Michelle Laura Flood, St. John Fisher University

On November 2, 2018, Scott Beierle walked into a hot yoga studio in Tallahassee, posing as a customer, before killing two people, injuring five others, and eventually killing himself (Selk). His motive? Pure misogyny. Identifying as an incel (short for involuntarily celibate), Beierle believed his lack of romantic and sexual success was no fault of his own, but rather that of uppity women who had forsaken their feminine duty to please men. While incels may seem extreme, Beierle is hardly a novel case. Men who abhor feminism and its emancipatory possibilities have mobilized in their quest to restore what they believe is the natural order. Stories of gendered violence can be traced throughout history but only since the advent of social media have vehement misogynists taken to chronicling their violence toward women in chatrooms and forums like 4chan and Reddit. In 2014, Elliot Rodger wrote a 141-page manifesto before murdering six people (BBC). His well-documented loathing of women gave birth to what he called the “Incel Rebellion,” or what can only be explained as a social network of men who share anti-feminist ideologies and plans for restoring a world where men dominate, and women know their place.  His strategic execution made Rodger an overnight sensation. For most people, especially women, Rodger was the boogeyman in the night. Surely this gendered violence was a one-off scenario that in no way indicated a larger societal issue. For others like Beierle, however, Rodger became the martyr of the incels, a man whose plan they could use as a blueprint. 

Stories of men like Beierle, Rodger, and even Harvey Weinstein are deeply salient in a cultural moment that protests gender inequality on a variety of platforms. Since 2014, celebrities like Beyoncé, Ariana Grande, Emma Watson, and company publicly claimed feminism and Greta Gerwig’s 2023 feminist-adjacent Barbie became Warner Bros’ highest-grossing film (Elle; D’Alessandro). More US citizens are galvanizing around gender equality than ever before, with 46% of millennial women and 61% of Gen Z women identifying as feminists (Rowland; Cox et. al). But this surge in feminism’s popularity provokes a reactionary swell of misogyny as people who benefit from patriarchy’s privilege seek to control and maintain the advantages afforded to them. These incel attacks are documented acts of violence against women, and stand as an exemplar of the persistent and sometimes deadly ideologies around gender relations. In the wake of the 2024 presidential election wherein Donald Trump was reelected president, popular misogyny reigns both in American institutions and in digital discourses. Nick Fuentes, a far-right icon for incels, inverted the second wave’s rallying cry for reproductive rights into “your body, my choice.” His post on X (formerly Twitter) was viewed over 90 million times and reposted over 4,000 times (Wyman). The tensions between feminism and misogyny are longstanding, but the ways that these antagonisms are playing out both in popular discourses and in current events in the contemporary moment provokes a number of questions. Must the rise of feminism always be accompanied by an insurgence of gendered violence? At what point will we achieve feminism’s overarching objectives, or must we eventually relinquish the fight for gender equality?

In this essay, I engage with two primary books and a number of complementary sources that serve as invaluable resources for performing rhetorical analysis at the intricate intersections of popular feminism, popular misogyny, and evolutionary moments in history. (ENDNOTE 1) Kenneth Burke’s Attitudes Toward History and Sarah Banet-Weiser’s Empowered: Popular Feminism and Popular Misogyny, when taken together, offer a glimpse into feminism and misogyny’s struggle for power. I proceed with two central assumptions in mind. First, popular culture discourse is an engrained element of US culture that requires a response that simultaneously acknowledges and challenges the inherent commodification of pop culture involvement in political affairs. Second, Burke’s Attitudes provides us with a framework to better understanding how marginalized groups prudentially mobilize and elicit support from broader publics to enact meaningful social change. When taken together, these assumptions lead to the conclusion that a current iteration of feminism, hereby referred to as popular feminism, includes celebrity advocacy, swift commodification, and millennial involvement. It forecloses opportunities to recognize the potentialities and implications of popular culture’s participation in feminist social movements. Using Attitudes, alongside a complementary consideration of prudence, to work through these tensions provides us not only with one useful perspective on the tensions between feminism and misogyny, but also on the issue of judgment as it is taken up in specific social movements. 

