The Communication Review
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Keynote Address: Media, Markets, Gender:
Economies of Visibility in a Neoliberal Moment
Sarah Banet-Weiser
To cite this article: Sarah Banet-Weiser (2015) Keynote Address: Media, Markets, Gender:
Economies of Visibility in a Neoliberal Moment, The Communication Review, 18:1, 53-70, DOI:
10.1080/10714421.2015.996398
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The Communication Review, 18:53–70, 2015
Copyright © Taylor & Francis Group, LLC
ISSN: 1071-4421 print/1547-7487 online
DOI: 10.1080/10714421.2015.996398
Keynote Address: Media, Markets, Gender:
Economies of Visibility in a Neoliberal Moment
SARAH BANET-WEISER
Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism, University of Southern California,
Los Angeles, California, USA
This is the keynote address I gave at the Console-ing Passions
Conference in April 2014, in Columbia, Missouri. In this talk, I
attempted to offer a broad picture of the contemporary gendered
economy of visibility and what I am calling the marketing of
“empowerment feminism.” It is reproduced here as a talk, without
the typical conventions of a scholarly article. A part of it has been
published in a special issue of Continuum, Issue 29, Vol. 2, 2015,
edited by Amy Dobson and Anita Harris.
I want to begin this talk by recognizing the incredible contributions of feminist media scholars who make it possible for me, and many others, to do the
work we do. Console-ing Passions, founded in 1989, began as the product of
feminist scholars like Julie D’Acci, Jane Feuer, Mary Beth Haralovich, Lauren
Rabinowitz, and Lynn Spigel. Other feminist media scholars, such as Angela
McRobbie, Jan Radway, Ian Ang, Susan Douglas, Tania Modeleski, Beretta
Smith-Shomade, Ellen Seiter, Charlotte Brunsdon, Robin Means Coleman,
Anne Balsamo, Mimi White, Michele Hilmes, and many others, recognized
the ways in which everyday life—and all media platforms—are gendered,
and encouraged us to think about what that means and what are the stakes of
acknowledging the gender of everyday routines and practices. These scholars and others formed a theoretical and activist foundation for academics and
practitioners all over the world, which is evidenced by all the excellent work
presented at the Console-ing Passions conference over the past few days.
These scholars also encouraged us to take pleasure seriously, as integral to the formation of identity, as a strategy of empowerment, as activism.
For me, McRobbie’s Feminism and Youth Culture (1991), was especially
Address correspondence to Sarah Banet-Weiser, Annenberg School for Communication
and Journalism, University of Southern California, 3502 Watt Way, ASC 305, Los Angeles, CA
90089-0281. E-mail: sbanet@usc.edu
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important, as I was writing a dissertation about beauty pageants when it
was published and was thinking about how the dominant feminist position
on pageants at that time—that they are objectifying, misogynist events, and
the women who participate in them are victims of false consciousness—was
too sweeping an indictment of women. McRobbie’s work on girls and popular culture (i.e., 1991, 2004, 2009), her call to us to recognize how that which
seems to be a clear example of consumption that “plays directly into the
hands of corporate consumer culture” (McRobbie, 2009, p. 158) can also be
read differently, perhaps as something potentially empowering, was absolutely crucial to my thinking. Indeed, such an insight made it possible for me
to write that dissertation and eventually my book (Banet-Weiser, 1999).
Perhaps most importantly for me, McRobbie has served as a model for
my own thinking about ambivalence and contradiction within cultural spaces
and artifacts (Banet-Weiser, 2012). McRobbie’s more recent work has been
equally transformative for me: Her ideas about what postfeminism is as a
context and an economy, and how dangerous the postfeminist landscape
can be for female subjectivity, informs all of my recent work. Yet, when I first
read the introduction to her 2009 book, The Aftermath of Feminism: Gender,
Culture, and Social Change, I was puzzled to read that she sort of rebuked
her earlier work, especially the idea of pleasure and ambivalence within
consumer culture. As she suggested, she had “misjudged” by attributing “too
much hope in the capacity of the world of women’s magazines, to take
up and maintain a commitment to feminist issues, encapsulating a kind of
popular feminism” (2009, p. 5).
I actually don’t think she misjudged (and this might have to do with
the fact that I based so much of my dissertation on Feminism and Youth
Culture!). I remain invested in her earlier work. But I do think what she is
tracing, in the publication of these two books—the first published in 1990,
and Aftermath published in 2008—is crucial. This tracing maps a transformative shift in the context in which not only consumption, but also pleasure,
takes place.
In my own intellectual trajectory, I moved from taking beauty pageants
seriously as a space of potential empowerment, to my current work where
I look at girl empowerment organizations with a critical eye, especially in
terms of the ambivalent spaces they occupy in contemporary culture. It was
difficult initially to analyze pageants as complicated and potentially empowering. And, conversely, it is also difficult for me to critique girl empowerment
organizations when the stated goal is about enabling girls to be more confident. But the impulse of both these projects is the same: Culture is simply
too rich and complex to take at face value, and it is profoundly unproductive to approach a study of culture within binary frameworks. McRobbie’s
insistence on this has been my guide throughout my work. The shift in
McRobbie’s work maps onto a shift in the structures and infrastructures of
the political and cultural economy.
