Genre Collapse

In a video on her YouTube channel entitled, we created ‘that girl’, Alice Cappelle advances an argument about why people enjoy dissociating while watching ‘vlogs’ of the curated ‘lives’ of well-resourced, good-looking women in their twenties. Drawing from Michel Foucault, Pierre Bourdieu and Roland Barthes, she makes the case that, in short, ideology produces aspiration which produces discipline, which produces a never-quite-ideal woman which produces a never-quite-ideal life which produces an ideally subservient capitalist subject. Contributing just one of its nearly 800,000 views, I remember being intrigued by the video’s popularity, largely because in it Cappelle casts a critical eye over her own tribe of ‘content creators’. Entangled as it is in YouTube’s profit-algorithm – and given the disturbing frequency with which, under the sign of feminism, capital exploits gender for its own interests – is Cappelle’s popularity still to be welcomed?

Regardless of how corrupt and ignorant of class some popular versions of feminism are, feminism’s popularity is part of its political power. The ‘popular’, as Stuart Hall says, is never a question of pure ‘autonomy’ or total encapsulation, but a site on and in which the struggle to define who ‘we’ are is continuously being waged. Maybe Cappelle thinks, as Hall and I do, that socialists and other left feminists could make better use of this fact. Maybe she considers her channel a tactic, if a highly compromised one, in the battle of feminisms. Maybe not. Whatever Cappelle’s own intentions, my interest in her book, Collapse Feminism, originated in this kind of curiosity about the popularity of her channel, about what happens when a brand of anti-capitalist feminism moves from YouTube to page.

One continuity between the two forms of media is Cappelle’s knack for pithy titles. Her book is titled Collapse Feminism not just because she sees the fatalism of ‘collapse’ as ‘the framework through which we write, debate, theorise and therefore make society’, but because she thinks that feminism, while itself affected by ‘the predominance of the narrative of collapse’, offers the best remedy for it. The book’s thesis is that we should resist succumbing to fatalism by taking ‘inspiration from people at the margins who[se] … existence depends on believing that things can get better’ and by rethinking ‘the basis upon which we make society’. We will do this with the help of intersectional feminism, which in her words is ‘bigger than gender equality, it is bigger than women; it’s a social project, a vision of how things could be if we ditched the culture of domination that the patriarchy nurtures’.

Cappelle never specifies to whom her pronoun ‘we’ refers. Still, in the likely case that she means relatively affluent, socially conscious people who live in advanced capitalist countries, she’s right. In the face of overlapping crisis and collapse – housing crisis, ecological collapse, cost-of-living crisis, collapse of the ‘rules-based-order’ – expressions of pessimism and resignation in this milieu are common. (So too, it’s worth noting, are naive expressions of optimism or, more precisely, expressions of relief at one’s privileged social position. The affirmation ‘things will be okay’ sometimes translates to ‘I’m pretty sure I’ll be okay’.) Even more opaque is the meaning of ‘people at the margins’. Is Cappelle referring to people living far outside the imperial core, in the Global South? Or people at the margins politically, presumably on the left? She never clarifies.

Despite its frequent assertions about the importance of hope, Collapse Feminism offers few reasons to be hopeful. Split into two parts, each composed of two chapters, the book is a critical evaluation of regressive gendered ideas that circulate online. In ‘Part 1: The Ideal Woman’, Cappelle analyses how the internet reproduces ideals of womanhood, first by scrutinising more or less extreme versions of pro-capitalist conceptions of female empowerment. She bemoans the way feminism is invoked to bolster support for far-right politicians like Georgia Meloni and Marine Le Pen –illustrative, in her view, of a dominant ‘girlboss feminism’ that ‘overfocuses on individual empowerment without questioning how the individual got where they are, the nature of their power and how they use it’. Yet Cappelle also criticises feminist unionism on related grounds – for being too ‘easily absorbed by capitalism’. Though unions are ‘so important’ because ‘what one can achieve as an individual is very limited compared to what one could achieve as part of a larger structure defending similar interests’, she takes issue with the (for her) contradictory online discourse of ‘girlunion’ that seeks ‘to make working-class feminism cool by reappropriating what made the girlboss cool’.