Rhetorical scholars are especially well-positioned to analyze popular feminism as a multifaceted site of inquiry due to their investments in not only public address, but also social movements. The insights that emerge from not only these two books, but also the surrounding literature encourage rhetoricians to analyze popular feminism from both an embodied and an intersectional orientation, thus resisting narratives that oversimplify, flatten, or center privilege. In attuning to this, rhetorical critics must attend to the marginalized dynamics of discourses that claim to advocate for gender equality, elucidating the ways in which popular feminism is both extremely limited in terms of its fundamentally commodified nature but also how it offers unique rhetorical possibilities related to the nature of international attention. My argument is two-fold. First, I argue that popular feminism, its form delineated from more radical feminisms before it, does not seek to revolutionize the way that we live out our gendered experiences. Instead, it attempts to stretch our firmly established normativities to shift the way we consider gender relations. Second, the tension between popular feminism and popular misogyny demonstrates the ongoing prudential struggle between official symbols of authority and collective dissatisfied parties in what Burke refers to as the curve of history.

To that end, I offer the following review as not only a set of resources that parse out the tensions between popular feminism and historical evolution, but also as a challenge to some of the more overly simplistic considerations of the aforementioned intersections. First, Burke’s Attitudes offers infrastructure for thinking about the ways that social changes affect historical evolutions through cyclical attitudinal enactments. It is only in the face of adversity that (wo)man develops an understanding of the universe, the human experience, history, etc. In thinking about how people react and respond to their experienced adversity, we can begin to think about how social movements are mobilized against the laxity of hegemony to make meaningful social change around matrices of identity like race, gender, sexuality, class, etc. In a similar vein, Banet-Weiser provides a framework for thinking about feminism in popular culture and expanding our conceptualization of popular feminism’s utility in aiding the facilitation of gender-based social change (3). Additionally, she introduces popular misogyny as a knee-jerk reaction to popular feminism’s networked capacities. Misogyny, in its roots, is an invisible norm that permeates almost all aspects of everyday life (3). Only when feminism, as a challenge to misogyny’s normativity, gains traction through mediated networks does popular misogyny arrive. Its attempts to use similar networks to stabilize gender norms and inequities and to find homeostasis against social change demonstrate Burke’s asymmetry in finding a breaking point for evolution. It is here that the question of judgment is illuminated in popular feminism: as popular feminism both contends with social order that privileges certain lives over others, it is also left to battle an imprudent popular misogyny as it seeks an emancipatory breaking point toward gender revolution. 

Enacting Social Change Through Burke’s Curve of History

Burke positions Attitudes as a social theory that argues it is through shifts in symbolism, attitudes, and allegiances that man shapes history (xii). As is characteristic of much of his work, his preoccupation with preservation and change makes for a process which he contends informs superstructures of dominance, as well as one’s allegiances to and inevitable rejection of those structures. In its tripartite structure, Burke first explores the attitudinal formations and frames that people use to understand and change their lived experiences. Through an application of these frames, he writes a metanarrative of Western history, emphasizing the process in which people shift their allegiances to symbols of authority, casuistically stretch their frames of acceptance, and eventually reach a breaking point that leads to revolution or war (21-25). Finally, Burke provides a glossary of key terms to understand not only the curve of history but also the tools that people use to reject normativity and push for social change (216-336). How this is done can either through an implementation of prudence or through more rash and irrational means, as will be demonstrated by the cases of popular feminism and popular misogyny. “According to Aristotle, prudence is a distinctive mode of intelligence. Neither scientific nor artistic nor contemplative, it is the capacity for reasoning about particular cases of contingent affairs with regard to what is good or bad. This reasoning occurs through deliberation and is completed in action” (Hariman viii). Prudence, when thought of this way, fulfills an administrative role in human flourishing as its application can serve both individual and collective interests. Prudence enables, then, collective action when groups aggregate on the basis of seeking social change. Thus, the motives for changing structures and authorities, according to Burke, are attitudinal enactments of dissatisfaction, rejection, and rebellion. 

