Public Feminism, a Conversation with Marcie Bianco and Andi Zeisler
Marcie Bianco and Andi Zeisler
The following conversation took place over SquadCast in March 2024. An edited transcript is below.
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Suzanna Walters (SW): We’re here with Andi Zeisler and Marcie Bianco to talk about public feminism. And of course the first question is the obvious one, which is: do you consider yourself a public feminist? What does that phrase mean? I mean, I’ve been using this phrase. I have an idea of what I think it means but I want to know: Is this a self-identity that you have? What does it mean to you? And how did you get into the public feminism racket? Let me start with you, Andi.
Andi Zeisler (AZ): Yeah, the very lucrative public feminism racket. Like all of us, I got into it for the money. [laughter]
I don’t want to say it was accidental, but my route into media criticism with a feminist bent came through the magazine [Bitch] that I cofounded back in 1996 with two friends. When I think about it now, it was a public feminist project in the sense that what we really wanted to do was take a lot of the incredibly visionary, transformative feminism that we had learned in explicitly feminist spaces—college, university, books, things like that—and take it into the mainstream. Because at that time, and this was at the dawn of the internet, there was not a lot of public feminism; there was academic feminism, and there were a handful of feminist publications, Ms. being the most prominent. But there wasn’t a lot in between, and our feeling was that this stuff is very relevant, especially because popular culture is where most people get their ideas about what feminism is, why gender matters, power dynamics—all of the things that are part of feminist conversations. So, our feeling was that we want to be the conduit for making feminism accessible to as many people as possible and connecting the dots between long-standing movement ideas and political ideologies, to show how media and popular culture reflect those out to the world.
SW: What about you, Marcie?
Marcie Bianco (MB): So there are some similarities in my journey in relation to Andi. I think the rise of the internet at that time in the late aughts and the early 2010s, when the internet was more democratized, really facilitated my move into a kind of more public realm but my story is—I always say it’s a bit more romanticized because it begins in academia. And I mean, to be quite honest, it begins with someone who I idolized who was a professor of mine and who I worked for for a long time. Her name is Marjorie Garber and she’s a Shakespearean. And in 2001, The Nation published an article on her called “Marjorie Garber, PI”–meaning “public intellectual.” And I said, “Oh, that’s what I want to be when I grow up. I want to be dazzling and sexy and have intelligent thoughts and ideas and speak to a larger public and really help shape public discourse.” Because I really believe ideas are the foundation for our actions, our policies—everything that we do. I really believe that. And the funny thing is, as I moved through academia and I studied Renaissance drama to be a kind of acolyte in her mold, I realized I wanted to speak to a broader audience. So for me, the public part of it is about speaking to—it’s really performative, like you’re speaking to who you want to speak to.
At the same time, what I realized—this is something that bell hooks spoke about in Signs in a 1997 interview with Tanya McKinnon. She was talking about her work and how it was written to share feminist ideas and a feminist sensibility to a larger audience, outside of a very privatized academic setting. But she noted—and I feel like this is really critical—it’s not the person who determines if they’re a public intellectual or a public feminist; for her (and she speaks specifically about a public intellectual), it’s how an audience embraces and uses your work. And they really end up identifying you or your body of work as a public intellectual. And I really like that definition because it decenters the individual, right? (Especially in today’s world where I feel like the most mainstream forms of feminism are really based in the individual and branding and people selling shit online, which I find to be really disgusting. And Andi’s actually made that subject of her book.) Instead she focuses on the body of work, which creates a longer temporality. bell hooks’s work, is more powerful and prescient than ever before. And people are engaging with her work. So it’s really the body of work that is the stand-in for the public intellectual. And I just love that definition. –
SW: I think you’re right in the best sense of a public feminism or public intellectual more broadly. It isn’t the individual, it’s the way in which that individual is a sort of conduit for a broader kind of collective understanding and need and desire for a community. But now we have a world in which people—and feminists—are, from the get-go, starting this self-branding process and beginning their careers as self-defined public feminists, both within academia and from outside academia. And I wonder what you all think about that tension between a kind of self-branding that is immediately commodified—I mean, it doesn’t become commodified; it is the commodity form—and that older, more romanticized, or more egalitarian, more collective ethos of a public feminist as being a conduit, as being not an individual but expressing a collective voice in some way. I wonder if you both could speak to that a bit, because it is the moment we’re very much in, I think.
