Katy Perry recently rocketed to the edge of space aboard Jeff Bezos' Blue Origin spacecraft, joined by a star-studded, all-female crew that included journalist Gayle King and Bezos' fiancée Lauren Sanchez. The 11-minute-long trip was marketed as a "historic" milestone for women in space. Perry kissed the ground and declared she felt "super connected to life." King declared everyone should go to space, ignoring the fact that most people are struggling to afford rent, groceries, and basic necessities. Their journey was met with widespread backlash, rightly, because it spotlighted the hollowness of liberal feminism, a brand of feminism that celebrates elite women's symbolic "firsts," while ignoring the material conditions of everyone else.

More pointedly, it's choice feminism, a subset of liberal feminism, which insists any decision a woman makes is feminist by default. Whether she's a CEO, a cop, or a space tourist, it's empowerment as long as she chooses it. Capitalism loves this version. It turns feminism into an identity you can buy or perform, rather than a collective struggle or set of politics. It never asks who's excluded from those choices or who pays the price for them. Every billionaire joyride to space after all, is made possible by exploited labor, tax avoidance, and public infrastructure gutted to subsidize their indulgent lifestyles.

No critique of liberal feminism is complete without naming Sheryl Sandberg's book Lean In. She told women to simply assert themselves and climb the corporate ladder. But as co-authors Cinzia Arruzza, Nancy Fraser, and Tithi Bhattacharya put it in their manifesto "Feminism for the 99%", this is simply "equal opportunity domination" diversifying the class of exploiters, not ending exploitation. While some women "lean in" to corner offices, millions labor in sweatshops. Over 80 percent of garment workers globally are women, largely in the Global South, and less than 2 percent earn a living wage. You can't lean in when you're struggling to survive.

Since October 7, 2023, over 55,000 Palestinians have been killed in the Gaza genocide. Or so we've been told. The true number is likely higher. By late 2024, the United Nations verified that roughly 70 percent of those killed in Gaza were women and children, many left to die as hospitals faced severe shortages of even basic medical supplies and subsequently bombed out of existence. At least 97,000 Palestinians, most of them women and children, have been wounded by Israeli forces, with many left permanently disabled and thousands expected to die from treatable injuries due to the collapse of Gaza's healthcare system. 

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Many liberal feminists have largely responded with hollow offerings, saying nothing at all or sharing an AI-generated "All Eyes On Rafah" graphic on their Instagram story. Some even cheered the genocide on, in the name of "fighting terror." This silence exposes liberal feminism's rot. Speaking up when it's politically convenient, shutting up when women outside the West are being incinerated.

When Kamala Harris ran for president in the 2024 U.S. election, supporters framed her candidacy as a historic feminist victory. When she lost, many blamed misogynoir, a factor, sure, but not the whole story. The rush to pin Harris' defeat solely on misogynoir served to deflect any substantive critique of her record. Be it her declaration that she did not intend to break from Biden's policies that left many Americans economically disenfranchised and deported 4.6 million people, her running to the right of Trump on the border wall, her repeated insistence that Israel had the right to defend itself or pledging to have "the most lethal military in the world." 

As legal scholar Cheryl I. Harris argues in her seminal essay Whiteness as Property, whiteness in America functions not just as race but as a form of protected status and access—one that can be performed, protected, or pursued by non-white individuals in proximity to power. In this context, Black elites can and do participate in advancing the very same white supremacist, carceral, militarized, capitalist systems that crush the working class and racialized poor.

We saw this dynamic with Harris and others, like Representative Jasmine Crockett who recently declared the U.S. "needs migrants"—presumably Hispanic migrants—because Black people are "done picking cotton," casually justifying migrant exploitation.

Liberal feminism's fixation on representation over liberation clears the path for such exploitation, revealing itself as nothing more than cosmetic hierarchy.

