Girl bosses, punk poodles, and pink smoothies: Girlhood as Enterprising Femininity
Abstract
The purpose of this paper is to add to the broader field of feminist organization and entrepreneurship scholarship by introducing and theorizing girlhood as a distinct enterprising femininity. More specifically, we investigate how girlhood, now enjoying a prominent role in commercial culture, impacts the relationship between enterprising self and femininity due to girlhood's many non-entrepreneurial features. We draw on the scholarship from the field of cultural studies to present the core politico-aesthetical categories, used to express girlhood as a distinct form of femininity. Empirically, we present and analyze an illustrative case of two large women-only professional networks that use girlhood and enterprising as their core message to their audiences. Our contributions render visible and provide a theoretical framework for studying girlhood as enterprising femininity, and add to the theorization of gendered and intersectional tensions and struggles between the market pressures to conform to the prevailing ideals of individualized success and the political ambition to challenge the status quo. More so, our theorization of girlhood as enterprising femininity allows us to raise question of what facets of femininity remain excluded – and thus in need of further theorization and critical feminist interventions – within the economic domain.
‘We want revolution girl style, now'
Double Dare Ya from the album Revolution Girl Style Now, Bikini Kill, 1991
1 INTRODUCTION
In the early 1990s, the Riot Grrrl movement set out to revolutionize girlhood by challenging the stereotypical – and tame – cultural representations of girls through the politics of punk, revolt, speaking up, and speaking back, closely tied to the aesthetic style of what a girl should and could be (Glenum & Greenberg, 2010). Several decades later, the refrain “Girls run the world,” sung by Beyoncé, is a reminder that girlhood has travelled from the outskirts to the mainstream of commercial culture. Girlhood today incorporates pink and plush alongside agency and rebellion, reflected in merchandise, brands, pop icons, and fictive characters as diverse as Spice Girls and The Girl with The Dragon Tattoo. So far, girlhood has been primarily studied within media and cultural studies, which highlight its inherent ambivalence, particularly in relation to commercialization (Baumgardner & Richards, 2004; Hains, 2014; Hopkins, 2018; McRobbie, 2009; Nguyen, 2013; Russell & Tyler, 2002; Thompson & Üstüner, 2015). On the one hand, girlhood in popular culture can be seen as a way of mainstreaming feminine agency and independence (Banet-Weiser, 2015; Baumgardner & Richards, 2004). On the other hand, the commercialization of girlhood may be a problematic neoliberal co-optation of its non-threatening features (McRobbie, 2009; Nguyen, 2013). Thus, girlhood seems to be a contradictory construct, delicately balancing countercultural resistance and marketplace performance (Hains, 2014; Thompson & Üstüner, 2015). Yet, considering the fervent organizing of and around girlhood, both as a market that services and employs women, and as a femininity that signals rebellion, girlhood has received surprisingly little attention in feminist organization and entrepreneurship studies. Existing research is predominantly based on an education and training perspective, focusing on how to foster entrepreneurship among girls (e.g., Johansen, Clausen, & Schanke, 2013; Tirivangasi, 2018), although there are exceptions which explore girlhood as a construct (e.g., Hunter & Kivinen, 2016; Russell & Tyler, 2002).
Thus, the purpose of this paper is to add to the broader field of feminist organization and entrepreneurship scholarship by introducing and theorizing girlhood as a distinct enterprising femininity. Our paper shares feminist entrepreneurship and organization scholars' engagement with and critique of the persistence of partial and conditional recognition and inclusion of women – and femininity – in the economic domain. More particularly, our article builds on feminist research that notes that the mainstream understanding of femininity has taken a postfeminist turn, that is, gender equality is treated as already accomplished, and the limits to professional and personal success are located within the women themselves – women can “have it all” if they only dare to adopt a go-getter attitude and assert themselves (Ahl, Berglund, Pettersson, & Tillmar, 2016; Byrne, Fattoum, & Diaz Garcia, 2019; Gill, Kelan, & Scharff, 2017; Lewis, 2014; Lewis, Benschop, & Simpson, 2017; Sullivan & Delaney, 2017). As numerous scholars suggest, postfeminism builds on the idea of the enterprising self, that is, assumption that human nature is essentially entrepreneurial – active, individualist, competitive, and growth oriented.1 However, if gender is seen as a socio-symbolic institution, encompassing a plurality of masculinities and femininities, only some of these are treated as compatible with the notion of enterprising self. For example, as Lewis (2014) has shown, women seeking entrepreneurial legitimacy tend to feel compelled to either follow the male norm and tone done femininity, engage in enterprising as complementary activity to motherhood, or embrace the gendered stereotype of relationality and empathy as a feminine advantage. Characteristics such as vulnerability and passivity, in contrast, tend to be seen as non-entrepreneurial in Lewis' typology. Yet the expression and celebration of vulnerability, passivity, excess, and lack of respectability are central to the construct of girlhood (Glenum & Greenberg, 2010).
Thus, if the above observations are placed alongside each other, they solicit the question of how girlhood, now enjoying a prominent role in commercial culture, impacts the relationship between enterprising and femininity due to girlhood's many non-entrepreneurial features. This article addresses this question by introducing a theoretical framework that allows to unpack the construct of girlhood and analyze how girlhood is deployed within work-life settings. More specifically, we draw on the scholarship from the field of cultural studies to present the core politico-aesthetical categories, used to express girlhood as a distinct form of femininity. Empirically, we present and analyze an illustrative case of two large women-only professional networks that use girlhood and enterprising self as the core message to their audiences.
