Fame, Feminism, and Failure: Lessons from the Rise and Fall of Time’s Up

Abstract

In the wake of #MeToo, the non-profit feminist organization, Time’s Up, was started by a group of celebrity women in 2018, only to dissolve four years later, mired in scandal. Using Boorstin’s theorization of the pseudo-event, this project analyzes the rise and fall of Time’s Up through a multimodal analysis of celebrities’ publicization of its launch alongside an analysis of reports detailing its demise. The findings show how the illusory, image-focused logics of social media and celebrity culture as well as the organization’s prioritization of the powerful subverted its goals of promoting gender equality. As of the few examples of large-scale feminist mobilization within celebrity circles, Time’s Up demonstrates the difficulty of converting stars’ publicity into sustained activism, providing lessons about the pros and cons of celebrity’s deployment of solidarity capital in social justice work.