– INTRO –
Akane Kanai Who runs the world? ‘Girls’, Beyonce told us some time ago. But maybe this was more of a ‘should’ statement, rather than a description of who actually tends to run transnational corporations, trade deals, owns property, and makes the laws. But this statement, while not strictly true in any sense, doesn’t come across as nonsensical. It taps into decades of media messaging around empowering girls and young women as leaders, breaking barriers, being bosses – or girlbosses, as we discuss in this episode. In short, messaging that ‘girls can do anything’, as I was taught in primary school.
In Part 2 of Feminist Not Fearless, I track my feminist participants’ personal navigations of this climate where young women in particular are ever more visible, and positioned as leaders and feminist role models. I discuss my participants’ own aspirations in this context. Many of my participants felt that it was important for women and marginalised people to lead social causes; they themselves often sought to be seen as leaders. But being in the spotlight isn’t necessarily a safe position to occupy. As one of my favourite theorists, Michel Foucault, argues, ‘visibility is a trap’. And this is particularly the case on social media.
My name’s Akane Kanai. I’m a researcher and teacher of identity, media, and popular culture, based at Monash University in Melbourne, Australia, situated on the unceded lands of the Kulin nations. This podcast is about my research into contemporary feminist cultures and social media.
Note: I don’t use my participants’ real names here.
– PART 1 –
Akane Kanai I met Daisy in 2021. She is full of bubbly energy, blonde, smiley, and her words tumble over each other. Since she was a kid, Daisy has always been the kind of person people have seen as a leader. She sat on her local council as a youth representative and chose her university because it promised structured pathways to leadership.
Daisy ‘I alway had it like strategically planned out because I also do, part of my degree is a global leadership program, and it allows you to get points for involvement in certain things.
Akane Kanai Tia, another participant, was also seduced by the leadership promises offered by another university. Tia is chatty and confident. Like Daisy, she tells me that she’s someone that people ‘look to’ to take the lead. Coming out of school, she had already been taught the importance of being a global citizen and had taken on leadership roles at school.
Tia I was interested in like world affairs and stuff like that. So I went on and I thought, global studies sounded pretty cool. Like the whole premise is like being a leader for social change.
Akane Kanai Universities are leadership dream machines; not just in what they promise but also in the extra-curricular social structures they offer – diverse collectives, clubs, and societies. In a highly competitive employment market in which secure ongoing work is harder than ever for young people to attain, participation and leadership in these associations allows young people to make claims about their personal drive, initiative, and other employable characteristics.
For example, Daisy had begun as a member of the executive team of her Amnesty International section, the international human rights charity, before making the move across to becoming a secretary and then president of the women’s collective. This work complements other youth ambassador roles she holds and her LinkedIn lists this leadership experience in detail.
Such expectations of young people to be leaders were particularly ingrained for those of privileged backgrounds who were invested in social causes. In these kinds of elite contexts, activism and leadership melded into the same thing. For example, for Margot, who attended an elite school abroad but who had since returned to Sydney:
Margot It’s like you’ve gone to an international school. You’re raised to be like the green leaders of tomorrow. And it was almost like this shameful thing to go back to where you used to live and just do like the normal thing like to go on a gap year and then to just do you know, an arts degree and then get a job.
Akane Kanai So, big things were expected of some young people, to be ‘the green leaders of tomorrow’. It was almost shameful to not continue on your international leadership pathway. Returning ‘home’ to a normal Australian university was not aspirational, in these terms.
The dream and the pressure of leadership in a broad sense, however, was something that appeared to have some level of resonance across the board. For example, my participant Hayley isn’t traditional ‘girlboss material’. Her main experience of primary school was being bullied mercilessly for her size, and for being brown. Her mum didn’t finish high school, going straight to work from 15, and her dad is a blue collar worker. But high school was better for Hayley as she found supportive teachers and friends and this helped Hayley materialise her desire to make change in the world. Now, at university, Hayley, like Daisy, is also running a women’s collective and has been elected to positions of leadership at the student council level. I asked Haley about her experience running for women’s officer.
Hayley Yeah, I was successful. I’ve been very lucky in all three elections I’ve run in. Yeah, I received the position, so I’m very grateful. And I’m hoping that that’s a testament to my work and to my rapport around uni. I’m hoping people aren’t just voting for me cause I’m like, oh, this name looks cool. But yeah, I was very lucky to be women’s officer for 2020.
Akane Kanai Side note, Hayley has a very distinctive surname, just to explain the ‘cool name’ bit. Also, to further protect Hayley’s identity this episode, we’ve used a voice actor for her quotes.
