Is feminism really in collapse?

Ten years ago, Time declared 2014 “the best year for women since the dawn of time”. While the truth behind this statement is definitely up for debate, it does echo some reality about the state of feminism then and our belief in it. 2014 was the year Beyoncé quoted Nigerian author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s thoughts on feminism in front of a live audience at the VMAs, with the words “feminist” plastered boldly and proudly behind her. It was also the year that the United Nations launched HeForShe, the solidarity movement for the advancement of gender equality, and when mass campaigns were launched in the UK and US to tackle the prevalence of sexual assault on university campuses.

Were there huge problems with the way feminism entered mainstream culture during this time? Absolutely. A movement that started as a critique of capitalist exploitation became commodified and, subsequently, undermined. But it prompted consciousness-raising among women and a drive to advocate for feminism in a way we don’t see as passionately today.

In 2024, the state of women’s rights and (feminism) is dire. In the introduction of her book Collapse Feminism: The Online Battle For Feminism’s Future, writer and video essayist Alice Cappelle highlights that in 2022, Roe v Wade was overturned in the US, and fewer women protested the ruling compared to the Women’s March in 2017. In that same year, Amnesty International warned that there had been a dramatic deterioration of women’s rights worldwide. Additionally, in France, where Cappelle is from, the Haut Conseil à l’Égalité entre les femmes et les hommes (High Council for Equality between Women and Men) found in their 2023 report that sexism is “stagnating” and “advancing” in some areas.

Is feminism and women’s rights doomed? Cappelle doesn’t think so. Through a close analysis of how conservative and anti-feminist ideas are filtered through social media, Collapse Feminism does not just offer critique about the state of the world but also alternatives to how we can reclaim our future online and in real life.  

We spoke to Cappelle about catastrophism, the rise of tradwives and how we can stand proud in our feminist beliefs.

Collapse Feminism is a rather pessimistic title for a book that is quite optimistic about the future of feminism. Why did you decide to analyse online feminism, identity and conservatism through the narrative of collapse?

Alice Cappelle: This framework is really dominant right now. There’s this idea that we’re approaching the end of times as a civilisation and that we’re going to get punished for all the wrong things that we’ve done, especially with climate change. This is how we talk about the world, always through the lens of collapse. So, I wanted to look at how this framework impacts the way we do feminism and social justice. What is interesting to me when we talk about collapse and the collapse of civilisation is that usually these discourses are shaped by the powerful. Trump is such a good example of that. He has provoked the ‘this is the end of Western civilisation’ type rhetoric. It’s a very privileged discourse. But still, I was so frustrated when I was doing my research and saw how that discourse was starting to gain legitimacy, even in progressive circles. So, I wanted to look at it across the political spectrum, in political spheres and non-political spheres. And, because I’m a video essayist, I wanted to focus on internet culture and legitimise what is done on social media.

It was quite a challenge reaching out to booksellers and telling them this book is about social media because they’re sceptical of its importance and legitimacy. We have a big issue when we see social media as this fun little thing and not as this place where young people and many others forge their opinions and identities. That’s why I also wanted to write this book.

What you’ve said about the collapse of society being a dominant theme in our world right now is so true. New York City even has a climate clock in Union Square (which states we have five years left to limit global warming from worsening exponentially), and young people call it the Doomsday Clock.

Alice Cappelle: Yeah. That’s crazy. I think it’s always about finding this balance between stressing that we’re in a serious situation and not scaring people to the point of paralysis. There’s this French climate activist who uses the metaphor of a car that is about to drive into you, and your initial reaction is fear – but what will you do with that fear? Are you just going to turn into yourself? Or do you find a solution and find alternatives to your situation? Also, the framework of collapse, as I argued in the book, will always bring people back to conservatism. It will always be harmful to women’s rights or social justice in general. So, we need to go beyond fear, not just for us but for the future of humanity and the future of people. Many people can’t afford to have this doomer-ish vision of society because their existence right now is already not fun. You have to believe in a better future to survive.

In the book, you define what feminism means to you and state that it is “bigger than gender equality; it’s bigger than women”. This was a really refreshing definition of feminism, especially since online feminism has become increasingly obsessed with gender categorisation from girl dinner and girl maths to the way people talk about Barbie. Why did you shape the feminism in this book beyond gender?

Alice Cappelle: I frame feminism in this way to resist what some scholars call ‘cultural feminism’, which goes back to the idea that being a woman equals being feminine and caring. This belief is becoming more and more prevalent. Even people who call themselves progressives have returned to these values. For example, if you take the notion of care – in an ideal society, we would prioritise care and caring for others. But it becomes tied to this idea of womanhood, and that’s when it turns into something that’s essentialist. This is where we get trends like divine femininity or this idea that all women are good and all men are toxic, and it just doesn’t work that way. My next video is going to be on how feminism or liberal feminism turns into authoritarianism. We’ve seen it with the discourse around Barbie and Hilary Clinton. Clinton projects this image of believing in feminine values, care and feminism, but she’s a war fanatic. We need to go beyond gender. Don’t get me wrong, looking at things through the lens of gender can be very positive and illuminating. That’s what the feminist and the LGBTQ+ movements are based on, looking at discrimination through the lens of gender. But sometimes, no.

