Commodifying feminism: Economic choice and agency in the context of lifestyle influencers and gender consultants

Feminism has in recent years become a more widespread ingredient in commercial and organizational contexts. This article examines two professional groups, lifestyle influencers and gender equality consultants, that both engage in the commodification of a feminist message and its relation to femininity. The purpose is to examine how questions of feminism, femininity and entrepreneurship is made sense of in these contexts? Different concepts have been used in feminist theorizing to discuss commodification processes in relation to feminism, most frequently ‘post-feminism’ and ‘choice feminism’, concepts that are often related to a de-politicization of feminism and seen as expression of neoliberal economic thinking in which all aspects of life become a resource for entrepreneurialism. Building on in-depth interviews and ethnographic and digital observations, this article argues that these new feminisms are far from de-politicized. On the contrary, they made sense to the interviewees because they gave recognition to the things they found important in life, in ways the interviewees had not experienced before. The appeal of ‘choice’ was an outcome of a perceived lack of choice, a matter of performing resistance to the culturally defined choices these individuals felt were presented to them