Cappelle then examines the proposal that women’s dissatisfaction with capitalism can be solved by a return to ‘traditional’ living. According to ‘tradfluencers’, the majority of whom are women, this means freeing women from the burden of vainly struggling against their ‘nature’ in seeking purpose through competition with men in the public sphere, allowing them instead to embrace their rightful roles of wife and mother. Despite being pronounced ‘feminist’ on the basis that some women choose it (a liberal idea as dull as it is ubiquitous), this supposed alternative to ‘girlboss feminism’, as Cappelle is not the first to point out, is not a solution but a trap, a contemporary online version ‘of the 1950s representations of the nuclear families in TV ads and magazines’, a new expression of a patriarchal desire to make women entirely financially dependent on, and therefore subservient to, men – albeit under the guise of emancipation.

Cappelle maintains this tenor of critique in ‘Part 2: A Failed Sexual Revolution’, evaluating other simplistic social diagnoses and remedies that find sizable online support. She probes a range of reactionary political positions, all of which begin from the claim that the celebrated sexual revolution of the 1960s did not, as the narrative of linear progress would have us believe, liberate gendered relations, but rather exacerbated mutual resentment between women and men, causing confusion, loneliness, and antagonism; in short, it did more harm than good. Cappelle looks first at how this argument circulates in online masculinist communities known as the ‘manosphere’, inverting bell hooks’ insights in The Will to Change (2004). There hooks argued that the struggle against patriarchy must be jointly waged by both feminist women who, rather than seeing men as the enemy, recognised that ‘patriarchy seeks to impose on men a sexist masculine identity’, and feminist men who, contrary to their patriarchal conditioning, were committed to learning how to give and receive love. Recognising that patriarchy exerts profound influence on all of us, hooks claimed, makes it possible to maintain a ‘radical critique of masculine domination’ without descending into a politics of resentment. Cappelle paints a less optimistic picture of men, due in part to the internet’s tendency to foster ‘dangerous echo chambers’. While her ‘goal isn’t merely to critique or point a finger at a constructed enemy’, Cappelle suggests that the manosphere’s networks of incels and pick-up artists, and individual nodes, such as Andrew Tate and Jordan Peterson, are only more acute examples of a broader refusal by men to treat women as equals – that is, examples of a will not to change.

Expanding her scope in the final chapter, Cappelle casts her critical gaze across self-described liberal, left-wing, and feminist arguments against the sexual revolution. For her, the increasing prominence of the substitution of an archaic pro-family narrative for a simplistic pro-sex one indicates just how profoundly lacking in collective ambition ‘we’ have become, just how constrained ‘our’ imaginative capacities now are, and, ultimately, just how far into despair ‘we’ have sunk. While Cappelle believes that the sexual revolution has been co-opted by patriarchal capitalism, she argues that the right response is not doing as reactionary feminist Louise Perry suggests and reinstating the Fordist family model. Instead Cappelle insists, rather vaguely, that the answer consists in striving to assemble a ‘collective of differences’ capable of ‘rethinking’ work, the family, the internet, and society. After presenting a pessimistic narrative about ‘how conservatives utilise the internet to disseminate their ideas in political as well as apolitical communities’, Cappelle reiterates her own ever-hopeful position for the last time:

But beyond alluding to her investment in representation as praxis, Cappelle has little to say on how such a movement will come about.

Particularly striking – for a book that champions intersectionality – is Cappelle’s tendency to regard feminism and class struggle as separable spheres. Given my (naive?) optimism about her channel, I was disappointed when, as early as page three, she writes:

Her explanation for choosing gender instead of class is that the relationship between ‘dominant left-wing parties’ and feminist, anti-racist, and LGBTQ+ movements has ‘historically’ been one-sided, with the energy of activists associated with the latter movements harnessed by, and then captured in service of, electoral politics. While I agree with Cappelle that too much energy is directed into electoral politics at the expense of more broad-based social justice campaigning, it’s hard to see why such a claim can or should entail a wholesale dismissal of class struggle.

Cappelle’s attempt at justification comes in the form of an example. She recalls that in 2022, members of La France Insoumise (LFI), most of them women, criticised its leader Jean-Luc Mélenchon for too quickly running to the defence of Adrien Quatennens, a senior figure in the party who had been violent towards his wife, Céline. Instead of taking the complaints surrounding Quatennens and Mélenchon’s handling of the situation seriously, LFI reprimanded those members who spoke out. Rather than the man who had himself admitted to slapping his partner, then, or the man whose responsibility it was to uphold anti-sexism as a minimum standard of behaviour, women were once again positioned as the problem, once again told they were ‘hurting the movement’.