Hayley was modest, but her pride was palpable. She wanted to make a difference, particularly in making sure campus was a safe place. She cared about the safety of the student body and had pushed for better student education modules on these matters. Above all, Hayley wanted to be a leader to help others.
Hayley I like helping people. I know it’s such a generic answer, but it’s honestly the core of where I’m at. Like, I would literally set myself on fire for someone else to be warm. It’s just like, it’s something that’s always been taught to me, you know, like kindness and empathy and respect for others. And so I just want to like promote that in the world and be able to help others see their own potential.
Akane Kanai Hayley had so much goodwill to give to the world. But of course, a person’s ability to take further steps in relation to leadership depends on their circumstances. When I met Hayley in 2021, she admitted that she had always been scrambling to fit her studies around paid work.
Hayley I wish I was not doing any paid work, but I am. For a while there I was working four casual jobs. That was absolutely manic. So I’ve cut that down to two at the moment.
Akane Kanai By 2022, she was still burning the candle at both ends to finish her last year of university. She had lost four months at the beginning of the year as a barely trained youth support worker. Her charge was an often violent 17 year old boy that other colleagues had refused to work with.
Hayley You know, I had shifts where I’d just come home crying. They’d sometimes be 16-hour shifts, because I’d be starting at 3:15 in the afternoon, and going to bed at 11 at his house, staying there and then waking up and leaving at seven a.m. in the morning. You know, so, it was just extended periods of time.
You know, I’m only just coming to terms with it now, you know that I did the best that I could with the utilities that I had. You know, it used to be two people on a shift and then it went down to one for 16 hours. So it’s… You know, I did the best with what I could.
Akane Kanai People like Hayley, who don’t necessarily have a huge amount of material networks and support behind them, are striving to get by to make a difference. They want to be leaders but already in terms of their trajectory may face significant challenges. From our conversations, I gathered that Haley wasn’t actively mentored in her career and study choices. She had a sense that her youth support work would be relevant because of her desire to help people, but it was getting in the way of her attempts to write a research thesis as a gateway into postgraduate study.
Time was against Hayley in what she wanted to do. She was trying to keep the women’s collective going but people had lost steam after the pandemic-related fatigue of 202. At the age of 22, she felt extra pressure to have financial security because she was planning to get married, so she kept the paid work going. She felt pressure to achieve and without inherited middle-class privilege, didn’t have access to the coaching, resources, or network to achieve this. She was doing it on her own.
– PART 2 –
Akane Kanai For others, there were other kinds of social hangups and judgments around desiring leadership, and the necessary visibility this entailed. These were particularly acute for those connected to the pulse of social media. This specifically turned on the social judgment of potentially being the wrong kind of leader: a ‘girlboss’.
What’s a girlboss? Well, it’s helpful to know that it’s already passé, particularly if you’re Gen Z. ID magazine asked at the beginning of January 2022, ‘does the downfall of high-profile girlbosses mean we’re no longer falling for it?’ Widely associated with Elizabeth Holmes, a young, blonde Silicon Valley entrepreneur who convinced countless investors to part with their money for a medical breakthrough that hadn’t been invented yet, the hashtag ‘girlboss’ has circulated widely in social media to connote unmitigated female ambition, fraudulence, and general bad behaviour.
Clip: ‘Boom! Dolla dolla bills, y’all!’
Akane Kanai Natasha Zeng, a PhD student at Monash University in identity, race, and social media culture has been thinking about the #girlboss phenomenon on TikTok. Tash is also my stellar project research assistant, so I asked her to share her thoughts this episode.
Natasha Zeng So when the term ‘girboss’ first started becoming popular with the rise of like this expectation that celebrities had to kind of make a feminist declaration say, you know, I’m a feminist or like Beyonce’s big feminist block letters. And I think that was in tandem with the Lean In era of feminism and the CEO of Nasty Girl, Sophia Amaruso, wrote a memoir called #girlboss, so I think that all kind of accumulated into a particular moment because, I don’t know, people had all these like mugs with girlboss on it and like t-shirts with girlboss, stickers with girlboss. And I think it resonated because it was this kind of a promise of a fantasy where it’s like you can be a feminist but you can also believe in capitalism.
But I think as time has gone on increasingly we’ve seen these figureheads of girlboss, like Sophia Amoruso, come under fire for like poor workplace practices, racism. And I think the lack of social and political awareness in a lot of this girlboss discourse backfired and as a result leads us to like the next stage that I find really interesting in the circulation of it. And that’s the kind of parodying and satirisation of girlboss figures.
