When reading a post on the website Everyday Feminism that explains the basics of transnational feminism, I noticed the online ads for a “Stars and Stripes Blouse” from a Seattle-based tech company, Zulily. Even before knowing what transnational feminism was at the start of the semester, the irony of an e-commerce corporation advertising a gendered, nationalistic product on a website introducing the basic ideas of transnational feminism seemed too absurd to miss. So I took a screen shot, which you can see above.
Zulily, one of the companies advertising on the Everyday Feminism site, was founded by a University of Victoria drop-out who ended up in the world of IT on the west coast. Zulily’s business model is based on daily flash-sale events marketed primarily to young mothers (Fast Company). Advertising algorithms undoubtedly pulled the words women, color, United States, clothing, attire, miniskirts, from the Everyday Feminism website and advertised accordingly, spitting out the “Stars and Stripes Blouse” for our shopping consideration.
Below these advertisements, Everyday Feminism highlights a core understanding of transnational feminism: “it is important to support immigrant communities, but also fighting to stop the US capitalist endeavors in developing countries that make immigration a necessity and not a choice.” Zulily and other fast-fashion online retailers symbolize the colonial, capitalist, nationalistic systems that are predicated on exploited, gendered, precarious labour and migration. Marketing a “Stars and Stripes Blouse” on a site whose partial aim is to challenge imperialism and capitalism demonstrates how the sharing of ideas and dissent is constantly at risk of being engulfed by neoliberal policies, such as Gender Studies programs in contemporary academia. Either you pay significant sums of money for post-secondary education, or you have to sift through advertisements that counter everything you’re reading. These ads also symbolize how transnational feminism itself is always at risk of recreating white/Western feminisms unless it actively challenges imperialist and neoliberal frameworks.
These types of neoliberal, transnational business models that capitalize off of inexpensive, precarious labour—both in the making of the products, but also in using free labour of children as models to start their modelling careers (Fast Company)—are the same types of neoliberal business models that force migration by eviscerating labour markets and environments in developing countries. The future relevancy of transnational feminism will depend on its ability to resist returning to white/Western feminist thought that is so well defined in the “Stars and Stripes Blouse.”
But it’s a hell of a blouse, isn’t it?
Keywords: Zulily, neoliberalism, e-commerce, white/Western feminism
Pseudonym: Petro Poroshenko
Great post. I want to say I was shocked when I first read your post but what happened for you also happened to me a month or two back. I believe that society has become so desensitized to capitalism that most, including myself typically do not blink twice when we see an advertisement like this online on a site relating to feminism. I agree with you that there is such an irony with that advertisement being on the Everyday Feminism’s website. Thank you for posting this because it is such an effective way for people to see how far capitalism and social media have gone in the wrong direction.