"Make Feminism Radical Again" : En ideologikritisk undersökning av H&M:s användning av feministiska budskap, och dess konsekvenser för feminismens politiska agenda

Sammanfattning: The aim of this essay is to find out in what ways the global clothing company H&M uses political and ideological statements, such as feminism, as a sales strategy. I have noticed an expanding trend in fashion; the use of feminism as branding, and how companies such as H&M have started profiling themselves with feminism. This could be seen as a typical neoliberal-femvertising phenomenon. In this essay, I use critique of ideology, a method developed by the Frankfurt school, to examine how H&M expresses feminism through their clothes, whether H&M’s production could be considered as a feminist one, and what consequences H&M’s use of feminist ideology have on the feminist political movement. To be able to answer these questions, I use gender theory and postcolonial theory. My aim is to show how neoliberal/capitalist ideologies often contain cultural and political appropriation, where an ideology such as feminism is exploited in order to make a higher profit. My conclusion is that when companies use feminist statements in their clothing they use irony and humour to emphasize positivity, such as “girl power”, instead of confronting structural inequalities among the sexes and harmful norms and gender stereotypes within this hierarchy. The consequence of this process is that feminism is depoliticized, which is harmful to the feminist political agenda.