When doing the readings for this week, one present-day examples of postfeminism in action that first came to mind was the Amber Rose SlutWalk, which I was recently reacquainted with on an episode of America's Next Top Model. For those who might be unaware of this event, it's a festival run by general celebrity / model / rapper Amber Rose whose basic mission statement is to discourage victim blaming in rape culture by encouraging women to embrace their sexualities and individual rights to dress as they please, have sex as they please, etc. This is the exact mission statement, as listed on the website: "To deliver a flawlessly executed event geared toward raising awareness about sexual injustice and gender inequality. The Amber Rose SlutWalk aims to impact and uplift while shifting the paradigm of rape culture. The event provides a safe, all-inclusive space to entertain, educate and empower." The website also states, "Our mission is serious but this day of dressing up, strutting your stuff and standing up for gender equality is filled with fun, laughter and a community in support of a tremendous cause. It is about self-expression, unity, shedding stereotypes and supporting one another."
I'm going to look specifically at Jess Butler's article, because she gives an overview of some of the academic rhetoric that has historically existed around postfeminism. Butler lays out her six potential criteria for postfeminist narratives / texts (I'm not generally a fan of "this is considered x if it meets y condition(s)," but I digress), several of which I think can be applied to my understanding of the SlutWalk. The aforementioned text that I pulled from the website appears to meet Butler's standards in at least the following ways: it "marks a shift from sexual objectification to sexual subjectification"; it "emphasizes individualism, choice, and empowerment as the primary routes to women's independence and freedom"; and it "promotes consumerism and the commodification of difference" (44). The notion of "sexual subjectificaton" is certainly at the heart of this event, as it promotes the general idea that women don't clothe themselves to be objectified, but rather clothe themselves as expressions of their individual freedoms. This ties into the second criterium that I quoted in terms of individualism (the mission statement itself uses the word "empower," as well).
The note around consumerism I find to be interesting. Firstly, the SlutWalk website does encourage the act of "dressing up," which one could argue plays into the "embrace [of] femininity and the consumption of feminine goods" (48). (The website does not encourage "girly" attire. However, the term "dressing up" I think has this connotation. This, coupled with the fact that it's positioned next to the phrase "strutting your stuff," which is commonly associated with feminine fashion models, arguably paints this in subtly "feminine" undertones.) Moreover, the event itself is bolstered by several corporate sponsors, and Amber Rose herself uses the neoliberal market to promote it--thereby promoting her own brand and products in the process. Her appearance on America's Next Top Model, in which she uses the models in a video shoot for the event, is an example of the latter. (Not to mention her social media feeds, in which plugs for the event collide with plugs for her other corporate endeavors.)
Despite the fact that the event seems to be political in nature, I find it interesting that the website downplays this as much as possible. The website says, "There is no recipe for what someone involved in the Amber Rose SlutWalk needs to look like, you DO NOT need to come from an activist background or know anything about these issues. The only requirement is that you be inspired by your own passion to do something about the issues that plague our generation." This is certainly reminiscent of Butler's claim that postfeminism "draws on a vocabulary of individual choice and empowerment, offering these to young women as substitutes for more radical feminist political activity" (43). SlutWalk's reassurance that participants don't even need to "know anything about these issues" seems to discourage active interrogation of the systems that create and propogate the issues in the first place.
I also think that the reclaiming of the word "slut" is another topic for discussion. Does the reclaiming of the word, historically used by a heterosexual male to describe a heterosexual female, covertly reaffirm that heterosexual norm? Or does it destabilize it? I don't think there's a cut-and-dry answer.
I do think that race plays a significant part in all of this, especially in the "slut" reclaiming. Several columnists have discussed the ways in which many women of color do not feel they can reclaim this word as easily as white women can, because they are victims of everyday racial stereotyping and are hyper-sexualized in mass consumerist media in ways that white women are not. The interesting part of this, though, is that Amber Rose herself is biracial, and when she stepped up to brand the event herself (it was previously run by white women), she sought to bring more women of color into the conversation. I am not sure how explicitly she addresses race at the event, so I can't speak to that, but I think this thread adds to its overall ambivalent nature. Its call for inclusion (not just for people of color, but also for the LGBTQ+ community) pushes against white-washed, heteronormative postfeminism, which is good, but it might nevertheless be constructed by and promoted through the normative systems and rhetorics that create the issues in the first place.
Though there have been SlutWalks organized in Budapest, Hungary, I have not been familiar with the Amber Rose version of it. Thank you for raising a lot of intriguing issues related to the feminism vs post-feminism tension through this very relevant example!
ReplyDeleteAs for its individualism, I would say that to me it was the constant balancing between emphasizing individuality and community that seems prominent in the mission statement, rather than pressing individuality and pushing the collective and the (explicitly) political into background. For instance, while the "event” is "about self-expression”, it is also about "unity” and mutual support. In relation to this very interesting quote that you pulled: "There is no recipe for what someone involved in the Amber Rose SlutWalk needs to look like, you DO NOT need to come from an activist background or know anything about these issues. The only requirement is that you be inspired by your own passion to do something about the issues that plague our generation." I agree that it may be (intended to be) read as a sort of depoliticizing gesture, or, similarly, that "doing something about the issues that plague our generation” might be way too vague as part of a politically/ethically committed statement, a more generous reading would interpret it as emphasizing the openness toward anyone who sympathizes with the main cause (i.e. is against rape culture and victim blaming, and for women’s sexual freedom—whatever that may or may not entail), that is highlights he fact that there is no gatekeeping and elitism going on in terms of who is welcome at this "festival”.
Surely the choice of words (event, festival), and the emphasis on pleasure, fun, and entertainment point towards a kind of politics that may not be radical enough or real politics to many, and which may be, indeed, directly and indirectly connected to the event’s commercial nature. [Though my subjective perception has been that it is just way too common a practice to discredit certain projects because they are not enough or not radical enough, which discrediting often works for the benefit of the speaker and their supposedly (more) true activist identity than it would helps faciliate the desired social change.] So I must admit that based only on the mission statement at least, I would imagine the Amber Rose Slutwalk to be quite promising, and while it manifests some of the feminist vs post-feminist tensions, I would actually read it, or, well, "grant” it the valuable adjective "feminist”, rather than flagging it as "post-feminist”.
(And the complex problem you raised in relation to the reclaiming of the term "slut" made me think of the related example of using the term "bitch" in ways that are supposed to resignify it...)