The contribution of the article to the feminist organization and entrepreneurship scholarship is threefold. First, the article renders visible and provides a theoretical framework for studying girlhood as enterprising femininity. Second, this article adds to the theorization of gendered and intersectional tensions and struggles between the market pressures to conform to the prevailing ideals of individualized success and the political ambition to challenge the status quo. Finally, and in a more speculative spirit, the third contribution relates to the broader debates on inclusion and exclusion in the context of a technology-mediated, click-financed, and increasingly aestheticized economy where innovation not seldom takes the form of appropriation of existing subcultures. In this context, theorization of girlhood as enterprising femininity allows us to raise question of what facets of femininity remain excluded – and thus in need of further theorization and critical feminist interventions – within the economic domain.
This article is organized as follows. First, we provide an overview of earlier research and describe the research gap. Second, we introduce a theoretical framework that provides the conceptual tools to unpack girlhood. Third, we discuss the methodology behind our empirical study and present the empirical illustration on how girlhood is deployed by two professional women's networks. The paper ends with discussion of the theoretical implications of theorizing girlhood as enterprising femininity and conclusions.
2 THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK
2.1 Feminist Perspectives on Gender in Organization and Entrepreneurship Studies
Our paper builds on earlier feminist organization and entrepreneurship scholarship and shares its core aims: to problematize uncritical treatment of gender as a naturalized social category and to render visible gendered relations of power (Ahl & Marlow, 2012; Bruni, Gherardi, & Poggio, 2004; Calás, Smircich, & Bourne, 2009; Lewis, 2014; Mirchandani, 1999). In particular focus in this paper are those critical feminist contributions that problematize the ascendency and the gendered subtext of the “enterprising self” (sometimes also referred to as entrepreneurial self) in the economic domain. The enterprising self is typically defined as an ideal that encourages individuals to view themselves as ongoing business projects, personally and professionally – managing and marketing themselves in the pursuit of competitive success through never-ending self-improvement, market popularity, and personal growth (Ainsworth & Hardy, 2008; Berglund, Lindgren, & Packendorff, 2017) and is associated with changes in organizational structures and employment practices in many industries, with emphasis on flexibility, precarious or short-term employment, market sensitivity, rapid change, and adaptation to ever-shifting customer preferences (Fenwick, 2002; Storey, Salaman, & Platman, 2005).
Critical feminist researchers note that the tacit gendering of the “enterprising self” appears early on in mainstream entrepreneurship research on business creation and the successes of individual entrepreneurs and business leaders. In this context, women entrepreneurs and gendered dilemmas in business creation were treated as invisible first, and then, with the rising awareness that gender matters, only in comparison to an implicitly masculine enterprising norm (Ahl et al., 2016; Ahl & Marlow, 2012; Lewis, 2006). For example, as Ahl (2006) has shown, trait-centered research on characteristics of an enterprising individual tends to reproduce a stereotypical masculine entrepreneur archetype, against which women appear as different and lacking.
Since then, the ideal of the “enterprising self” has spread to many (if not most) societal domains (Du Gay, 2004). Today, personal enterprising ethos is often promoted as a desirable set of features to be cultivated by any individual and is articulated as an explicit ideal in many industries, ranging from long-time trend-sensitive industries such as media and software development (Lampel & Germain, 2016) and corporate career development in general, to the public domain, for example military service (Strand & Berndtsson, 2015), education (Berglund et al., 2017), and state policy (Pettersson, Ahl, Berglund, & Tillmar, 2017). In this context, enterprising is often used as descriptor for a particular initiative-taking style, centered on individual agency and self-leadership. A part of this development is that the “enterprising self” is now promoted as available to and inclusive of women, framed as a possibility for women to “have it all” through the cultivation of a “go-getter” type of mindset (Ahl et al., 2016; Byrne et al., 2019; Gill et al., 2017; Lewis, 2014; Lewis et al., 2017; Sullivan & Delaney, 2017). Typically referred to as postfeminism by critical scholars, this particular framing of femininity treats gender equality as an already accomplished fact in Western societies, assuming that women need to take an enterprising approach in order to succeed in any – or every – area of their life. Associated with popular management literature such as Sheryl Sandberg's book “Lean In,” postfeminism tends to locate the causes of not getting ahead in the business world within women themselves, and suggests that right strategic choices will enable a spectacular career.
However, postfeminism is a problematic construct. Postfeminism may treat women as capable and competent, yet it does so from a position of neoliberal individualism, rendering invisible structural inequalities such as gendered domestic labor, precarious employment conditions, and lack of financial security (Ahl et al., 2016; Gill, 2014; Gill et al., 2017; Swan, 2017). Another problematic facet of postfeminism is the marketization of the private sphere of the individual's life. As numerous scholars note, postfeminism promotes normative ideals of beauty, physical fitness, and motherhood as “natural” components of the feminine enterprising self, reinforcing traditional gender roles and privileging white heterosexual middle-class femininity (Lewis, 2014; Sullivan & Delaney, 2017). It is therefore not surprising that the private sphere tasks such as homemaking are seen as something to be seamlessly integrated into women's professional projects, leading to a whole new subcategory of business ideas for women such as mamapreneurs and bloggers (Archer, 2019; Drenten, Gurrieri, & Tyler, 2020; Wilson & Yochim, 2015).
