LAUSR

Nowadays it seems that feminism is everywhere. From the world of celebrities to political activism, we are witnessing a new kind of feminism emerging. The F word seems to have passed from the shadow of social stigmatization into the light of the media. It would appear that declaring oneself a feminist is cool. One example of this trend is the feminist fashion show starring Cara Delevingne, Georgia M. Jagger, and Gisele Bündchen that was organized by Chanel in 2014. However, this widespread trend in the world of celebrities co-exists with another tendency among young women to repudiate feminism, given the belief that equality has already been achieved. As a young woman, I wonder how the co-existence of these contradictory trends will affect the future of equality in our societies. At the same time, as a feminist researcher, I wonder about what lies behind this new scenario. Not so many years ago, the public personalities who recognized that they were feminists were few and far between. Recognizing it meant making public a political commitment to gender equality. That is to say, it implied an active struggle against injustice and considerable awareness of changing unequal structures. In a neoliberal context, such an explicit commitment could pose problems for these public personalities. However, more and more public personalities are making this commitment explicit. Has the word feminism perhaps lost part of its strength and now means something different? That is to say, perhaps feminism and neoliberalism have begun to dance by intertwining their natures, which dilutes the political nature of this social movement. This is the issue that I address in this text. According to Nancy Fraser, who in her position paper in NORA 4/2016 centres her reflection on the US context, liberal-individualist understandings of feminist emancipation have gradually replaced the more expansive, anti-hierarchical, egalitarian, class-sensitive, anti-capitalist understandings of feminism that flourished during the 1960s and 1970s. In today’s societies, we are witnessing an individualistic and meritocratic feminism which leaves aside the political struggle that this emancipation requires. Therefore, maybe it is true that the word feminism has lost part of its strength and now means to play the neoliberal game. However, as we will see in this text, it is precisely this context, shared by the Nordic countries, that underscores the need to recover the political meaning of feminism. I will continue with this idea later. Nevertheless, together with the emergence of the word feminism among celebrities and powerful women in Western societies, there is still a marked tendency for young women to reject feminism as part of their identity. These are opposing trends, but they co-exist