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In my own work, I see these shifts as one from the politics of visibility to
economies of visibility. In my current work, I think through this shift and how
it has encouraged an economy of visibility. This shift is not the replacement
of one context with another, but rather one that overlaps, with spaces of
ambivalence in between.
Many feminist media studies scholars have long been invested in studying the politics of visibility. The politics of visibility usually describes the
process of making visible a political category (such as gender or race) that
is and has been historically marginalized in the media, law, policy, etc. As a
politics of visibility, this process describes what is simultaneously a category
and a qualifier that can articulate a political identity. Representation, or visibility, takes on a political valence. Here, the goal is that the coupling of
the qualifier and “politics” can be productive of something else—hopefully,
social change. “Politics,” then, is a descriptor of the practices of visibility,
where visibility will hopefully result in political change.
In the current environment, however, while the politics of visibility are
still important, economies of visibility increasingly structure not just our mediascapes, but our cultural and economic practices and daily lives. Economies
of visibility fundamentally transform politics of visibility, because political
categories like race and gender have transformed their very logics from the
inside out. In turn, political categories have also been restructured and have
restructured themselves to stop functioning as qualifiers to politics (and thus
no longer being productive of something else). Race and gender, as visibilities, are then self-sufficient, absorbent, and are therefore enough on their
own. Economies of visibility do not describe a political process, but rather
assume that visibility itself has been absorbed into the economy. The visibility of identities becomes an end in itself, rather than a route to politics (Gray,
2012).
Here, economies are different from politics—politics implies a struggle,
a recognition of inequity, and most importantly, a highlighting of dynamics
of power. Politics references the ways in which systems are structured, and
often works to change things at a structural level. So when, for example,
media activists challenge networks or other platforms to change representational practices in media, it is done so as a way to change the way identities
matter and are valued socially, politically, culturally.
Economies, on the other hand, define themselves as sort of neutral;
key to most business models, economies exist for the purposes of exchange
and most of the time profit. Crucially, economies are about individuals—
consumers, buyers, sellers. Economies privilege and give value to the
individual within that economy.
Economies of visibility are gendered and raced. I focus on girls and
women here, because there is a specific imperative for girls and women
to make themselves visible in the current moment. They are made more
visible not only through media representation and production but also in
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discourses of law and policy. Importantly, girls are also widely recognized
as one of the most powerful consumer groups in the United States, and
are marketed to relentlessly. There is, then, a more demanding imperative
for girls and women to be visible, precisely because the bodies of women
and girls are always understood as potentialities, in need of regulation and
evaluation (see Banet-Weiser, 2013).
What do economies of visibility look like? In her 1995 book, American
Anatomies, Robyn Wiegman defined “economies of visibility” as “the epistemology of the visual that underlies both race and gender: that process
of corporeal inscription that defines each as a binary, wholly visible affair”
(1995, p. 8). Wiegman traces this visual inscription of the body historically, in
both the pre– and post–Civil Rights eras, and links the economy of visibility
to the proliferation of cinema, television and video and the representation of
bodies as kinds of commodities. While surely media such as film and television continue to serve up bodies as narrative commodities, I’d like to extend
Weigman’s definition to thinking about how economies of visibility work in
an era of advanced capitalism and brand culture, postfeminism, and multiple
media platforms.
Specifically, I see economies of visibility as gendered economies, that
function to make the feminine body central, not just in media representation,
but also in law, policy, health, and discourses of sexuality. Defining economy
in this context is important: On the one hand, I’m not making the argument
that we can simply apply a business model onto the ways we construct
our personal identities or understand social relations. That is, it is not the
case that business strategies get plucked from the realm of economics and
mapped neatly onto the realm of culture. Yet, I’m also not using “economy”
or “market” as mere metaphors. Rather, I adopt a more nuanced account
of the logics and moralities of both economics and culture as a way to
understand how identities are constructed within the economy of visibility,
and to ask what is at stake in this kind of construction. In particular, what
is at stake for girls and women, and for culture, in adopting the logics and
moralities of visibility as an end in itself?
Every economy comprised different components. For example, as a
basic concept, an economy relies on a space wherein forces of supply and
demand operate, where buyers and sellers interact to trade or buy goods,
where the value of products is deliberated, where consumers are identified,
and where specific forms of labor and production occur.
The current demand for visibility for girls and women is created in
part because girls are seen as in crisis: this most recent “girl crisis” finds
purchase in education, self-esteem programs, confidence, and leadership.
The supply for visibility takes many forms, but is most clearly enhanced by
social media—in an era where selfies are a common form of expression, As
Sarah Projansky points out, the demand for visibility for girls is constant: As
she says, “media incessantly look at and invite us to look at girls. Girls are
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objects at which we gaze, whether we want to or not. They are everywhere
in our mediascapes. As such, media turn girls into spectacles—visual objects
on display” (Projansky, 2014, p. 5).