Thus, the relationship between femininity and enterprising is a rather paradoxical one. The “enterprising self” discourse has a history of being male centered and male gendered, against which women have appeared as different and less than capable. In contrast to this exclusion and devaluation, postfeminism represents women and men as equally skilled to excel in business endeavors. However, it does so without a critical examination of the structural causes that have created unequal opportunities in the first place, depicting economic success as solely determined by individual ambition. In consequence, many of the traditional gendered binary categories continue to influence the postfeminist view of women's participation in the economic domain. For example, despite the postfeminism's emphasis on expression of individuality, Lewis's (2014) overview of entrepreneurial femininity suggests that it remains limited to three archetypes; that of adopting the masculine-gendered behavioral norms, that of choosing enterprising as a more flexible career choice for part-time mothers, or that of promoting certain moderate feminine features as a business advantage. According to this typology, all forms of “excessive” femininity, both in terms of expressing vulnerability and passivity, and certain intersections of gender, race, ethnicity, and socioeconomic class, fall outside of legitimate expressions of femininity in business contexts.
“Excessive” forms of femininity may not be associated with a normative idea of a business person, yet they are nevertheless present – and increasingly successful – in the economic domain, as numerous studies, primarily in the field of media and cultural studies, but also entrepreneurship and organization, suggest (Abidin & Gwynne, 2017; Drenten et al., 2020; Duffy & Hund, 2015; Genz, 2014; Hopkins, 2018). For example, as Genz (2015) shows in her study of British model and media entrepreneur Katie Price, the current media economy and celebrity culture encourage commodification and branding of various forms of excessive, plastically enhanced, and exaggerated femininity. And while excess may be first and foremost welcomed as a celebrity feature, the increasing pressures to engage in branding and stylization of the self are becoming mainstream due to the overall aestheticization of economy (Butler, Olaison, Sliwa, Sorensen, & Spoelstra, 2011; Hancock & Tyler, 2007). Fun, playfulness, and the injunction to be oneself are becoming increasingly important in everyday working life as visual-affective ways to align oneself with one's employer and/or clients (Cushen, 2011; Fleming & Sturdy, 2009; Harquail, 2006; Land & Taylor, 2010). In other words, aesthetic labor, required to marketize one's physical appearance and emotional disposition, is now deployed in professional settings beyond showrooms and retail stores (Lopez, 2010; Warhurst & Nickson, 2009; Witz, Warhurst, & Nickson, 2003). In addition, visuality and aesthetics are further reinforced by the growing centrality of websites, digital communication, and social media in organizations (Nicolini, 2012). Thus, Weiskopf and Steyaert's (2009, p. 197) observation that a critical understanding of entrepreneurship focuses not on business creation as such, but on those ethico-aesthetic re-negotiations of the relationship between oneself and the world takes on a rather literal expression in the digitally mediated economy. Today, many professionals are encouraged to build their personal brand around the affective appeal of visual and verbal narrativization of who they are (or appear to be). In the context of increasingly digitalized and aestheticized economy, exaggerated, excessive, and otherwise non-traditional femininities can be a way to attract attention and enable audience identification, as, for example, in Genz's study, where continuous references to working class identity are central to Katie Price's brand. Thus, these developments suggest that there is a need to investigate and theorize non-normative femininities that encompass exaggeration, vulnerability, passivity, and diversity, in terms of both commodification and emancipatory potential in the working life. The aim of this paper is to add to this overarching theoretical field by introducing and discussing girlhood as a distinct enterprising femininity.
Our focus on girlhood is motivated by girls' high visibility in popular and political culture and its ambivalent relationship to consumerism and femininity. On the one hand, girls are increasingly important in the contemporary economy as consumers and marketeers of commodities due to the rise of social media (Banet-Weiser, 2015; Russell & Tyler, 2002). On the other hand, girls' relationship to consumerism, traditional gender norms, and even global capitalism is far from straightforward, including subversion, revolt, and protest (Currie, Kelly, & Pomerantz, 2009; Harris, 2004). In this context, we do not view girlhood as an inherent quality of feminine-gendered children, but rather an active engagement with the attributes and artifacts, associated with hegemonic discourses of feminine childhood. In other words, girlhood is a distinct form of femininity that can be deployed by a person of any age, as a way of challenging (or ignoring) social norms, associated with adult self-expression. In the next section, we discuss artifacts and attributes of girlhood in more detail.
3 GIRLHOOD: INTRODUCTION TO THE CONCEPT
So I coined the term-the Gurlesque, mashing together sounds and consonants and ideas from the Bakhtin carnivalesque theory of upside-down spectacle-land public-art subversion and the glitter pasties and sneer and drag and pratfalls of the burlesque performer and the ‘take back the girl, fuck up the spelling' riot grrl punk rock music zine activism movement.
The purpose of the term is to capture the distinct performative practices, used to represent girlhood through text and images as a counter-move to a mainstream culture that marginalizes, sexualizes, or, in other ways, straightens out the rather liminal and contradictory condition of being a girl in today's society. In this regard, gurlesque is a product of a broader scholarly and artistic project to represent girlhood in popular culture, art, and literature without succumbing to reification and essentialism (Glenum & Greenberg, 2010).