So I think in one part it kind of forms a wider trend about this kind of like generational conflict cause a lot of it ties into like millennial cringe. Millennials love girlboss and they’re, they’re just overly earnest all the time about these political things and they’re really obsessed with the kind of popular woke language.
Akane Kanai So from what I’m understanding from you, there’s this 2014 Beyonce feminist, Sophia Amaruso girlboss, kind of, feminism is good, capitalism is also good. That kind of thing. Then we have the second stage which we are more at now, which is basically making fun of that, and associated with that is Gen Z feminists or Gen Z people in general making fun of millennials for being too earnest? Is that what you’re saying?
Natasha Zeng Yeah, I think what I’ve noticed is like even with the term Cheugy, which, because I’m a millennial cusp, I like didn’t really understand and then I was on TikTok and like yeah millennials cop a lot of flack from Zoomers because I think people are talking a lot now about like cringe and I think there was a stage in the past year or so where it was like everything millennials do is cringe. But then the other day, I saw the headline and it was like cringe is over.
Akane Kanai Okay. So there’s just cycles of things being over.
Natasha Zeng Yeah.
Akane Kanai Things being done.
Natasha Zeng Yeah.
Akane Kanai But generally now you would say there’s a kind of negative connotation with girlboss.
Natasha Zeng Yeah, definitely in certain spaces. But I’m fully aware that in a lot of other digital spaces, girlboss in its most sincere form is something that is still encouraged because it’s like otherwise the kind of like hustle culture that we see wouldn’t still be such a prominent part of a lot of online spaces and some of, I feel like, the most popular podcasts for women are about how to be more financially empowered, you know, how to be more assertive, which are all like important and valid, but they often have this kind of like girlboss vibe to it.
Akane Kanai So, what’s the difference then between girlboss and just boss?
Natasha Zeng So, Shirley and I argue in our forthcoming book chapter that the circulation of these critical girlboss memes presents a very like messy and contradictory digital landscape for girls to kind of navigate. So the memes show how like girlhood is often regulated and managed on digital platforms like TikTok and girls really have to kind of think about how they come to terms with femininity and feminism online.
And I think we made a pretty good point in saying that like it demonstrates how there’s never this like acceptable way to act online for girls. It’s very like precarious situation that they’re often in. And I think it is a really like disorienting experience and space to be a part of because it’s like as young women you do feel disempowered often.
Akane Kanai There’s a LOT of feminist research that is quite critical of the tendency to attribute particular thoughts or ‘waves’ to particular generations, particularly generations of feminists. It simplifies the huge differences and complexities within any social movement at any particular moment in time. But what Tash is describing, I think, is the pressure to always ‘move on’, to get past something that gets ‘old’. If you’re too forgiving of a particular kind of feminist expression it could mean you’re also left behind.
And side note: if you want to look up cheugy, it’s spelled c-h-e-u-g-y. I won’t try to explain it as I’m an elder millennial.
Coming back to girlboss. Girlboss is ultimately very flexible in its meaning. It can span downright criminal activities that seem to have little connection to women’s leadership. It can also be associated with the commercial, ‘popular’ feminism that I mentioned last episode, associated with empowerment and confidence. So this isn’t actually criminal, but this was something that had to be carefully negotiated and even avoided for a number of my participants. Here’s Daisy again:
Daisy We were trying to create some hoodies and shirts for our collective. And we specifically had conversations like we don’t want it to look like, girlboss-y, Cotton On feminist. Like, that’s like an aesthetic now, right? Feminist T-shirts and tote bags and mugs, like girlboss mugs. We specifically realized that we didn’t want our image connected with that.
Akane Kanai Cotton On, by the way, is a successful Australian fast fashion brand.
Girlboss is thus something you might not want to associate with your own feminist brand. It can make you look basic, mainstream, a sellout, even ‘cringe’, as Tia put it:
Tia I feel like girlboss feminism, which I feel like you could almost equate to like neoliberal feminism, I think it’s maybe a little bit cringe, but then it’s just because I feel like the people that tend to like use those girlboss catch phrases and those ideas tend to be kind of like white middle class women. It’s all about promoting your own voice I suppose and not about bringing in all perspectives.
Akane Kanai So girlboss was also specifically associated with ‘white’ feminism, which was connected with particular traits – a selfishness, not listening to other voices. But this was complicated by other perspectives. For example, Leyla, whose parents are migrants from West Asia, was careful to distance herself from girlboss.