In an economy for visibility, buyers and sellers interact to trade or buy
goods. For example, this interaction manifests in YouTube partnerships,
where posters can be offered a partnership with YouTube based on the
number of hits they have accumulated. It manifests in empowerment organizations, where girls are seen as in need of being empowered, and which use
corporate, nonprofit, and governmental funds to form organizations. It manifests in the form of the “girl effect” in international development discourse,
where the girl is positioned as the prominent agent of social change and as
the symbol for a “smarter economics.”
The product in gendered economies of visibility is the feminine body.
Its value is constantly deliberated over, evaluated, judged, and scrutinized
through media discourses, law, and policy. The dual dynamic of regulating
and producing the visible self work to not only serve up bodies as commodities but also create the body and the self as a brand (Banet-Weiser,
2012).
Consumers are clearly identified in the economy of visibility. Like with
all economies, some consumers are considered more valuable than others
(though this does not mean that other sorts of consumers don’t exist). In the
economy of visibility, the two most visible female consumers are those that
Anita Harris calls “Can-Do girls” and “At-Risk girls” (Harris, 2004). The CanDo girl—typically White, middle class, and entrepreneurial—is positioned in
opposition to the At-Risk girl—typically a girl of color or a working class
girl, and one who is thus apparently more susceptible to poverty, drugs,
early pregnancy, and fewer career goals and ambitions. Defining girls as
Can-Do and At-Risk is in part the result of the current historical moment,
where girlhood and womanhood is understood as both a site of possibility
and a challenge. The visibility of Can-Do and At-Risk girls also creates a
context of intense surveillance around girls, a practice of looking that traces
their every move to see if it is one on the path to Can-Do or At-Risk. This
constant surveillance, in turn, encourages girls’ participation in the circuits of
media visibility.
And of course, in every economy, there is labor and work. The kind
of labor in a specific economy varies. In a gendered economy of visibility, there is a dominant presence of the affective labor of femininity. In a
context of post-Fordist capitalism, as many have noted, the content and
shape of work shifts, so that work becomes more and more about what
Nancy Baym calls “relational labor,” which is “precarious, flexible, immaterial, service-oriented, and often tied to the management of one’s own and
others’ emotions.” (Baym, forthcoming; see also Gregg, 2011; Weeks, 2011).
Alongside dominant practices of neoliberal capitalism, where work is more
“insecure and casualized” (Pratt & Gill, 2008, p. 3), other economies such as
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the economy of visibility emerge, where work and labor are primarily selfcare and care work. This is in part because of labor shifts since the 1970s
that Lisa Adkins describes as the “cultural feminization of work,” in which,
regardless of gender, more workers are expected to incorporate relational
work into their routine practices.
Here, the labor of the Can-Do girl is especially visible, where girls
and young women engage in particular forms of affective labor to make
themselves marketable in an economy of visibility. Part of what characterizes the contemporary labor environment is a move away from what have
been traditionally more stable jobs (because these jobs are no longer available) toward more precarious, informal ones, where girls and young women
cultivate and acquire status as a form of currency, in order to make themselves marketable (Marwick, 2013). Of course, not every girl or woman can
monetize their self-work, or their affective labor, in a way that is actually sustaining. The striving for marketability in an economy of visibility functions as
what Lauren Berlant calls “cruel optimism,” where affective labor is normative and disciplinary, and works to bind “us into structures and relations that
may, in classical Marxist terms, not be in our own real interests” (Berlant,
2011; Pratt & Gill, 2008).
Finally, in economies of visibility, there are markets. In the current environment, I see these markets as industries that are built around both the
“crisis” of girls and girls as consumers, industries that support and validate
the Can-Do girl or invest in the At-Risk girl, that illuminate and make visible
specific bodies over others. Again, these are the elements that comprise an
economy of visibility: supply and demand, buyers and sellers, deliberation
of value, products, consumers, and specific forms of labor and production.
Though I laid them out here as separate elements, importantly, they are
deeply interrelated and intertwined. In other words, the product in the economy of visibility is the feminine body, but women and girls are also the
buyers; the consumers in this economy are also the products. The Can-Do
and At-Risk girl can be conflated in the same girl, if one is empowered by
her own choices but these choices place her At Risk. The markets for girls
exist alongside literal, much more malicious markets in girls. These components are not discrete, but rather inform and constitute each other. In the
following talk, I examine two different markets in the economy of visibility:
The market for empowerment and the market for protection.
THE MARKET FOR EMPOWERMENT
In September 2013, New York City unveiled a new public health drive targeted at girls. The program, called the NYC Girls Program, is funded by then
Mayor Michael Bloomberg (total cost US$330,000), and includes an afterschool program, physical fitness classes, and a Twitter campaign, #IAmAGirl.
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The campaign is aimed at “improving girls’ self-esteem and body image,”
and features ordinary kids with the tagline: “I’m Beautiful the Way I Am.”
The program has a wide distribution plan, with ads on subways and bus stations, and a 30 second video that will be posted on YouTube, the campaign’s
website, and played in city taxis.
Empowerment is, as we know, a current buzzword—it is the keyword
of postfeminism, but it is, and has been, an important term for other kinds of
feminism as well; it is a word used relentlessly in marketing and branding; it
is a political term, used to capture the need to address disenfranchisement.
