On (not) wearing pink

Abstract

On (not) wearing pink Feminists Don't Wear Pink and Other Lies is a book curated by the writer, journalist and blogger Scarlett Curtis. The Sunday Times Top 5 bestselling book, published in October 2018, includes writing by 52 women on what feminism means to them. It features contributors who are celebrities, including many actors (e.g. Keira Knightley and Emma Watson), actor and stand-up comedian Lolly Adefope, comedian and feminist writer Deborah Frances-White, as well as activists (e.g. Alicia Garza, Trisha Shetty), writers (e.g. Helen Fielding as Bridget Jones), journalist/author/performer Rhyannon Styles, models (e.g. Adwoa Aboah) and entrepreneurs (e.g. Whitney Wolfe Herd and Sharmadean Reid). As someone who has studied negotiations of feminism since the mid-2000s, I was intrigued when the book came out and recently had a chance to read it. My initial response was one of feeling slightly overwhelmed: I had to google a number of contributors, which made me feel utterly out of touch. I was also irritated by some entries' focus on entrepreneurialism, individual empowerment, and felt (and continue to feel) I needed more time to make sense of the book's attempt to include a range of women's voices in terms of race, ethnicity, religion, national/geographic perspectives, class, sexual orientation and trans*gender. In this editorial, I will try to make sense of my feeling of irritation by focusing on the ways in which Scarlett Curtis's introduction constructs the relationship between feminism and femininity. In previous work (Scharff, 2012), I explored repudiations of feminism amongst a diverse group of young German and British women. Various factors accounted for these repudiations, one of which is particularly relevant to this editorial: feminism and femininity were frequently constructed as mutually exclusive. The women whom I interviewed in the mid-2000s did not want to claim the label feminism out of fear of being considered unfeminine. Against this backdrop, I was intrigued by Curtis's book title, Feminists Don't Wear Pink and Other Lies. The title's allusion to femininity through reference to the colour pink made me wonder whether constructions of the relationship between feminism and femininity have shifted in recent years and, if so, what this shift signifies politically. I will begin by situating my reflections on Feminists Don't Wear Pink and Other Lies within current feminist scholarship on the rise, unprecedented popularity and luminosity of feminism in recent years (Banet-Weiser, 2018; Gill, 2016; Rottenberg, 2018). As I will argue, the scholarship on feminism's recent popularity raises a range of important questions which, for example, relate to the resonances between neoliberalism and popular feminism (Banet-Weiser, 2018) or, indeed, to the rise of neoliberal feminism (Rottenberg, 2018). Given the short length of this editorial, and its exploratory nature, I will limit myself to exploring how Scarlett Curtis constructs the relationship between feminism