Virginia Commonwealth University VCU Scholars Compass Theses and Dissertations Graduate School 2021 Theorizing #Girlboss Culture: Mediated Neoliberal Feminisms from Influencers to Multi-level Marketing Schemes Frankie Mastrangelo Follow this and additional works at: https://scholarscompass.edu/etd Part of the American Popular Culture Commons, Communication Technology and New Media Commons, Critical and Cultural Studies Commons, Gender and Sexuality Commons, Gender, Race, Sexuality, and Ethnicity in Communication Commons, Inequality and Stratification Commons, Other Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Commons, Other Film and Media Studies Commons, Other Sociology Commons, Political Economy Commons, Political Theory Commons, Politics and Social Change Commons, Race and Ethnicity Commons, Rhetoric Commons, Social Justice Commons, Social Media Commons, Sociology of Culture Commons, Visual Studies Commons, and the Women's Studies Commons © The Author Downloaded from https://scholarscompass.edu/etd/6648 This Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by the Graduate School at VCU Scholars Compass. It has been accepted for inclusion in Theses and Dissertations by an authorized administrator of VCU Scholars Compass. For more information, please contact libcompass@vcu. 1 Theorizing #Girlboss Culture: Mediated Neoliberal Feminisms from Influencers to Multi-level Marketing Schemes A dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy at Virginia Commonwealth University by Frankie Mastrangelo Master of Arts, Media, Cinema, and Digital Studies, University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee 2016 Bachelor of Arts, English and Women’s Studies, Rollins College, 2010 Director: David Golumbia, Associate Professor, Department of English Virginia Commonwealth University Richmond, Virginia Copyright Frankie Mastrangelo 2021 All Rights Reserved 2 Acknowledgements Thank you to my committee advisors: David Golumbia, Jesse Goldstein, Karen Rader, Myrl Beam, and Jenny Rhee.
Thank you to my PhD cohort family: Chaz Barracks, Jeanette Vigliotti, Clare van Loenen, Beth Collins, Megan Ratliff – you all held me up when institutions fell short. Thank you to my parents, who remind me of my light. Thank you to my nanas, Gigi and Joanie, for being the clever forces to be reckoned with that propel me forward. Thank you to all of my sisters who saw me, celebrated me, and sustained my growth along the way: Katie, Victoria, KC, Mars, Meghan and so many others over the years that helped me become who I am.
Thank you to my comrades in Richmond Mutual Aid, who remind me that another world is possible. Thank you to Merm: my heart and grounding. Thank you to my dog Paulie Walnuts, who made sure I got up at 7am everyday to write. Thank you to VCU GSWS for providing me with necessary community and inspiring models of compassionate pedagogy during rough times.
Thank you to my students, for providing the wisdom, passion, and humor that keeps me going, laughing, and hopeful. 3 Table of Contents Abstract. 5 Chapter 1: Theorizing #Girlboss Feminism. 8 Historicizing Feminism, Racial Capitalism, and Neoliberal Cultural Politics.
8 #Girlboss Feminism, Discourses of Entrepreneurship, and Economies of Visibility. 19 Wealth, Health, & My Best Self: How to Be a Girlboss. 25 Girlboss Feminism in Digital Spaces. 28 Girlboss Feminism, Counterculture, and the Profitability of Rebellion.
30 The Underdog Narrative: Constructing a Feminist Myth of Meritocracy. 36 Chapter 2: The #Girlbosses of Neoliberal Wellness Culture. 39 A Brief Cultural History of Neoliberal Wellness Culture. 39 Hippies Turned Entrepreneurs.
40 Patriarchy and Wellness: From the Source Family to Dr. Oz to Goop: Girlboss Feminism Enters Neoliberal Wellness Culture. 51 The Wellness Ideology of Goop Feminism. 56 Racial Capitalism in the Goop Lab.
60 Goop’s Ableism: The Implications of Offering “Cures”. 69 Chapter 3: Visualizing and Manifesting Capitalist Success: American Self-Help as Neoliberal Education from Televangelist Preachers to Girlboss Influencers. 71 Change Starts from Within. 71 Acres of Diamonds and Bootstraps Fables.