When seeking to change the superstructures of domination, be them social, political, economic, intellectual, etc., the preservation of these structures is equally as important as their change and development, at least for Burke. This becomes quite clear as Burke thinks through his idiomatic use of “change.” His investment in change develops in two parts. First, Burke explains how shifts in allegiances to symbols of authority happen on an individual level. Rejection is a by-product of acceptance and occurs when we as individuals decide to shift our allegiances to authority to authority (Burke 21). Dissociation arises to make trouble against the normative, and many men who participate in this rejection are symbolically marked as anti-socially attitudinally positioned (99). To their detriment, they are preoccupied with the impact of the material attached to the authority they are resisting, and this individual rejection and rebellion often results in demoralization and opportunism. Adversity, rejection, and rebellion are, at this juncture, are individual articulations of dissatisfaction with the superstructures that govern their lives. These individual exercises of rejection do not in themselves hold much agency to provoke change, which is why they largely result in demoralization and anti-socialization. However, this individual process is important because it paves the way for the second type of change in which Burke is more closely invested: collective curvatures of history. 

As the title of the book may suggest, Burke’s interest mostly lies within the larger shifts, or historical evolutions, that shape and transform the superstructures that govern everyday life. A first reading may suggest that Burke maps revolution as it relates to the asymmetry and breaking points that he describes as “revolutionary values” (Burke 235), but it is more appropriate to assert that Burke traced evolutions rather than revolutions, even if certain evolutions were explicitly named as revolutions. This may seem paradoxical or enigmatic, but Ross Wolin explains that “the ‘curve’ or history, what Burke calls the five acts of ‘the historic drama,’ clearly shows that for Burke change is often channeled by the past” (111). The curve of history is a continuous cycle of development that is neither punctuated nor linear. In this way, Burke does not necessarily offer a theorization of revolution but rather evolution. In other words, the aforementioned superstructures of society, at least for Burke, can never be completely torn down or eradicated. Instead, they can be amended and manipulated on a situational basis to better meet the needs of those who have expressed their collective dissatisfaction. 

To do this, however, the need for struggle is grounded in the resources of strain and can be linked to the human need for justification. According to Burke, man must prove himself right in every regard, whether logically or morally, in order to feel at home in his situation (Burke 124). When any given frame of acceptance is met with resistance or rejection, it is acutely felt as guilt, but it can also be casuistically stretched to accommodate the cognitive dissonance felt in the frame that encapsulates the normativities of lived experience. This stretching is often an act of prudence, because as Hariman argues, “we need to develop prudence as a program for identifying and getting inside that new class of political problems that currently elude solutions because of both their complexity and their lack of alignment with established political interests” (288). To align Burke and Hariman, it is easy to obey symbols of authority and live within the longstanding structures that govern our lives. But when that authority either provokes complicated political issues or is not capable of coping with them as they arrive out of other circumstances, then prudence is needed to reassess the competency of established authority. This can lead to the rejection or questioning of acceptance frames, or simply the way things are, which Burke explains is the painful dispossession process. We can ease this suffering through casuistic stretching, which combines both new and resistive principles with the old principles, but eventually breaks through demoralization (Burke 229). In short, we can live with the discomfort of knowing that we are not best supported by the structures that govern us if we can rationalize it away. Be that as it may, when the awareness of structural shortcomings becomes overwhelming, the frame stretches to its breaking point and leads to an evolution. Through this process, Burke maps five evolutions (Christian evangelism, mediaeval synthesis, protestant transition, naïve capitalism, emergent collectivism, and comic correctives) into what he calls the curve of history.

