Feminist Studies

Feminism, Neoliberalism, and SlutWalk KathyMiriam By now many of us know the Toronto police officer's comment that sparked the wildfire called SlutWalk. This set of events has been lauded as "bold" and "original" by feminist columnists such as Katha Pollitt in The Nation.1 The most common defense of the name SlutWalk—when the event has been often debated—is that it attracts attention and that it is a brand that travels well. But does it really take media savvy (as Pollitt attri butes to the protestors) to utilize the same currency of patriarchal fantasy that makes mass media everywhere go round: the figure of the sexual ized, young, thin female? The idea that media savvy is praiseworthy in and of itself indicates a puzzling lack of critical analysis and an obviously instrumentalist approach to politics where the means of doing something displaces reflection on the ends. What does it mean when activists trade on the very semantics of rape culture—male fantasy—to relay a message against rape? What does it mean when the branding of a message assumes greater importance than the message, with the message itself off the table for any serious deliberation or theorizing? SlutWalk, at its core, is an example of a kind of feminism that has effectively supplanted a collective world-changing project with individ ualized empowerment. Feminism here is converted from a term refer ring to a political movement to an identity term with no content save whatever empowers the individual woman who chooses the identity. It might sound gutsy to shout along with Jaclyn Friedman, the celebrity femi nist who led chants in Boston, that we're here to demand a world in which what we do with our bodies is nobody's business. But what women actually do with our bodies is, in reality, majorly big business. Indeed, to the tune of billions, corporate investment in branding female sexuality is obvious; ever-new body-modifying and mutilating procedures are promoted as necessary for women's "self-esteem." The structural causes of how women dress Feminist Studies38, no. 1 (Spring 2012). © 2012 by Feminist Studies, Inc. 262 Kathy Miriam 263 and adorn ourselves as a class are obfuscated by the emphasis on individual self-determination. Thus a main slogan of SlutWalk—most often trum peted by women dressed in Victoria's Secret lace and stilettos—is that women should be free to choose how they dress, and it's not an invita tion to rape. While rape is of course never invited, this statement only makes sense from the most one-dimensional, flattened perspective — one that removes the individual woman from the matrices of social rela tions through which our choices are structured. If the choice of sexual self-presentation for women were such a free, unconstrained choice, why does it seem to come in only one flavor, namely, some preconceptual ized variant of the patriarchal construct of "slut"? And why does corpo rate patriarchy have such a mammoth investment in this construct? In light of these questions, a main claim of SlutWalk, "I have the pussy, so I make the rules"2 seems more like a declaration of self-deception than — as intended—self-determination. SlutWalk has been hailed as a practice of female self-determination. The problem ignored is that how a woman or girl dresses and/or sexually self-presents is more of an obligation than a choice — or it is a choice that is obliged. As so many feminists have argued, from early in girls' lives, femi ninity consists in learning to fulfill the obligation to signal sexual availabil ity to the male. Yet in a situation defined by women's sexual exploitation, sexual self-presentation is a double-bind since, whatever choice of presen tation is made by a woman, she will be punished — or sometimes both rewarded and punished.3 Women are both exhorted to self-present as sexy and yet are punished as sluts: failure to self-present as sexy is punished as prudish or as lacking worth within a system that bases women's value — and indeed very visibility — on competency in displaying sexual availabil ity (aka "sexiness") without falling into the "slut...