivated—or, less charitably, unwilling to do the bootstrap-pulling that’s required to get ahead. American culture, perhaps more than any other, prizes individualism. Our narratives of art, politics, and business idolize the person who triumphs against the odds, with only himself or herself to answer to. The lone wolf. The stranger in town. The maverick. The plucky kid. The Final Girl. You’ve only got yourself, in the end. It’s all up to you.
Neoliberalism is significant to contemporary feminism in quite a few ways, but one in particular is that both emphasize consumer choice and individual power in a way that can narrow to tunnel vision. Much as “trickle-down” economic theory was a linchpin of Reaganomics, “trickle-down feminism”—a term coined by sociologist Tressie McMillan Cottom—has become central to mainstream feminism: both propose that entitlements and benefits will flow downward from the citizens richest in those resources, and ultimately benefit everybody. Trickle-down economics was a roaring failure for almost everybody but the already-rich; the stake
s for trickle-down feminism are not that much more hopeful. “Powerful people,” writes McMillan Cottom, “will act in the interest of power, not in the interest of gender (or, race, for that matter).”4
Where neoliberalism meets the feminist uncanny valley is in the unquestioning celebration of, for instance, women in powerful positions—even when they use their powerful positions in ways that do most women very little good. Former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, for instance, was a powerful woman in a powerful position, but did not use that power in the interest of other women. Ditto for the Republican women who voted, along with every one of their male colleagues in the Senate, against the Equal Pay Act—twice. Yahoo’s Marissa Mayer took the helm of the tech giant and promptly cut the company’s work-from-home policy, a decision that stood to affect families in particular. And the less said about Sarah Palin, the better. On the way down into the uncanny valley, we’ve decided that images of women in power, in the abstract, are as important as people of any gender who are actually working to make equality a reality for everyone.
One common response to the mainstreaming of consumer feminism is the question: Well, isn’t this a good thing? Shouldn’t we be psyched about a mass centering of anything that embraces the concept? “If feminism has to become a brand to make change, I’m all for it,” asserted Lena Dunham in a November 2014 interview with the UK’s Guardian. But again, the purpose of a brand is, like neoliberal feminism, deeply at odds with the necessary evolution of movements to address issues that are about more than what trickles down from the highest echelons. The diversity of voices, issues, approaches, and processes required to make feminism work as an inclusive social movement is precisely the kind of knotty, unruly insurrection that just can’t be smoothed into a neat brand.