Because it is so malleable, it lends itself both to politics and commodification. When we talk about empowerment, then, it is crucial to be very
specific about what we mean, and we must not simply state it as if it is
self-evident. Instead, we must finish the statement with the necessary clause:
empowerment for whom? And for what? What are we empowering girls
to do?
The claim of empowerment by organizations such as the NYC Girls
Program is not the same use of empowerment as, say, advertising and marketing (and in the contemporary marketplace, female empowerment is used
to sell things from tampons to technology). Yet, the claim of empowerment
in girl empowerment organizations rests on a similar foundation as marketing and branding—that of the individual girl, one who is seen to be in crisis
and at the same time recognized for her market potential.
The NYC Girls Program is part of an exponential rise in “girl
empowerment” organizations in the United States, which are variously corporate, nonprofit, and state-funded, in the past 15 years. The Girl Scouts,
founded in 1912 and now with 3.2 million members, have more or less held
the place of organizations that empower girls in the U.S. While organizations
such as the Girl Scouts have long focused on building confidence in young
girls, contemporary empowerment organizations and their emphasis on
building feminine leadership skills, self-confidence, and healthy self-esteem
seem unique to the current context. That is, the contemporary moment is not
merely characterized by the commodification of empowerment, but it also
positions the subjects of empowerment—girls—as particular kinds of economic subjects. It is, then, not only a process of commodification but a shift
in gendered subjectivity. There are different, and contradictory, discourses
and practices of femininity that are deeply interrelated in this moment, from
a critical focus on the hypersexualization of girls and women in the media,
to persistent efforts to empower girls, to postfeminist sex positivity, to the
retraction of reproductive rights in the U.S. Girls are generally seen to be
“in crisis”—whether because of the media, education, or public policy—and
thus are in need of a resolution, found in empowerment organizations.
And, since the late 1990s, there has been a remarkable increase in organizations that have the goal of empowering girls. Many of these organizations
are well-known, like Girls, Inc. or the Dove Self-Esteem fund. Many others
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are smaller and more localized. There are also dozens of empowerment initiatives, such as the recent Sheryl Sandberg’s Ban Bossy campaign and Cover
Girl’s #Girls Can. These U.S.-based empowerment organizations emerge at
around the same time that empowering girls becomes a central theme in
international development discourse.
For example, in the mid 2000s, the Nike Foundation, in partnership with
the UN and the World Health Organization, coined the term “the Girl Effect,”
to demonstrate the significance of empowering girls in a global economy
(Koffman & Gill, 2013). Girls have been highlighted by development organizations as “the powerful and privileged agents of social change, indeed even
as solutions to the global crisis and world poverty.” (Shain, 2013, p. 9), leading to what Koffman and Gill call the “girl-powering of development” (2013).
Investing in girls in this discourse is, importantly, the right business move—it
reflects what is called “smarter economics,” where the education of girls in
developing nations are seen as the impetus for economic development and
progress.
Out of over a hundred girl empowerment organizations that have
emerged in the U.S. since 1990, 87% have emerged since the late 1990s,
with a sharp increase after 2000. Though these organizations all claim to be
dedicated to empowering girls, they understand and define empowerment
according to different criteria: Those founded in the early 21st–century generally focus on three factors: 40% focus on confidence, leadership, and
self-esteem (including those that focus on health and fitness); 37% focus on
poverty or risky behaviors (these are mostly international, located in developing countries); 19% focus on the education of specific tools, including
media/filmmaking, writing, and STEM fields (Dejmanee, personal correspondence, September 20, 2013). Again, consumers in the economy of visibility
are typically Can-Do or At-Risk girls, and the themes of girl empowerment
organizations map onto this framework so that those with a focus on confidence, leadership, and self-esteem target the Can-Do girl, while those with a
focus on global poverty and education target the At-Risk girl.
We first need to think about why there has been such a dramatic
increase in these organizations in the 21st century. This increased focus on
the empowerment of girls is in part because girls have been identified as
a group in “crisis” during this time—in terms of leadership, confidence and
education—so that federal and state funding has been allocated to address
the problem of girls in education, public discourse, and urban planning;
and international development organizations have focused on the girl as the
solution to a host of issues, including poverty and the global economy.
Another reason there has been such an increase in empowerment organizations within the current moment is because, again, girls are seen as an
incredibly lucrative consumer market. They are one of the fastest growing
markets in the 21st century, and they are targeted endlessly through branding and marketing culture. Within this multilayered context, girls in crisis and
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girls as consumers are seen as in need of empowerment. Girls are increasingly positioned within consumer culture as the hopeful solution to tough
economic times, and are constantly marketed to because they are seen as
financially lucrative.
Importantly, these two positionings of girls—as in crisis and as powerful consumers—are mutually sustaining. In both of these subject positions,
girls are seen as in need of empowerment, and in both, the definition of
empowerment focuses on the individual girl as an entrepreneurial subject.