AZ: I actually don’t really romanticize the idea of the feminist public intellectual community because I think one of the things we talked about a lot when we started Bitch, and one of the things we actually wrote about quite a bit, was the way that movements are split from outside when a single figure becomes anointed. And so during the second wave, for instance, there was so much—there were multiple feminisms. It was not a monolithic movement. But because the mainstream media glommed on to just a very, very small handful of figures and anointed them, that caused rifts within the community because it was really elevating certain personalities and certain issues over others. We got we got a very limited view of what feminist issues were. They were generally tied to sort of middle-class, white women’s issues, even though that’s not what feminism on the ground looked like. But that was the image that was cemented in the cultural imagination. That was something we were really mindful of, and so for that reason we didn’t think of other feminist magazines as our competition. We weren’t thinking about market share. We were thinking about a rising tide that lifts all boats, and the more feminist media there was, the less each of us would have to be everything to everyone. And I think that’s really important.
I think what we have now is a lot of, as you said, self-described public feminists but very, very few public feminist spaces. And I think that a big part of it is being in community, having a multiplicity of voices, and not pushing down individual personalities but really understanding how individuals can reach certain audiences with certain ideas but also connect the dots and draw them back to the larger discourse of feminism. And as Marcie said before, there are a lot of silos. And with the decimation of the progressive media landscape, there are fewer ways to see feminists in conversation with one another in mainstream spaces.
The second wave ... was not a monolithic movement. But because the mainstream media glommed on to just a small handful of figures and anointed them, that caused rifts within the community because it was elevating certain personalities...over others.Click To TweetSW: That’s such an important point because one of the reasons Bitch was so important, I think, is that it was this internal and external conversation. It felt conversational. It felt engaged in community building as a site. So we have this phenomenon now where there have never been so many feminist public intellectuals. Feminism is—whether it’s the gender editor at the New York Times—I mean, it is all over in popular discourse, in mainstream news coverage, in mainstream television to some extent. So it’s more present, but feminist spaces for that conversation have diminished drastically. And so it’s this weird phenomenon.
MB: Yeah, I feel like Andi is right on the nose to identify the landscape in terms of the complete denigration of those feminist spaces, whether they were blog sites or—I mean, places where we could build community and be in discussion with each other and also allow that discussion to seep or filter into a broader public sphere. I felt that personally having worked in really marginalized media, whether it was lesbian media, queer media, or feminist media, since 2007 when I began contributing to what was then the Feminist Review, which was a cultural review, book reviews website. Most of these websites have completely shut down, and so we don’t know where to go. And what has happened, too, with the rise of social media, there’s a continued atomization of the collective.
I love that people are identifying as feminists; I want to make that perfectly clear. I love that feminist sensibility; I want that conversation to really thrive. But I don’t know with the current state of how social media operates, in which the algorithm really informs who is seen and what is seen—I don’t know if we will actually be able to advocate for those really radical feminist ideas in a way that can circumnavigate certain algorithms. I think the “social” of social media really demands conformity in order to get eyeballs, right? You have to play the game.
I don't know if we will actually be able to advocate for those really radical feminist ideas in a way that can circumnavigate certain algorithms. I think the “social” of social media really demands conformity in order to get eyeballs.Click To TweetSW: So one question I have is, how do you see public feminism changing over time? When we think back to figures who we might not have defined, or who might not have defined themselves, as public feminists—you know, Germaine Greer, Gloria Steinem, Kate Millett, bell hooks, Andrea Dworkin; or back further, Mary Wollstonecraft, Simone de Beauvoir—whose works and ideas had a public reverberation even though they didn’t have the platforms that we now think of as public spaces (social media or our own magazines or whatever). Because there always have been public feminists. But how would you analyze that shift from earlier generations to this generation that is marked, as we’re saying, by both the presence of more feminists in the public sphere and in civic life, by social media’s evisceration of anything that’s not social media, and by the decline of the institutional spaces like Bitch, the decline of those places where we had those internal conversations. At the same time, we have the rise of feminism as an intellectual enterprise in the academy. So you have these countervailing—it’s a complicated movement, I guess is what I’m trying to say. And I’m interested in what you both think about some of those larger shifts when you look back at some of our great foremothers.