Similarly, many social movements can be worked through this framework. The structures that govern race and gender, amongst other lines of marginalization, have been met with powerful social movements that have pushed and stretched the frames that contained them. But Burke would argue that neither the Civil Rights Movement or women’s liberation can be classified as true revolutions because they did not eradicate the superstructures of dominance that created the problems of inequality. Instead, Burke would argue that they casuistically stretched the frames of acceptance laden within US public culture just to their breaking point, and shifted the attitudes around their respective central issues. This is an evolution of sorts because the social movements that have fought for equality haven’t revolutionized our lives and expunged discrimination and unequal treatment on the basis of identity. In their most generous light, they have stretched the superstructures of race and gender to better develop to meet the articulated needs of marginalized groups. Nevertheless, these evolutions are far from satisfactory because issues of race, gender, sexuality, class, etc. permeate every facet of everyday life and the vast inequalities established by normative structures are profoundly experienced by those who do not share certain privileges. In short, social movements like feminism still have a lot to do. 

So What, Feminism Is Like, Totally Cool Now or Whatever?

In 2014, feminism and pop culture collided in unprecedented ways. Celebrities proudly claimed feminist identities in droves, and feminist influences began to permeate the everyday, be it a quirky slogan on a t-shirt, the lyrics of a Top 40 pop song, an awards ceremony speech, or even as political campaign platforms. In Empowered, Banet-Weiser argues that feminism becomes “popular” in three senses. First, it manifests in discourses and practices circulating in both popular and commercial media, including not only broadcast media but also digital spaces like social media platforms. Not only is feminism no longer relegated to academic circles or niche enclaves, but it is visible to even the largest publics (Banet-Weiser 6). Second, the popularity of feminism means that it is capable of being likeable or admirable by certain groups of like-minded individuals. Third, the “popular” is, along the thinking of cultural theorist Stuart Hall, a landscape of struggle where competing demands for power and domination battle for visibility and authority (72-80). There are currently many different types of feminism, as historically there has been for over the last century, and to name all of today’s iteration popular feminism would be flattening at best, but certain feminisms are more visible than others in popular culture as they are networked across all media platforms. Naming this networked version as popular feminism allows us to imagine a culture in which feminism, in all its pluralities and multiplicities, does not have to be defended at every turn but instead is accessible, trendy, admirable, and even celebrated. 

Banet-Weiser is only one of many media and rhetoric scholars who are invested in the larger popular feminism project. This larger academic conversation is one that parses out the entanglements of personal and private feminisms, particularly as popular culture transitioned from its alignment with postfeminism toward popular feminism (Dow; Tully; Dubriwny; Roberts; Butler; Tasker & Negra; McRobbie). Most recent waves of feminism have an ambivalent relationship with political matters partially because popular feminism has smoothly incorporated itself in the capitalist world of commerce and culture. The relationship between feminism and popular culture focuses on the individual, as well as differences and heterogeneity, making collective feminist activism seem contradictory. The emphasis on the commodified individual does not fully account for the ways that popular feminism has marinated into larger discourses on gender. Popular feminism exists as a continuum wherein visibility is inextricably linked to capitalism. As such, it risks obscuring feminist activism that loudly critiques patriarchal structures and interlinked systems of oppression. It is undeniably a watered-down version of the feminism belonging to our mothers and our grandmothers, and this changes the significance of its enactment. 

Thinking about the implications of popular feminism in terms of prudence adds a necessary texture to this overall conversation because prudence is so heavily concerned with the relationship between the contingent and the universal. One of feminism’s many mantras, “the personal is political,” is demonstrative of prudential reasoning because women and other marginalized groups have rallied around the injustices felt in their own personal lives. Prudence requires a knowledge of particulars acquired through experience, thus culminating character. The lived experiences of women create a living body of social knowledge that enables a prudential feminist movement in seeking to shift attitudinal alignments around gender. Moreover, prudence acts a mode of reasoning that embodies the increased scales and shifted orientations of current issues. We need prudence as a tool of analysis and organization for political problems, like gender inequality, that seemingly have few plausible solutions. Using prudence to work through social change and advocacy allows us to see both the potentialities and the implications of various waves of feminism. Prudence is typically thought of as happening on an individual level, but it is equally useful for thinking about collective efforts to work through complex political problems. I suggest that prudence can be both found and lost in various points of feminist histories. Natalie Fixmer-Oraiz and Julia Wood contend that:

