Who is the Economista?

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Department of Informatics and Media

Master’s Programme in Social Sciences, Digital Media and Society Specialization

Two-year Master’s Thesis

Who is the Economista?

- The Paradox of Feminism: Collectivism and Individualism Within an Online Group for Female

Private Investors

Student: Nathalie Saller Supervisor: Matilda Tudor

Spring 2021

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Abstract

In the last few years, there has been an explosion of Facebook groups specifically directed at a female audience. One topic that seems to organize and interest Swedish women especially is money. This study explores the biggest Swedish financial group of them all: Economista – women who enjoy stocks and private economy, currently hosting 146 thousand members.

The group is studied through a theoretical lens of fourth wave feminism, characterized by the use of digital tools for feminist action, as well as a revival of the feminist collective action from the second wave feminism, and a continuation of a feminist individual empowerment of third wave feminism. The study aims to investigate how feminism, and the empowerment of women is negotiated within the group. It also investigates what defines and delimits the female discursive object of the Economista.

Methods used are a critical feminist discourse analysis and an explorative netnography, combined with focus group discussions with members of the group.

The study shows that Economista can be seen as a collective space as members experience the group as a safe space where they educate each other about the stock market – a field historically dominated by men, that many are reluctant to enter. It also functions as a space for consciousness raising about patriarchal structures playing out in their everyday economic lives. However, the group can also be viewed as a limited emancipation, as it only includes a limited scope of individuals. The economically liberated subject that comes forth – The Economista – is a neoliberal, feminine version of a Homo economicus, who is responsible for making deliberate, rational decisions regarding her economy. In this postfeminist discourse, feminist analysis is no longer needed, as women have all the possibilities in the world to live a rich and happy life – if they just put their minds into it.

The study shows that it is precisely these instances of “empowerment” that are important to dissect, as these often conceal limiting structures. In this case, the implications that this notion of freedom and

“lack of governance” has for feminist struggle is that it masks norms, hierarchies and structural power relations producing economic inequality. Economista thus becomes part of the problem that it sets out to solve, as the group pictures itself as a solution to women’s economic inequality, at the expense of other solutions.

Keywords: Fourth wave feminism, postfeminism, neoliberal feminism, social media, Facebook groups, separatism, women’s communities, economy, investing, consciousness raising, safe spaces online

Word count: 27 318 words

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Acknowledgements

First of all, I want to thank my supervisor Matilda Tudor, whom I have never physically met as the thesis writing happened to correlate with a world-wide pandemic. Despite this, she has felt very present throughout my writing: always warm, engaged and encouraging, and mean- while sharp, challenging and on-point in her feedback. And (almost) never annoyed when our Zoom-meetings lasted a little longer than planned.

I also want to thank the Economista members participating in the focus groups, for devoting their time and energy to share their thoughts and to help raise all of our consciousnesses through engaged and personal discussions. Further, I am grateful to Uppsala university, for the online services that they have provided students with during Corona, in terms of support, workshops and guidance. Especially, I want to thank Sarah Schwarz from Språkverkstaden for her valua- ble grammatical comments and, also, moral support that went beyond her responsibilities. To the friends taking the time to last-minute proof-read: thank you too!

Moreover, I am grateful for the thesis-fikas organized by the program coordinator Johan Lin- dell, as well as my little Stockholm study girl group, who made thesis-writing in Corona much more fun. I am also grateful to everyone that I have met in the last half year, who have asked questions about by project, shared their thoughts, and provided stimulating discussions, in- creasing the quality of the end result.

Last but not least, thanks to my family, who is always there, cheering me on in high and low.

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List of figures and tables

Figure 1 ……….………29-30

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1. INTRODUCTION

In the last few years, there has been an explosion of Facebook groups specifically directed at a female audience. One topic that seems to interest and organize women online is money, especially since the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic (Andersson 2020). In these groups, topics such as how to invest money, maximize profit and other queries that have to do with private economy are discussed. Hundreds of thousands of Swedish women have joined groups centered around personal finance and investments, showing that this field, traditionally dominated by men (Vohra and Kaur 2016), is also one that women want to be present in – but preferably, without the men. This trend is also shown in an all-time high number of women investing money through stockbrokers such as Avanza and Nordnet.

