Being a Girls' Girl Doesn't Mean Breaking the Glass Ceiling
The Empty Cheers of Liberal Feminism
When I think back on my earlier conceptions of feminism in high school (circa 2015), the gender pay gap and the glass ceiling, slut-shaming in The Scarlet Letter (1850) and Easy A, even Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign were some of my ushers to FeminismTM. Wanting equal recognition for excellence in work and a proportionate representation of women in leadership positions was about the extent of my “feminism.” If none of that sounds suspect, then keep reading! [Now, to be clear (and this is the only time I will make this concession which I feel can pander to the empire’s standard of reasonableness, i.e., respectability politics), the objective here and here on is not to call people “out” (although, let’s be real, some people need to be called out; I’ll let you come up with your own list of political enemies). Instead, I am inviting you into a cozy corner of my home, where we can sip our choice beverages (earl grey for me) and gossip about the enforcers and enablers of hegemonic culture— “Gossip provided another way of ‘talking back’ to the dictatorship. Recognizing the danger to the dictatorship posed by gossip, Marcos issued a decree prohibiting rumor mongering. Gossip was classified as a threat both the nation’s security and the hegemonic culture of law and order.” (Tolentino 134)]
In this essay (lol…), I am problematizing this brand-name (and yet, knock-off) FeminismTM identified in leftist political thought as liberal feminist ideology. My hope is that the hollow promises of liberal feminism (as it is espoused by corporate girlbosses, influencers, and “average Janes” alike) agitates you into first, developing a more critical analytical lens, and then ultimately, using that ever-sharpening lens to engage in the communal labor of radical world-making.
This critical lens is not meant to be divisive (it can taste bitter sometimes, though), but to help us see each other better and thus, look out for one another better.
A lofty goal, I am aware, but it’s a good thing the work didn’t start with us [“This is the world in which I move uninvited, profane on a sacred land, neither me nor mine, but me nonetheless. The story began long ago … it is old. Older than my body, my mother’s, my grandmother’s. As old as my me, Old Spontaneous me, the world. For years we have been passing it on, so that our daughters and granddaughters may continue to pass it on.” (Minh-ha 1)]
As I am thinking about how to take my first bite of this interminable topic, I am transported back to a conversation during my last semester of college, at my English thesis seminar. I think we were getting into the weeds of misogyny within and surrounding Mary Sue characterizations. [One of my peer’s senior projects was on the subversive merits of fanfiction, and she was writing a chapter on Star Trek fanfictions, which apparently have a substantial history on Wattpad and Archive Of Our Own. #iykyk] I brought up the instrumentalizing of Mary Sues to gain access to literary settings that are male-dominant, if not male-exclusive (think Barbie as an astronaut, except it’s Mary Sue as a corporate pick-me), when someone in the cohort (I’ll call her Janice) responded with something along the lines of, “Well, women being in leadership isn’t inherently bad.”
…Okay, I’ll bite (barring how my point was woefully missed). [My instructor may have seen the look of determined protest on my face because she was quick to intervene and restore the conversation to its initial trajectory, i.e., how my other peer should structure her discussion of Mary Sues in her senior project. I’ll finally say my piece in its heated entirety here.]
If we lived in a world where blanket statements weren’t dangerous, I guess I wouldn’t vehemently disagree with Janice, but the reality is that we don’t live in a political vacuum. As a fresh(wo)man in high school taking AP Government, I still remember the definition that my teacher gave to us on politics because I still find it a useful heuristic for deeper political analysis: Politics encompass “who gets what, when, [where, and] how.” Therein lies my beef with such a statement as Janice’s— it’s a reductionist and irresponsible claim! We all have stakes in who gets what, when, where, and how, and women being in leadership positions has very real impacts that can’t just be chalked up to being “[not] inherently bad”! Not only is it unhelpful to simply ascribe to a broad group of people (even to individuals who contain gradations of difference within themselves) the “good” or “(not inherently) bad” tags, but it is also un-critical (if there’s anything you take away from my blog, I pray it is how to read critically). None of us should afford the benefit of the doubt to deceptively-apoliticized claims of humanism, especially as we currently reside in a world where gender difference is deeply inscribed into a pecking order, wherein everyone is implicated for better or for worse.
