Judith Taylor

Feminist Consumerism and Fat Activists: A Comparative Study of Grassroots Activism and the Dove Real Beauty Campaign

C orporations have a long history of incorporating emancipatory ideals into marketing campaigns, often with limited transformative outcomes (Frank 1997; Heath and Potter 2004). Virginia Slims, for instance, promotes an image of feminist independence in the “You’ve come a long way, baby” marketing campaign, and yet it sells women a highly addictive, cancer-causing product. While “feminist tobacco” contains obvious contradictions, today’s transnational corporations employ a panoply of socially responsible wares ranging from fair-trade coffee to biodegradable yoga mats and organic frozen dinners (Johnston 2001). Because in some instances such corporate strategies appear both well intentioned and well received, we move beyond cynical dismissal to empirically investigate and analyze corporate discourse to identify its transformative possibilities and contradictions. In this article, we question whether transformative visions are exclusively linked with grassroots models for social change—models at the heart of feminist consciousness-raising. Our primary goal is to compare the discursive contributions of Dove’s “Campaign for Real Beauty”—a corporate project that claims to oppose restrictive feminine beauty standards and promote a more democratic vision of beauty—with those made by a Toronto-based grassroots fat-activist organization that also targets feminine beauty ideals: Pretty, Porky, and Pissed Off (PPPO). We use a comparative approach to evaluate how each case challenges feminine beauty ideology while also considering the scale

The Problem of Women's Sociality in Contemporary North American Feminist Memoir

Systematic analysis of 25 contemporary North American feminist memoirs reveals the significance of this kind of cultural production in the life of the womens movement. In memoir, feminists contest dominant movement narratives, recast and reclaim conventional gender stereotypes, and use their experiences to refine movement ideas and goals. Combining sociological aggregation and pattern identification and interpretivist understandings of memoirs empirical significance, this research indicates that feminists have spent considerable energy focused on transforming not just relations between women and men but among women themselves. To this end, they assert that feminists must acknowledge two difficult “truths”—women are emotionally damaged, and women are not as socially capable as convention would suggest. By analyzing such arguments, this article indicates feminist memoir is a vehicle through which actors do not simply uphold but also contest movement narratives, refining or abandoning movement frames that wear thin as lived experience contradicts them.

Organizational Elaboration as Social Movement Tactic: A Case Study of Strategic Leadership in the first US School-sponsored Program for Gay and Lesbian Youth

This research contributes to our understanding of two central and related problems in the study of social movements: tactical innovation and strategic leadership. Focusing on the leadership history (1984–2003) of the founder and director of the first US public school program for gay and lesbian youth, called Project 10 and located in the Los Angeles, California public school system, this case study illustrates the importance of leadership agency on the part of those ‘organizing from within’. Analyses herein indicate the significance of both institutional constraints and life course circumstances in determining leadership choices. This paper maps organizational obstacles and the tactical dilemmas they produced to explain how successful strategic choices get made. The case of Project 10 indicates that institutional constraints can be overcome tactically with organizational elaboration. Additionally, hybridity, assumed in the literature to produce organizational precariousness, is shown here to be a mechanism for stability, facilitating networks and resource acquisition over time.

THE EMOTIONAL CONTRADICTIONS OF IDENTITY POLITICS: A CASE STUDY OF A FAILED HUMAN RELATIONS COMMISSION

This case study of the birth and death of a human relations commission in California contributes to our understanding of the emotional stakes of social movement participation and the meaning of multiculturalism in the U.S. post–civil rights era. The research indicates the extent to which resonant movement frames are necessary for movement success and how their absence can cause emotional harm to movement adherents. In this account of institutional activism, the frameworks of human relations and multiculturalism—simultaneously affective and amorphous— attracted participation but produced a harmful emotional climate and ultimately proved insufficient to inspire collective identity and action. Thus, instead of transforming social movement behavior, the state project of human relations deployed here succeeded in invigorating entrenched grievances and identities. Other factors, such as leadership, social movement identity work, and the “emotion culture” of movements are also discussed. Findings presented herein are based on one year of participant observation, twenty-four interviews, and analysis of public records.

Who Manages Feminist-Inspired Reform? An In-Depth Look at Title IX Coordinators in the United States

This article presents an analysis of the political consciousness and commitments of six gender equity coordinators who served in the same public agency in the United States during a 20-year period in an effort to contribute knowledge about the people who institute movement-inspired laws and the diverse ways in which they come to understand their mandates and the organizational and political milieus within which they work. The author’s findings corroborate existing research indicating that bureaucrats have considerable autonomy to interpret equity law and vary in their approaches. Most significantly, the author shows the ways in which individuals’ commitment to movement ideals can deepen (rather than abate) in the course of working as equity bureaucrats.

A Corporation in Feminist Clothing? Young Women Discuss the Dove ‘Real Beauty’ Campaign

The Dove campaign for ‘real beauty’ has been exceptionally successful, generating public attention and increased sales. This article uses focus group analysis to investigate how young, feminist-identified women understand the campaign, and how they respond when a corporation encourages them to exercise their politics through consumption. We ask whether the campaign is seen as compatible with their vision of feminism, and whether corporations are potential vehicles for feminist change. To conceptualize critical consciousness, we suggest that classical critical theory, particularly Herbert Marcuse, can be fruitfully connected with contemporary critical and feminist theories of capitalist cooptation. Participants varied in their critiques, but relished the opportunity for deliberation, and displayed a clear capacity to disentangle ‘opposites’ like feminism and corporate profiteering. Most women saw the campaign as ‘better than nothing’ and supported some notion of ethical consumption – a kind of pragmatism that suggests the difficulty of imagining alternatives to consumer capitalism.

Obligations and Omissions: Canada’s Ambiguous Actions on Gender Equality, edited by Rebecca Tiessen and Stephen Baranyi

Columba Achilleos-Sarll is a Ph.D. ESRC-funded student at the University of Warwick. Her research lies at the intersection between feminist and postcolonial theory, UK foreign policy and the Women, Peace and Security (WPS) agenda. She recently published in the Journal of International Women’s Studies: “Reconceptualising foreign policy as gendered, sexualised and racialised: Towards a postcolonial feminist foreign policy (analysis)” (2018).