The concept of gurlesque treats girlhood as a liminal temporality and an experimental space that draws on both feminine adulthood and childhood. In this regard, girlhood encompasses revolt, introversion, play, and non-conventional self-expression, wherein sexuality remains experimental and toys are still present. It is also only loosely bound to a particular age group. Moreover, girlhood entails an uneasy relationship to conventional expressions of femininity and expresses it through the use of contradictory and excessive aesthetic combinations of verbal and visual styles, for example, the grotesque and cruel with the spangled and dream, or safety pins and ripped stockings with tutus and organza (Glenum & Greenberg, 2010, p. 2). Thus, while the lack of overt political message and the extensive use of props makes gurlesque commercially deployable, it remains excessive and troubling in relation to the social norms of the adult world.
3.1 The Politico-aesthetic Content of Girlhood and Gurlesque
Gurlesque, as we discuss earlier, is a concept that gathers the shared themes of the many aesthetic categories of girlhood in girl-centered and girl-created countercultural movements, literature, art, music, and media production. Glenum and Greenberg (2010) suggest that one of the sources of inspiration for gurlesque is Mikhail Bakhtin's concept of the carnival as a metaphor for the counter-normative performance of revolt. The carnival in the Bakhtinian sense is closely connected to a temporary suspension of everyday life through mockery and turning upside down of relations of power and social norms (Bakhtin, 1984). In other words, the politico-aesthetic process of exploring girlhood through gurlesque revolves around the exploration of the constructs of pretty and cute while simultaneously disfiguring them through play with that which is perceived as ugly.
Cuteness, together with ugliness, is central to understanding the relations of power, vested in the construction of girlhood and the politics of gurlesque. Cuteness is associated with girlhood in contemporary culture, with various shades of pink as its central color scheme (Glenum & Greenberg, 2010). Cuteness as an aesthetic category is characterized by smallness, compactness, simplicity, softness, and pliancy, which typically signify a state of helplessness and pitifulness (Ngai, 2012). In other words, cuteness is the aestheticization of powerlessness and accentuates helplessness and vulnerability. According to Ngai (2012), this is because “the cute object addresses us as if it was our child” (Ngai, 2012, p. 60) and appeals to us for protection. By judging and calling something cute, we infantilize the object and thereby make it unthreatening and powerless. However, cuteness can also evoke ambivalent and conflicting emotions of attraction, protectiveness, violence, and dominance (Ngai, 2012). In this regard, cuteness can also be used as a provocative form of protest, as, for example, in the Kawaii culture, which gained traction in the eighties and nineties, as a revolt against traditional Japanese values and a life of duty and work (Yano, 2013).
If cuteness can be a strategic position to either render visible or challenge prevailing relations of power, ugliness too is a provocative aesthetic category. Ugliness, according to Strati (2000), is a relative concept that is only possible in relation to beauty. Ugliness gains attention in the mid-nineteenth century, as a symbol for the moral and physical disfigurement caused by industrialization, urbanization, and mass production, because ugliness “poses a threat to the beautiful and must therefore be eliminated” (Strati, 2000, p. 21). In this regard, ugliness as aesthetic category carries with it “an active, dangerous and aggressive power” (Bodei, 1995, p. 186, in Strati [1999]). The dangers of ugliness are several. It stands in stark contrast to the normative notions of good taste, art, and beauty. It also reveals concealed facets of social and corporeal life by focusing on ill-proportioned and the disfigured. Thus, ugliness has the potential of rendering visible those relations of power that give legitimacy to and posit certain aesthetic standards as a norm.
The use of cute and ugly in gurlesque resembles a feminine/feminist appropriation of camp, kitsch, and grotesque. Both camp and kitsch are two styles that draw on ugliness by emphasizing the constructed, excessive, and artificial nature of commercialized aesthetics. In contrast, grotesque focuses rather on ugliness as disfigurement and less-than-perfect corporeity through images of the flawed human body, death, and birth (Bakhtin, 1984).
Kitsch is associated with the industrialization and the urbanization in its wake. According to Strati (2000), this concept represents an emphasis on the mundane and a mix of the mediocre with bad taste, but also the alienation of the bourgeois society and the feeling of being controlled by things. Typical elements in kitsch are mass-produced pseudo-art objects, centered on pleasant and inoffensive features. Camp draws on similar objects and aesthetics, but is more excessive and glamorous, and emphasizes “the calculated posture of self-seduction in the excessive, the unnatural and the artificial” (Strati, 2000, p. 21), or as Sontag (2009) expresses it “the essence of Camp is its love of the unnatural: of artifice and exaggeration.”
The grotesque in the writings of Bakhtin (1984) is associated with development, change, and transformation and images of birth, growth, copulation, pregnancy, old age, disintegration, and dismemberment, as well as abusive language of oaths, and curses. Russo (1995) points out that the most vivid representation for the grotesque used by Bakhtin is the “senile, pregnant hag” and that the grotesque is often associated with the female body – without boundaries, overflowing, and hysterical. The female grotesque is, according to Russo (1995), almost a tautology because the female is always measured against the male norm and thereby per definition grotesque. In this regard, the grotesque is similar to the notions of uncanny and abject, wherein grotesque is constructed through display in the public sphere, while the uncanny plays out within “an individualized, interiorized space of fantasy and introspection” (Russo, 1995, p. 8) and the abject emerges at the boundaries between socially accepted and prohibited sides of the self (Kristeva, 1982).
