Christina Scharff Repudiating feminism: Young women in a neoliberal world

Reviewed by: Jonathan Dean, University of Leeds, UK

Young women today generally feel negatively about feminism. For many, this seems so self-evident as to be scarcely worthy of investigation. Christina Scharff's Repudiating Feminism is therefore refreshing in its willingness to subject young women's attitudes to feminism to analytical scrutiny. Her book is not a large-N quantitative study: instead, it is a detailed qualitative analysis of the tropes and rhetorics young women use to frame their thoughts and feelings about feminism. It uses data from forty interviews with young women in the UK and in Germany, drawn from a range of classes, sexual orientations and racial backgrounds. To some extent, the book reaffirms the argument already made in a number of feminist books published over the past decade, namely that young women today are generally hostile towards feminism (see, for example, McRobbie, 2009; Aapola et al., 2005; Harris, 2004). However, for Scharff, this is just the starting point of the analysis: this book aims to explore precisely how and why young women talk disparagingly about feminism, and to what extent neoliberal cultural and socio-economic forces shape rejections of feminism.

In so doing, Scharff finds that there was broad convergence in the responses offered by British and German interviewees. Thus, the chapters are arranged thematically: after an initial engagement with the wider literature on young women and feminism, the subsequent chapters all focus on particular dimensions of young women's engagements with feminism. These are enlivened by a series of thoughtful appropriations of the work of a wide range of theorists including (among others) Butler, Ahmed, Mohanty, Bourdieu and especially McRobbie, whose influence is keenly felt throughout. Scharff examines the complex ways in which the neoliberal promulgation of choice and responsibility precludes identification with feminism, given the latter's associations with collectivity and structural constraint. She also provides a vivid analysis of the tendency to displace the need for feminism on to ‘non-western’ cultures: Scharff's interviewees frequently shored up their self-understandings as empowered Western selves via the drawing of contrasts with the figure of the ‘oppressed Muslim woman’, who is framed as overburdened and constrained by patriarchal cultural practices. However, Chapter 4 is perhaps the most absorbing, focusing on the role of the stereotype of the unfeminine, man-hating lesbian figures in repudiations of feminism: this figure, says Scharff acts as a ‘constitutive outside’ to an intelligible feminine subjectivity in a heteronormative context. Remarkably, although her respondents were consistently unable to cite empirical examples of unfeminine, man-hating feminists this didn't diminish the psychic hold of such a figure in their framings of feminism. Her analysis is both engaging and original, bringing together various theoretical strands drawn from psychoanalysis and the so-called ‘affective turn’ to make a distinctive contribution to existing literature on the psychosocial dynamics of contemporary gender identities.

In the final main chapter, Scharff draws together the main theoretical insights of the project to frame rejections of feminism not simply as expressions of pre-existing attitudes and prejudices, but as performative acts that enable the construction of a modern, agentic feminine self shaped by (among others) the parameters of neoliberalism, post-feminism and heteronormativity. In so doing, the book is theoretically nuanced and challenging throughout, but also accessible and often genuinely engrossing and absorbing, due to the clarity of the writing and the wealth of empirical data that Scharff is able to draw upon to substantiate her theoretical reflections. Therefore, from a pedagogical point of view, the book provides a wealth of potential points of discussion with students about the ways in which gender norms, heteronormativity and neoliberalism shape our day to day lives.

For the most part, Scharff is keen to highlight the ways in which repudiations of feminism reflect, and help shore up, heteronormativity, neoliberalism and (certain forms of) Orientalism/neo-colonialism. Although a number of pages are devoted to discussions of what Scharff calls ‘complications’ – in which repudiations of feminism became uncertain and uneven – I would have been interested in reading some slightly more detailed reflections on the ways in which her respondents’ self-descriptions might trouble – however indirectly – post-feminist, heteronormative and neoliberal frames of reference. A further potentially interesting aspect that is also perhaps under-explored is the comparative element of the analysis: as a reader I was surprised at the extent to which British and German interviewees converged in their accounts of feminism, but Scharff says rather little about how or why this might be the case, although this is in part offset by an engaging analysis of the wave of new feminist writing in Germany (of which Charlotte Roche's controversial erotic novel Wetlands (2009) will be the one best known to Anglophone readers).

In contrast to those recent texts – such as Redfern and Aune (2010) – that have drawn hope from the apparent resurgence of feminist activism in Britain, Scharff's analysis may well provoke in the reader frustration or even despair at the distortions, misrepresentations and crude stereotypes of feminism she scrutinises. However, a more hopeful angle would be to suggest that Repudiating Feminism provides the kind of clear, theoretically informed empirical analysis of resistances to feminism that we are surely going to need if we are to get to grips with what might be at stake in affirming feminism today.