AZ: I think the most obvious one and the most obvious change from then to now, and one that’s actually been pretty monumental and pretty recent, is just the shifting of what feminism is for. And I think social media, in particular, and the rise of a very widespread social-media-fed pop feminism, chips away at feminism as a transformative social movement and an ideology and makes it increasingly about feminism as a metric of whether something is okay to consume, whether something is laudable, whether something is worthwhile to spend your money on. It’s less about using feminism as a lens, as a worldview, and more about feminism as a kind of value judgment and in many ways a consumer cudgel, a way to say, “Don’t watch this; it’s not feminist,” “Don’t buy that; it’s not feminist.” It’s very hard to talk about feminism now without, as Marcie brought up, talking about the individualist personal branding that is the goal—or maybe that’s unfair—that seems to be the goal of a lot of public feminists. Without idolizing or romanticizing the past, I think feminism has always been an ideology that needed to get out there and the work of feminism in so many ways has always been about justifying its own existence, and that’s unfortunate, because so much of the possibility of feminist thought and feminist action is just really hamstrung by the fact that every public feminist since there have been public feminists has been tasked with justifying why they’re speaking out, why they’re talking, whether they have anything to say, whether anyone’s going to listen. And so much of the work of feminism has simply been struggling to convince other people that feminism is needed to begin with. Much of the potential transformative work ends up falling by the wayside and then the next public feminist who is anointed has to start that work all over again. In many ways it’s “two steps forward, one step back” or “one step forward, two steps back,” depending on how pessimistic I’m feeling. It’s a dynamic that has not really allowed for much forward movement because the larger world is so resistant to the very idea of it.
Social media ... chips away at feminism as a transformative social movement and ... makes it increasingly about feminism as a metric of whether something is okay to consume, whether something is laudable.Click To TweetSW: I want to get back to the academic, because I did want to ask you all about that. That’s always been a big divide within feminism, or at least it’s presented as a big divide. I’m not actually sure how huge a divide it really is in actual feminist lives, but okay, for the moment, let’s grant this activism/academia divide, the public and the scholarly, that sense of there being really two discrete worlds. And the irony is, of course, that so many of contemporary public feminists have a foothold in both and really do start this branding of themselves as public intellectual feminists very early in their careers. I mean, I see it all the time with young feminist scholars. I’m like, “Wow, girl, go ahead.” It’s quite amazing to watch this process. Because for my generation, of course, there was just no thought that the public would be in any way embracing anything we had to say. You know, it was just presumed that feminism was antithetical to mainstream media because of its radicalism. But now that has changed and yet we still have this understanding of these as separate worlds or in some contestation. Why do you think that is? Why does that narrative still hold so much?
MB: I feel like this contestation is really about policing boundaries, in large part. Academia has really changed in the last twenty years. When I decided to step out and not follow that career path—this is around 2011 because I, again, wanted to have a broader conversation. I had studied Renaissance drama, Christopher Marlowe, and I was like, “I want to speak to more than twenty people. I want my work to mean something in this world.” I mean, no offense, I still want to write on Marlowe someday. But there was a very specific and very strict pathway to your tenured life that was still probable at the turn of the century. We still believed that tenured positions existed.
These days, I still work in academia but on the margins: I’m a staff member, I’m an editor. And I often speak to graduate students, and I work with grad students, early career professionals, mid-career, and I edit texts from tenured professors as well. Everyone is trying to parlay their work into being for a more public audience. That has become part of the academic trajectory, whereas before, the recipe was: establish yourself in the field, get tenure, publish two books, and maybe your third book can be that public book (a la Marjorie Garber’s Vested Interests). These days it’s different; I get a lot of graduate students coming to me saying, “how do I translate my academic work for a broader audience?” I feel like that’s a product of several things. One is the complete denigration of the humanities, the decline of jobs in the humanities. And there is a larger desire to find connection to the outside world and find meaning of one’s work in the outside world when, at least in America, working in the humanities is seen as valueless or not worthy of investment when in fact we give everyone the ideas, the tools, frameworks, the discourses, to live their lives and create ethics to live their lives. So, yeah, it’s changed a lot.
