Feminist Mobilization: How Bait-and-Switch Male Dominance Undermines Feminism and How Feminists Fight Back

Abstract

Johnson uses the book’s blueprint of the interplay between formal and informal politics to show how professionalized NGOs and deradicalized “gender talk” represent the bait and switch of feminist mobilization in the neoliberal era. Comparing feminist mobilization in Russia and Iceland, this chapter shows how activists at first took the bait, leading to similar limitations as on women in politics. However, feminists have become increasingly aware of how they too have been boxed in, with Russia’s Pussy Riot and similar activism in Iceland constituting a new stage of guerilla feminism which directly takes on the twenty-first-century form of male dominance.