A Politics of Snap:Teen Vogue’s Public Feminism

Abstract

Once known for its fashion, beauty, and celebrity coverage, Teen Vogue has recently reinvented itself into an intersectional feminist digital platform advancing progressive social justice issues. Drawing on Sara Ahmed’s writing on “feminist snap,” this article explores Teen Vogue as a pertinent example of public feminism that diverges from the popular, neoliberal feminisms that have been the focus of much feminist media studies research. I mobilize “radical impatience” and “refusal” as analytical concepts that distinguish Teen Vogue’s feminist politics while considering how they operate through both mediated representation and material activist culture. Ultimately, I contend that Teen Vogue’s intersectional feminist politics pose a challenge to neoliberal feminisms while reimagining youthful femininity as a subjectivity with political agency that threatens patriarchal authority in politics. In doing so, this article builds on existing scholarship on popular feminism while demonstrating the need to employ a wider analytic lens to understand the diverse constellation of public feminisms within contemporary media cultures.

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