The reactionary turn in popular feminism

Abstract

This paper considers the rise of “reactionary feminism” within popular culture, suggesting a possible departure from, or mutation of, the hegemony of neoliberal and postfeminisms of recent decades. It locates reactionary feminism as key to the growing backlash against “liberal feminism,” pointing to emergent popular feminist discourses of “brutal truths,” “material conditions,” and women as a “sex class.” I analyse three seemingly diverse iterations of the reactionary feminist turn: its political-intellectual articulation by anti-progressive, “post-liberal” feminists; secondly, its manifestation within the “femosphere” - the online, female-centric communities which mirror those of the manosphere—focusing specifically on the “Female Dating Strategy;” and thirdly, “dark feminine” dating influencers on TikTok and YouTube, sometimes framed as “Andrew Tate for girls.” Reactionary feminism appears to have certain similarities with leftist, intersectional feminism; it has a strong critique of liberal feminism, and explicitly centres issues such as misogyny, the devaluation of women’s work, gendered economic inequality, and the politics of care. However, I argue that while it purports to oppose misogyny and the manosphere, it mirrors many of its regressive logics, and is characterised by an aggressive sense of fatalism, bio-essentialism, and a deep animosity towards liberationist feminism and any form of social hope.

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