Seeing is Consuming: Feminism and the Perils of Visibility

by Abbe Schriber

To question everything. To remember what it has been forbidden even to mention. To

come together telling our stories, to look afresh at, and then to describe for ourselves, the
frescoes of the Ice Age, the nudes of high art, the Minoan seals and figurines, the moon-
landscape embossed with the booted print of a male foot, the microscopic virus, the
scarred and tortured body of the planet Earth. To do this kind of work takes a capacity for
constant active presence, a naturalists attention to minute phenomena, for reading
between the lines, watching closely for symbolic arrangements, decoding difficult and
complex messages left for us by women of the past. It is work, in short, that is opposed
by, and stands in opposition to, the entire twentieth century white male capitalist
culture. How shall we ever make the work intelligent on our movement? I do not think the
answer lies in trying to render feminism easy, popular, and instantly gratifying. To
conjure with the passive culture and adapt to its rules is to degrade and deny the fullness
of our meaning and intention.
Adrienne Rich, Foreword to On Lies, Secrets and Silence

Among the goods for sale at the womens social club The Wing are T-shirts,
keychains, baseball caps, and tote bags, each of which bears a cheeky phrase in a range
of energetic fonts: Boys Beware; Girls Doing Whatever the Fuck They Want in 2017.
There is a pencil set, currently sold out, in a range of sorbet-hued pastels labeled with
both fictional and real women, including Lisa Simpson, Michelle Obama, and Benazir
Bhutto. There are shoelaces, shower caps, and stickers emblazoned with the companys
curved W emblem. The tone is sweet with a hint of toughness, enough to puncture the
illusion of docile, meek, or worse: nice. Despite being an organization geared toward
professionals, the swag belies an attachment to cutesiness; to girlhood. Its not that
girlishness and womanliness dont coincide. Indeed they are inseparable. Girl has
bypassed its association with traditional gender binariesit is at once affectionate
greeting, private vernacular code, queer appropriation, and stand-in for the innocence and
safety that many women have had to create for themselves.1 However, these products,
and their social-media visibility, perform a kind of oblique feminism, which declares
itself not only through conspicuous consumption, but endless publicity and self-imaging.
For The Wing, the complex identificatory process of girl is touted as a form of defiant
subversion that remains a smoke-and-mirrors operation, given the upward mobility
aspired to by its members.
Ostensibly, we should be cheered by the prospect of so many newly feminist-
identified people in the public sphere. And yet, visualizing feminist power now frequently
happens through branding, or worse, the conflation of consumption and activism.
Contemporary for-profit feminisms want women to inhabit elite positions (akin to Sophia
Amorusos famed girlboss), as well as glorify the hierarchical qualities of a boss.
(Women spent decades entrenched in pink-collar jobs characterized by emotional labor,
exuding comfort, nurture, tranquility, and assurance; it follows that a girlboss deploys
practices of assertion and domination typically understood as leadership skills.) While
these aspects of resurgent feminist strands have been critiqued, less has been said about
the role of visual images, and of a feminist role in lookinghow women use bourgeois
class affinity and the promise of the upgrade to represent themselves, and sell that
representation to other women. This might include everything from hip new members-
only community spaces like The Wing and Hey Sally, to interviews endorsing products
used in a beauty routine, to meticulously lit salad blogs featuring arcane ingredients.
Integral to this ubiquitous publicizing role is what Hito Steyerl has called
circulationism, meaning not the actual production of images, but their state of constant
malleability and mobility in postproduction: the public relations of images across social
networks, she writes, and their advertisement and alienation.2 No image exists that
isnt selling something, even or especially if we didnt know we wanted it. After all,
where and howand for whomdoes current feminist labor become visualized,
reproduced, and consumed? Given that emancipatory politics is now easily
interchangeable with the desire to be seen championing a feminist cause, does feminism
happen if nobody sees it?
Though The Wing is hardly alone in selling goods that declare feminist self-
actualization, the company is among the first to monetize a womens-only community,
for which the merchandise recirculates as a lived advertisement. As is by now all too
clear, community and collectivity are being rapidly absorbed by corporate brands
along with words like self-care, empowerment, and even patriarchy. These terms
get redeployed into the rhetoric of marketing, and help make consumers into
entrepreneurs, celebrating leadership and self-determination. Currently, Lululemon, the
lifestyle and fitness clothing brand, offers a Sweat Collective geared toward leaders in
sweat, which offer[s] special perks to our members as a thank you for their leadership
and commitment to sweat. The women-founded cosmetics brand Glossier defines itself
as a beauty movement that celebrates real girls, in real life, even as it mediates this
authenticity through the inherent artificiality of its products, and a femme, millennial-
pink cyber-presence quite literally punctuated with rainbows.
On the one hand, these companies are using feminist strategies and language to