In 2018, I became one of these women. Having always found personal finance boring and only glancing at the funds that my grandmother had invested in for me, I found that Facebook groups had a way of making boring things feel accessible and interesting. I joined a few investment groups, and soon found my way into the biggest one of them all: Economista – din guide till ekonomiskt oberoende (author’s translation: your guide to economic independence), with more than 146 thousand members. The group serves the purpose of teaching women to do what men to a much larger extern do: invest their money. I eventually published my first post – a begin- ner’s question on how to start investing. In accordance with the advice that I received from other women; I soon created my own savings account on Avanza.

As my investment journey began, as well as my activity in the group, I became increasingly interested in what has been referred to as the the phenomenon Economista (Lindmark 2019).

The majority of media coverage celebrated the group, as well as other women’s finance groups, for being emancipatory and allowing for women to “claim their power” (Brockman 2020),

“making their voices heard” (Kågström 2017) and for new, female power holders to rise in the name of equality (referring to the creators of the groups) (Lindmark 2019). A hopeful, enthu- siastic rhetoric about how white men’s dominance over the financial sector was being over- thrown, as a part of reducing inequalities between men and women, dominated the angle of the media (see also Ekeblad, Granberg, and Magnell 2020; Bratt 2020; Dahlberg 2017).

However, there was also another perspective being shared, although by much fewer voices, problematizing the emancipatory potential of women’s increased presence on the stock market.

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8 What kind of feminism are we really creating, they asked, when women are encouraged to increase their participation in capitalist activities? These voices argued that when women enter the financial market – the most white, masculine sphere there is – the white man’s privilege is consolidated and his structures reinforced (Bjärskog 2020). Criticism was made towards what they referred to as “ISK-feminism” (“ISK” standing for Investeringssparkonto – a type of investment account), whose feminist deed consisted of producing pink investment books and building a “fuck-off-capital” (Broberg 2021). This new feminism only benefited some and did not change the fundamental and continuously unequal conditions in society, since those who did not invest their money (if they had any to spare), were left behind, missing the emancipatory train.

Having been a member of the group for some time, I started realizing that the success story of Economista as a liberator and a room for feminist action and change needed to be nuanced a bit. On the one hand, I noticed enthusiasm, sisterhood, community and “girl power” within the discussions in the group and in the rhetoric surrounding it. But on the other hand, I also saw conflicts within the group, combined with a growing, inner sense of unease. What kind of community was this and how could it be an object of both high praise and severe criticism, all in the name of feminism?

Relying entirely on earlier research to answer these questions and understand women’s economic communities online is not an option, since it is quite scarce (Riordan 2002). Even on the broader topics of women and economy in the field of communication and women’s groups online, the body of research is meager (ibid.). Already in 2002, media studies scholar Ellen Riordan called for more analysis and understanding of how finance and capitalism affects women. To this day, 20 years later, the research gap remains. As for the other field that inter- connects with the topic, women’s groups online, some studies have been done, but there is still a general lack of empirical focus (Clark-Parsons 2018; Lewis et al. 2015; Pruchniewska 2019).

Considering the lack of research in these two fields, a study where women and finance come together in a concentrated space is clearly motivated. In this paper, I will therefore examine the group Economista, which is currently the biggest online investment group in Sweden. This thesis investigates how feminism, and the empowerment of women is negotiated within and through female online investment groups in Sweden today, with the help of critical discourse analysis (CDA). As CDA views language as a form of “social practice”, an investigation of it

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9 can be used to find underlying assumptions and meanings shaped by ideology and power relations (Fairclough 1995).

To understand the complexity of the group, I will use a theoretical framework that allows for multiple aspects to show of what is going on inside. The overarching name for this is “fourth wave feminism”, as the current state of feminism is commonly called (Blevins 2018). A state where different themes from the history of feminism meet, and digital media takes on a particular significance. Early feminism, during the 19^th and 20^th century, was to a large extent focused on collective action for women, for example by forming so-called consciousness raising groups, where they could speak privately, safely, and undisturbed by men about their experiences of being women in an unequal world and catalyze social change (Campbell 1999). With the start of the third wave, in the early 1990s, the character of feminism changed to a large extent. Focus shifted from structural inequalities and a discourse about women and other mar- ginalized groups as just that - a group - to a more libertarian feminism, highlighting individual empowerment and the importance of freedom for everyone to create their own success (Cren- shaw 1991).

