'Game Changers': Our Pop Culture Icons in Feminism (original) (raw)
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TSU College of Arts and Social Sciences Faculty Journal, 2019
Promoting gender equality and empowering women is a Millennium Development Goal set by the United Nations as a way to address gender-related issues that are prevalent in societies. To ensure the success of campaigns and movements related to the aforementioned concepts and to contribute towards development, it is important to clearly explain the said terminologies. This study used Feminist Rhetorical Criticism and Speech Act Theory to unveil the misconceptions, re-introduce the terms feminism and gender equality, identify the key terms used in the speech to correct such misconceptions, and understand the intended meanings attached to the context of the speech by Emma Watson during the launch of the HeForShe campaign of the UN. Watson mentioned in her speech that over the years, feminism has been equated with man-hating, and that gender equality is an issue that affects men and women alike. The misconceptions arose due to the Three Waves of Feminism during the late 19th century to the early 20th century. The speech was instrumental in proving five out of six feminist premises identified by Lois Tyson (2006). These feminist premises gave a clear view of what feminism and gender equality means as it was evidently framed in Watson’s speech.
Corporate Feminism? Emma Watson and the UN’s #HeForShe Movement
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This study regards actress Emma Watson’s key speech launching HeForShe at the United Nations in 2014, with a special focus on the way she refers to men. The #HeForShe initiative ostensibly differs from traditional feminist approaches in its recognition of the importance of reaching out to men. This study aims to explore tensions in her argumentation and within the movement itself. It uses a mixed method analysis that consists in the application of some traditional tools in the analysis of political rhetoric, evaluative language, framing, problem-solution, naturalisation, erasure. Results are to highlight a discursive tension in the portrayal of men that downplays their role as perpetrators of historical injustice for women and instead emphasises their victimhood. The conclusion brings out some of the corporate contradictions inherent in the HeForShe project.
Institutionalizing pop feminism: a key to women's empowerment
Mapping online gender-based violence, 2022
The first chapter, written by Ioanna Pervou, challenges us to consider the influence of pop culture in understanding feminism in the digital age and new forms of awarenessraising. She argues that connections between celebrities and victims of gender-based violence allow social discussions that can create communities, empower victims, and, overall, demand the protection of women's rights as a collective.
The reactionary turn in popular feminism
Feminist Media Studies, 2024
This paper considers the rise of "reactionary feminism" within popular culture, suggesting a possible departure from, or mutation of, the hegemony of neoliberal and postfeminisms of recent decades. It locates reactionary feminism as key to the growing backlash against "liberal feminism," pointing to emergent popular feminist discourses of "brutal truths," "material conditions," and women as a "sex class." I analyse three seemingly diverse iterations of the reactionary feminist turn: its political-intellectual articulation by anti-progressive, "post-liberal" feminists; secondly, its manifestation within the "femosphere"-the online, female-centric communities which mirror those of the manosphere-focusing specifically on the "Female Dating Strategy;" and thirdly, "dark feminine" dating influencers on TikTok and YouTube, sometimes framed as "Andrew Tate for girls." Reactionary feminism appears to have certain similarities with leftist, intersectional feminism; it has a strong critique of liberal feminism, and explicitly centres issues such as misogyny, the devaluation of women's work, gendered economic inequality, and the politics of care. However, I argue that while it purports to oppose misogyny and the manosphere, it mirrors many of its regressive logics, and is characterised by an aggressive sense of fatalism, bio-essentialism, and a deep animosity towards liberationist feminism and any form of social hope.