At this juncture, it seems wise to balance sympathetic and critical assessments of the third wave. The embodied politics they celebrate may be both rousing and naïve, both powerful and limited, both productive and reproductive. The same could be said of second wave politics, for that matter, any politics. Perhaps the central insight into power is not that disciplinary power is more important than juridical power, but that neither operates alone and neither on its own is capable of instigating and sustaining changes in power relations as those are figured in formal structures and practiced in everyday life. By extension, this suggests that it would be imprudent to dismiss embodied politics for not focusing on structural change just as it would be unwise to dismiss structural politics for not emphasizing everyday practices.” (253)

The slippage of prudence happens in the translation between feminism’s personal and political. An embodied politics would suggest an articulation of prudence as it is concerned with the particulars, but structural politics is messier in that the relationship between the particular and the universal more heavily favors the universal. Herein lies popular feminism’s entry point. Should we consider popular feminism to be prudential? Its pervasiveness seems to be a calculated shift that combines the palatability of flattened feminist ideals with marketability and commerciality. However, it would not exist without the social body of knowledge that more radical and arguably more prudential forms of feminism have previously established. It seems, at least in this contemporary moment, that popular feminism is prudential when convenient or necessary for its own endurance. Interestingly enough, the inverse is true for its counterpart, popular misogyny. 

The Imprudent Reactivity of Popular Misogyny

For many people of all genders, a broader acceptance of feminism both as an identity and a set of practices is thrilling; at long last it seems that work of the past 100+ years is resulting in tangible change. However, for those who perceive feminism to be a threat, this popular acceptance and embrace of feminism stimulates fear, apprehension, aggression, and even provokes violence. While feminism gains traction on a variety of fronts in popular culture, it is unsurprising that misogyny prepares its own backlash (Banet-Weiser 3). Banet-Weiser’s excitement for both the potentialities and the limitations of popular feminism is detailed in her book, but she is equally concerned with its counterpart: popular misogyny. 

Popular misogyny, like popular feminism, takes advantage of many of the same affordances of social media networking. Misogyny is expressed and practiced on multiple media platforms as it galvanizes like-minded individuals to join in the fight to take back what power they perceive to be theirs. Popular misogyny follows in the footsteps of traditional notions of misogyny; it is a simple hatred of women. However, Empowered nuances popular misogyny as it positions it as a networked instrumentalization of the systemic devaluing and dehumanizing of women. Unlike popular feminism, which should be considered active resistance against a patriarchal society that privileges one gender over others, it is important to note that popular misogyny is reactive:

While networked culture has provided a context for a transfigured feminist politics, it has also provided a context for misogyny to twist and distort the popular in ways that seem new to the contemporary era. Because popular misogyny is reactive, it doesn’t have the same consistency, history, and political motion as popular feminism. Clearly, the intensification of misogyny in the contemporary moment is in part a reaction to the culture-wide circulation and embrace of feminism. Every time feminism gains broad traction – that is, every time it spills beyond what are routinely dismissed as niched feminist enclaves – the forces of the status quo position it as a peril, and skirmishes ensure between those determined to challenge the normative and those determined to maintain it. (Banet-Weiser 3) 

Misogyny has long existed as a norm in not only US society, but in all societies as the patriarchy has proved to be an inescapable governing structure of human experience. As the patriarchy’s violently playful offspring, misogyny is built into our infrastructures, our laws, our policies, and our normative behavior. As such, its permanence renders it an invisible norm. One may think that misogyny is not a norm under which we operate, but its ubiquitous nature is enacted in almost all aspects of everyday life. 