In the current, fourth wave, which can be said to have begun in the 2010s, these two themes meet, in a new, digital context. On the one hand, we see a re-ignition of the collective approach of early feminism though digital tools (Blevins 2018). On the other hand, it is a natural continuation of the third wave, with its individualism and personal empowerment, prioritized over collectivist organizing (Pruchniewska 2019).

It has been argued that this linking of collective action and individual empowerment in the fourth wave is particularly visible in “the reincorporation of consciousness-raising groups through social media” (Blevins 2018, 101). I have allowed this definition of the fourth wave feminism to shape the way in which I approach Economista, as it mirrors the seemingly con- tradictory feminist understandings of the group that are being articulated in the media: on the one hand, we have the (dominant) view of Economista as a consciousness-raising group, cre- ating sisterhood and raising awareness about structural economic inequalities. On the other hand, there is the perspective of an increased individualism, where focus is turned away from collectivity and community, towards a goal of self-realization and individual power. This thesis can thus be seen as an empirical litmus test “following up” the notion about these two values

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10 uniting in a contemporary, digital space and age. The aim is to see what “truths” are being produced through the group, to gain knowledge about the state of feminism in Sweden today.

1.1 Research questions My research questions are thus:

1. In what ways can the group Economista be understood as a case of feminist collective action?

2. In what ways can the group Economista be understood as a case of feminist individual empowerment?

3. What defines and delimits the female discursive subject of the Economista?

To answer these questions, I will apply a combination of research methods. First, an explorative netnography, investigating the actual activity in the group through mainly posts and comments.

Secondly, focus groups with members from Economista, investigating how the group is expe- rienced by participants. Together, the empirical materials collected by these methods will be analyzed through discourse analysis.

1.2 Outline of the thesis

The introduction is followed by a short background chapter, complementing the initial background provided in the introduction. Subsequently comes a chapter presenting existing research and the theoretical framework, consisting of the overarching Fourth wave feminism, and its two theoretical clusters of Collective action and Individual empowerment. The chapter ends with a mapping of knowledge gaps in existing research. This is followed by a chapter presenting research approach and methods: netnography, focus groups, and a feminist critical discourse analysis, as well as reflections on reflexivity, ethics, and limitations. Then, results and analysis are presented, structured in line with concepts and ideas from the theoretical framework, as well as the empirically identified themes. Finally, a concluding discussion is presented, tying the analysis back to the research questions and to previous research. This is followed by a discussion on the study’s limitations and suggestions for further research.

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2. BACKGROUND

2.1 Women, money and investing

Women’s lower economic standards is does not come as a surprise to anyone. There is a gender wage gap, women work more part-time, work more often in low-salary, women-dominated sectors, and they take more parental leave, to name a few examples (Fogelqvist 2021). Another difference is that men also get bigger income from invested capital (ibid.). Today, the number of women in Sweden who buy stocks from online brokers like Nordnet and Avanza are only 24 percent (Kågström 2017), and out of more than a million users, 365 000 of them are women (Kull 2020).

Sandra Bourbon, aka. Framtidsfeministen, wrote in a blog post on the International women’s day in 2020, that we should celebrate the event by encouraging women to buy more stocks.

The motivation being that “ownership is power”; by owning stocks, you have the right to vote at annual meetings of shareholders. Furthermore, investing your money is a way to make your money “work for you”, and grow in size while you sleep (Bourbon 2020). Women’s participation in the stock market has been relatively unchanged over time, she argued, but “new times are coming” (ibid.).

One reason for women to engage less in the stock market is that they find it stressful, difficult and time consuming (Vohra and Kaur 2016). They also have less confidence than men in financial questions, and are more anxious and insecure in general when it comes to economy (Lind 2019). Further, since finance is considered a masculine domain, questions regarding private economy, for example, can be experienced as a stereotypical threat to women (ibid). This can, more or less consciously, make women avoid engaging in private financial questions.

Through a 2018 financial survey, the investment management firm Pimco showed that 72 per- cent of women, and 81 percent of millennial women, thought that the investing system was

“set up to be confusing” (Brockman 2020). It also showed that the words that came to mind when bringing up the topic of money to a woman were “isolation”, “uncertainty” and “loneli- ness”.

Vohra and Kaur (2016, 1) however argue that “women’s economic empowerment is the biggest social change in recent times”. The head of Nordnet, Eva Trouin, has declared that interest and curiosity has existed among women, but that it has been consolidated by the emergence of

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12 Facebook groups about investing for women. This can be seen in an increase in the number of costumers, which has grown significantly over the last few years. Nordnet has thus started targeting women in their courses and lectures (Kågström 2017).