elevate the commodity beyond a simple product, appropriating the language of personal
choiceread: purchasethat now governs and regulates consumers. On the other hand,
there is the content of the products, like the Benazir Bhutto pencils, which rapidly recycle
internet slang and topical pop-culture phenomena into objects. The Future is Female
went viral as an unofficial campaign slogan for Hillary Clinton in 2016, after being
popularized and sold on apparel by the design studio and retail space Otherwild. The
phrase, as the Washington Post reported, has its roots in second-wave radical feminism,
once the slogan for the lesbian-founded New York bookstore Labyris. Rediscovered in a
1975 photograph reposted by the archival Instagram account @h_e_r_s_t_o_r_y, The
Future is Female reentered political discourse after decades of obscurity with the
permission and collaboration of the photographs maker. Is its resurgence in the material
life of contemporary politics proof of a revitalized activist culture? Or is it the radical
ideals and counterculture of the New Left 1960s and early 1970s, packaged and
internalized into an individualist system that equates consumer goods and political
interests? On a corner of Wythe Street in gentrified North Williamsburg, there is a store
called Bulletin Broads, which brings women-run emerging brands to brick-and-mortar
markets in an attempt to drive online consumers back to physical retail spaces. Upon
entering the shop, one might choose to dip their credit card to give five dollars to Planned
Parenthood, or sip ros out of a paper cup. All of the wares are marketed to woman-
identified shoppersfor example, small gold trophies depicting beauty queens and
cheerleaders that say things like Smasher of the Patriarchy, tote bags that illustrate
nasty women, pink t-shirts that read Designer Pussy, and faux-marble mugs made in
China labeled with Misogynist Tears. There are chunky crystal rings, bright posters that
pun on Frida Kahlos name, lighters covered in chain mail, Chinese slippers embroidered
with words like cute and kinky, and jade rollers that stimulate bloodflow when used
on the face. The influx of what, to some extent, can only be described as feminist kitsch,
cannot be separated from the direness of our political context. Brands creating goods like
these flourished during the trauma of the 2016 election and its surreal afterlifeand
Bulletin Broads opened its Williamsburg space last November. It can be challenging to
see how commodities of this sort elevate women as the very constituency to whom they
are meant to appeal. Yet at the same time, feminist kitsch allows for self-recognition,
claimed through the possibilities of consumer life in the public sphere when the
responsibilities of citizenship seem not only daunting, but intensely disillusioning. In
Instagrammable capitalist feminism, the difference between self-recognition and self-
branding is increasingly blurry. If corporate and governmental strategies alike now utilize
radical leftist slogans and vocabulary, consumers have internalized and redistributed the
rhetoric of marketing in the types and frequency of our social-media posting, in our desire
to be seen.
...
Let me be clear. The difficulty of this moment in commoditized feminist public life is
that we want to be hailed, to be called by its name. It is hard to remain unseduced by
the accoutrements of a chic communal belonging, by the promise of speaking back to
patriarchy, by donating a portion of the proceeds to Planned Parenthood in the process.
Furthermore, for black women and women of color, rerouting mass-media spaces as
spaces of social recognition can be seen as tactics of survival, of self-preservation rather
than indulgence, to paraphrase one of Audre Lordes oft-quoted lines. Conservation of
the self corresponds to the maintenance of a (counter)public sphere. Lorde, Angela Y.
Davis, bell hooks, Chandra Mohanty, and many other black and third-world feminists
have led the struggle to think beyond a capitalist system that it is impossible to wholly
escape. Their vocabularies of radical imagining have been crucial to equating mere
survival as political resistance, reversing the forces of denial, erasure, blame,
compromise, and death that weigh on poor, black, and/or queer people. At the same time,
the affirmative language of these thinkers is most vulnerable to appropriation, as the
verbal expressions and gestures of black women tend to be in the trend cycles upon which
capitalism depends. Hence, all the more reason that sites of appearance, whether in
advertising, consumer goods, or political representation, require contestation. Sara
Ahmed writes:

Those who challenge power are often judged as promoting themselves, as putting
themselves first, as self-promotional. And maybe: the judgment does find us somewhere.
We might have to promote ourselves when we are not promoted by virtue of our
membership of a group. We might have to become assertive just to appear. For others,
you appear and you are attended to right away. A world is waiting for you to appear.3

As Ahmed points out, there will always be a space of appearance for those who
have less to lose, and in a context of feminist representation, that pertains to white,
heterosexual, female-identified feminists. But, as Krista Thompson has suggested,
visibility as a primary ambition may need to be rethought, given that those who continue
to find themselves on the social and economic margins seem to demand visibility more
than anything else, which points to the limited effectiveness of strategies of visibility
their failure to produce the political power they were supposed to assure and secure.4
...

