We Were Feminists Once: From Riot Grrrl to CoverGirl®, the Buying and Selling of a Political Movement

by Andi Zeisler

Feminism has hit the big time. Once a dirty word brushed away with a grimace, feminist" has been rebranded as a shiny label sported by movie and pop stars, fashion designers, and multi-hyphenate powerhouses like Beyoncé. It drives advertising and marketing campaigns for everything from wireless plans to underwear to perfume, presenting what's long been a movement for social justice as just another consumer choice in a vast market. Individual self-actualization is the goal, shopping more often than not the means, and celebrities the mouthpieces.But what does it mean when social change becomes a brand identity? Feminism's splashy arrival at the centre of today's media and pop-culture marketplace, after all, hasn't offered solutions to the movement's unfinished business. Planned Parenthood is under sustained attack, women are still paid 77 percent,or less,of the man's dollar, and vicious attacks on women, both on- and offline, are utterly routine.Andi Zeisler, a founding editor of Bitch Media, draws on more than twenty years' experience interpreting popular culture in this biting history of how feminism has been co-opted, watered down, and turned into a gyratory media trend. Surveying movies, television, advertising, fashion, and more, Zeisler reveals a media landscape brimming with the language of empowerment, but offering little in the way of transformational change. Witty, fearless, and unflinching, We Were Feminists Once is the story of how we let this happen, and how we can amplify feminism's real purpose and power.

• ISBN10: 1610395891
• ISBN13: 9781610395892
• Publish Date: 3 May 2016
• Publish Status: Out of Print
• Out of Print: 9 April 2021
• Publish Country: US
• Publisher: INGRAM PUBLISHER SERVICES US
• Imprint: PublicAffairs,U.S.
• Format: Hardcover
• Pages: 304
• Language: English

Reviews

[Joséphine]

Feminism is a broad subject that is difficult to cover in-depth in a single book, so I'm glad that isn't the purpose of We Were Feminists Once. The primary focus of this book is how commercialisation and capitalism has impacted feminism — on one hand popularising it but on the other, trivialised pressing issues. Zeisler discusses white feminism, or "marketplace feminism" as she likes to call it, considering body politics, gender, as well as economic and social power.

One salient point throughout the book is choice. While an individual might think they have a choice, and that that is a reflection of their equal standing as woman vis-à-vis a man, Zeisler reminds readers about circumstances. Not everyone has the privilege of choice. Even when choice is presented to one, it's a veiled non-choice. Choice is limited by other personal liberties, such as time, spending power, etc.

Just because it's in vogue to claim the feminist label, what exactly are we doing that advances the cause? We've come a long way but feminism still has a lot of work ahead, which We Were Feminists explored through various chapters broken down into essays.

[clementine]

Normally I do not finish nonfiction nearly this quickly, but Zeisler's voice is compulsively readable - and, of course, feminist analyses of pop culture are pretty much my thing (and what my degree is essentially in). I was actually expecting it to be a bit more on the excoriating side (which I would have enjoyed), but I suppose the irony of the book is that in order to sell it to a mass market the argument has to be a bit more even-keel than I might have anticipated. I do feel that occasionally Zeisler's argument got away from her: while her look into the structural inequality in the film industry was very interesting, it didn't necessarily neatly or obviously link to her thesis about the commodification of feminism.

For that matter, my biggest gripe about the book is that it didn't quite delve deep enough into the commodification aspect. The book was as much about economics as it was feminism, but it didn't portray itself that way. This topic is almost begging for more overt Marxist analysis, but aside from directly referencing Marx's concept of commodity fetishism Zeisler mainly tiptoed around Marxism. I mean, much of her argument is based on how feminism has become an individualist movement, and individualism is at the heart of Marxist analyses of capitalism. I really feel that her point would have been much more potent had she engaged more deeply with Marxism. There are great Marxist feminist essays which emphasize how capitalism and patriarchy cannot be viewed separately, and surely the commodification of feminism is a topic which warrants this type of two-pronged approach.

That said, this was a very enjoyable read due both to Zeisler's smart but very accessible and entertaining writing style and her argument about how feminism has been commodified and watered down so as to be a meaningless, amorphous brand rather than a political movement. Her examples were all contemporarily relevant and illustrative. Compared to Roxane Gay's Bad Feminist, another prominent work of feminist cultural analysis, I'd say that her cultural examples were a little more relevant, though it's true that the book just came out and most were very timely - I wonder how they'll hold up over the years. Regardless, I'd definitely recommend this one to people who are interested in such topics. It's very refreshing for those who, like me, are more than a little tired of how the term "feminist" has come to indicate almost nothing.