2.2 Economista and its context

Economista was created in October 2016 by Swedish entrepreneur Isabella Löwengrip, also known as Blondinbella, and journalist and economist Pingis Hadenius, and currently hosts more than 146 thousand members. The cover photo is a flourished pattern in gold, surrounding the word “ECONOMISTA” in pink, with the text “Din guide till ekonomiskt oberoende” –

“Your guide to economic independence” underneath. In the top, the golden pattern is forming two swans, holding up a big, golden crown with their beaks.

The description of the group reads that it is created for all women who are “interested in stocks, regardless of earlier experience of buying them”. In the group, members share questions and advice on stock trading, but also deal with bigger topics of private economy and finance. The description also explains that to keep the group as welcoming and nice as possible, they have developed a set of rules that should be read, to avoid misunderstandings and to create a “more powerful group”. The description finishes by stating that if the reader is completely new in the area, they are extra warmly welcome. “We hope that you find the group to be inspiring and self-developing”. To further contextualize Economista, it is also the name of a podcast launched by Pingis and Isabella in 2014, as well as a book published in 2013 called Economista – take control over your economy and get a more joyful life¹.

Facebook groups can have three different settings: public, closed and secret. Economista is closed in the sense that you have to apply for a membership, but not secret as it can be found by everyone and does not require an invitation. When applying, you are required to read and approve of a set of group rules. These regard relevancy of posts, respectfulness and lastly, address that there might be “commercial collaborations with chosen partners that can provide relevant knowledge”.

1 Author’s translation.

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13 The group is managed by the administrators (Isabella and Pingis) and five moderators, who decide which posts will be allowed and which will not. The activity in the group is high, with hundreds of posts being published every month.

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3. EXISTING RESEARCH AND THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK

A study of women’s financial net cultures touches upon several different academic fields, which will be presented in this overview. This is often the case with media studies; media scholars Paul Long and Tim Wall (2021) argue that they therefore can be thought of as a field rather than a discipline. It consequently becomes more than the sum of its parts, and in this lies its strength.

This chapter starts by outlining existing research done on women and economy. The subse- quent parts (with the overarching name “Fourth wave feminism”) consist of both previous research done in the area of feminist media research, as well as theoretical concepts within neoliberalist theorization. As the limits between theoretical concepts and earlier feminist media research are relatively fuzzy, previous research and theory will be treated thematically throughout this chapter. The theoretically driven nature of the research questions (i.e., the research questions come out of the theoretical framework), also motivates the existing research to be integrated into the theoretical framework.

In the “Fourth wave feminism”, Collective action is initially introduced, mapping out key themes in feminist media studies and research done on women’s cultures. Predominant con- cepts are separatism and safe spaces, as well as Consciousness raising. These will also be central in organizing the results and analysis to discuss how togetherness and community is created in women’s groups. In the second, Individual empowerment section, the theoretical concepts of neoliberalism and postfeminism are central in the understanding of an increased individualization of the feminist subject. Furthermore, related concepts such as normalization and othering are presented.

3.1. Existing research on women and economy in communication studies

Already in 2002, Riordan called for more research in the field of feminism and political economy. “Where are all the women?”, she asked (Meehan and Riordan 2002, x), after having established that feminist scholars were fairly invisible within political economy, and so were scholars of communication who took a feminist perspective. Feminist scholars had been reluctant to enter the field of economy; rarely did these studies examine capitalism, labor and class as shaping women’s experiences (Riordan 2002, 3). And even though feminist sociologists had theorized economic structures affecting women’s lives (e.g., Acker 1999; Edin and Lein 1997),

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15 these had gravitated more towards questions of representation and identity, concerns usually covered within cultural studies analyses.

One possible reason for feminist communications scholars to avoid political-economic issues was that the academy marginalizes both feminist and political-economic research (Meehan and Riordan 2002). Furthermore, women have historically not been welcomed into the political and economic domain – in the public sphere, as well as in academia. Even though second wave feminists stated that “the personal is political”, feminist scholars have found it hard and often unnecessary to tie the everyday-lives of women to the structural level of capitalism, therefore often ignoring political-economic concerns (Riordan 2002, 4) The authors thus called for a

“friendly alliance” between the topics of political economy and feminism in communications studies, to be able to understand communication at the personal, experimental, institutional and structural level (ibid.).