Thus, the categories associated with gurlesque center on the feminine themes in between adulthood and childhood, such as toys, pets, sequins, makeup, and clothes, sexuality and body, and deploy the politico-aesthetics of cute and ugly in various combinations. Typically, these categories are series of ongoing explorations that unfold relationally via interactions with multiple others without making authoritative claims of what it “really” means to be a girl. While the commodity market is one possible point of reference in girlhood, it never has full influence over it. As our two illustrative cases in the next section suggest, the engagement with the commercial culture may be necessary for sustained business activity, it does not preclude taking a political stance for questions of inclusion, nor does it fully remove the unease with the mainstream femininity and the world of grown-ups.
4 GIRLHOOD IN ENTREPRENEURSHIP: AN EMPIRICAL ILLUSTRATION
In this section, we provide an empirical illustration of how girlhood is deployed as enterprising femininity. To do so, we use examples from an empirical study of two networking platforms for professional women, Girlboss and Her,2 both of which build primarily on slogans, popular cultural references, and imagery that combines pinkness and cuteness with edginess and provocation when communicating with their audiences, digitally and in real-life settings. As Costas and Fleming (2009) suggest, an empirical illustration as a methodological approach is suitable when adding empirical depth to papers, engaged in developing concepts and introducing novel theoretical directions. Thus, the purpose of our empirical illustration is to show that – and how – girlhood can be theorized as a distinct type of enterprising femininity.
We chose to use examples from two networking platforms, Girlboss and Her. The two platforms share many similarities in their missions and presentation of their brands, yet aim to reach different target audiences. Our main argument for using examples from two platforms instead of just one is to show that girlhood is not used to create distinctiveness for a particular brand. Rather, girlhood appears to be a particular construct of femininity that attracts the attention of large and diverse audiences from around the globe. Thus, girlhood may be becoming a necessary attribute of a brand that tries to reach these audiences. In our empirical illustration, both platforms display an aesthetic style that is nearly identical. The style is consistently conveyed through their websites, social media channels, and physical meet-up events.
Both platforms' missions are to support women's career pursuits through women-only networking activities and they share the ambition to reach out and connect as many women as possible. Both platforms are supported by a famous female entrepreneur. Sophia Amoruso, the founder of Nasty Gal apparel brand, and the author of the autobiographical book Girlboss about her entrepreneurial journey, is one of the initiators behind Girlboss, while Babba C. Rivera (formerly Canales), listed by Forbes as one of the top 30 talents under 30 in 2015 for her work at Uber, was enrolled in Her when the network started expanding in the United States. Girlboss began as a foundation; its social media network was launched in 2019 and was sold to media holding company Attention Capital at the end of that year. However, Amoruso continues to work for Girlboss as the CEO. Her was started in 2014 in Sweden and has been expanding globally since.3
However, despite the similarities, the platforms' target audiences and the brand niches do not fully overlap. Girlboss is open to any professional identifying as female in the United States, with emphasis on millennial women. Her, in turn, recruits its members via either an online application, which must be approved, or invitation, and targets women professionals working as CEOs, founders, industry leaders, influencers, and directors, and arranges network activities in 20 cities in Europe, Asia, Australia, and the United States. The platforms do not disclose statistics of membership. However, Girlboss claimed that pre-registering initial interest in the network generated a waiting list of 54,000 potentially interested women, which could be plausible considering that Girlboss has a large following on social media platforms, 1.5 million followers on Instagram, and 75, 000 on Twitter. Her, possibly due its more exclusive profile, has “only” 22,000 followers on the US Instagram account and 15,600 on the European one. Together, these two platforms cover a broad range of industries and geographical locations.
4.1 Empirical Data Collection
The empirical examples used in this paper are taken from a study of the two platforms' public communication to their audiences, stretching over a period of 2 years. We have followed both networks and the two founders, Amoruso and Rivera, on their websites, social media channels, in the mainstream media, and other publications such as books, during 2018 and 2019. Both platforms communicate primarily through their social media sites. The Girlboss website does contain a compilation of short articles on three topics – work, money, and life. Her website provides information about the network and its mission. Girlboss publishes to its Instagram account daily, typically motivational slogans, and images, while their Twitter account is updated less often and focuses more on upcoming events and sponsored posts. Her has different channels for its US and European sites, and publishes at least one a week on each. Taken together, these two platforms produce and contain an abundance of textual and visual data. During the 2-year period of the study, we followed the two platforms by reviewing their communication on weekly basis and taking structured notes on the topics and themes in the images and content. Over a 1000 captions, images, and articles were reviewed and themed. We have also gathered illustrations of the recurring themes by taking photographs of the public content of these platforms and writing down examples of user comments. However, we have been careful to respect the privacy of the individuals interacting with the digital context and have neither recorded nor stored identifiable personal data, such as images of comments and user names. We made notes of typical user comments, such as “OMG ME!!!” cited in the next section, but without making notes about the users that made them, and only as illustrations of the overall tone on the websites. Over time, we could identify certain patterns in the communication of the two platforms, many strongly related to the aesthetics of girlhood.