Perhaps none of this would seem as egregious if it werent under the auspices of
a communal female empowerment that largely excludes those who might most benefit
from it. In the case of The Wing, for whom is its visibility truly meant, when it financially
benefits a small elite? For $215 a month or a $2250 annual subscription, there are many
who will never have access to the self-professed throne away from homethe self-
advancement, lifestyle upgrade, and networking potential that a membership promises.
However, despite being founded as a physical space meant to foster real-life networks, it
is The Wings so-called immaterial spacesits digital connectivity and online
communitywhich are the real heart of its operative functioning. Though a recent article
in the Village Voice suggested that future membership might include sliding-scale
options, the application process also, unsurprisingly, makes evident what is really sought
in the Wing populationinfluencers, future members likely to post, like, and re-gram
its panel discussions, roof-deck bar, or partnerships with brands like Chanel. In the brief
web application, the final question requests a link to a social media account, which helps
us to get to know you as a person. Therein lies the crux of The Wings own mission, and
its goal for recruitment. An enterprise whose very existence depends on exclusivity, its
search for members is predicated on the conflation of image and self, amid few other
personal questions. Perhaps this analysis puts too much stock in the idea of a self before
our own writing of itof interiority that exists somehow outside or apart from its online
expression. Perhaps it is my own navet that wants this to be true.
Social mediaits instantaneity of access and gratificationstokes consumer
desire and social status as much as it fosters networked activist consciousness. Now it
helps market a feminism that is transgressive, or according to another trendy term,
unruly. Visual economy has controlled and mediated the image of oppositional feminist
subjectivity from the beginning, though. In the late 1920s, the president of the American
Tobacco Company (ATC), George Hill, hired the public relations consultant Edward
Bernays to counter societal taboos against women smoking in public, and convince
female consumers to purchase more cigarettes. Bernays, widely credited with the
founding of the modern public-relations industry, happened to be the nephew of one
Sigmund Freud, who sent him a copy of General Introduction to Psychoanalysis. His
uncles ideas helped Bernays modify propaganda from wartime purposes to the rise of
mass consumption, and connect commodities to the unconscious, rather than appeal to
the rational mindfacts, numbersas many advertisers (and government officials) had
tried to do. Bernays spoke to the psychoanalyst A. A. Brill to figure out what cigarettes
mean to women.5 Brill told him that cigarettes were phallic symbols, and by making
cigarettes signify opposition to male power, Bernays could convince women to buy them.
He did just that in a carefully orchestrated stunt for the 1929 Easter Parade in New York,
sponsored by Hill and the ATC. Bernays recruited women to march in the parade, and
then at an arranged time, light up their cigarettes, which became referred to as Torches
of Freedom. By tapping into the unconscious, irrational desire of women, the image of
smokingthe originary signification of independence and subversionset the stage for
how images would mediate and control perceptions of feminist claims to power. In other
words, by recuperating the phallus, the resignification of the cigarette parallels the
pursuits of a lean-in feminism and the drive toward capitalist ambition and gender
equity espoused by The Wing and Amorusos Girlboss Foundation, among others. The
story of Bernays and the cigarette industry illustrates how the right to consume became
linked to social visibility: the power of purchase would seem to bestow a more visible, if
not more equal, citizenship. This anticipates a hallmark of neoliberal capitalist feminism:
economic identification, embedded as it is in racial and gender subjectivity, as the
foundation for political life.
The notion of gender balance at all costs drives popular Instagram posts such as a
found image, taken from Eric Rohmers 1967 film La Collectionneuse, posted to The
Wings account on August 5 of this year. A woman (Hayde, in the film) wearing a light-
green, sleeveless mock turtleneck leans back in a lounge chair, smoking a cigarette of
course, a book propped open on her lap. Superimposed on top of the film still is the
subtitle: A period of open hostility ensued. Combined with the memes caption
When you realize only 4.2% of fortune 500 companies are run by women this text
helps recast a New Wave interpersonal drama as corporate plotting and scheming.
The Wing assumes that fusing female collectivity with work and social status
perhaps work as social statusis something at once attainable and necessary for women
in order to participate in the organization. Such ideals continue to customize desire, envy,
and wish-fulfillment; they operate under the guise of empowerment, yet inevitably
depend on lack and exclusion. After all, 4.2 percent is still a percentage under the rubric
of a 1 percent. In attempting to evade sexualized, idealized images in mass media, now
many images for and by women trade on upwardly mobile status and the liberatory
illusion of work, in the process fostering admiration and its easy flip side, envy. In a tour-
de-force essay on Toni Morrisons novel Sula and the stigma of competition amid female
solidarity, Sianne Ngai shows the paradox of a capitalist society that is based on
competitive markets, but that disapproves of women who are at oddsas in second-wave
feminisms repression of female competition. But envy, Ngai explains, is a negative or
shameful emotion whose outcome is turned inward rather than outward, as in the dynamic
progress of productive competition.6 Envy and admiration are closely related, and this
is in part why admiration can at times produce ambivalence in the admired. This
interconnected system of response is pivotal to how capitalist feminism links liberatory,
collective identification to consumption and appearance. We can see it in the relationship
status cartoon posted to the Instagram account of Spanx, in which a box next to
Building My Empire is checked rather than the boxes next to Single and Taken.
...

