ABSTRACT
This chapter explores some of the contradictions in postfeminist celebrity activism, which advocates for global gender equality through a celebrity performativity intimately linked to Westernised consumerism, economic inequality, and sexualised patriarchal culture. It focuses on feminist analysis of popular culture, which questions the contemporary ‘postfeminist phenomena’ of linking discourses of celebrity with sexualisation and empowerment. The chapter argues that the name of self-actualisation through postfeminist digital activism, female celebrities frequently privatise politics by absorbing the complex stories of distant others into their own mediated identity narratives of self-growth and ‘making a difference’. The campaign became a lesson in the limitations of celebrity digital activism, which often provides a simplistic, individualistic, and decontextualized view to complex economic, political, and historical problems. Feminist celebrity politics, in the postfeminist, mobile, and global media age, embodies a number of contemporary cultural contradictions. Celebrity appropriation of feminist discourses delivers them some claim to a commodity that is increasingly rare and valuable: authenticity.