Premise I: Everyone is a political subject here. We are all implicated in uneven ways.
To start, here is a definition of liberal feminism, which I borrow from Feminism for the 99%: A Manifesto (2019) by Cinzia Arruzza, Tithi Bhattacharya, and Nancy Fraser:
“Although it condemns ‘discrimination’ and advocates ‘freedom of choice,’ liberal feminism steadfastly refuses to address the socioeconomic constraints that make freedom and empowerment impossible for the large majority of women. Its real aim is not equality, but meritocracy. Rather than seeking to abolish social hierarchy, it aims to ‘diversify’ it, ‘empowering’ ‘talented’ women to rise to the top… Everyone else remains stuck in the basement.” (11)
Yes, whenever the ruling class threatens the civil liberties of those of us living at the margins (the margins the ruling class instated themselves), we must oppose it fiercely. And then we must sustain our resistance, pacing ourselves and strengthening our political stamina, renewing our political fervor, reorienting our political compass. But liberal feminism doesn’t allow for that— it can’t anticipate a protracted struggle because it is woefully un-oriented to the material super-structure of the world we inhabit. If liberal feminism is our political compass, our true north is superficial, unreliable in its navigation of a world where contradictory interference abounds.
Liberal feminism is reactionary, wheezing after responding (or at least whatever arbitrary moralistic standard constitutes a “comprehensive enough” response) to insular (or so this bark-over-bite ideology views) forms of gendered oppression, e.g., slut-shaming, professional double standards. It keels over and lies down after co-opting radical language, fatigued from expending too much empathy, and audaciously (frustratingly!) impervious to those of us who have other worries compounded onto gender identity (let’s see, uh, generational trauma from living paycheck to paycheck, dealing with microaggressions just about everywhere, being subject to state and sexual violence, having our native cultures ripped from us, being forcefully displaced, and the list goes on). Because liberal feminism does not seek to understand the causes and interconnectedness of gendered violence, it is not equipped to uproot it in its shape-shifting and proliferation; it settles for distributing equal recognition for excellence in work and promoting a proportionate representation of women in leadership positions (sound familiar? re: the second sentence of this post), whether that’s having the first woman president, more women CEOs, and so forth.
Since the objective of Kanto is to share my personal processual account, I have to show my analytical work here, which means I can’t just give you the theory without concrete examples— this is the fun part where we get to talk about pop culture and look at visual media, e.g, screenshots!
Take the public reactions of Swifties to the news of their fave becoming a billionaire girly as a case study in liberal feminism (my question: is the “boys’ club” no longer a “boys’ club” when a few women are allowed to join? short answer: no). To begin to closely read this pop culture moment, I paid attention to (a) what side of TikTok I was on and then (b) how the fans there responded. My algorithmic echo chamber is inundated with leftist content and recently, Chiefs-related content with “End Game” playing in the background, so I did not directly observe any fans adamantly defending T Swizzle’s ill-gotten wealth. Instead, I saw fans being critical, with one saying, “Folklore— one of the best albums of all time. But [Taylor Swift] is a greedy capitalist.” [Two things can be true at the same time in the world of the poet, “where complexities interfere and contradictions abound,” and “everything is tinged with doubt and ambiguity.” (Nafisi ch. 1) I personally listen to “the lakes” on repeat, and I also think billionaires shouldn’t exist.]
A liberal feminist approach to Taylor Swift’s billionaire status:
In other words, a liberal feminist approach counts Taylor Swift as one of the girlies and cheers for her rise to the top. One small step for (wo)man, one giant leap for (wo)man kind, right? On the contrary. Arruzza et al. aptly describe this shallow approach to “solidarity” with other women:
Some girl boss apologists out there may say, “No win of hers [Taylor Swift’s] is a loss of yours,” to which I respond, “Yeah, and it’s not a win for me either.” Are we okay with patriarchy when a sporadic few women are its tokens, its posterchildren? Capitalist patriarchy is alive as ever (you need only look to the right or left of you) and is still preventing the 99% from self-determination, self-actualization. What if my wins were your wins, and vice versa? What would it look like for victory to be collective and material, and not merely culturally-symbolic? Can we, in good conscience, claim that Taylor Swift [or insert other girlboss here] have helped make the political landscape more equitable so that it is possible for everyone to lead an autonomous life? Liberal feminism has us mistake the reshaping of the political landscape for the transformation of the political landscape. Conflating the two only serves to reinforce the status quo, that is gender-based oppression. The “change” that liberal feminism permits is an illusory one in the sense that it only permits a select few women (that are not so radical that it’s threatening to the social order) to be hyper-visible and celebrated for their merit, rendering the 99% unworthy of being uplifted and thus, disposable. Or put into TikTok terms, elite social positions are gatekept for a select few girlbosses, and we are gaslit into thinking this will effect holistic change on the world as we know it and/or we too can eventually work our way up to an elite social position.