This has allowed for the creation of a market of empowerment. The question that continues to linger, however, is empowerment for what? What are
girls empowered to do, exactly? To address these questions, I look at two
girl empowerment organizations, the Confidence Coalition, which focuses on
confidence and leadership, and AfricAid, which focuses on educating girls
in Africa so that they can be part of the official global economy. These two
different organizations have different logics and mechanisms—both are nonprofit, but one is geared toward middle-class American girls, and the other
geared toward girls in a vastly different economic context, that of global
poverty. Without conflating the two contexts, I want to argue that both kinds
of organization make visible the two primary consumers in an economy of
visibility: the Can-Do and At-Risk girl.
THE CONFIDENCE COALITION
The Confidence Coalition was founded by the Kappa Delta sorority and,
as their mission statement declares, they are dedicated to the “confidence
movement” that intends to “build confidence in girls so that they can feel
better about themselves, stand up to peer pressure, challenge media stereotypes and bullying behavior, and end abusive relationships.” (Confidence
Coalition website) While certainly these are admirable goals, this organization (which is actually a coalition of different organizations) relies on
conventional feminine routines, activities, and identities as activist practices.
Perhaps most importantly, the Confidence Coalition focuses on the individual girl as an agent for change, thus putting the burden of confidence on her
body, rather than addressing more structural and infrastructural mechanisms
that encourage a lack of confidence for girls in the first place.
Of course, confidence, self-esteem, and leadership are important elements of one’s subjectivity, especially for girls and women who have been
encouraged to understand themselves as submissive, insecure, and subordinate. I am not challenging this. But what I am suggesting is that these
individual aspects of empowerment lend themselves to commodification,
precisely because they are so often expressed and understood within a postfeminist sensibility and a context of capitalist marketability. And, helping
girls become more confident in the Confidence Coalition is not a feminist
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issue with feminist goals. It is about individual girls and women and their
subjectivities, not about the ways patriarchy depends on women being NOT
confident. It is this tension, between the important goals of confidence and
leadership with girls, and the commodification of these concepts, that then
transforms this as an individual rather than a social, or feminist problem.
For example, the Confidence Coalition asks girls to take a “pledge
to be more confident.” This positions “confidence” as a choice, a
commodity—girls, as consumers, just need to be confident, and then apparently it will happen. The various activities endorsed by the Confidence
Coalition are typically to be undertaken individually. Their success, measured
in terms of self-confidence, is also an individual accomplishment.
One of the forms of activism promoted by the Confidence Coalition is
the “Go Confidently” handbag collection. This is a campaign where members of the coalition donate handbags, which are then given to charity to
give to girls who might not otherwise afford them. While this is not conventional commodity consumption in the sense that it is not a typical purchasing
exchange, this campaign challenges little about traditional definitions of femininity as being overly focused on fashion and accessories and the body.
More than that, this campaign squarely situates confidence as a commodity—
something “you can carry!”—thus relegating empowerment to something that
is individual and self-realizing and as part of an industry, instead of recognizing the way that institutionalized gender politics denies power to girls and
women.
Inserting “empowerment” into industry, or creating it as a kind of market, is not simply marketing spin. There are real stakes in understanding
visibility as empowerment. The commodification of empowerment through
visibility reifies empowerment as a dynamic force, and contains it as an end
in itself, rather than as a starting point for material change and social justice. The “crisis in girls” and the need for confidence achieves momentum
within the specific political economy of neoliberal capitalism, where girls
are also recognized as important consumers. In fact, the crisis exists as a
crisis precisely because there quickly emerged a market for dealing with its
needs—which is a key component of the dynamics of neoliberal capitalism.
And, as often occurs when markets emerge, the “crisis in girls” was transformed into a brand - a logo or slogan to attach to research reports, self-help
books, and educational programs: It is “confidence you can carry!”
AFRICAID
Alongside those organizations such as the Confidence Coalition that hope to
empower can-do girls, a number of non-profit organizations have emerged to
help provide resources for those girls who are seen as at-risk. While there are
certainly organizations that focus on local marginalized and disenfranchised
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girls, the majority of groups that have emerged in the 21st century that focus
on at-risk girls target those populations affected by global poverty. There
is a seeming paradox here, where nonprofit organizations aiming to eradicate global poverty are also built upon the marketability of the “girl crisis,”
or at least the ways in which this “crisis” leads to the profitability of girl
empowerment in the current economy. So, while “can-do” girls, and the
organizations that are created to support and validate this subject position,
certainly can be seen as a “value-add” in the marketability of empowerment,
the at-risk girls and the organizations that support them are similarly needed
as logics for this same market. To be sure, these are different economic contexts, but some of the ways in which they invoke the girl as someone who
is both in crisis and a potential economic subject are similar.
Thus empowerment organizations often state that the lasting goal of
focusing on girls in poverty in international development will be an “investment” in girls, because it is girls who can motivate financial growth. As Ofra
Koffman and Rosalind Gill, Heather Switzer, Farzana Shain, and others have
noted, the positioning of girls as the answer to global financial crises has
resulted in what Nike has called “the Girl Effect,” where girls are seen as
agents of change in development.