It is only when a worthwhile challenger, like feminism or another status-quo-challenging social movement, presents discernible resistance that misogyny rears its ugly head to counter-protest. In the case of popular feminism, misogyny is assembled through the same organizing principles as its challenger to fight back against a threat to patriarchy’s seemingly natural order. Its organization is based in a reactionary perceived victimhood. “Rhetorics of victimage and scapegoating are culturally effective, and may derive from the différance of language from itself couple with the drive for erotic self-transcendence” (McDaniels 104). Incel culture, for example, galvanizes support from the idea that sexually unsuccessful men are victims of feminism. It is here that I locate not only the tensions between our society’s latent misogyny and feminism’s emergence via the popular, but also how Burke’s curve of history is deployed within a contemporary context. 

Gender Evolution Through Burke’s Curve of History

An immediate consideration of feminism as a social movement along Burke’s curve of history would squarely locate it within the process of stretching acceptance frames to their breaking point. Feminisms as a social movement, whether they be associated with the waves of feminism or with more transnational versions of feminism, have stretched the frame of acceptance imbued within contemporary US culture. This acceptance frame is one that privileges whiteness, cisheteronormativity, affluence, and other veins of normativity, and feminism in any iteration can be thought of as a collective effort to interrogate, trouble, and redefine those privileges in the pursuit of equality. Reading gender equality alongside Burke, the objective of any feminist efforts would be to stretch the frame of acceptance to a point where the dissatisfaction of standardized gender relations eventually breaks the frame toward revolution. After all, feminism is not only about equality based on gender, but also along other matrices of identity and experience (Crenshaw).

Popular feminism is a stretch of the normative. It is nowhere near a collective radical feminism that would, in a best-case scenario, break its frame. It is, however, stretching it enough to make for some worthwhile social changes despites its normative implications. Popular feminism suggests that feminists push for social change through the same avenues they have been using for a century. Consciousness-raising, protesting, forgoing marriage and children, etc. are all examples of how feminists strategically stretch their frame of acceptance. However, the marketable, likeable, and highly commodifiable nature of pop feminism changes the way the stretching happens. More radical yet less visible feminisms before it pushed acceptance frames in ways that limited their efficacy. Popular feminism is a different story because its reach is wide as popular culture’s influence on feminism has allowed it to soak into myriad aspects of everyday life. Because it is so highly visible, its recruiting power is stronger, and this is clearly evidenced by how many millennial and Gen Z women now identify as feminists. In short, it achieves less but it does so on a wider scale. In this way, popular feminism helps to shift discourse around gender on a widespread scale, even if the ways that it is taken up are diluted and made more palatable through its commodification. 

Nevertheless, it is not nearly enough to point to the way that popular feminism functions within Burke’s curve of history. Any analysis that stops there would be insufficient. Burke does not account for the struggles that happen within the casuistic stretching of frames, but Banet-Weiser’s interrogation of popular misogyny more fully fleshes out the stretching and breaking of acceptance frames. Because I have positioned popular feminism as a potentially prudential challenge to normative gender relations, popular misogyny’s reactivity illuminates two things for Burke’s curve of history. First, when an acceptance frame is stretched by dissatisfied parties, those who find comfort in the frame’s privileges and affordances can be expected to attempt to reclaim that power (Burke 229). This is not necessarily something that Burke himself elaborates on, but the struggle between the challenger and the incumbent is a critical point for defining what constitutes the curve of history. This is immediately evident in cases like second-wave feminism, where the efforts of the women’s liberation movement were met with both emancipatory and constraining legislation. 