Twelve years later, in 2014, the scarcity of communication studies on women and economy was still being addressed, as Micky Lee and Monica Raesch, feminist political economy schol- ars, authored an article named How to study Women, gender and the financial markets: a mod- est proposal for communication scholars. The article’s opening sentence reads: “How much do communication scholars know about women, gender, and the financial markets?” (Lee and Raesch 2014, 339). The answer was soon given: Very little. Out of forty-nine articles published in the special issues on the 2008 financial crisis in five cultural/critical studies in communication journals, only one had a concern for women. A review of over a hundred published articles on the financial markets and the financial media in communication scholarship showed that only one employed a feminist perspective.

Outside the discipline of communication, the body of feminist literature on finance is also slim, showing that feminist scholars continue to neglect the financial markets (ibid.). When specu- lating on why this is, Lee and Raesch speculate that one plausible reason is that the intersection between women, gender and finance has fallen into the crack between macro and micro levels of investigations. At a macro level, many feminist scholars “do not resonate with the object under study: structural capitalism—which means overt politics, policies, institutions, organi- zations, laws, regulations, and an understanding of economics” (Riordan 2002, 12). At a micro level, studies on for example investment clubs and trading floor have been done, but these studies do not approach finance from a feminist perspective (Lee and Raesch 2014, 339–40).

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16 One rare exception was a paper examining the relationship between gender and investment in the popular media. Lee (2014) conducted a critical discourse analysis of all books giving investment advice for a female audience published between 2002 and 2011 in the US market.

The results showed that popular financial literature asks women to solve the problems that they encounter in a patriarchal household by participating in the financial market.

However, studies on capitalism’s impact on women are however needed, as they naturalize a male bias because it values traditionally masculine ways of organization and knowing (War- ing 1999). In this bias, women’s ways of knowing are usually understood in relation to men’s and as a category within a masculine-biased system (Riordan 2002, 9).

3.2 Fourth wave feminism

Having established a lack of research done on women and economy in communication and media studies, how are we then to understand the occurrence of a female online community dealing with personal finance? In this study, the answer is through the lens of a fourth wave feminism.

So, what defines fourth wave feminism? To summarize is not an easy task, as feminism has perhaps never operated in a more difficult political and cultural milieu and has never has more internal turmoil (Hipps 2014). It is also important to point out that history can of course not be divided into these mutually exclusive categories as it is a very simplified view on reality. The division into waves is however a way to point at bigger historical and contemporary tendencies.

As mentioned, something that defines fourth wave feminism is however the use of digital tools:

for example in discussion boards on social media, feminist blogs and in Twitter campaigns (Blevins 2018). Blevins asserts that “instead of returning to a centrally-organized social movement, young feminists are forming communities, consciousness-raising groups, and discussion goals that are relevant to their individual, lived experiences” (ibid., 101). Where earlier waves met resistance in the form of rigid sociopolitical structures and lack of good communication channels (Schuller 2018), fourth wave feminists use the internet to connect, share perspectives and get a bigger understanding of experienced oppression (Cochrane 2013). Furthermore, it can be said to be signified by an online continuation of both the individual empowerment rhet- oric of the third wave, and a renewed interest in collective feminism from the second wave (Pruchniewska 2019).

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17 3.2.1 Collective action

The strong focus on the collective within feminist organization was established in the time of second wave feminism (1950-1970’s) and is being revitalized in the fourth wave. Here, women’s collectives are central, as well as the acknowledgement of power structures over per- sonal autonomy (Blevins 2018). In this view, differences between men and women are not created by nature but by society and a wider, structural analysis is done, acknowledging how men as a group are hierarchically advantaged in a gender system. This feminism is organized around a steering welfare state, legitimized through its purpose to redistribute resources and power, to even out inequalities (Fahlgren, Giritli Nygren, and Johansson 2016).

Even though not much research has been done on women’s financial groups online, we can investigate our case by seeing how it relates to studies done on other, non-economic, all-female environments online.