It's not enough to put a Black woman in office if her policies reinforce empire, extraction, and domination. A Black face on a drone strike doesn't make the blast more liberating, as many hopeful young voters learned when the Obama administration dropped over 26,000 bombs that killed countless women and children in countries like Yemen, Pakistan, and Somalia in 2016 alone. A Black woman expanding the police state or arming Israel isn't a win for poor Black women in Jackson, Mississippi or for Palestinian women in Gaza.

Liberal feminism

Liberal feminism's fixation on representation over liberation clears the path for such exploitation, revealing itself as nothing more than cosmetic hierarchy.

This is the hollowness of liberal feminism: a politics of spectacle that flatters the powerful and forgets the powerless, which is why, after the loss, Harris' next move was not toward organizing direct action against Trump's escalating fascist agenda, but to sign with Creative Artists Agency (CAA), a Hollywood talent agency. She went on to appear at events like the NAACP Image Awards—a ceremony long steeped in respectability politics and the celebration of the Black elite—and the 2025 Met Gala, fashion's most elitist event. Harris mingled with celebrities at a charity ball with a steep $75,000 entry fee, more than most Americans make in a year. It was eerily reminiscent of AOC's 2021 "Tax the Rich" gown, a performative meme-able moment that changed nothing.

Echoing that performative spirit, in 2020, director Ava DuVernay, a prominent figure in Black liberal circles, ardently defended Harris' vice-presidential candidacy in an Instagram post saying:

"There is no debate anymore. There's no room for it in my book…Oh but, Kamala did this or she didn't do that. I hear you. I know. And I don't care. Because what she DIDN'T DO is abandon citizens in a pandemic, rip babies from their mother's arms at the border, send federal troops to terrorize protestors, manufacture new ways to suppress Black and Brown votes….So I don't wanna hear anything bad about her. It doesn't matter to me. Vote them in and then let's hold them accountable. Anything other than that is insanity."

But by 2024, the Biden-Harris administration had either directly done or tacitly enabled much of what DuVernay claimed to find unconscionable under Trump. COVID-19 safety measures were gutted, forcing sick workers back on the job. At the border, family separations continued. Palestinian children were fatally ripped from their mothers' arms. Pro-Palestinian protestors faced mass arrests and repression, while Harris condemned them as "despicable acts by unpatriotic protestors." During the 2020 George Floyd uprisings, Harris' vice presidential pick Tim Walz deployed the National Guard against protesters.

Still, DuVernay stood loyal, posing for selfies at the 2024 Democratic National Convention with Oprah and Kerry Washington. The message was clear: so long as a Black woman holds power, the same violence becomes tolerable.

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This myopic worldview is why liberal feminism can't offer real solidarity to the poor, working class, or colonized. Liberal feminism doesn't want to dismantle the empire, it wants a girlboss in charge. And once she gets that seat, the bombs keep falling, the prisons stay full, and the brunch crowd goes silent.

Symbolic wins for a select few won't save us when the systems that brutalize the global majority of women, especially poor women and racialized women remain intact.

Feminism that isn't anti-capitalist, anti-imperialist, and anti-racist, is worthless to those most impacted by these systems and, therefore, doesn't deserve to call itself feminism at all. The fates of a Black single mother in Mississippi working three jobs to make rent, a Palestinian mother in Gaza living under bombs paid for by U.S. tax dollars, and a Congolese girl mining the cobalt that fuels the tech industry are linked by the same global systems of oppression. 

This is why feminism must be a radical, internationalist tradition. Fannie Lou Hamer understood that none of us are free until all of us are. That means refusing to be satisfied by optics, slogans, or identity reductionism stripped of substance. It means building a global, intersectional movement that isn't afraid to confront empire, capitalism, and every structure that keeps us in chains.

We won't be liberated by billionaires, bombs, or space trips. We won't be freed by Met Gala appearances or feminist tote bags. Liberation will come from solidarity, class struggle, and the rejection of the lie that aesthetics equal victory.

Ashley Viola is a cultural critic and YouTube personality who examines pop culture at the intersections of class, gender and race. Her work centers on liberation for the working class and Global South, with a sharp focus on how consumerism, influencer culture and other forms of mainstream pop culture manufacture consent for capitalism and undermine class consciousness.