Leyla Girlboss feminism was rife when I was growing up and it was something that I almost had to unlearn because that was my first experience with feminist theory.
Akane Kanai Leyla said she had gotten it from two sides, one, her private school education, and two, her mother. But she noted that this was also the kind of feminism that felt significant for her mother, for whom the possibilities for career advancement in Australia were really important and different to what was possible for her at home
Leyla I mean, it’s a bit different when, you know, you’re a newly arrived Australian or new Australian. For example, my mum had so many more opportunities when she arrived in Australia. So she, for the first time women can actually do these certain things.
Akane Kanai Hearing this, I wondered, where does ‘girlboss’ end and aspiring for leadership begin?
So, my participants are facing a conundrum. They’re determined young people who want to lead, to make change. But they’re also hampered, if not by material obstacles, by a cultural context in which they’re constantly dodging being associated with the newest iteration of the ‘bad woman’.
– PART 3 –
Akane Kanai I’m going to end by talking about a connected phenomenon. Girlboss, I mentioned, is already passé. But it reveals the continual cycling through of girl types that are hot one second and discarded the next. Against this longterm trend of telling girls and young people they should be leaders and to be the feminist change they want to see, what my participants reported were continuing shortterm trends on social media that showcase different kinds of ‘girl’ that you should and shouldn’t be. These blended feminist-feeling ideals like ‘go-getting’, ‘achievement’ with other forms of youthful womanhood that girls have been told to aspire for. Pippa, a thoughtful white woman in her mid-20s explained this to me.
Pippa I think now that’s called being ‘that girl’, I guess. Maybe a few years ago it would have been called like a girlboss thing and it’s just kind of had all these iterations. And I think this most recent iteration probably started on TikTok, but has now made its way everywhere. Yeah and I, it’s about like girls waking up, doing a workout, like they look so pretty, they’re so skinny, they have this perfect life and it’s really like this ‘women having it all’ kind of vibe.
Akane Kanai So ‘that girl’ is the new girlboss, but she hasn’t yet lost her shine. That girl’s an achiever, serenely getting tasks done every day, waking up at 6 to walk her dog, having a nutritious smoothie at 7, then going on to start work, through to sleeping in a perfectly made bed at 11pm. This, however, was painful for Pippa.
Pippa I do set a lot of tasks for myself in the day, I quite naturally feel like, oh, I really should be doing that, and like, I feel, yeah, I guess that’s where the comparison stuff starts to come in where you feel like you’re not good enough because you’re not doing all this stuff and you’re not having, you know, the most amazing day just because you don’t wake up at six and have like a million things done.
Akane Kanai Pippa’s always been cast as a high achiever. Privileged and smart, she’s also someone that feels vulnerable to the emotional promises of effortless productivity #thatgirl promises. As someone who struggles with a longterm eating disorder always hovering in the background too, she’s drawn to dreamy visions streaming into her TikTok of ‘having it all’, requiring ever more control and monitoring of her time, body, and schedule.
I wanted to mention Pippa because I think she shows how women’s leadership and connected ideas of empowerment and achievement can feel like a carrot – something you want – but also a stick. Something that requires you to portion your life into ever slimmer pieces of time, even as doing this might make you look like you’re trying ‘too hard’, as #girlboss and #thatgirl become fads to be transcended.
So these ideals of empowerment are everywhere. They can feel feminist, to a point, because they focus on girls and young women. In social media culture, it can also feel ‘feminist’ to tear such images to pieces, even as they feature in real people’s aspirations. So, what space does that leave for those aspiring to make change, like Hayley, Daisy, Pippa?
– CREDITS –
Akane Kanai Thanks for listening to Feminist Not Fearless, written by me, Akane Kanai, and supported by Monash University and the Australian Research Council. If you liked this episode, please share it.
Next episode on the podcast, we’ll be discussing the politics of calling out.
Special thanks to Natasha Zeng for appearing in this episode and is research assistant on the project. Her book chapter with Shirley Chen is forthcoming in the Routledge Companion to Girls’ Studies, edited by Sharon Mazzarella.
Also a big thank you to my participants for letting us share their interviews in this episode. We didn’t use their real names.
Emma Baumhofer is the show’s producer. Melissa May is our audio engineer. Music by Ben Hallinan. Additional support from Gareth Popplestone and Doug Donaldson from the Monash Media Lab.
Until next time…
Further links:
- Shirley Xue Chen and Natasha Zeng on girlboss memes
Digital Feminist Futures - Home of the Feminist Not Fearless Podcast 