Take, for example, the empowerment organization AfricAid. The tag line
of this U.S. based nonprofit organization is “Reach Teach Empower,” and the
mission statement of the group states that it is dedicated to supporting “girls’
education in Africa in order to provide young women with the opportunity
to transform their own lives and the futures of their communities” (AfricAid
website, my emphasis). Indeed, one event that AfricAid sponsored explicitly references the “Girl Effect:” The primary output of the organization is
educational scholarships, with the specific aim “to empower African girls to
be leaders.” The organization’s website follows a conventional humanitarian
visual aesthetic, with pictures of smiling young African girls at school and at
play, as well as an embedded video demonstrating one of the organization’s
missions to support girls’ education in Tanzania.
But it is not merely the humanitarian narrative that is embodied by
organizations such as AfricAid. The narrative focus of empowerment organizations such as the Confidence Coalition on individual issues for girls—i.e.,
confidence, self-esteem, and body image—is the same narrative that mobilizes organizations that focus on girls who lack resources and are victims of
poverty. The Girl Effect, that is, relies on the contrast between girls’ powerlessness and their exceptional capacity (Koffman & Gill, 2013). Within
this frame, the Girl Effect, and the organizations that mobilize this discourse, position girls (especially those in the global South), not only as the
key to international development but also as the perfect embodiment of a
neoliberal subject. Girls in the global South are therefore seen as potential
neoliberal subjects, hindered by poverty and patriarchy; they merely have
to be harnessed by development organizations in order to realize neoliberal
subjectivity.
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In fact, it is precisely because of obstacles such as poverty that makes
girls in the global South quintessential neoliberal subjects. As Koffman and
Gill point out (2013), development initiatives such as the “Girl Effect” portray girls in poverty as “already entrepreneurial” because they have had to
be resourceful: “Poverty, it seems, can be celebrated for the entrepreneurial
capacities it stimulates” (Koffman and Gill, 2013, p. 90). The “empowerment”
message of AfricAid might read a bit differently than the Confidence
Coalition, but it still taps into a market of neoliberal empowerment.
A postfeminist cultural landscape, neoliberal capitalism, and the normalization of the brand and lifestyle of “girl power” enables these organizations
to follow an entrepreneurial business model that is encouraged and
given shape by neoliberal capitalist practices, and in both we can see
girls as an investment upon which these organizations thrive, and where
“empowerment becomes a function of rational exchange.” (Switzer, 2013,
p. 349).
The goals and intentions of girls’ empowerment organizations are certainly important, and I am not questioning whatever impact they may have
here. It is actually quite difficult to be critical of these kinds of organizations. However, it is important to attend to the discourses and practices
that provide the logic for these organizations, as they validate the business
logic of individual entrepreneurialism and thus have political ramifications
for girls’ subjectivities. These are not the same political ramifications that are
struggled over within feminist politics. Within the market of empowerment,
organizations work to build financial profiles where girls are “human capital
investments,” and validate their position as a kind of resolution to financial
crisis.
THE MARKET FOR PROTECTION
There is a seemingly contradictory market emerging at the same time as the
market for empowerment: the market for protection. However, these markets are not in opposition to each other, but are rather mutually sustaining.
In the market for protection, girls are also seen as “worthy investments.”
During the same period when we witness an increase in girl empowerment
organizations and the emergence of a market for empowerment, we also see
the emergence of another market, what I am calling the market for protection. As I hope to show, both the market for empowerment and protection,
while seemingly encompassing different categories of analysis—one is about
putting girls on display, the other is about containing girls—revolve around
the individual girl and her body. But these markets are recognized as important within an economic context—they are simply “smarter economics” to
invest in girls, whether they are Can Do or At Risk. This economic context
is not a feminist context—it is not invested in restructuring systems so that
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girls would not feel insecure in the first place. This lack of feminist politics
as a context for empowerment encourages the market for protection, where
girls and women are seen as untrustworthy with their personal and bodily
choices.
The market for protection, unlike the market for empowerment, has
clear religious connections, in particular with evangelical culture, because
this market focuses on the purity of the female body, and reinforces a
religious-patriarchal organization of gender. Here, religion and politics intertwine to create a context that operates under the logics of the neoliberal
market, with identifiable consumers, the value of the product—a women’s
“purity”—that gets deliberated in public spaces, and an industry of merchandise connected to protecting women. The market for protection has two
major components: Abstinence-only education and the purity movement,
and the political rollback on women’s rights of the body in the 21st century.
ABSTINENCE AND PURITY
At the beginning of the 21st century, there was an increase in federal funding
of abstinence education at U.S. public schools, and a general increase in the
abstinence-until-married movements. Like girl empowerment groups, these
initiatives and campaigns range from non-profits to for profit to state-funded.
An industry has emerged around these campaigns, including merchandise
and retail, public speaking, curriculum services, and literature. While theoretically one could argue that abstinence-only education is targeted to both
boys and girls, it is clear that the primary address is to girls, and is focused
on the question of “virginity”—a discourse which is almost always applied
to girls (Valenti, 2009).
Abstinence-only education is not new, but like girls’ empowerment
groups, we have seen an exponential rise in these programs in the 21st
century. We also see more federal money spent on these programs (while all
other sources of federal funding for public school is being cut) in the middle
of a global economic recession. The funding amounts have been somewhat
uneven, but nonetheless consistent (this can be traced back to the Reagan
administration). Federal funding for abstinence only education persists, even
given an overwhelming body of research proving that these programs do not
work, and that the goals of the federal expenditure have not been achieved.
