Categorical feminism

New media and the rhetorical work of assessing a sexist, humorous, misogynistic, realistic advertisement

Abstract

This article focuses on online assessments of a controversial British television advertisement. Across blogs, websites and forums, a range of stances emerged in debates about its possible “sexism”, “humour”, “misogyny”, or “realism”. The analytic interest here is in the ways that assessors invoked “f-” categories (e.g., “feminism”, “feminist”) as part of their assessments: across the data corpus, people would locate themselves or others in relation to “feminism”, where “feminism” was variously old-fashioned, modern, prejudiced, vital, dogmatic, complex, and/or many other things besides. To account for this variability, the article pursues an ethnomethodologically-oriented policy of treating categories not as vectors for in-the-head social attitudes, but as resources for on-the-screen social actions. Categories thus became analysable not for what they revealed about their authors’ real thoughts vis-a-vis feminism, but for how they functioned as crucial components of recipient-designed online assessments. Studying examples of positive and negative assessments, the paper subsequently shows that and how users claimed or denied their own (or some others’) allegiance to “f-” categories as a method for strengthening their own (or undermining others’) assessments. A concluding discussion considers the wider applications of a categorial approach to feminism in a world of increasingly mediated interaction.