“Is “Feminism” Still Another Dirty “F-Word?”: The Case of Conservative Feminism”
Codes of Conduct - Code Switching and the Everyday Performance of Identity - K. Merinda Simmons
Leslie Dorrough Smith [+]
Avila University
Leslie Dorrough Smith is Associate Professor of Religious Studies at Avila University, USA, where she is also the Director of the Women’s and Gender Studies Program. She is the author of Compromising Positions: Political Sex Scandals and American Christianity (Oxford University Press, 2020), Constructing “Data” in Religious Studies: Examining the Architecture of the Academy (Equinox Publishing, 2019), and Righteous Rhetoric: Sex, Speech and the Politics of Concerned Women for America (Oxford University Press, 2014).
Description
Since the 1960s and 1970s, most historical accounts of the feminist movement detail the strong opposition that the movement experienced from politically-organized conservative women. Fast forward several decades later, and many of those same conservative women’s movements are now using openly feminist language – even calling themselves “true” feminists – in their public self-descriptions. While most feminists and other liberal activists have cried foul in response, this presentation considers what is involved in the popular notion that liberals “own” the feminist label, and whether the rhetorical strategies employed by conservative women’s groups are a unique moment of code-switching in their own right.