Funding for these programs grew exponentially from 1996 until
2009, particularly during the years of the George W. Bush administration.
According to the Sexuality Information and Educational Council of the United
States (SEICUS) public policy office, between 1996 and 2009, Congress
funneled over one-and-a-half billion tax-payer dollars into abstinence-onlyuntil-marriage programs. While many of the groups are religious-based, there
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is also an ostensibly non-religious federal agenda on abstinence only (these
are called Welfare Title V, Abstinence till Marriage Fund and SPRANS).
In 2010, the Obama administration cut a great deal of the federal money.
However, one of the federal funding sources, Title V, was recently resurrected under the Affordable Care Act (which could be read as a way
to appease conservatives who were up in arms about the ACA providing coverage for birth control). Importantly, the framing and discourse of
Title V has shifted in the 21st century: Unlike other governmental acts that
included abstinence education as part of preventing, say, teen pregnancy,
the Title V abstinence-only-until-marriage program marked a significant shift
in resources and ideology from preventing teen pregnancy to promoting
abstinence from sexual activity outside of marriage, at any age. Every state,
with the exception of California, has at one time accepted Title V abstinence
only-until-marriage funds (and these end up often connected to religious
organizations). This shift in rhetoric and ideology from prevention of pregnancy and STDs to preventing all sexual activity before marriage encourages
the merging of abstinence-only education with what Jessica Valenti has called
the purity movement (Valenti, 2009).
Within the market for protection, abstinence-only education and purity
discourse position the virginal female body as the product. As in the market
for empowerment, consumers within the market for protection are girls and
women, who are cast as vulnerable and in-crisis. Here again, girls are seen
as worthy investments and important consumers. The investment in girls in
the market of protection is about disempowering them through the regulating
and policing of their bodies. With identifiable products and consumers, an
industry has developed around abstinence and purity, in the form of organizations, speakers for hire, and retail merchandise. These are advertised
and offered on a national abstinence clearinghouse website. Organizations
such as Aim For Success, True Love Waits, the Pure Love Club, and Project
Reality, ask young teens to commit to abstinence until married—and it should
be noted that this seems to be an exclusively heteronormative definition of
marriage, with many of the organizations defining marriage as “biblical.”
For example, the organization True Love Waits asks young teens to
make the True Love Waits Pledge: “Believing that true love waits, I make
a commitment to God, myself, my family, my friends, my future mate, and
my future children to a lifetime of purity including sexual abstinence from
this day until the day I enter a biblical marriage relationship.” There are
individual speakers for hire; motivational speakers, often comedians, who
are hired by schools to present the value of abstinence. A few examples:
Jason Evert, from the Pure Love Club, says: “A culture of immodest women
will necessarily be a culture of uncommitted men” and “Sexuality is meant
to be a gift between a husband and wife for the purpose of babies and
bonding.” Justin Lookadoo, a former crime prevention specialist, says about
girls: “Accept your girly-ness. You’re a girl. Be proud of all that means. You
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are soft, you are gentle, you are a woman. Don’t try to be a guy. Guys like
you because you are different from them. So let your girly-ness soar.” He
also delivers this zinger: “Women shouldn’t be surprised, if they dress like a
piece of meat, if men want to put them on the barbeque.”
Almost all the speakers on the abstinence clearinghouse site are men,
and there is an obvious heteronormativity and misogyny that shapes most of
the rhetoric. It is this same discourse that shapes the purity movement: While
purity is known as a religious-based movement, there are deeply intertwined
relationships between religious purity movement and the federally funded
abstinence-only education programs.
Retail and merchandise are produced for the purity movement, such
as the company, The Silver Ring Thing. This organization seems to revolve
around the commodity object: the silver ring that represents one’s pledge
to remain a virgin until married. For the Silver Ring Thing, one should only
buy and wear the ring after attending a Silver Ring Thing event to discuss
purity. They also sell replacement rings (I’m assuming not for people who
decided to have sex, but then regretted it), new student ring packages, parent
ring packages, and postevent rings for people who attended the events but
didn’t have a chance to buy the rings. There are other retailers that are not
as overtly religious (such as K-Mart, Target, and Hot Topic) that sell the
rings and other purity merchandise alongside other products. Aside from
organizations, speakers, and retail, there are other cultural forms associated
with purity, such as Purity Balls—which are often federally funded— where
young girls pledge their virginity to their fathers at a formal event.
Finally, in the market for protection, abstinence and purity exist alongside a more overtly political dimension, the retraction of reproductive rights
and other rights of the female body in the U.S. political sphere. At the
same time as girl empowerment organizations are gaining traction, there
is a parallel political and cultural context in the U.S., where the ostensibly
“empowered” female body is under threat. While discourses of visibility and
empowerment abound in popular culture and media, in political culture, the
bodies of girls and women are increasingly disciplined through law, policy,
and public discourse. This disconnect marks the difference between individual empowerment and feminist empowerment; in the first case, with the
girls empowerment organizations, the focus is on empowering individual
girls (and perhaps by extension, the global economy). While this is important, the focus is not on feminist empowerment. This allows for the market
of protection to emerge in particular ways.