71 From Prosperity Gospel to Contemporary Self-Help: Magical Thinking and the American Dream. 73 From Tony Robbins to Sheryl Sandberg, Change Starts from Within. 80 Manifesting and Visualizing Girlboss Status. 88 Chapter 4: Who Wants to be a #BossBabe?: Community and Capital in Multi-Level Marketing Schemes.
97 LuLaRoe: Engaging Community as a Technology of Power. 108 LimeLife : The Power of Sharing Vulnerability in Community. 115 doTERRA: Remedying Isolation with Essential Oils. 128 4 Abstract I define girlboss feminism as emergent, mediated formations of neoliberal feminism that equate feminist empowerment with financial success, market competition, individualized work-life balance, and curated digital and physical presences driven by self-monetization.
I look toward how the mediation of girlboss feminism utilizes branded and affective engagements with representational politics, discourses of authenticity and rebellion, as well as meritocratic aspiration to promote cultural interest in conceptualizing feminism in ways that are divorced from collective, intersectional struggle. I question the stakes involved in reducing feminist interrogations and commitments to discourses of representation, visibility, and meritocracy. I argue that while girlboss feminism may facilitate individual opportunities for stability and advancement under neoliberal constraints, the proliferation of girlboss feminism as an emergent and mediated thread of neoliberal feminism plays a vital role in perpetuating the severe inequalities required to sustain racial capitalism as an oppressive political-economic and socio- cultural framework. I look to three key spaces: wellness culture, self-help coaching, and multi- level marketing to understand how feminism and racial capitalism grow intertwined via mediated formations of girlboss culture.
In charting these formations, I initiate conversations that investigate the nuances and complications of feminist movement work under racial capitalism. I hope that identifying these emergent threads of neoliberal feminism provides insight on how intersectional and liberatory modes of collective struggle might remain more nimble, and generate more political power, than incarnations of feminism that reinforce an oppressive status quo. 5 Introduction In the Spring semester of 2021, I talked with my Digital Feminisms class about how concepts of feminism take on varied meanings under racial capitalism. Following Cedric Robinson and Jodi Melamed, we discussed how capital needs to continuously accumulate, and perpetuate relations of severe inequality in order to sustain itself as a political-economic system and series of cultural logics.
After reading Melamed, we needed to make the connection between racial capitalism and feminism. I asked them, “where do we see feminism conceptualized in pop culture as acquiring wealth and power to perpetuate structures of racial capitalism? In other words, where do we see feminism defined as getting a piece of the pie that reinforces systemic inequities and colonial legacies.a feminism defined as getting power and money?” A few students responded, “Oh, that’s girlboss culture.” As I’d been working on a dissertation project seeking to illuminate what “girlboss feminism” was, I asked them to define girlboss culture, and the connection it had to reproducing and sustaining racial capitalism. “It’s toxic positivity on Instagram -- those memes that say you just need to be positive and you’ll be successful. Those inspirational picture quotes.
It’s supporting Vice President Kamala Harris because of her intersecting identities, despite the fact that she’s incarcerated so many Black and brown folks, when she claims to support those communities. It’s peak white feminism. It’s looking out for yourself and no one else. It’s a performance of feminism.” Their thinking aligned with what I was actively investigating in mediated spaces.
Thanks to this brilliant community, our discussions helped me think through and consolidate a working definition of girlboss feminism. Girlboss feminism is fundamentally a product of racial capitalism in how it defines social change through the narrow constraints of capital accumulation, and its associated preservation of hierarchies and inequities. Girlboss feminism emerges from colonial legacies and structures of power that are predicated on maintaining inequalities based on race, ability, and normative gender expression. In contemporary culture today, white feminism is a shorthand for expressions of 6 feminism that are highly individualistic, divorced from collective struggle, and perpetuate various forms of systemic privilege and oppression.