Despite its French particulars, all this example demonstrates is that sexism continues to structure relations between women and men, even feminist women and left-wing men; that women’s subordinated social status persists in all spheres of society, including the electoral left. In Australia as in France, some left-wing men are chauvinist pigs, and far be it from me to defend the institutional sexism of left-wing political parties. What Cappelle draws from this example, though, is the far more sweeping conclusion that class struggle is incompatible with feminism. Cappelle takes left-wing parties, really the behaviour of sexist left-wing men involved in such parties, as sole representatives of class struggle, which on this basis she then counterposes to social movements.

In confusing putative representatives of the movement with the movement itself, Cappelle’s musings on leftist men and the relationship between gender and class risk reducing left-wing politics to a battle between antagonistic identity categories. After making the claim, based on a friend’s Instagram poll, that ‘most men’ think that feminism ‘has gone too far’, she criticises a certain type of leftist man:

The online sphere is a hyperbolic space, in which people tend to build straw men out of those with whom they disagree. And there does exist a type of ‘very online’ white leftist man who upholds the primacy of class struggle and mocks a never-defined ‘identity politics’. Criticising men is certainly compatible with, often a necessary part of, class struggle. Yet a representative instance of Cappelle’s stance towards class throughout the book is her claim that ‘true liberation cannot be achieved if only class disparities are eliminated, or if only racial inequalities are cancelled, or if only gender discrimination becomes obsolete’ [emphasis added]. In other words, she advances the now most common understanding of intersectionality, which reduces it, as Amia Srinivasan says, ‘to a due consideration of the various axes of oppression and privilege: race, class, sexuality, disability, and so on’. Separating out these axes in the way Cappelle does – think, ‘I chose gender instead’ – risks obscuring the central insight of intersectionality, which, as Srinivasan details, is ‘that any liberation movement … that focuses only on what all members of the relevant group have in common is a movement that will best serve those members of the group who are least oppressed’. Intersectionality’s value is not, as Cappelle’s depiction of it suggests, as a call to eliminate class disparities alongside struggling for racial and gender justice. Intersectionality rather offers one way of recognising, as Patricia Hill Collins might say, that ‘class disparities’ cannot be eliminated without racial and gender justice, nor racial or gender justice achieved without international class struggle.

While I find her account of intersectional feminism to be overly categorical, it’s worth trying to imagine the implied audience of Cappelle’s book. Taking the entirety of its contours into consideration, my guess is that Collapse Feminism is written for people who fall into the same category as Cappelle’s ‘we’ but who, more specifically, are in their early twenties, already fans of her channel and likely identify as feminists. If this is the case, then maybe Cappelle thinks that contrasting gender with class is a way to draw her readers towards anti-capitalist feminist arguments.

Feminist scholars have long argued that the most popular versions of feminism, as well as the most popular feminist figures, are partly so because of their compatibility with the dominant culture. As Sarah Banet-Weiser puts it, ‘media and entertainment platforms are conditioning the content of feminism … so that business models end up conditioning the types of feminist expressions that we see’. As an influencer, Cappelle has to think about clicks and views and ad revenue – marketing questions that similarly dictate the ‘feminist content’ of her book. The fact that Cappelle is a YouTube influencer is thus a crucial context for examining the tension between Cappelle’s anti-capitalist feminist ideas on the one hand and her reductive class/gender binary on the other. Does her popular brand of anti-capitalist feminism express the upper limit of what a capitalist platform can celebrate?

Cappelle’s framing cedes too much ground to the status quo, reproducing, as Hall might say, the cultural logic of ‘the dominant classes’. By repeating the idea that a ‘class-centred agenda’ sits in tension with, or somehow threatens, the advance of women’s interests, Cappelle is expressing the logic at the heart of the feminism she herself rejects, both on her channel and in her book, as ‘girlboss feminism’. This is a feminism that, actively hostile to even minor reform, aims to parade a few women as figureheads of a fundamentally corrupt system. It is espoused by capitalists like Hilary Clinton and Sheryl Sandberg, the only subset of women in whose interests it is to present feminism and class struggle as mutually exclusive. Cappelle astutely criticises Clinton for proclaiming, after Meloni was elected Prime Minister of Italy with the populist right-wing Fratelli D’Italia party, that ‘every time a woman is elected to head of state or government, that is a step forward’, and Sandberg for embodying ‘a form of moderate, individualist feminism that turns resentment towards gender inequality into judgement towards other women’. Criticism of this feminism is such a large part of Cappelle’s brand of politics, her rejection of class politics is not just self-defeating; it becomes confusing.