SW: It’s changed enormously. I think you put your finger on it. I see, certainly, that people are really beginning their careers—feminists (I mean, that’s all I work with, feminist scholars) are beginning their careers thinking, “How can I make this accessible? How can I make this public?” with a marketing edge and branding edge to it too. And for my generation, of course—I was in fact penalized because my work was more public. It was like, “Why are you being reviewed in newspapers? That’s terrible!” That was really told to me. So that’s shifted.
So my question, the follow-up is: Has that resulted in a denigration or an enhancement of the public sphere of feminism? Here we have this mixed phenomenon of academics, scholarly feminists who are now being more public and at least trying to be more accessible. And, of course, this was just marked by Judith Butler having a book that was their first attempt to really do a public book. To change the discourse, to lay it out. How much it succeeds is an open question, but it certainly is out there in the world with that desire. And then we have all of these individual public feminist figures who speak in our name in some way. Are we left with a richer public sphere that has a more diverse, interesting, nuanced, substantive array of feminist voices?
AZ: Yeah, I mean, just to get back to the question before about the interaction of academic feminism and more public feminism: For my generation, I think there was really a bright line between academic feminism and public feminism that really came down to activism. I was never in academia, but I worked with a lot of writers who were trying to straddle the line between academic writing and writing for a broader public and making their ideas accessible and being able to function in two places. The sense I got from them, often explicitly, was that academia really prized a kind of objective distance, and activism was seen to mar that in a way—that actually engaging in feminist activism would possibly discredit their work or make it less estimable, I guess. And at least a few of them that I know of ended up leaving academia because they felt really constrained in terms of what kind of visible activism they could be doing. I think, as Marcie said, we’re in a period of a kind of toxic populism, where there’s a real distrust and denigration of the humanities but beyond that, distrust of anyone who has a specific, specialized kind of expertise.
The belief that only the ostensibly unbiased person should be listened to is something that has really, really taken hold and infected so many things, from this overweening focus on the undecided voter to the idea that that people who have experienced things like institutional racism or sexual harassment or rape are unqualified to be public voices because they have too much skin in the game. There’s very much still this reverence for the supposed objective distance of the omniscient white male narrator. And so much of what that ends up looking like is a habitual mistrust of anyone who knows too much about a certain subject, who has too much experience combined with education or expertise or training.
MB: Oh my God, Andi, I love everything that you’re saying.
SW: Me too, we all agree.
MB: Because it makes me think, okay, is public feminism getting richer? In some ways, yes, when we think about more people entering this public field, we get more diversity of perspective whether or not that diversity of voice or perspective is given an audience or a huge platform. But thinking about people who have come out of academia or who have connections to academia: Melissa Murray, Roxane Gay, Brittney Cooper. These are all people whom I revere, and I want to grow up to be.
For me the public is really defined by access and circulation. For me, circulation is really tied to temporality. And to Andi’s point specifically about the denigration of expertise, I feel like this is the biggest challenge for the movement forward in public feminism. Because it’s been primarily online. The temporality of social media is rapid. There’s such a waterfall of content that we can barely grasp onto things. And what is lost in that is the history of what has come before—all those feminist voices who, frankly, have already said everything we’ve said.
There's such a waterfall of content that we can barely grasp onto things. And what is lost in that is the history of what has come before—all those feminist voices who, frankly, have already said everything we've said.Click To TweetSW: I have to agree with that.
But part of it is—and you all have mentioned it many times, and I think you’re right—the evisceration of those feminist institutional spaces. So we have Ms. still. We have Women’s Media Center. It’s not that there’s nothing. But they’re looking more and more mainstream. And they’re not as conversational in the way in which—I mean, I have to always go back to Bitch because there was a model there of a kind of collectivity and an internal discourse that was always externally focused. And I don’t know how we—this is for you younger people—begin to build those again, because I do think that this sort of atomization of individual, acceptable feminists is a problem that that is not up to the task before us.