As we use the empirical material from the study as an illustrative example, the selection of the images, captions, and text for this paper was based on abductive analytical approach. Our point of departure in the analysis, based on good familiarity with the communication of the two platforms, was that both brands build on girlhood as their core aesthetic concept. Thus, the question guiding our analysis was how girlhood is constructed and communicated to the platforms' audiences, not only via explicit references to girls via labels such as “girlboss” or celebration of international girls' day, but also via images, slogans, captions, and presentation of work-related topics.
In order to answer our question, we went back and forth between theming aesthetic elements and textual messages in the empirical material and concepts in the literature on gurlesque and girlhood. The interpretive scheme for the images draws upon Yanow's (2006) methodology for analyzing organizational artifacts and non-verbal communication. The aspects considered in the analysis were design elements such as size, material, shape, and color; the relation between the images; and the types of artifacts used in the images. The aesthetic categories of girlhood in the theoretical framework were used to develop a coding scheme for the images. Each image was reviewed, coded, and categorized based on its aesthetic content. In the next step, we analyzed how the images related to each other when posted on social media in order to identify if they affirmed, negated, and contrasted each other. The images and captions we have selected to include in the paper (Figures 1-7) are illustrative of how aesthetic elements of girlhood are deployed by the platforms and reflect different channels these platforms use to communicate with their audiences. Our presentation of the cases also includes quotes from various texts, associated with the platforms, to give the reader a sense of two brands' core values and the responses from their followers in order to contextualize the imagery.
4.2 Ambition Begins Here: Construction of Girlhood by Girlboss and Her
While you're reading this, I have three pieces of advice that I want you to remember: Don't ever grow up. Don't become a bore. Don't ever let the Man get to you. Okay? Cool. Then let's do this.
The quote gives an indication of how construction of girlhood as an enterprising femininity revolves around the elements of adolescence – the Washington Post even called the book #GirlBoss “Lean In for misfits”5 because the book dispenses entrepreneurial advice to social outsiders that do things their own way, despite not having money, education, and contacts. And, as we will show in this section, the construction of girlhood these two networks are engaged in recreates many of gurlesque's contradictions where cuteness and pinkness are placed alongside excess, revolt and ugliness.
Both platforms present a similar mixture of arguments – vulnerability, authenticity, importance of women's support – for joining a professional network exclusively for women. Thus, neither of the networks position themselves as singularly oriented toward financial and career success. Her, for example, states that “We celebrate womanhood: we believe that all women are heroes in their own right who see good in one another” as a part of the platform's value statement on its global website. Girlboss, in turn, states on its website that the network's purpose is to “create a new reality where women can make progress personally, professionally, and in service of others.” The overall message is that the networks are intimate spaces of care and support for women by women that enable conventional individual success in all areas of life, illustrated by slogans such as “ambition begins here” and [email protected].6
In addition to care and ambition, the two networks also have a component of collective protest and social critique in their overall message, and one illustration of how these different notions are fused together is a video where Her presents its network idea, posted on network's global website. The first part of the video consists of brief video clips of various historical women's protest marches and ends with a still image with the network's name stamped on a photograph with a distinctly feminist iconography, as presented in the screenshot in Figure 1. From the still image, the video moves to the present day and a series of brief shots of young women, each making a short statement starting with “I am….”
I am Her, screenshot of video on Her website 365x209mm (72 x 72 DPI)
The importance of protest social change and diversity is consistently promoted by the two platforms and their founders. Sophia Amoruso, associated with the label of “lean in for misfits,” mentioned earlier, speaks openly about her attention deficit hyperactivity disorder and the difficulties it caused her in younger years. The founders of Her make a point of their immigrant background and thus not having any particular privileges to exploit when starting their careers.7 Both platforms are keen on showing their audiences that inclusion is a core value that they promote, and their networks can be platforms from which women can collectively speak up against sexism and discrimination, embrace diversity, body positivity, and fight for women's rights.
The themes of feminine solidary, personal success, and diversity are continuously reproduced through the platforms' social media feeds. Girlboss, as illustrated in Figure 2, did a #blackhistorymonth series with images of famous African American women alongside a mixture of slogans, re-tweets, and images of women and celebrities with added-on captions that in different ways relate to personal and professional development.
Girl power, screenshot of Girlboss Instagram feed 334x225mm (72 x 72 DPI)
In this context, a slogan such as “Women don't need your opinion to exist” can generate over 29,000 likes on Girlboss Instagram feed and comments from the followers such as “Exactly! We get sh!t done!!!” and the same week be followed up with posts such as “There is no elevator to success you have to take the stairs” and retweets of statements such as “Ladies, the next time you're worried you're asking for too much money think about how many raspberries have the audacity to cost $7 for ONE 6oz container. We need organic raspberry confidence. Thank you that is all.”
Not all of the captions are about success. The messages go back and forth between the “go-getter” attitude and the adolescent attitude of wanting to sleep in, eat pizza and not be ambitious and perfect. In Figure 2, one of the images is of a young woman with her phone, with a caption “Sorry I'm on relaxation mode today all phone calls will be sent directly to voicemail […],” followed by nearly 25,000 likes and textual exclamations such as “OMG ME!!!”