Cappelle’s analysis in Collapse Feminism often is confusing, though – not because she fails to make interesting points, but because she makes too many, too quickly. Her pages are saturated with loosely connected ‘takes’, few of which she articulates fully. On page 65, for example, Cappelle describes the rise of online ‘divine femininity influencers’ – women who claim to be able to teach other women how to cultivate their supposedly innate feminine energy in order to become more attractive to men. Turn the page, and Cappelle is marking a parallel between these influencers and a fringe group of 1970s American radical feminists pejoratively known as ‘cultural feminists’. Criticised for their essentialist view of gendered relations, these feminists ‘aimed to create a female counterculture where male values would be exorcised and female values nurtured’. The connection Cappelle makes between these past and present groupings of organised womanhood is worth expanding on – it would be interesting to know, for example, her thoughts on feminism’s own role in entrenching belief in a feminine essence – but a tweet-like remark is all we get. By the bottom of page 66, Cappelle has moved on to mention how ‘French streamer @Cass_Andre looked at the typical life of a twenty-first-century Western woman and concluded that the act of procreation, as well as the feminine values assigned to it, cannot define the role of women in society’. On the next page, her attention is somewhere else again because, in her own words, ‘I’m reminded as I’m writing this of something French actor Omar Sy (who is known internationally for his role in the NetFlix TV series Lupin) once said’. Towards the bottom of page 67, Cappelle’s focus has shifted once more, this time to the entanglement of race and gender. ‘Black femininity has been subjected to racist stereotypes for centuries’, she reminds us.

This sequence gives just a taste of how fast Cappelle moves in Collapse Feminism, jumping from point to point to point. Cappelle doesn’t give herself sufficient time to explain what she is arguing, or why she is arguing it. She tends not to define her terms, and the book doesn’t have as much reflection as is needed to make her arguments convincing. Notwithstanding her clumsiness regarding the relationship between feminism and class struggle, most of the claims in the book are fairly commonplace to anyone of a progressive political persuasion. Cappelle-the-writer relies too heavily on the fact that, since many of her readers are likely already fans of Cappelle-the-influencer, most of them will nod along. Indeed, while reading Collapse Feminism, I was struck by the sensation that I was looking, in print form, at something akin to a social media feed or, more precisely, that I had opened my laptop, gone to YouTube, clicked on one of Cappelle’s videos, and was now, thanks to the algorithm, being subjected to a random flow of her channel’s content.

Cappelle herself cultivates this sense of genre collapse throughout the book, in part by making arguments ‘with’ her followers. On the question of whether it’s common for men to expect women they’ve never met in person to sext in their first conversation on a dating app, Cappelle writes that while she hasn’t experienced this personally, and while her hunch is that it isn’t, it would be wrong of her to draw conclusions solely on this basis and so, she does a survey:

The next page further exemplifies the blurred boundary between Cappelle’s channel and her book. In an attempt to counter the socially conservative view that casual sex is inherently toxic, Cappelle recounts how she asked her followers to share with her their ‘positive casual sex experiences’. Cappelle then shares with us, her readers, one of the ‘heartwarming’ answers she received from her followers. The parasocial relationship that Cappelle cultivates with her followers, in part through these crowd-sourced critiques, serves to position her as someone akin to a big sister, or ‘leader’ of a friend group, the one who ultimately makes the decisions, but only after getting advice from her ‘hive mind’.

The merits of Collapse Feminism mirror the merits of her channel: both demonstrate Cappelle’s detailed knowledge of how the online sphere (re)produces gendered norms. While reading, I often found myself with my phone out, googling the vloggers, Instagram influencers, podcasters, or ‘video essayists’ as Cappelle mentions them, so as to get a fuller grasp of who or what she was describing. This added something to the reading experience, a feeling not dissimilar to reading a book based on a successful movie franchise: a kind of pleasurable familiarity in not being surprised, a comfort in anticipating the next plot device and, in the case of Cappelle’s book, intuiting the intersectional feminist stance she would take on a given issue. But Collapse Feminism is also expressive of genre collapse in a more sinister sense. The book is yet another example of how YouTube – embroiled as it is with BIG TECH, the ALGORITHM etc. – is steadily encroaching amoeba-like on the publishing industry, threatening to turn books, even anti-capitalist feminist books from an anti-capitalist press, into advertising material for a marketing campaign. Of course, the disjuncture between Cappelle’s anti-capitalist feminism and the entanglement between capitalism and popular feminism out of which her ‘content’ emerges is not something for which she herself can be fairly held responsible, nor something that her ‘influence’ alone can overcome. For that, a much larger struggle is required.