A liberal feminist approach would not investigate how it is possible for a single individual (especially a woman who is preemptively “one of the girlies”) to accumulate an obscenely high net worth. What conditions had to be in place for Taylor Swift to be able to reach billionaire status? [Before the finance bros come for me for my financial illiteracy, regardless of whether Taylor Swift has liquid assets amounting to a billion dollars or if her assets (master rights, real estate, and so forth.) are estimated to be worth a billion dollars once sold, my skepticism remains, and I believe for good reason.] Just look at this WikiHow page on “How to be a Billionaire.” It suggests “creat[ing] opportunities, invest[ing] wisely and retain[ing] wealth,” which, first of all, is hilariously ironic, and secondly, just makes me indignant. Indignant because the value of diligently working your way to billionaire status is a cruel dream sold to us plebeians, one that keeps us saddled to our current means of reproduction and further entrenches our largely immobile and determined class conditions. [The hyperlinked source is a study conducted by a Harvard research team, but I cannot emphasize enough that formally published academic work is not the only (nor should it be the only) way we should go about deriving knowledge.]
From an anti-capitalist understanding, a prerequisite for accumulating that much wealth is stealing and profiting off of other people’s labor, not earning it independently. [Yes, I hyperlinked a Teen Vogue op-ed, and what about it?] Regardless of whether or not you buy into that understanding (you’ll have to do your own research synthesis there because there are several accessible resources), we need to historicize and deconstruct the ideal of deservingness, and how it is used to rationalize wealth inequality (i.e., poor people are poor because they’re lazy, and rich people are smart and work hard for their wealth). For the Teen Vogue haters, Tom Malleson in his (Oxford University Press-published, for those that this information matters to) book Against Inequality: The Practical and Ethical Case for Abolishing the Superrich (2023) wrote five substantiated critiques of the capitalist-conservative justification for deserving one’s economic earnings and its subsequent variable distribution, one of the most commonly-cited ones being:
“It does not make sense to say that people deserve their income if they enter the labor market from very different starting points—that is, if they come from markedly different social classes and family backgrounds. Market desert [or deservingness, put simply] is undermined, in other words, by unequal opportunity, because if opportunity is unequal, then the resultant competition between people is manifestly unfair. If the race is rigged to be easier for some and harder for others, the resultant victories and defeats are meaningless, null and void.” (138)
If you want to get into the nitty-gritty economic philosophy of “distributive desert,” Malleson’s fourth chapter is for you!
Now, am I claiming that Taylor Swift tricked us all into thinking she’s a good artist, or that her lyricism, musicianship, and storytelling do not warrant the global fanbase she has? Absolutely not; I’m not at all saying that people who like her music are silly. What is silly, though, is using Taylor Swift as a litmus test for being a girls’ girl. To support Taylor Swift unequivocally (or any woman, for that matter) such that she becomes beyond reproach, is to bind our hands with identity politics and disavow principled, intersectional critiques.
Premise II: Liberal feminism offers a weak, if any, political analysis on how women and oppressed genders are implicated in uneven ways (re: class relations). It presupposes a womanhood that is uniform.
I dedicated way more digital page space to Taylor Swift than I initially thought I would, and I don’t want to hastily write my third premise and conclusion. [We learn slowly and deliberately here, folks! (How is it already Sunday, I’ve been mulling over this post for the last two weeks!)] For now, I will pause at my second premise above, and give myself (and you) time to digest these thoughts and roll them around in our heads, figure out how it fits (or doesn’t fit) into our current praxis. Until then!
Yours truly,
Y.B.