Separatism and safe spaces

Women’s desire to separate themselves from men is not a new phenomenon. Feminist research has shown that men tend to talk more and longer than women (Poland 2016), and also interrupt or ignore women to a larger extent (Fraser 1990). This can lead to a conscious, or subconscious, silencing of women – a behavior referred to as “mansplaining” in academia and oftentimes in daily life (ibid., 38). This behavior happens regardless of whether the man has expertise in the topic or not and aims at showing the women’s opinions are less valuable or right than men’s (Fraser 1990.). This behavior has its roots in men’s historical control over the majority of do- mains such as economy, politics and media (Poland 2016). Empirical research has shown that the silencing of women does not disappear online (Zoonen 1994). When women try to add to the discussion on the internet on the same premises as men, there is a risk of being ignored or belittled (Herring 1999; Lindberg and Jonsson 2020). Furthermore, threat, sexism and harassment of women by men is not uncommon (Herring 1999; Zoonen 1994)

The use of safe spaces through separatism has therefore been an important feminist strategy (Freedman 1979). Even though notions of safe spaces are frequently invoked in wider feminist environments, they have been relatively neglected in academia, as relatively little attention has been paid to explore the meaning and experience of spaces they consider to be “safe” (Lewis

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18 et al. 2015). However, some research has been done about physical safe places (e.g., Lewis et al., 2015; The Roestone Collective 2014). Safe spaces online have been less researched, but has gotten some attention (e.g. Jane 2016; Rentschler and Thrift 2015; Shaw 2013)

So, what constitutes a safe space? The meaning can range from the feeling of anonymity towards the outside world (Hartal 2018), to when an individual can express internal conflicts without judgement (Gembus 2018). A study done in 2015 showed that women interacting in safe spaces experience a cognitive and emotional freedom, encouraging their personal devel- opment (Lewis et al. 2015). Oftentimes, the term is applied to groups where sensitive topics are being discussed, such as sexuality (Linander et al. 2019). Lewis et al. distinguish between safety from and safe to, demonstrating that “once women are safe from harassment, abuse and misogyny they feel safe to be cognitively, intellectually and emotionally expressive (Lewis et al. 2015, 1).

Despite the potential of safe spaces online, there needs to be an awareness of the potential

“unsafety” of the platforms hosting these groups. New technologies open up for, on the one hand, new types of connections and ways to share content with more people faster, but on the other hand creates new types of surveillances and ways to capitalize on these groups (Shaw 2013). Facebook has been created by a small group of white, American men, and is being financed by risk capitalists who want to make a profit from the collection of personal information. No matter the activity, the internet is thus not a neutral space, but a “system that re- flects, and a site that structures, power and values” (Noble and Tynes, 2016, 2). Blevins (2018) argues that it can be difficult to build a safe space in an online sphere that encourages sexist practices. The Internet, including Facebook, is designed with a white, male, heteronormative, cisgender worldview and digital technologies can, through their very design and architecture, limit the experiences of underrepresented groups (Brock 2011; Daniels 2013)

Consciousness raising

Another central term connected to safe spaces is consciousness raising, which first emerged when radical feminists began to organize in a separatist way, during second wave feminism.

Consciousness-raising groups were informal gatherings for women in different communities, places where women could vent about sexism and social inequalities (Blevins 2018). In safe spaces, a higher consciousness was created among women, through insights about the fact that men’s explanations about the world and how it functions, creates an exclusion of women (Frye

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19 1996). Through sharing knowledge and experiences, women could become aware of the rela- tionships between their own lives and social structures and inequalities (Crossley 2019; Ko- vacevic 2020; Stanley and Wise 2002). The aim was not to erase individual experiences, as in stating that everyone has the same experiences, but rather to see patterns in experiences (Frye 1996). The sharing of a collective experiences could then contribute to a world view that is adapted to women’s perspectives (ibid.).

These consciousness-raising groups, however, fell out of vogue after the second wave of fem- inism (Blevins 2018). They received critique for lacking a visibility for women who were not white and upper-middle class. According to prominent feminist scholar bell hooks (2000, 7), the “dismantling of consciousness-raising groups all but erased the notion that one had to learn about feminism and make an informed choice about embracing feminist politics to become a feminist advocate”. The loss of consciousness-raising group thus decreased the overall feminist activism (hooks 2000).

With the arrival of the internet, consciousness-raising groups have however gotten a revival:

“Now, young people are using social media as a way to overcome barriers to activism by con- gregating in new, grassroots consciousness raising groups” (Blevins 2018, 92). These have created new ways for women to participate in a global feminism of the internet (Muro 2013).

