By Elisabeth Seiple
Walk around any Forever 21 or H&M in the country and you’re guaranteed to find a multitude of shirts and jackets embroidered with catchy phrases like “girl power” or “girls rule the world.” These sentiment-covered shirts, while slightly trivializing, are in and of themselves not the problem. The problems of commodification come not through the act of wearing or purchasing a shirt that says “girl power,” but rather through a lack of thought on behalf of both the wearer and the manufacturer. Not thinking beyond the causes often represented on merchandise, the conditions in which the merchandise was made, or the merchandise’s potential service as an excuse for inaction, are just some of the issues caused by the commodification of feminism.
Which issues get represented in mainstream fashion are carefully curated by those in power, and often ignore other aspects of feminist beliefs in favor of a more “white feminist” viewpoint to remain widely palatable. This act of maintaining palatability is often because the companies themselves don’t strongly believe, or potentially believe at all, in these other aspects of feminism, and suffer no loss to their success or well-being in the further suppression of these beliefs. Rather, it ensures that these corporations will be able to make money without fear of controversy. Peter Coffin wrote about this trend in his article Enough of Lena Dunham’s Marketplace Feminism. “Women of color are more adversely affected than white women by every issue feminism takes on. For them, the wage gap is wider, the harassment is more frequent and more fervent, and the erasure is constant. For this reason, they are often the progenitors of much of what eventually gains acceptance as ‘feminism,’ which then gets stripped-bare to contain the most attention-worthy aspects to create the ‘marketable’ version.” This “marketable version” completely ignores intersectionality, offering only the stories and issues directly affecting white, straight, cisgender women. To see how this plays out, you only need to look at Bustle’s “7 Gifts for the Feminist In Your Life Who Cares About Intersectionality”. It offers expensive products, like a $79 clutch, with no definition as to what the author of the article believes intersectionality is. The author even praises the ever-controversial Lena Dunham, who is far from an intersectional feminist icon. The article continues to list merchandise relating to issues that, while valid and important, don’t have clear or special connections to the topic of intersectionality. The merchandise doesn’t directly call out issues covered by intersectionality, like race or gender identity. Instead, they offer the “marketable version”, the basic outline of an issue. The “gifts” barely touch on enormous issues thus ignoring the intersectional beliefs they advertise. This way, the commodification of feminism only furthers the silencing of those who have been marginalized throughout history, only now under the guise of a movement that is supposed to protect them.
Similarly, the issue of where the merchandise is made arises. The abuse of factory workers is often ignored and distanced from our lives in the US. Factory workers are shown as far away and foreign, and therefore their struggles are portrayed as a simple fact of life abroad. Rachel Mellicker, in her article for the Huffington Post, calls out this hypocrisy perfectly. “For starters, it is not feminist to shop at stores that are exploiting people, because people exploited in the garment industry are overwhelmingly females. Women are the majority of those dying in the factories that have caught on fire or have collapsed. Women are the ones who cannot make a living wage to feed their families. Women are the ones getting poisoned from the chemicals they are forced to work with. Girls are the ones working in the factories instead of going to school.” Mellicker brings to light the overwhelming irony of those who say they advocate for issues like equal pay, girls education, and equal work opportunities while continuing to buy things made in exploitative factories. Take, for example, the Swedish clothing chain H&M. H&M is a huge manufacturer of what’s called “fast fashion”. Their shirts are plastered with phrases such as “girls support each other” and “feminism: the radical notion that women are people”. The hypocrisy is especially prevalent in this last phrase/slogan. H&M has constantly been called out for their exploitation and terrible working conditions for foreign workers. A 2016 article in the Guardian references the Swedish book “Modeslaver” (Fashion Slaves) which highlights conditions in one of H&M’s manufacturer’s factories. Here “children as young as 14 toiled for more than 12 hours a day”. Demographics show that around 85% of overseas factory workers are female, mostly at reproductive age. These women are often employed on short-term contracts, in order to be easily fireable when if they become pregnant. Because of this, women working in the factories are often driven, for fear of losing their incomes, to undergo dangerous abortions. In Bangladesh, where most of H&M’s factories are located, some 523,808 to 769,269 illegal abortions were performed in 2014 (compared with 644,435 in 2013 in the US, where abortion is legal). Because of abortion’s illegality in Bangladesh, women are forced to acquire unsafe and unregulated procedures. In 2010, some 572,000 procedures led to complications from these hazardous procedures, and only 231,000 received official medical attention. By ignoring these horrendous truths of the conditions in which lots of clothing is made, the “feminist” clothing serves to contradict those same feminist views it attempts to sell.
The danger of producing and perpetuating the highly involved, political ideas of feminism through such unengaged mediums as t-shirts, is that it maintains that feminism is not a political movement, but rather a mere fashion trend. It drains it of its true intended societal powers, and it depreciates activist’s symbols and words to little more than an accessory, or a cliche. An article about Andi Zeisler’s book We Were Feminists Once states, “Feminist sensibilities in pop culture do matter. But what Zeisler also saw was the proliferation of ‘marketplace feminism,’ a ‘cool, fun, accessible identity’ that is, in the end, depoliticized”. Feminism cannot be separated from politics, from societal change. Its roots were founded within both of these institutions, and the problems they address are directly related to them. And to those who believe that representing feminism in their closet is enough, “if feminism is so ‘in’ right now, why have state restrictions on abortion rights skyrocketed since 2010? Why are women still stuck in the lowest-paying jobs with the worst benefits? Why do we still have no nationally funded childcare?”
The “solution” to marketplace feminism is not to stop buying things associated with feminism. The commodification of feminism has done enormous good. Just a few years ago feminism was considered dirty, shameful, and radical. Through mainstream brands, feminism was introduced to masses of people who otherwise wouldn’t have even given it a thought. Marketplace feminism and the commodification of feminism are complex, ever-changing issues. There is not, and probably never going to be one answer to the many issues and questions brought up by this new phenomenon. The best thing to do is to be aware of the many sides of the issue, and not to separate, for example, your “girl power” t-shirt, and the underrepresentation of women in the United States Congress.
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