Her social media feeds are similar. In Figure 3, Her US Instagram feed contains a short film of women's protest in Chile, a women's shopping day add for buying from women's owned companies, motivational slogans, and an image with a “cup of ambition,” a reference to the song lyrics by Dolly Parton for the soundtrack to the movie “9 to 5.”. This connects the right for women to be ambitious, have a career, and earn their own money to a particular personal style, here embodied by Dolly Parton, those style can be easily associated with the aesthetics of kitsch and camp.
A cup of ambition, screenshot of Her USA Instagram feed 346x227mm (72 x 72 DPI)
Pinkness, cuteness, kitsch, and camp make regular appearances in social media feeds of the two platforms. Pink and cute fonts and color schemes are common, as can be seen in Figure 4 of Her Europe Instagram feed. Little girls appear too, often in short films and images where they give advice and do otherwise impressive things, combining smallness and cuteness with wisdom, power, and strength. Moreover, images of female characters from popular culture, such as Wonder Woman in the example, but often Lisa Simpson, or various characters from children's animated films, together with cute animals, predominantly dogs, make regular appearances. Incidentally, cute dogs seem to be a signature feature of both Sophia Amoruso and Babba C. Rivera, where Sophia is an owner of several poodles, often featured on her personal social media feeds, while Babba is regularly seen with her French bulldog Blue. Typically, images of cuteness are often followed by, or combined with elements of kitsch, glamour, or excess, amplifying the contradiction between cute and ugly.
Girls giving advice, screenshot of Her Europe Instagram feed 343x227mm (72 x 72 DPI)
That's the spirit of Nasty Gal: We want you to dress for yourself, and know that it's not shallow to put effort into how you look. I'm telling you that you don't have to choose between smart and sexy. You can have both. You are both.
Women's' right to be sexy whenever they want and dress up for themselves is also illustrated by an image from the Girlboss Instagram (Figure 5) feed of a woman wearing a sequin cocktail dress, high heels, red lipstick, and rubber gloves, while putting colorful plates in the dishwasher and drinking champagne. Notable is that the sexiness featured is exaggerated and often with references to drag queens and artists with a kitsch style such as Dolly Parton and Cher, with big wigs, heavy makeup, and tight dresses. The materials in the clothes featured in the books by Amourso and in the social media echo the artificial and the clothes are often mass-produced, second hand, and in typically cheap materials such as polyester, nylon, and plastic. The props used in the images are also nodding to camp and kitsch with large pink phones in plastic from 1980s and pink slippers with feathers and glitter. Here too, the images of glamor are followed up by contrast and contradiction, such as placing Dolly Parton amidst her teddy bears, and thus never fully leaving the domain of childhood and cuteness.
Champagne and rubber gloves, screenshot of Girlboss Instagram feed 351x233mm (72 x 72 DPI)
The topics and imagery that are absent are also quite interesting. Men appear very seldom and typically in supporting roles to the female protagonists. Family, motherhood, and sexual relations are touched upon primarily through the reproductive rights and the financial family planning lens. For example, in relation to girlhood, there are no images of families with daughters, or actual mothers and daughters featured. The emphasis is often on friends, rather than relatives and romance, as, for example, Galentine's day (which is about celebrating your gal friends on the eve of Valentine's day) or Friendsgiving instead of Thanksgiving.
The two platforms use aesthetics of the websites and the social media feeds in their real life meet-ups as well. Girlboss arranges an annual Girlboss Rally, a highly publicized event, and each year the event is styled to reflect the core values of the network – feminine care, ambition, and revolt – through various shades of pink, edgy quotes and design, pitch competitions, self-care booths, and in-house astrology readings. For example, in Figure 6, we are invited to see inside of the Girlboss Rally of 2018, featuring a pink lounge with motivational quotes on the walls, a slogan on taking power back by Beyoncé and another one on self-love.
Girlbosses rallying with Beyoncé , image from Girlbossrally Facebook feed 212x157mm (72 x 72 DPI)
Conversely, Her arranges more intimate meet-ups for invited members only, and so the aesthetic resembles informal dinners for girlfriends. The images posted of the events are very similar to private photos usually posted on Instagram with less staging, less elaborate props, and more subdued colors. Moreover, the aesthetics and messaging of Her network makes subtle references to those same slogans and aesthetics as Girlboss. In Figure 7, the image of the presents each participant received during one of those intimate dinners features a Girlboss mystery jar and a notebook with the statement “Make shit happen” (Figure 7).
Girlboss meets Her, screenshot of Her Europe Instagram feed 351x233mm (72 x 72 DPI)
5 DISCUSSION
In the theoretical framework, we outlined the content of girlhood and gurlesque as a feminine aesthetic and further explored the deployment of this aesthetic by women's networks through our empirical illustrations. In this section, we will discuss the themes, identified in our empirical section and their theoretical implications.
