Laurie Penny’s In-Your-Face Feminism

[ismnotwasm]

When reigning pop queen Beyoncé Knowles stood, with the unshakeable self-assurance of a warrior, in front of a boldly lit, capital-lettered declaration of “FEMINIST” at the MTV Video Music Awards last month, the media responded with something approximating rapture. “The zeitgeist is irrefutably feminist: its name literally in bright lights,” wrote Jessica Valenti at The Guardian, while Amanda Marcotte at Slate argued that the singer had put paid to the idea that feminists are just “ugly wannabes” who “hate men” and children. The New Republic’s Rebecca Traister called the performance “one of the most powerful pop-culture messages of [her] lifetime.”

The moment marked a crest in the current wave of popularity and recognition feminism has been enjoying in popular culture recently. Young celebrities from Lorde to Miley Cyrus to Taylor Swift have been eagerly claiming the label, while old school media like Cosmopolitan and Playboy have given themselves feminist makeovers. Beyoncé’s performance just made it official. Feminism is cool now: no longer the refuge of, as conservative commentator Rush Limbaugh once put it, women who had been excluded by “the mainstream of society,” but front and center of the mainstream itself—celebrated by queen bees, and Queen Beys.

The resurgence of the women’s movement over the past decade has been a product of two opposite but interrelated impulses. The first has been the explosion of feminist discussion in the blogosphere and on social media, which has sparked lively conversations around issues such as racial inequality, transgender rights, and the cultural factors that contribute to sexual assault. The second has been a concerted attempt to destigmatize feminism and make it more palatable, as exemplified by twin campaigns last year by UK women’s magazine Elle and New York-based media platform Vitamin W to “rebrand feminism.”

At first glance, these two developments seem starkly divided: one niche, complex and devoted to the development of new ideas, and the other populist and unthreatening, designed to appeal to the broadest audience possible. But they have more in common than you might think. It was the eruption of feminist conversation online that informed commercial publishers that there was money to be made from talking about gender. And the desire to popularize the women’s movement has been as much a motivator for parts of the feminist blogosphere as the development of a new set of feminist ethics.

http://news.yahoo.com/laurie-penny-face-feminism-040000726--politics.html