Authentic feminist? Authenticity and feminist identity in teenage feminists’ talk

Abstract

This article explores how young people's feminist identities take shape in conjunction with a contemporary ideal of personal authenticity: to know and to express the 'real me'. Drawing from interviews with 18 teenagers living in Auckland, New Zealand, we examine a novel convergence of authenticity and feminism in participants' identity talk. For social psychologists interested in identity and politics, this convergence is intriguing: individualizing values such as authenticity are generally associated with disengagement with structural critique and with a repudiation of politicized and activist identities. Rather than seeking to categorize authentic feminism as an instance of either 'good/collective' or 'bad/individualized' feminist politics, we use discourse analysis to examine how the identity position of authentic feminist was constructed and to explore implications for feminist politics. On one hand, interviewees mobilized authentic feminism to affirm their commitment to normative liberal values of authenticity and self-expression. At the same time, the position of authentic feminist appeared to authorize risky feminist identifications and to justify counter-normative feelings, desires, and actions. To conclude, we explore how encountering others' intolerance of authentic feminism exposed interviewees to the limits of authenticity discourse, propelling some towards new understandings of the social world and their space for action within it.

Gendered hybridity in leadership identities: a postfeminist analysis

“…An emphasis placed on authenticity and being the “real me” is often associated with a disavowal of structural change in favour of a focus on the individual. However, when senior women leaders draw on a discourse of authenticity, are they only concerned with their own unique inner compass and leading authentically in accordance with it (Calder-Dawe and Gavey, 2017)? Considering the emphasis placed on authenticity, we can see that the same individualising logic informs masculinised and feminised leadership behaviours as both concentrate on personal transformation.…”

“…The discourse of authenticity provided them with “[…] a more intelligible and liveable framing […]” for their leadership identities. For these women leaders, being authentic was not just “[…] an inwards looking project of the self […]” (Calder-Dawe and Gavey, 2017, p. 792). Rather, it provided them with a space to be non-conformist within a traditional masculine environment, unlocking an opportunity to challenge this masculinity through calibration with leadership behaviours that fall within the realm of femininity.…”

“…At the same time, they create an opportunity of stepping outside the masculine orthodoxy of command and control, advocating change through a feminised relational form of leadership. Being a postfeminist authentic leader, provides these senior women leaders with “[…] a politicized framework to make sense of the difference and distance between their experiences of self on the one hand, and the cultural conditions of recognition (as a leader) on the other” (Calder-Dawe and Gavey, 2017, p. 792). As we have shown, being called to engage in a calibration of masculine and feminine behaviours, when leading, is not just about achieving a correct balance between a set of contradictory gender norms.…”

Feminism, Foucault, and Freire: A dynamic approach to sociocultural research.

“…The shape of our project allowed us to discover that many we interviewed were describing themselves as feminist when they had not done so before. Participants’ talk about being and becoming feminist offered us a way into understanding how processes of feminist identification unfolded (Calder-Dawe & Gavey, 2017). We anticipate this analytic possibility will appeal to sociocultural researchers who, like us, are less interested in establishing states (i.e., who is feminist) and more interested in understanding how processes of identification unfold and what their consequences might be: in our case, gaining an understanding how being feminist is “done,” and what this identification makes possible (see Calder-Dawe & Gavey, 2016a, 2017).…”

“…The purpose of the workshops was to open space for participants to reflect on and “problem-pose” (Freire, 1972) everyday injustices if and as they were inclined, and to create a shared experiential and epistemological context for the interviews to follow. Individual interviews conducted 4 to 10 weeks later were an opportunity for us to tap into participants’ (re)orientations to issues of gender, power, and sexism in the wake of the workshop, and were used as our primary source of data (Calder-Dawe, 2015; Calder-Dawe & Gavey, 2016a, 2016b, 2017). Third and finally, we offer some reflections on the analytic and ethico-political potential of a dynamic sociocultural approach to research for scholars interested in pursuing a more active form of engagement with research participants, alongside a consideration of some of the sticky issues that might arise along the way.…”