Some lauded 2023 as the year of the feminist fable, thanks in part to the hit movie Barbie, however it was also a year of ideological backlash. Many claim such movies or celebrities are not feminist enough. For this International Women’s Day, Dr Jessica Ford urges us to recognise the limits of these pop-culture narratives and think more expansively, and critically, about feminist forms.

Feminism and popular culture a have a complicated situationship. Feminism is both a lens through which popular culture is examined and an ideology that is spread through films, TV series, music, podcasts and other media. As such, critics have long been preoccupied by the intersection between feminism and popular culture, insofar as particular characters, authors and genres have been identified and theorised as “feminist.”

There is a critical desire to label film, television, music, and celebrities catering to women as “feminist.” Refinery29 argues that reality TV is “one of the most feminist formats in TV today.” Sofia Coppola’s latest feature film Priscilla (2023) has been described as “a bold feminist retelling of Elvis’ dark fairytale marriage.” Taylor Swift’s ongoing Eras tour and subsequent monocultural moment has led to a range of dissections of her alleged feminism in The New York Times, Vice and Ms. Magazine.

Feminism has become both the yardstick that popular culture is measured against and a tool to criticise texts for not achieving some invisible, non-specific determinant of “feminist enough.” Recently, The Women’s Agenda declared Poor Things (2023, Lanthimos) a “more feminist film than Barbie,” while Vulture described it as “a banal rendition of faux-feminist sexual freedom.”

Determining precisely what makes a movie, TV show or celebrity “feminist” is increasingly difficult, because there is much content being read and marketed as “feminist.” At the same time, what exactly makes this content “feminist” is becoming blurrier and more inexact.

Many forms of feminism (neoliberal, popular, activist, lipstick, celebrity, white etc.) operate in today’s popular media landscape. Writing in 2017, British sociologist Rosalind Gill noted that, “a few years ago it sometimes felt difficult to make any feminist arguments ‘stick’ in the media, today it seems as if everything is a feminist issue.” We seem to be reaching the zenith of this phenomenon with almost anything “women-centric” likely to be promoted and understood as “feminist.”