'Game Changers': Our Pop Culture Icons in Feminism (original) (raw)
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
Язык и текст
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.
2019
Within the past five years, a flurry of feminist manifestos have garnered intense mainstream media attention and reenergized feminist debates in the US, most trenchantly around the question of why middle-class women are still struggling to cultivate careers and raise children at the same time. Two of these, Anne-Marie Slaughter's Why Women Still Can't Have It All (2015) and Sheryl Sandberg's best-seller Lean In: Women, Work and The Will to Lead (2013) might well be said to have initiated this trend of high-power women publically and unabashedly identifying as feminists. Considered together with Emma Watson's September 2014 speech at the UN Women #HeforShe campaign launch, Beyoncé's "spectacular" appropriation of Chimamanda Adichie's talk We Should All be Feminists, and other widely publicized feminist enunciations, it seems safe to say that we have indeed moved from an arguably
Introduction: Righting Feminism
New Formations, 2017
In the last few years, we have witnessed a perplexing new trend. Following an extended period in which few high-profile women were willing to identify publicly with feminism, all of a sudden-or so it appeared-many well-known women were loudly declaring themselves feminists, one after the other: from the former president of Barnard College, Debora Spar and the current UK Prime Minister, Theresa May, through internationally popular music celebrities Miley Cyrus and Beyoncé to right-wing populists like Marine Le Pen in France. 1 Indeed, Hillary Clinton's 2016 presidential campaign was strongly endorsed by liberal feminist organisations, and marked one of the high points of a resurgent feminist agenda in the United States with resonances across the western world. Despite her ultimate defeat, Clinton was nevertheless the first woman in US history to be nominated as a presidential candidate by a major national party. Feminism, it seemed, had finally become legitimate in the popular imagination in ways that it simply never had been before. These public feminist declarations were not the only ways in which a revived feminist discourse began circulating, however. Rather, since 2012-in both the anglophone world as well as in the west more generallythere has been a virtual explosion of feminist discussion in both popular and mainstream media: from internationally bestselling books, through widely read articles in the mainstream print media to popular television shows. These discussions, framed as inspired by feminism, have been diverse and occasionally contentious, including, for example, how egg-freezing technologies could potentially render talk of women's biological clock anachronistic and whether the casual 'hook-up' culture among women undergraduates on university and college campuses should be considered part of feminism's emancipatory legacy. 2 One particularly influential site for the dissemination of this popular feminism has been a new form of feminist manifesto. Two of these-former Princeton University professor Anne-Marie Slaughter's 'Why Women Still Can't Have It All', and Facebook's chief operating officer Sheryl Sandberg's best-selling Lean in: Women, Work and the Will to Lead (2013)-might well be said to have initiated the trend of high-power women publicly 'coming out' as feminists, while serving as a springboard for reenergised feminist debates in the Anglo-American world, mostly around the question of why well-educated middle-class women are still struggling to cultivate careers and raise children at the same time. The success of these manifestos has, in turn, more recently stimulated a publication boom of advice-oriented memoirs and 'having it all' self-help guides for women. In the last two years alone, former Fox anchorwoman Megyn Kelly's Settle for More, Ivanka Trump's Women Who Work, and 1. Asked if she identifies herself as a feminist, Le Pen said that she could consider herself as such to the extent that she defends women's rights, which are threatened by Islam. F. Scrinzi, 'A new French National Front?', forthcoming.
WE SHOULD ALL BE FEMINISTS: THE MANIFESTO OF NEW FEMINISM
International Journal of Advance and Applied Research, 2022
In this paper, I dissect Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, and her TED Talk based on her book, "We Should All be Feminists." Adichie is a Nigerian lady who has first-hand involvement in women's activist issues of disparity and she fills in as a speaker and lobbyist for issues of woman's rights and then some. She is a famous creator, lobbyist, scholastic, and a women's activist. Knowing about her encounters concerning imbalance, I acknowledged I am ready to recognize matches between her encounters and the disparities I have confronted regardless of our incomprehensibly unique histories. The significance of her work as a women's activist is accentuated in her explanatory methods, like utilizing individual accounts and public jargon to bring association and a feeling of uniformity to her crowd. Adichie urges society to change its activities to advance and standardize woman's rights in a positive light. Adichie's strength as a woman, a writer, an orator and an activist makes her very attractive. Throughout her life of inequality and decision making, she has continued to pursue grace and peace through her work, her conversational style, and her ability to persuade. One of the many reasons I admire Adichie is her storytelling technique and personal story. In her books and the discussions, she gives, her ability to tell stories and make readers feel as if they are living with her is commendable. As I listen to her talk on TED talk, "We should all be feminists" which I am further deconstructing, I can't help but appreciate her ability to connect with the audience as a rhetor; I believe he can achieve a high standard of rhetor.
Proceedings of the 1st International Conference on Applied Economics and Social Science (ICAESS 2019)
This research focuses on the analysis of transitivity, social wrong and solving problem in Emma Watson's speech for the HeForShe campaign by using Fairclough's theoretical framework of critical discourse analysis. Transitivity analysis is the fundamental tool to see how Emma Watson using language to show people ideology of the issue and also assert her thought in the speech which elaborated in the Fairclough's steps methodology to find the social wrong, obstacle in solving the social wrong, the position of social wrong and the strategies to pas the social wrong. The results show that there are some issues that needs to be dealt with to achieve gender equality. Women and men need to be united because the impact of the gender inequality is not only for women but men as well. Redefinition of feminism hopefully can make people disassociate feminism with manhating ideology. The use of the public figure as the speaker is one of the effective way to highlight gender inequality issue and that seems controversial as it gets a lot of attention through social media