Corporate feminism

The charge in the definition is structural before it is moral. Women's liberation is a global exosocial struggle in Marsh's account, meaning it reaches outward across group boundaries and works towards levelling. Corporate feminism converted that into an endogroup, a bounded thing with an inside, an ideal member and an edge to defend, and the conversion is the objection rather than any particular position or policy. Her definition of feminism proper supplies the contrast. Feminism is the belief in the liberation of women to fulfill their full potential through uninhibited exosocial expansion, and she adds that the word itself is a poor substitute for the concept of women's liberation. Removing male and other types of endo-idealism would do more towards liberation than establishing endogroup feminism. The origin claim is specific and is hers: a movement emanating from the United States in the 1960s, heavily guided by the CIA and by corporate interests. The mechanism matters more than the attribution. Once a struggle has become an endogroup it acquires all the machinery of one, an endo-ideal at the centre and a negative image at the edge, and it also becomes capturable, because a bounded movement has a leadership that can be funded and a membership that can be defined. That is how an outward struggle can be turned to the service of the structure it began by opposing.

Corporate feminism circulates widely as a name for feminism concerned with women's advancement inside existing corporate hierarchies, and the criticism is well developed. bell hooks attacked a feminism that sought equality within an unjust system, Nancy Fraser argued that feminism supplied capitalism with a progressive vocabulary and Catherine Rottenberg described a neoliberal feminism that shifts responsibility onto individual women. Marsh overlaps with these in target and differs in two ways. Her objection is not primarily that the movement became individualistic but that it became a bounded group, which is a claim about structure rather than about ideology. And she attaches a specific origin claim about direction by United States intelligence and corporate interests in the 1960s, which the academic critiques do not make and which remains contested.