Please join the Westminster Communication and Media Research Institute (CAMRI) for a research seminar with Dr Rachel O’Neill and Dr Simidele Dosekun, exploring the online mediation of money-focused feminisms – in the context of International Workers’ Day.
Details
In this talk, we introduce and begin to conceptualise a new transnational phenomenon that we call ‘popular financial feminisms.’ Popular financial feminisms are highly mediated projects in which women claiming to have insight and expertise in financial matters – whether pertaining to everyday money management, the workings of complex financial instruments and investments, or anything in between – move to ‘empower’ other women with it, to share what they know as a kind of feminist act. Such texts and actors represent a culture of contemporary popular feminist solutionism applied to a generalised situation and sense of economic precarity, thereby engendering a novel form and site of financial self-help. While such projects represent a pragmatic response to the binds many women find themselves in, we argue that aspects thereof are pernicious in terms of what they bind women as well as feminism to. Our argument is developed with reference to two illustrative cases from disparate national and cultural contexts, demonstrating from the outset that these new money-focused feminisms span various forms of ‘difference’. In line with our May Day thematic, we conclude by discussing how left and socialist feminisms might variously contest and engage this terrain, in the interests of building assemblies directed towards a ‘red feminist horizon’ (Women’s Strike Assembly 2019).
Biographies
Dr Rachel O’Neill is a feminist media and cultural studies scholar specialising in gender and sexuality. Her research centers questions of subjectivity and inequality, primarily in the contemporary UK context but with attention to transnational circulations of culture and capital. She is the author of Seduction: Men, Masculinity and Mediated Intimacy, published by Polity in 2018. Her work has appeared in journals including Feminist Theory, Television and New Media, and European Journal of Cultural Studies.
Dr Simidele Dosekun is Assistant Professor in the Department of Media and Communications at LSE, where she also serves as Programme Director for the MSc Global Media and Communications (LSE and Fudan) and MSc Global Media and Communications (LSE and UCT). Dr Dosekun’s research centres African women to explore questions of gender, race, subjectivity, and power in a global context. She is the author of Fashioning Postfeminism: Spectacular Femininity and Transnational Culture, and co-editor of African Luxury: Aesthetics and Politics. Her work has appeared in the journals Feminist Media Studies, Feminism and Psychology, Qualitative Inquiry, and Feminist Africa, among others.