In the past several years in the U.S., reproductive rights of women have
been challenged through a variety of means, from federally funded abstinence programs just discussed to challenges to overturn Roe vs. Wade, to
other antiabortion campaigns and restrictions. In 2011 alone, in every state
in the U.S., legislators introduced more than 1,100 reproductive health and
rights-related provisions. By the end of 2011, 135 of these provisions had
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been enacted in 36 states, a dramatic increase from the year before. 68% of
these new provisions—92 in 24 states—restrict access to abortion services.
These provisions range in severity from conservative discourse trying to
prevent health insurance companies to cover contraception to the larger context of public battles over rape and abortion laws. In 2011, for example, more
than 200 Republican members of Congress co-sponsored House Resolution
3, the No Taxpayer Funding for Abortion Act, which contained language
restricting the exception for federally funded abortions to “an act of forcible
rape or, if a minor, an act of incest.” The Tea Party political movement, under
the guise of “controlling government spending,” have introduced close to a
thousand antiabortion bills in the United States since 2007.
These legal struggles have been mirrored in popular and political discourse by the increasing aggressiveness of conservative politicians in making
their views on rape and abortion known to the public (as is well known).
Last year, at least four states have voted to ban all abortion coverage in private health care plans, Michigan most recently, and most states have limited
coverage (more updated stats).
The market of empowerment and the market for protection are mutually
constitutive and sustaining. They both rely on the female body as product,
they both identify girls as primary consumers, and they both deliberate over
the cultural value of the body. Yet, the market for empowerment invokes
empowerment as an individual characteristic or aspiration, not as a systemic,
or feminist, politics of empowerment. The linkage here is that without a feminist definition of empowerment, contradictory markets such as the market
for protection can emerge, again focusing on the individual girls body, but
in this case as one to be protected.
CONCLUSION
It is easy to make an argument about these markets as yet another expression of voracious neoliberalism. And it’s easy in part because it is true. But I
want to think through the ambivalence of capitalism, and also take seriously
what this context enables as well as what it forecloses. In other words, it is
important to take seriously the cultural value of emotion, affect, and desire,
such as empowerment and confidence, that comes out of capitalist practices,
and think about these values in terms of the potential of ambivalence, its
generative power. For it is within these spaces that hope and anxiety, pleasure and desire, fear and insecurity are nurtured and maintained. It is here
that we can think about what it means to move theory to everyday practice,
and how approaching consumer culture, or neoliberalism, for that matter, is
not a zero sum game.
Investing in girls is important, and significant. But we need to think
seriously about the reasons why girls are seen as good investments. It is
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not necessarily about being fair in an unfair world, or challenging gender
inequities that are wide-ranging and systemic. Yet, it is about gender inequality. In 2009, the President of the World Bank said that addressing “gender
equality is smart economics.” In Obama’s recent State of the Union Address
he said, “When women succeed, America succeeds.” I think we need to think
through this, and take this as an opportunity to redefine the discourse here.
To return to McRobbie, she argues that girls are seen as better economic subjects in a context in which feminism is losing ground and traction. They are
also positioned as better economic subjects within an economy of visibility
(McRobbie, 2009).
In his recent work, Herman Gray has critiqued visibility, and what he
calls the continuing “investment in the cultural politics of representation for
the liberal subject of identity” (Gray, 2012). He questions what visibility might
mean as a political practice in an era of what he calls “the proliferation
of difference,” and he calls this the shift from race to difference. Gray’s
focus is on race, specifically African American identity, but I want to think
about what this means for gendered identity. That is, the cultural conditions
that made it important to demand visibility in the first place—not enough
representation, representation that is highly stereotypical, institutionalized
sexism—have shifted in an age of postfeminism and advanced capitalism, so
that that demand looks different. Rather, the demand for visibility as something that is not coupled with a political project is becoming more and more
paramount.
This, I see as a shift in how gender is articulated and experienced
within an economy of visibility. Here, the shift might be thought of as
from liberation to empowerment (Carole Stabile suggested this to me). In a
postfeminist context, the historical feminist goals of “liberation” have transformed to empowerment, because ostensibly women and girls have been
liberated. That is, liberation, problematic as it is as a concept, was understood within a context of feminism as a way to address structural inequalities.
Empowerment is understood within a concept of “smarter economics” that
sees gender as an important way to stimulate the economy. Since the connection is economic, the locus of empowerment is the individual girl. This is
not unimportant. But like Gray’s concept of difference, empowerment as an
individual attribute is both a commodity and a market for commodities.
The markets for empowerment and protection are not merely metaphorical markets. Rather, girls are identified as key players in an international
market, and we are told to invest in them. But when gender inequality is
understood through an economic context rather than a feminist one, we
might get smarter economics but not necessarily smarter politics. Both markets rely on the girl’s body as product, both deliberate over the cultural
value of girls, and both are situated within an economy of visibility. Feminist
politics allows us to question the ways in which these two markets are mutually constitutive, how they inform and validate each other. Feminist politics
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insists on wondering why girls should be empowered to feel confident in a
context that politically and legally does not trust them to make choices about
their own bodies.
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