Second, the ways in which popular misogyny manifests in the wake of popular feminism’s emergence is unique in that it results in a battle over the normative, much like the aforementioned struggles inside the stretch, but this battle is characterized by imprudence, aggression, vitriol, and eventually violence. In a paradoxical manner, misogynists act much in the way that Burke characterizes the dispossessed sectarian: 

In men who have been trained to sectarian thought, too simple an attempt to reverse the direction of their thought becomes confusing. They are threatened with demoralization, in that simple reversal of sectarianism is opportunism – and opportunism arises when the man schooled in sectarianism is dispossessed by his sect. In breaking down the clear lines of demarcation by which his character has been formed, the dispossessed sectarian is in danger of losing his character. (101)

The demoralization of men who do not feel at home in their current situation are left with two options: reject the governing conditions of their lives or revert back to a level of cognitive dissonance that makes life bearable. Here I want to proffer the following challenges to Burke’s conceptualization: what happens to the demoralized when their anguish is caused by a disruption of their normative privilege, as in the case of feminism and misogyny? Can the dispossessed sectarian be one that is invested in the larger structures of power and domination? The villains (or heroes, if you’re asking incels) of popular misogyny, like Beierle and Rodger, occupy a precarious position in the curvature of history. They are at once insiders who benefit from male privilege and other forms of supremacy, and they are also outsiders sitting on the fringe because they perceive themselves as having been robbed of the advantages promised to them by heteronormativity. The misogynists, collapsing the term here with incels, are typically white, cisgender, heterosexual men who do not possess the love and adoration of women that they feel so acutely owed (Banet-Weiser 38). On every other level of the human condition, they benefit from privilege. But in this arena, misogynists fall flat in a way that provokes their backlash toward what they perceive to be the cause of their anguish: the rise of feminism. 

The aforementioned stretching of the normative that feminism attempts, and to varying degrees, achieves, leads misogynists and incels to believe that women’s empowerment is the reason for their suffering. Put simply, if women didn’t spend so much time liberating themselves from a system that has worked for thousands of years, they could get on with their womanly duties of tending to men. Herein lies the struggle that Burke failed to explicate in Attitudes. What happens when two diametrically opposed groups, feminists and misogynists, experience demoralization in the stretching of the normative acceptance frame? The wideness of its reach means that popular feminism’s stretching is noticed by those who are fiercely protective of gender norms and relations as they currently manifest in US culture.  In its more extreme forms, popular misogyny utilizes popular feminism’s very same networking techniques to attempt to revert society back to a homeostasis that privileges patriarchy. Popular misogyny is akin to Burke’s alienation, or the state in which a man no longer owns his world because he deems it to be unreasonable. Repossession, or acts of mobilized misogyny, represents the struggles between these diametrically opposed groups during the stretching of the frame. Burke does not necessarily account for the struggles between those who find home in the established frames and those who seek to change them, let alone those who occupy unique locations like the previously mentioned incels.

An application of prudence may elucidate the difference between popular feminism’s strategic rise in visibility and popular misogyny’s reactionary violence. A working theory of the curve of history could, and should, account for the tug of war over power shifts. Banet-Weiser gets at this when she argues that popular feminism is active and popular misogyny is reactive. The active nature of feminism in all its iterations can be considered prudential to a degree because it is a deliberate effort to change gender relations. Popular feminism in its current articulation, though, is unclear in its relationship to judgment. Prudence is a way to live through change that we cannot control. “[I]t valorizes democratic politics as they are being absorbed into a global culture shaped primarily by market economies and private corporations, and it holds out the possibility of overcoming social divisions between academics, public intellectuals, and ordinary citizens” (Hariman 289). Immediately, it feels as though popular feminism’s investment not only in the larger project of pushing for gender equality but also in commodification and economic participation meets Hariman’s definition of contemporary prudence. It is an evolutionary shift that does not seek to destroy or eliminate structures that govern gender, but rather compromise in both its objective and its scope. Popular feminism finds its footing in barely stretching and advancing the way that society at large considers intersectional inequities, but it finds a comfortable home in a capitalist culture that values consumption and economic participation. To the dismay of more radical feminists, this positioning is as pragmatic as it is strategic; if breaking the frame of acceptance is next to impossible, then we must settle for bending the rules but nevertheless playing the game. 