On the occasion of the International Womens Strike, a group of academics and

theorists wrote a text for Viewpoint magazine in solidarity with a feminism of the 99%
Writing in response to the Womens March and other vast waves of resistance and
disenchantment incited by Donald Trumps election, the writers articulated the need to
hold broader neoliberal institutions, of which Trump is merely symptomatic, to account:
Lean-in feminism and other variants of corporate feminism have failed the overwhelming
majority of us, who do not have access to individual self-promotion and advancement and
whose conditions of life can be improved only through policies that defend social
reproduction, secure reproductive justice, and guarantee labor rights.
Among the signers of the Viewpoint text was Angela Y. Davis. As early as 1981,
Davis had raised her suspicions of wage labor as a liberating force and key touchstone of
womens liberation. In On the Approaching Obsolescence of Housework, she argued
that the conventional notion of a housewife who did not work for wages was one only
available to white middle-class women. Not only had black women been conscripted into
forced labor alongside black men under chattel slavery, but domestic work outside the
home had long been monetized as the domain of black feminine labor. Left with few other
options to support themselves and their families in the north and westward sweep of the
Great Migration, black American women had effectively already been earning wages for
housework, as one of the few jobs consistently available to them. Davis thus pushed back
on the Wages for Housework movement of the 1970s supported by theorists like Silvia
Federici, citing this history as well as the history of womens paid domestic labor under
South African apartheid. According to her, the oppressive situation of labor would remain
essentially unchanged if women became compensated for housework. Further, wages
would fail to alleviate the boredom, psychological alienation, and personal isolation that
so often accompany the restriction of labor to the traditionally private sphere.
Davis foresaw the ways in which simply putting women into the positions of
patriarchal authority would only continue cycles of inequality and worker oppression.
How does that translate now, when women have become active agents in casting virtually
any actions and activities as entrepreneurial? How does that translate now, when womens
collectives and other platforms for social visibility are at great pains to elevate women-
of-color membership and participationyet are ultimately curated according to the
standards of a professional-managerial class, who contribute to the divesting of care work
onto a labor class comprised mostly of low-income women of color?
We will not be escaping the throes of a consumer-driven feminism and its
desirable face anytime soon. But we need a renewed critical eye that accounts for how
feminism is coopted, and for who. Does a self-visualization exist that remains specific to
the struggles of various women-identified histories, yet refuses spaces of appearance
catered to traditional authoritative models? I find myself returning to Davis, to Ngais
article on Sula, and to Adrienne Richs 1978 foreword to On Lies, Secrets, and Silence, a
compendium that doesnt offer any immediate answers, but helps articulate a pause, a
challenge, a path toward a more ethical feminist mode of looking. Richs text feels
something like a blueprint: registering the carefulness, the slowness of looking and
communicating that allows for constant question-asking. Suspicion, in a constant state of
surveillance and control, can manifest as oppressive weight, but maybe it could also be
affirmation, creating skins of protection and safeguarding akin to what Ahmed suggests:
unlearning inherited modes of consumption that define limiting conceptions of
womanhood; questioning the drive toward visibilitytoward being seen, and by who
that they underwrite.

NOTES
1
In using women I mean to signal anyone who identifies with, and as, this contingent,
unstable term.
2
Hito Steyerl, Too Much World: Is the Internet Dead?, in Mass Effect: Art and the
Internet in the Twenty-First Century, eds. Lauren Cornell and Ed Halter (Cambridge,
MA: MIT Press, 2015), 445.
3
Sara Ahmed, Selfcare as Warfare, feminist killjoys, August 25, 2014 .
4
Krista Thompson, Shine: The Visual Economy of Light in African Diasporic Aesthetic
Practice (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015), 39.
5
Interview with Edward Bernays in Adam Curtis, The Century of the Self: Part I:
Happiness Machines, BBC, originally broadcast April 29, 2002.
6
Sianne Ngai, Competitiveness: From Sula to Tyra, Womens Studies Quarterly 34, no.
34 (FallWinter 2006): 10739.
Image: Still from Eric Rohmers film La Collectionneuse.