A study done on American Facebook groups for professional women showed that the support given in the group additionally could affect the physical sphere, making women stand up for themselves to a larger extent, as they got equipped to make changes in their lives and demand political changes (Pruchniewska 2019). Pruchniewska also notes that groups do not have to be explicitly feminist to be seen as consciousness raising, as it is “also important to study the less explicit ways that feminism takes shape in the fourth wave, by (1) people who do not label themselves as feminists and (2) through everyday practices" (ibid., 1364).

bell hooks (2000) has listed key features for consciousness raising groups. First, they are a place for members to vent about everyday sexist experiences, in an empathic and community building environment. Secondly, argumentative discussions are a necessary and productive part of these groups. In an online sphere, the combination of anonymity and access has created an atmosphere where these are the norm, and maybe even amplified. The third feature is that they have the fundamental objective of converting individuals to feminist politics (ibid.). Despite

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20 being accused of “slacktivism" – lazy online activism that comes at the expense of “real” activism - social media platforms are often being used for political activism, for example in communities where users discuss and learn about action to be taken. The fourth feature is that the digital activism has realistic expectations for change, focusing on small, meaningful changes.

Fifth, consciousness-raising groups should be non-hierarchical; there are no set leaders, and all voices are equally heard (Blevins 2018).

In Sherry Turkle’s (1995) influential book on how identities are constructed through internet communication, she claimed that to be “good at the internet”, one needs an ethic of community, collaboration, consensus, and communication: all traits that she thinks that women are partic- ularly good at (Jenkins 1999, 332). As the internet removed barriers and obstacles, unprece- dented levels of spontaneous affection, intimacy and informality are facilitated, which has been claimed to be the core element of network technology (Plant 1998). Despite the gender-essentialist tendency in these statements, Zoonen (2001) argues that we can see how these authors are working towards a redefinition of the internet from an exclusive masculine domain, towards its feminine antithesis of “peaceful communication and experimentation” (ibid., 96). Moreover, studies have shown that women are more interested in personal interaction and support, for example in chat groups of forums, than men, as they “seek to build a personal relation with a site and feel strongly connected to online communities.”

Intersectional critique

Having lined out concepts central for the study of women’s separatist communities, we have established that these come from a second wave of feminism, but has gotten a revival in the current, fourth wave. Something that is significant for the third (and by extension, the fourth wave), is an intersectional critique of the second wave (Pruchniewska 2019). This critique came from the previous tendency of viewing all woman as a homogenous group, and thus being narrow sighted and exclusionary. This has been addressed as one of the biggest limitations of social media providing a true space for consciousness-raising groups: the potential of repeating patterns that characterize dialogues for white upper-middle-class users (Blevins 2018; Pruch- niewska 2019). The intersectional critique brings forth the idea that social features, such as race, gender, class, and sexuality, intersect to produce unique oppressions within broader social structures (Crenshaw 1991).

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21 Feminist social media researchers Susanna Paasonen and Jenny Sundén (2020) argue that feminist online initiatives prioritize gender differences over other embodied differences in social relations of power: “As decades of feminist critique have pointed out, a focus on binary gender – men and women, men and women, over and over again – renders invisible the intersections of diverse identity positions and social relations of power (Sundén and Paasonen 2020, 6).

Oftentimes, feminist success stories are stories about white middleclass, cis, straight women – that is, certain kinds of women (Riordan 2002; Sundén and Paasonen 2020, 7).

Even though the feminist discussion today denies the existence of uniform gender subjects such as “man” and “woman”, these are still applied in the political discussion on equality. I position myself critically towards those kinds of “set” identities and note that it is important to maintain an intersectional perspective in all feminist research. At the same time, it is difficult to see a

“feminism without women” (Fahlgren, Giritli Nygren, and Johansson 2016, 65). Furthermore, while acknowledging an intersectional critique in the research of consciousness-raising rooms, it is important, as Riordan (2002) acknowledges, to look at one’s study objects with empathy.

The existence of an investment group for women can be justified even though they fail to fully include everyone. Even though it is important to identify in what ways it is problematic to only address “women” and have a discourse that covers women’s issues, there can be a simultaneous understanding for why these groups exist and what sorts of needs it can fill.

In this research, I will thus be using the group’s own terminology, referring to the members as

“women”. The motivation for this is that I want to say something about women as a group in the “Butlerian” sense that gender is the product of social construction, of course avoiding an essentialist view that there is an inherent “woman-ness” in those biologically female and ac- knowledging that not all members of Economista identify as women despite their biological sex.