While girlboss feminism aligns with these understandings of white feminism, I seek to deepen the conversation around how racial capitalism and feminism intersect in mediated realms. The intersection of racial capitalism and feminism produces emergent cultural threads that shift and evolve conceptualizations of feminism in tandem with neoliberal structures. Girlboss feminism is a mediated formation that takes shape through narratives claiming that anyone can attain wealth, regardless of gender, race, ability, and so on -- so long as you work hard, think positively, and rise above any obstacles thrown at you. By leveraging mediated spaces to perpetuate such aspirational narratives, girlboss feminism naturalizes and obscures the conditions of severe inequality endemic to racial capitalism.
Girlboss feminism is inspirational picture quotes, Instagram memes, and sales pitches that claim one’s mindset and behavior is the only thing standing between them and being a millionaire. This mediated content works to further entrench racial capitalism as a governing cultural rationality and the architecture for social and political relations. In this chapter, I first explore how girlboss feminism emerged as a formation of neoliberal cultural politics, drawing a connection between mediated socio-cultural material and the expansion of neoliberalism as a prevailing set of logics. This requires a historicization of feminism as a social movement, and associated interrogation of how racial capitalism and the feminist movement grew into overlapping forces.
I then move into a discussion around understanding the girlboss as a mediated cultural text that supports the expansion of racial capitalism through facilitating cultural commitments to entrepreneurship. By generating opportunities for affective connections to entrepreneurship as a cultural logic, girlboss feminism works to equate feminist empowerment with financial success, market competition, individualized work-life balance, and curated digital and physical presences driven by self- 7 monetization. Finally, I look toward how the mediation of girlboss feminism utilizes branded and affective engagements with representational politics, discourses of authenticity and rebellion, as well as meritocratic aspiration to promote cultural interest in conceptualizing feminism in ways that are divorced from collective, intersectional struggle. 1 This chapter questions the stakes involved in reducing feminist interrogations and commitments to discourses of representation, visibility, and meritocracy.
I argue that while girlboss feminism may facilitate individual opportunities for stability and advancement under neoliberal constraints, the proliferation of girlboss feminism as an emergent and mediated thread of neoliberal feminism plays a vital role in perpetuating the severe inequalities required to sustain racial capitalism as an oppressive political-economic and socio-cultural framework. 1 I follow Black feminist theorists and activists such as Kimberle Crenshaw, Vivian May, Patricia Hill Collins, Audre Lorde, and many others in defining intersectionality as a feminist framework that embraces multiplicity to discover how identities, experiences, structures, and institutions produce varied relationships to systemic privilege and oppression. Intersectionality values cultivating bridges between theory and practice to shift material realities and restructure systems in service of producing liberatory futures, and recognizes that centering those with multiple marginalizations enables us to build more complete and transformative grassroots solutions. 8 Chapter 1: Theorizing #Girlboss Feminism Historicizing Feminism, Racial Capitalism, and Neoliberal Cultural Politics From Beyonce unveiling a giant sign reading FEMINIST during the 2014 MTV Video Music Awards to actress Emma Watson’s viral “Why I’m a Feminist” speech, key watershed moments facilitated a twenty-tens cultural zeitgeist for feminism.
The concept of feminism seemed to suddenly become mainstream in the post-2010 media landscape. Pop journalism started focusing on getting celebrities to ask the million-dollar question: “are you a feminist?”2 With this cultural attention, feminist identification grew into a pivot point, distinguishing celebrities as either “progressive” or behind the times. Yet, what it means to be progressive in the Western cultural imaginary gains shape through the political and economic forces that structure experience and reality. When those political and economic forces prioritize market-driven logics and practices, mainstream conceptions of progressivism are constrained by capitalist values of self-responsibilization.
Our post-2010 era of feminism is the defining historical period for girlboss feminism, and this thread of contemporary feminism emerged within a framework of shifting neoliberal cultural politics. This set of cultural politics can be understood as the social and cultural practices, processes, texts, and techniques that proliferate neoliberalism as a governing rationality.