This resurfaced quote from Emma Watson shows how vapid mainstream feminism has always been
Though the actor’s observations are from a different time, from women’s private members’ clubs to bestselling books, this kind of rhetoric is far from over
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Your support makes all the difference.2014 was a strange time for feminism. Anyone who was Very Online™ when Tumblr was in its heyday and when Lena Dunham’s Girls hit streaming sites for the first time can probably now acknowledge, with a little bit of humility, that our priorities were off.
Celebrities declaring themselves “a feminist” – or “not a feminist” – were headline-worthy utterances in themselves, people opened their purses to purchase T-shirts that read “this is what a feminist looks like”, and Twitter attempted to have genuine, good-faith conversations about whether Beyoncé was a feminist icon or not. Amid this, we also saw a dramatic increase in questions about the superficial choices that individual women make. In hindsight, the whole conversation was nonsensical, cyclical, and lacked any sort of structural analysis, but it still got a lot of airtime, and in some spaces, continues to do so today.
That’s why many Twitter users felt confused, irritated and tired when campaigning group The Women’s Organisation tweeted a quote from an old interview Emma Watson did with Elle over the weekend, in what felt like a cursed blast from the past. "If you want to run for prime minister, you can,” the quote read. “If you don’t, that’s wonderful, too. Shave your armpits, don’t shave them, wear flats one day, heels the next; We want to empower women to do exactly what they want.”
Watson’s comments were somewhat taken out of context (the quote in full adds that “feminism is not here to dictate to you”) – nonetheless, the statement does still feel a little jarringly regressive. Meanwhile, the supportive response from some readers seems to reveal that this sort of rhetoric still very much exists within the movement.
But this sort of discourse, which is primarily concerned with issues like body hair, clothing, or whether we have a woman prime minister, reeks of White Feminism (which doesn’t just refer to feminists that happen to be white, but rather those that typically don’t account for overlapping systems of oppression). Because, of course, decisions regarding what to do with your armpit hair or whether to wear heels are not on the list of primary daily concerns for the majority of working-class women, women of colour, queer women, trans women, or disabled women.
These women, who experience misogyny in tandem with classism, racism, homophobia, transphobia or ableism often find themselves at the end of state policies like austerity, the hostile environment and the proposed scrapping of the gender recognition act – and are therefore more concerned about survival. But to the most advantaged women, superficial questions about what to do with your body in order to call yourself a “feminist” can feel most pressing.
Directly attached to this issue is the never-ending obsession with “feminism” in the nominal sense – i.e. “can I call myself a feminist?” Writer and professor Roxane Gay’s 2014 essay collection Bad Feminist grapples with exactly this – the cultural myth that there are prescriptive markers of what a feminist can wear, or the music that they can listen to. In mainstream conversations about feminism in the early 2010s, this almost felt like the question, with column inches abound dedicated to dilemmas like “can you be a feminist and still enjoy a hen party?”, “can you be a feminist and get married?”, “can you be a feminist and get a boob job?” and “can you be a feminist and wear spanx?”
As we hurtle into the next politically and economically fraught decade, it feels there is a growing consensus that this is the wrong question entirely – feminism should be something you do, not something you are (or something you declare about yourself on a T-shirt).
Then, there is the idea that feminism is about me – whether I am a feminist, and the choices that I make – which is ultimately underpinned by neoliberal ideology. "Choice feminism" is more interested in the individual than the structural – it breaks down large-scale analysis and tells us that feminism can be approached on a case-by-case basis. This is the sort of feminism that tells us each woman’s individual “successes” are successes for all of us, even if the least advantaged women see none of the rewards. By this system of logic, neoliberal feminism also teaches us that each woman’s individual choices are of the same inflated importance. On the contrary, black feminists like myself argue that we should instead turn our attention to the structural forces that oppress women – particularly on an institutional or state level.
Of course, even though Watson’s quotes are from a different time, and her politics have also come a long way since, White Feminism and neoliberal feminism are far from “over”. From women’s private members’ clubs to bestselling books, we can see that this kind of rhetoric is still incredibly profitable – and we also still see people using the defence of “feminism” to justify the harmful actions of women prime ministers and women CEOs. But thinking back to the context of Watson’s quotes in particular, it does seem like the conversation we were having then is quite different to the one we find ourselves in the midst of now; that women, and anyone who experiences gendered oppression, are increasingly aware that “individualist feminism” is an oxymoron.