Doing it #LikeACorporation: feminist organisations navigating the corporate feminism dilemma

While the involvement of corporations in feminist campaigns has recently been in the limelight of feminist research, with studies exploring its impact on consumers as well as its utility for various corporations, little research has been carried out regarding the impact of corporate involvement on feminist organisations, such as organisations fighting against menstrual poverty, sexual harassment, or for better sexual education. The project thus aims at bridging this gap through a series of semistructured interviews with participants who work for, or volunteer with, a range of feminist organisations in the UK, followed by a thematic analysis of these interviews to examine the perceived relationship between corporate feminism and feminist activists.

After reviewing theories of the history of the relationship between feminist theories and capitalism to highlight the tension between ideologies, the thesis explores how feminist organisations navigate corporate partnerships and how and why they consider forming one, the activists’ perception of the social impact of corporate feminism, and whether they believe it makes a real difference.

Drawing from theories such as popular feminism and neoliberal feminism, and using a feminist framework to give a voice to significant actors, the thesis explores how capitalism has shaped new strands of feminism, and how it has redirected the feminist focus to once again charge women with their own happiness and emancipation. Through the interviews, the thesis reveals the struggle of organisations in terms of money and platform, and their fear that their values might clash with that of corporations, and how this difference, coupled with corporate influence and platform, impacts society’s perception of feminism, and, in turn, the work of activists. The thesis thus explores the concept of constrained feminism, which argues that organisations are affected by the involvement of corporate feminism whether they enter partnerships or not, as they have to compromise.