The Performance of Neoliberal Feminism and the Rhetoric of Liberation: Women Instrumentalized and Struggles Depoliticized
- Marina Misaghinejad
- 4 days ago
- 6 min read
In recent months, much of the public debate surrounding feminism has appeared to focus on its performative dimension. Across social media, marketing campaigns, and even political discourse, the word feminism is increasingly being branded, transformed into a label to be displayed rather than a practice of concrete political struggle. Hashtags, merchandise, "Instagrammable" demonstrations, and influencer profiles seem to have replaced grassroots organizations, community networks, and collective practices that historically made feminism a force for social transformation. This trend produces a narrative in which emancipation is measured through visibility and symbolic recognition rather than through genuine changes in structures of power.
Within this context, contemporary white feminism emerges as a central protagonist: capable of appropriating the symbols, slogans, and struggles of others, transforming them into consumable performances legible to Western audiences, and imposing a hierarchy of voices that privileges visible individuals over the collectives actively organizing on the ground. As it has developed across the Western landscape over recent decades, white feminism has never been solely a movement for individual emancipation; it has often functioned as a tool for consolidating the cultural and political power of a particular way of practicing feminism. Its hegemony has been built largely through the appropriation of others' struggles, transforming locally rooted demands, embedded in specific histories of multiple forms of oppression, into neutral symbols or easily consumable slogans for the media and the marketplace.
Consider, for example, major global feminist movements: from the struggles of Kurdish and Iranian women to the mobilizations of African women against war, state violence, and economic exploitation; from Indigenous women's battles for land rights and self-determination to migrant women's resistance against institutional racism and the violence of global bureaucracies. In each of these contexts, feminist practices are rooted in distinct histories, cultures, and strategies of survival and resistance that often escape superficial understanding. Yet these same struggles have frequently been reduced to icons or symbolic brands, stripped of their political complexity and transformed into digestible media content suited to Instagram, television talk shows, or feminist marketing campaigns.
The wars in Afghanistan and Iraq represent some of the clearest examples of how Western feminism has been instrumentalized for geopolitical purposes. During these conflicts, international campaigns frequently portrayed local women as passive victims awaiting rescue, emblematic figures of total oppression, incapable of acting autonomously without external intervention. This narrative produced a dual effect. On the one hand, it simplified and depoliticized the experiences of local women by reducing them to symbols for media consumption. On the other, it legitimized military interventions and imperialist policies by framing war and occupation as humanitarian acts of women's liberation.
The case of Afghanistan remains among the most striking. Following 2001, Western rhetoric repeatedly emphasized the veil and Taliban restrictions as universal symbols of female oppression. This approach erased—indeed, flattened—the country's social and political complexity, reducing Afghan women to passive spectators. Their roles as agents of change within their own communities, through clandestine education, survival strategies, and everyday forms of resistance, were neither recognized nor valued within the dominant narrative. Everything was transformed into a spectacular representation, easily digestible for Western media and distant audiences. The same dynamic unfolded in Iraq, where during and after the 2003 invasion women were portrayed as universal symbols of dehumanization. Slogans and images were extracted from their context, invested with Western moral and political meanings, and deployed to legitimize a military intervention that in reality produced new regimes of oppression, systemic violence, and social destabilization.
This extractive and selective appropriation constitutes one of the most problematic aspects of Western feminism. It is a feminism that claims to save but rarely listens; one that links emancipation with state violence and privatizes the political narratives of local women by incorporating them into stories compatible with neoliberal and capitalist logics. The risks are evident: these practices diminish local women's ability to be recognized as autonomous political subjects, displace genuine forms of resistance, and reinforce Western hegemony by transforming radical struggles into consumable media icons. Countering this mechanism requires an international feminism that listens, values, and centers local voices, recognizing that autonomy, justice, and liberation cannot be imposed from outside but must emerge from the very communities that practice them every day.