Our exploration of the empirical illustration yields three themes concerning the deployment of girlhood aesthetic in the context of women's professional networks. First, our illustrative case suggests that girlhood is used to attract the attention of professional women, as a legitimate aesthetic expression of enterprising femininity. In contrast, the more subdued and tame forms of enterprising femininity, identified in previous research, are not used by the networks (Lewis, 2014). The two platforms use aesthetic categories of girlhood in contradictory combinations when creating a distinct aesthetic style/genre of communicating their message. In other words, it is not a cleaned-up cute version of girlhood, but aesthetic categories associated with the gurlesque that are continuously reproduced through their social media and physical meet-up spaces. By including pop icons such as Dolly Parton with her stuffed teddy bears as a role model for working women, the platforms signal that the cute, camp, and kitsch can be combined with success and ambition. Whereas girlhood as a personal aesthetic style is used by individual women outside of the activities of the two networks is beyond the scope of our study. Certainly, girlhood as enterprising femininity could be a particular genre of expression, limited to social media and the women-only networks. However, in line with Bonner and du Gay's (1992) discussion of the enterprising self, such networks can also be seen as educating their followers on what particular view of the self is the key to professional and personal success, making it legitimate – and possibly even desirable – to explore and experiment with girlhood in working life settings. Moreover, girlhood resonates with the overall aestheticization of economy and the general interest in uniqueness, playfulness, humor, and self-expression in the corporate world (Fleming & Sturdy, 2009).
Second, the aesthetic categories of gurlesque are used not only to retake girlhood, and its associated symbols of pink, dolls, and tulle as in earlier iterations of this movement, but also to create a wider message of inclusion. The role models in this pink online universe can be from diverse ethnical, racial, and religious backgrounds, representing a distinctly intersectional perspective on enterprising. The postfeminist version of femininity has been critiqued for concerning primarily western, white, heterosexual, and middle-class women (McRobbie, 2008). In the context of postfeminism, girlhood as enterprising femininity is therefore far more inclusive of diversity among women. Moreover, the use of the aesthetic categories associated with gurlesque could be seen as a rebellion against the toned-down self-representation, associated with the white middle-class norm of feminine respectability (Skeggs, 1997). Thus, in the case of the two platforms, girlhood aesthetic could be seen as a revolt against not only adulthood, but also narrow white middle-class gender norms.
Third, the message interwoven in the girlhood aesthetic echoes discourse on the enterprising self in combination with themes from different waves of feminism. The otherwise predominant discourses on the enterprising self are reflected in the two platforms' focus on performance, career, self-actualization, individualism, and authenticity, and the demand for women to constantly improve and develop themselves (Bröckling, 2005; McRobbie, 2009). However, continuous messaging on growth and self-improvement appear hand in hand with a feminist message of women's collective effort (Beasley, 1999). The two networks' emphasis on the importance of women supporting each other and of collaborating in a safe space without men is reminiscent of radical feminism. This is a reverse move from the development identified in other studies, which highlights the shift from a radical feminist discourse calling for collective action to a postfeminist neoliberal discourse (Berglund, Ahl, Pettersson, & Tillmar, 2018). However, both platforms abstain from defining femininity in relation to men, motherhood and domesticity and focus instead on women's equal rights in the public domain, in line with liberal feminism. Similarly, celebration of diversity and inclusion borrows elements from intersectional feminism.
These observations imply that girlhood and gurlesque are helpful concepts in theorizing a distinct type of enterprising femininity that otherwise is rendered invisible as “nonpreneur.” Girlhood as enterprising femininity challenges both the male-dominated and the postfeminist discourses by engaging with diversity, inclusion, vulnerability, imperfection, and lack of respectability. However, its message is politically and ideologically contradictory, as it weaves together elements from different feminist waves with the enterprising self. Girlhood, when deployed to convey an emergent enterprising femininity, may allow to voice objections against discrimination and limiting social norms, yet it never abandons the ideas of the enterprising self and personal success as the ultimate goals of personal and professional development. Thus, it can be seen as ideologically exploitative of social movements it borrows imagery from.
One explanation for girlhood's appeal to contemporary professional women may lie in that it is a cultural–aesthetic genre and a part of larger cultural movement of cuteness and pinkness producing affective responses in a growing audience online (Dale, Goggin, Leyda, McIntyre, & Negra, 2017; Yano, 2013). The consumption of cute images online can be seen as a coping strategy and emotional outlet for workers in the contemporary workplace (Page, 2017). Watching and liking rebellious cats on Youtube or reading and commenting motivational quotes on Instagram can be a temporary affective relief from otherwise increasingly insecure and fragmented working life. However, activity in the social media bubble does not necessarily lead to social critique and organizing in the actual workplace. In other words, engagement in girlhood in online settings might resemble the pseudo-political processes of the social media, as described by Seymour (2020), where passive liking, commenting and sharing displace political organizing in real-life settings.
6 CONCLUSIONS
To make Riot Grrrl move into the future in a new way with a bunch of new names and a bunch of new energy, younger people have to learn about it and apply it to their own lives and own modern conversation. And they are.
CONFLICT OF INTEREST
No conflict of interest has been declared by the authors.
ENDNOTE
Biographies
Anna Alexandersson is a senior lecturer in entrepreneurship at School of Business and Economics at Linnaeus University. Her thesis focused on entrepreneurial processes in business incubators, in particular, the role of polyphony and dialogue in creative processes. Her current research covers organizational aesthetics and play, femininity and entrepreneurship in social media, digitalization in accounting, and entrepreneurship in the platform economy.
Viktorija Kalonaityte is a senior lecturer in entrepreneurship and organization studies at Linnaeus University. Her current scholarly work is at the intersection of organization theory and humanities, such as Girlhood studies and Gurlesque, political philosophy of Jacques Rancière, the Anthropocene, and Post-humanism. Her other interests are non-academic writing and art as a form of knowledge production.