MB: Andi, could I ask… I actually wanted to ask you—I mean, this is your career, this is your expertise. We need literal spaces, even if they’re spaces of a magazine/book, right? But what has happened—and I’m wondering what your take on this is—is that because we don’t have feminist spaces, magazines, or really prominent blog sites anymore—to the extent that we used to—what has happened is that these public feminists have tried to seek publication or acceptance in mainstream media. And as a result, I feel like there’s a lot of infighting because we know there’s only one space for one gender person at the New York Times, and we don’t lift each other up. I’m wondering how you see it coming from your actual vantage point.
AZ: I think it’s a huge loss, and I think what it really speaks to, and what I think everyone knows but has always been the elephant in the room, is that feminism is fundamentally incompatible with capitalism. And so when every feminist project has to not only justify itself ideologically and content-wise but also somehow make money, it’s incredibly difficult. The single biggest problem for Bitch was always funding. The amount of money that we saw going into venture-capital-backed feminist sites—Bustle is a great example. It’s very frustrating because even with women venture capitalists like the ones who backed The Establishment, that short-lived feminist site—these were people who didn’t want to fund existing projects. They wanted to make something that they put their name on and put their flag in the ground as a feminist site because the idea was that women, and feminist women in particular, were an untapped market that could return an investment—without really engaging with the idea that feminism, as a transformative social movement, was never meant to be profitable. You know what I mean? It just wasn’t. And I think unfortunately that has been something that is almost impossible for collective feminist media projects to reckon with. Because what happens when you really need money to function is that you’re going to be appealing to people who aren’t really looking at the ideas, they’re looking at the marketability. And that comes back to the fact that most people do not want feminism to exist. It is an incredibly inconvenient social movement. It challenges everything.
Feminism, as a transformative social movement, was never meant to be profitable.... Most people do not want feminism to exist. It is an incredibly inconvenient social movement. It challenges everything.Click To TweetMB: I love that. That’s a perfect phrase, “an inconvenient movement.”
SW: It’s very inconvenient.
AZ: Yeah, it’s just, people act like the lack of funding is a bug and not a feature. It’s obviously very dispiriting to me as someone who feels like the most radical feminist work is done in community. It doesn’t come from one voice, it doesn’t come from one person. It comes from conversations, it comes from disagreements, it comes from the belief that we have to stand together even if we don’t always agree. And so what we have now is certainly a media realm where there is a multiplicity of feminist voices, but you still have ones that are platformed much higher than others, and those are the ones that tend to be working for corporate media, media that is really not invested in progressivism, whatever their public attitude. It’s frustrating. And then even when you look at some of the platforms where feminists do have a voice and are essentially self-funding their own work, these are platforms that could go away at any moment. Substack could fold. I mean, it probably won’t. But I’m saying—big tech’s infiltration of media and big tech’s branding as independent media is really not a sustainable way for feminist media to, to develop, to be reinvigorated….
MB: You know the two fields or the two industries we’re talking about, media and academia—we sure really did pick winners!
[laughter]
SW: Yeah, they’re both in great shape these days!
AZ: Well, what are the alternatives, you know?
SW: Right? Could we all be tech bros? That’s not gonna happen.
MB: No, I’m not wearing khakis.
SW: You know, that’s a good note to end on. None of us will ever wear khakis.
Listen, I could talk with you guys forever. It’s been absolutely fabulous. One thing we’re leaving with is the darkness of the moment. There’s no way to not think of that. But also because so many more people are thinking and doing feminism in some form, there is a potential to reimagine, I think. The question is where does that sit—where does that sit spatially, temporally? I think that’s part of the question—to take it away from those individual moments and be able to have conversations like these. To me, this is so much more interesting than hearing me go on or you go on. It’s about an interaction. And I think that’s what is so missing when you have the anointed individual who is getting a platform. So I want to thank you both.
Andi Zeisler is a writer, editor, and the cofounder and former Editorial Director of Bitch Media. She is the author of the books Feminism and Pop Culture and We Were Feminists Once: From Riot Grrrl to CoverGirl, the Buying and Selling of a Political Movement. Her writing on feminism, activism, and popular culture has appeared in the New York Times, the Washington Post, NBC Think, Time, Salon, the Los Angeles Review of books, and more. She lives in Portland, Oregon.
Marcie Bianco, PhD, is a writer, editor, and cultural critic. She is the author of Breaking Free: The Lie of Equality and the Feminist Fight for Freedom and is an editor at Stanford Social Innovation Review.