This appropriation is not politically neutral. It has concrete consequences, particularly in strengthening the visibility and legitimacy of Western feminism itself as the supposedly authentic and system-compatible path to liberation. The dominant narrative thus becomes one of a feminism that rescues or instructs rather than learns and engages in dialogue, reinforcing a cycle in which women from certain regions or backgrounds are never fully acknowledged as autonomous political subjects but remain passive spectators of others' emancipatory projects. In other words, white feminism tends to naturalize its own leadership by presenting its perspective as universal, while relegating all other experiences to material to be interpreted or appropriated rather than voices endowed with political agency.
This is a structural mechanism intertwined with power, capitalism, and cultural imperialism. Transforming pain, struggle, and survival into symbolic commodities compatible with the market not only depoliticizes these practices but also neutralizes any potential challenge to dominant structures. This process occurs not necessarily through direct violence but through media legitimization, the production of marketable narratives, and the selective amplification of stories deemed suitable for public consumption.
Under the same promise of emancipation and self-determination, white feminism has also constructed a dominant narrative deeply intertwined with Western capitalist logics of individual competition. The figure of the businesswoman—the woman who "needs no one," who succeeds entirely on her own, who becomes the entrepreneur of her own destiny—is frequently presented as the universal model of liberation. On the surface, this ideal appears to celebrate female autonomy, resilience, and the capacity to transform one's abilities and image into economic and social capital. Beneath this veneer of empowerment, however, lies a very different reality: emancipation is depoliticized and reduced to the individual's ability to climb institutional and market hierarchies, while the structures of power—patriarchy, capitalism, racism, and imperialism—remain fundamentally untouched.
This paradigm has been exported globally, recasting women's struggles outside the West as success stories compatible with Western liberal ideals. Rather than valuing collective forms of emancipation, community solidarity, and everyday strategies of survival, dominant narratives transform these experiences into aesthetic or media symbols. As Rafia Zakaria argues in Against White Feminism: Notes on Disruption, white feminism uses the lives of women of color as a stage upon which to legitimize its own authority, without genuinely listening to them or recognizing them as political subjects. Stories of resistance are thus reinterpreted according to standards of visibility and individual success, while practices that do not generate profit, recognition, or personal branding risk being ignored or relegated to decorative background.
The compatibility of the self-made woman with capitalism is unmistakable. The emancipated woman becomes a brand; the self itself is transformed into capital. Individual success replaces collective transformation, hierarchical advancement replaces solidarity networks, and media performance replaces genuine resistance. Responsibility for liberation is placed upon the individual, while the structural conditions of oppression—class inequality, discrimination, and systemic precarity—are rendered invisible. The result is a form of white feminism that represents and rescues but seldom listens, constructing itself upon the symbolic exploitation of others' struggles.
The consequences of this dynamic are profound. On one hand, it neutralizes the radical potential of social transformation by reducing liberation to an individual performance. On the other, it reinforces the hegemony of white feminism by determining who is permitted visibility and who remains marginalized. Women living under the most oppressive conditions are thus confronted with a false choice: integrate into the dominant model and become examples of "success" according to Western standards, or risk remaining unheard, invisible, and depoliticized. In this sense, neoliberal Western feminism does not promote universal emancipation; rather, it selectively determines who may become a symbol of liberation according to their compatibility with market logics and hegemonic narratives.
Challenging this model requires reimagining emancipation in collective, anti-capitalist, and anti-colonial terms. It means recognizing community organizing, care work, and everyday solidarity as forms of political resistance. It means creating spaces in which women can autonomously determine their own priorities and strategies without adapting their practices to the demands of visibility, profit, or media performance. It means listening to and centering local voices, valuing forms of emancipation that do not pass through paid employment or personal branding, and recognizing that liberation is not an individual product to be exported but a collective, complex process rooted in specific social and cultural contexts. As Zakaria argues, a genuinely intersectional feminism must break with appropriation, symbolic paternalism, and the centralization of Western voices in order to build authentic solidarity grounded in listening, respect, and concrete political action.
