From Bertha’s sacrifice of utopia for wealth in Tieck’s Fair Eckbert (1797), to Marta’s betrayal at the hands of her “woke” friend Meg in the 2019 film Knives Out, to the events that have necessitated San Francisco’s recent introduction of the CAREN (Caution Against Racially Exploitative Non-Emergencies) Act, the complicity of female players in patriarchy has a long history. Concomitant to this complicity are other forms of privilege that allow some women to gain provisional access to safety and success under the confines of patriarchy. For example, the Twitter #SolidarityIsForWhiteWomen, coined by Hood Feminism author Mikki Kendall (@Karnythia) in 2013, summarizes contemporary discourses surrounding the employment of white women’s perceived vulnerability and fragility to uphold systems of violence and oppression. Such maneuvers often rely on forms of policing and marginalization––revealing a disconcerting perpetuation of the very frameworks that disenfranchise certain women and femmes at the expense of protecting others. This panel series highlights contributions that analyze media from a variety of linguistic and cultural traditions that depict female figures whose actions serve to bolster patriarchal structures and/or destruct feminist movements. Our series features approaches that consider how anti-feminism and misogyny relate to and intersect with other forms of oppression, such as racism, ableism, anti-queer and anti-trans discrimination, and discrimination against religious minorities.

Part of a proposed three-panel series on the topic of “Handmaidens of the Patriarchy: Anti-Feminist Complicity Across Cultures,” this session is co-sponsored by The Coalition of Women in German and Feministas Unidas. This panel aligns with and further develops discourses that the other two bring to light, with a focus on artifacts of popular culture by and targeted towards women. Featuring cohesive, yet distinct, papers, this panel highlights topics such as performance and misogyny, handbooks for housewives, and “exotic women.”

Elizabeth Jones analyzes the 2007 Mexican self-help book Embrace Success by Adriana Macías with special attention to intersections of feminism and disability studies. Macías critiques and the institutions that have, due to her disability, attempted to limit her position in Mexican society while she simultaneously participates in other systems that privilege her. Jones discusses the value in academic study of pop culture or works of so-called lowbrow literature, such as Abrazar el éxito, as a venue for cultural investigation. Jones reaches beyond representations typically examined in academia to understand how patriarchy and misogyny take shape in our most consumed forms of media.

C.J. Enloe sheds new light on the disjuncture between conservative women’s magazines’ doctrine of domesticity and the economic situation Spanish women faced in the 1940s, revealing editors’ attempts to rhetorically shift the blame for Spain’s economic woes away from the regime and onto women. Close reading reveals that editors’ indoctrination attempts were undermined by discursive disruptions: fictional debates and moralistic stories incidentally exposed readers to heterodox views, and advice column letters revealed women’s real-world struggles and aspirations. Enloe contends that readers did not necessarily interpret these magazines’ messages the way editors intended, but may have decoded their discourses in unexpected ways.

Anwesha Kundu examines Cornelia Sorabji’s strategic anti-feminism in her autobiographical works and the ways in which it furthers and undercuts her self-fashioning as colonial India’s first woman lawyer. While the critical conversation surrounding her work acknowledges the importance of her success as a professional woman, it has a significantly more uneasy relationship with her anti-feminist methods. Kundu argues that Sorabji’s self-fashioning as an anti-feminist women’s champion exposes the complicated and unexpectedly murkier relationship between these two apparently contradictory ideological positions.

Amy Hill focuses on the Austrian novel One for Many and reveals a nuanced portrayal of female oppression at the turn of the 20th century in German-speaking Europe as influenced by the burgeoning field of sexology. Hill argues that the epistemological journey in the text reveals the colonization of female psychic space by male-driven institutes of knowledge like sexology during the fin de siècle. Using Kelly Oliver’s theory of the colonization of psychic space, Hill exposes what kept female subjects in their subordinate conditions when the chains of their oppression were invisible.

As part of a three-panel co-sponsored series, this session helps unify the series as a whole while maintaining a distinct focus on the double-edged sword of popular women’s culture. This panel showcases rigorous and innovative interdisciplinary scholarship and it draws on contemporary popular culture, which promises to appeal to a wide audience from a variety of disciplines and backgrounds.

Each panelist will prepare short presentations of 12-14 minutes to ensure enough time for introductions and 15 minutes of unstructured discussion time.