Sometimes, it’s not about gender. Sometimes, it’s about class, racism or imperialism; there are so many lenses through which we can look at certain issues. But when people like Clinton or conservative feminists use feminism in a way to cover racism and imperialism, this is where feminism goes wrong. That’s why, in the book, I wanted to talk about not just toxic masculinity or the manosphere but also the other side, when ‘feminine’ values are used to cover the worst ideologies.

“Liberal feminism turns into authoritarianism. We’ve seen it with the discourse around Barbie and Hilary Clinton. Clinton projects this image of believing in feminine values, care and feminism, but she’s a war fanatic” – Alice Cappelle

My favourite part of the book is when you talk about the death of the girlboss. Young women have now realised that work will not liberate them, and now they’re wondering what will. This is where the rise and popularity of tradwife content comes into play. Can you speak more about this new belief in liberation through domesticity?

Alice Cappelle: Similar to Andrew Tate, tradwives represent the extreme of something that is happening in our culture today. When it comes to tradwives, I’m more interested in the space they create on the internet and the conversations they trigger. In the comment sections of their videos, you will see other women talk about how they wish they had hobbies or time to cook for themselves. This all stems from a frustration with working and a lack of fulfilment, but why is the answer to that lack of satisfaction in work domesticity? The late Dawn Foster writes about this in her book Lean Out, which was a response to Lean In by Sheryl Sandberg. She queried why women can’t have an emotional or political life. Why can’t we do all those things? Why is it always about work or domesticity? And when one of those things is no longer liberatory anymore, the liberation flips onto the other side, as it has now with domesticity. There are alternatives to this, but they’re not very popular, and I think this is a very big failure of the mainstream feminist movement. There was so much focus on the girlboss and this idea that you can be feminine and a feminist (which is a fine idea), but we are now in a real dilemma where women are incredibly dissatisfied and unhappy at work. They feel like they aren’t contributing to something important, and we don’t have a popular alternative theory, which is a significant issue we need to work on.

It also should be noted that many of the tradwives we see online are middle class or upper middle class, and some of them use their role as tradwives online to make businesses on the side. In actuality, a lot of these tradwives are businesswomen! These women tend to build their careers, get married, and then have the stability that allows them to be stay-at-home mothers. So class is also essential when it comes to analysing tradwives. We need to bring class back into the discussion with these things. 

It’s been really easy for people to feel disheartened and embarrassed by the state of online feminism recently. Just last week, people were so up in arms about Barbie being supposedly ‘snubbed’ in this year’s Oscar nominations, while people in Gaza have no access to menstrual products, and miscarriages have increased by 300 per cent. You even mentioned at the start of the book how you felt apprehensive to tell people you were writing a book about feminism. How do we return to a place where we feel confident and proud in supporting this ideology?

Alice Cappelle: This is a hard question to answer. In those cases you listed above, there’s sometimes an urge to say this isn’t really feminism or that those people don’t understand anything about feminism. I find myself flipping into this mode of stating: ‘This is what feminism is,’ and ‘There’s only one type of feminism,’ but that is the wrong way to think of it. I think the biggest weakness of feminism is that it’s ‘femini’, meaning feminine. People always see it as meaning women. We live in a society where it’s all about representation and who we put at the forefront. So feminism equals more women on screen, equals more women on this and on that. And that is what progress looks like. But this is wrong. So what do we do about it? Should we get rid of this term? But that would be a victory for the right because that’s exactly what they want to do. They want to remove all meaning from these words that started social movements.

I believe that, especially when it comes to social movements, gender, feminism and LGBTQ+ rights, we need to make sure they are strong and that they mean something. It is our job to show what these causes mean to us and how they go beyond representation politics. What became apparent to me while writing the book was the importance of intersectionality. It is not just a buzzword. When I started writing the book, I don’t think I understood this concept as much as I do now and just how much we need to include it in our feminism. We need to keep this word and bring back its true meaning. I’m hopeful that younger people are aware of this sort of Hilary Clinton type of BS neoliberal feminism that always switches back to conservatism. Hopefully, maybe I’m just projecting.

I think it’s also important to remember, as Roxanne Gay wrote in Bad Feminist, that feminism is people-led, and people are flawed, which means that feminism will also sometimes be flawed.

Alice Cappelle: Yes. It’s also important to remember that feminism is not something you take and put on yourself. It’s something you advocate for and do. So maybe it’s about thinking of yourself not as a feminist but as someone who advocates for feminism. As somebody who will do sexist things sometimes, because we are flawed, but who will advocate for the feminist cause and do everything in their power to educate themselves. Maybe that’s the shift we have to make when we think about feminism. We advocate for things, so we take action; we don’t apply feminism to ourselves as if it is just an identity label.

Collapse Feminism is available now