Abstract
Feminism’s current momentum, encouraged by movements such as #NiUnaMenos or #MeToo, has caused many social media agents to adopt some degree of feminism as a part of their online image or personal brand. ‘Being a feminist,’ for some, has become a marketing strategy in times of great polarisation between progressive forces and a reactionary backlash against feminism. The appropriation of feminism by the global market challenges public opinion, media, and academia to think and rethink feminism, and to consider whether these changes have voided it of political meaning (Banet-Weiser, 2012, 2018; Gill, 2016b). In Spain, the (extreme) right is continually launching attacks against feminism. At the same time, minority collectives such as LGBTQ+ or Roma are helping to spread feminist values into the mainstream, denouncing one of its main struggles: structural and intersectional violence against women, including online hate and harassment. In this context of confrontation, social media agents are keeping the debate about feminism alive and are picking up Spanish grassroots movements’ claims (Araüna, Tortajada, &amp; Willem, in press). In this article we outline the latest trends in feminist media research in Spain, examining 20+ years of postfeminism as an analytical tool, and highlighting new trends. Through recent research results, we show that in the Spanish (social) media landscape many different strands of feminism are entangled, all struggling to impose their narrative of what feminism looks like in the post-#MeToo<em> </em>era. We will examine the main fault lines along which feminism is divided into different undercurrents, some of which are fostering the progress of feminism, and some of which are undermining it: age (generation), class, race, and sexual identity.
Highlights
Issue This article is part of the issue “Gender and Media: Recent Trends in Theory, Methodology and Research Subjects” edited by Sofie Van Bauwel (Ghent University, Belgium) and Tonny Krijnen (Erasmus University Rotterdam, The Netherlands)
The paradox is that feminism is gaining new spaces because postfeminism is paving the way with its neo-liberal representations of individualism and cosmetics, which large groups of women do not relate to anymore
Rosalind Gill talks about ‘a new luminosity’ of feminism (Gill, 2016a, 2016b). We argue that this new luminosity of feminism is not necessarily at odds with postfeminism and, to a large extent, is projected from it
Summary
More than 20 years after its emergence as a theoretical concept in cultural studies, postfeminism has resisted the passing of time as an effective analytical tool to scrutinize representation regimes of gender, sexualities, sex-affective relationships, and feminism in popular culture (e.g., Gill, 2014, 2016b; Lotz, 2001; McRobbie, 2004, 2011; Tasker & Negra, 2007). Some of the new representational strategies regarding gender and sexuality are in line with how the media have appropriated the very concept of ‘empowerment’ and connected it to women’s sexual agency, a culture of confidence, or ‘feminist’ demands in the representation of women, without involving any kind of political or social criticism (Gill, 2016b) This postfeminist framework and its liberal optimism have contributed to rendering the structures of inequality invisible and holding individuals accountable for their own failures and successes while promoting mechanisms of self-surveillance and self-demand in performing standard and marketable identities in terms of ‘appropriate femininity’ (Araüna, Dhaenens, & Van Bauwel, 2017). On the other hand, understanding the paradox by which postfeminism both enabled and constrained feminist actions is key to gaining insight in the online construction of gender and sexualities (Caballero et al, 2017; De Ridder & Van Bauwel, 2013), and—more generally— in feminist digital activism (Banet-Weiser, 2018; BanetWeiser & Miltner, 2016; Jouët, 2017; Lawrence & Ringrose, 2018; Linabary et al, 2019)
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