The same cannot be said for popular misogyny. Its role in the expansion and shifting of acceptance frames is an irrational, rage-fueled endeavor. I argue that popular misogyny’s attempts to reclaim a gender order reminiscent of a traditional patriarchy are individual acts that lack any sort of prudence. Surely, they are exercising a type of judgment, one that results in the loss of life, but that judgment is illogical and filled with rage. No hundred-page manifesto can prove that these acts of misogyny are prudent. Their violence can be senseless, or it can be calculated, but what it cannot be is prudent. No matter how angry or violent popular misogyny can be, its acts of violence do not make the case for reverting the acceptance frames back to their original shape. Its imprudence is read as just that. Men like Rodgers who commit violence against women may be taking society’s sexism and misogyny to its extremes, but they hold little efficacy in making American sympathize with their cause. Their role in the tug of war is read as irrationality on the fringes of society, and in no way means that popular feminism, or any feminism, can be halted in its efforts. 

Conclusion

Perhaps the best place to end this explorative essay is with a consideration of rage and prudence. Seemingly at odds with each other, articulations of rage and applications of prudence happen as popular feminism and misogyny battle to stretch our society either forward toward progress or backward toward tradition. I am unsure if feminism in any iteration can move beyond Burke’s curving evolutions and instead be a true revolution. I do know that popular feminism will never be able to break its frame of acceptance, in part because it so gladly partakes in popular normativities and in part because its widespread palatability re-inscribes a status quo that ironically supports capitalist comfortability. This observation is not meant to discount the contributions of popular feminism, but merely to point out that, like every other social movement, it shines in its possibilities but is held back by its limitations.

An application of prudential reasoning can force the stretching of acceptance frames. We can reason through why social change is necessary on numerous levels. What this analysis has hopefully demonstrated is that the struggle within the stretching often results in imprudent misogynistic violence. When prudence facilitates social change, phenomenon like popular misogyny deploy imprudence as haphazard reactionary violence. Ironically, both utilize rage. In its most simple definition, rage is an extreme anger, but it can also mean that something is in a frenzy or it is fashionable. When something is “all the rage,” like popular feminism became in the 2010s, it means that people cannot get enough of it. They need to engage with it, participate in it, and yes, even consume it. Popular feminism’s prudence gives new meaning to rage. When it is calculated, strategic, and popular, rage can be used to change the world. But when it is harnessed through anger, as in acts of violent misogyny, it is easily dismissed and accomplishes little. I want to end this essay with a charge of sorts. In the wake of the 2024 election, those who support equality need to take advantage of popular feminism’s “all the rage” status by prudentially finding a way to move beyond Burke’s evolution, instead toward a true gender revolution. What we need is a sort of transformation that transfigures the rage of popularity as it embodies today into a powerful rage, an intersectional, collective rage that is actually able to tear down racist, heteronormative structures. This rage, unlike the one belonging to popular misogyny, must be a lasting one. 

Notes

1. I use the term evolution instead of revolution because Kenneth Burke maps five acts of historical drama in Attitudes Toward History through what he calls “the curve of history.” Social change is channeled through the engine of preservation, meaning that whenever a group seeks to change social, political, or economic structures to meet its needs, the preservation of these structures is the mechanism used to meet new development. Situations may change to make existing structures less useful, but they still exist to serve some purpose, thus they must simultaneously develop to meet the situation and preserve the prevailing structures. Put simply, Burke offers a theory of developmental evolution, not revolution. When I use the term revolution in this paper, it intentionally signifies feminist objectives of shifting gender relations, and the slippages between evolution and revolution perhaps signal the normative and flattening qualities of popular feminism.

Works Cited

Banet-Weiser, Sarah. Empowered: Popular Feminism and Popular Misogyny. Duke University Press, 2018.

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