3.2.2 Individual empowerment

Individual empowerment is the second aspect defining fourth wave feminism (Pruchniewska 2019), starting with the arrival of the third wave in the 1990’s (Fahlgren, Giritli Nygren, and Johansson 2016). In the individualistic understanding, #nomakeupe selfies, intersectionality and individual freedom over collectivist organizing are regarded prominent features (Pruch- niewska 2019). These can be seen through a discourse of neoliberalization of society and of

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22 feminism (ibid.; Oksala 2016), as well as the closely related concept of postfeminism (McRobbie 2009). These concepts will now be explained in more detail.

Neoliberal subjects of luminous potential

Neoliberalism is originally a term used to describe global contemporary ideas about economic liberalism and free market-capitalism. It has been theorized in different ways, for example by Michel Foucault, viewing it as a theoretical and political movement, as well as a shift in the view of politics and societal organization (Fahlgren, Giritli Nygren, and Johansson 2016). In Sweden, neoliberalist discourse can be identified through changes in the welfare state’s collec- tive and direct political solutions, to a system which puts the individual’s responsibility in the center, letting the market become a model for societal organization, only providing it with frames and conditions to proceed.

Historically, liberalism has been valuable for feminist politics, as politically disadvantaged groups of women who have been systematically denied equality, as well as the freedom to control their lives, make choices and act as agents in the world (Lazar 2007). However, as this liberal way of viewing society and its actors has influenced feminism into a neoliberal kind of feminism, critical feminist scholars have argued that this has flawed feminist effort (Rivers 2017). The Foucauldian view on neoliberalism has thus been adopted by feminist scholars, using his notion of neoliberal governmentality, essentially meaning that the state outsources the responsibility for the well-being of the population, to the individual citizens, who act as entrepreneurs, navigating their own lives through seemingly free choices (Oksala 2016). The picture of the thus Homo Economicus emerges: a model of human interaction used in national economic theory, to describe a rational being who maximizes their own profits through delib- erate decisions (Fahlgren, Giritli Nygren, and Johansson 2016, 20). In her book The aftermaths of feminism, Angela McRobbie (2009) discusses how women are created discursively as “sub- jects of luminous potential”, interpellating them into subjects that have “limitless capacities”, which should be celebrated (Gill and Scharff 2011; McRobbie 2004; 2009). The assumption that women can “have it all” if they just “try hard enough” is problematic as it reframes women’s struggles and accomplishments as a purely personal matter, thus dismissing social and material constraints faced by different groups of women. This inward-looking focus created contentment only in the achievement of personal freedoms and fulfillment. It is a self- focused me-feminism, shifting focus away from the collective “we-feminism” (Lazar 2007, 154).

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23 The regulation of neoliberal governmentality is then falsely seen as a “lack of governance”, as this “freedom” hides norms, hierarchies and power relations that produce and maintain a nor- malized gender order. The result is that no-one is to blame for social and economic inequality, but the individual themselves (Oksala 2011).

Normalization and othering

Another Foucauldian concept central in the critique of the neoliberal welfare state is the one of normalization (Fahlgren, Giritli Nygren, and Johansson 2016). Using the concept of normali- zation can be beneficial in critical discourse studies (which will be further explained in section 4,3), as normalization takes place when “new forms and ideas of social order (…) become part and parcel of mainstream common thinking (Krzyżanowski 2020, 435). Foucault describes

“the normal” as a discursive construction and shows how phenomena such as norms and nor- mality are not obvious or natural but emerge from power relations (Fahlgren, Giritli Nygren, and Johansson 2016) Through normalization processes, subjects and their actions are being compared, and requirements for similarity and conformity tend to transform differences into hierarchical orders. A condition for this silent, implicit “we” is that “the other” is being simul- taneously produced (Fahlgren, Giritli Nygren, and Johansson 2016; Lazar 2007).

The process of normalization also creates new ideals of femininity. These can be observed as the most successful performances of feminine appearance in our society today no longer are symbolized by subservience, in professions such as waitresses, flight attendants or secretaries, but by women who have power and money (Oksala 2011). A new kind of feminine ideal can be seen in the shift of women’s role in the family and in society, from being passive, self- sacrificing to allow for the husband and children to attain their autonomous subjectivity, to be egoistical subjects that have self-interest (Oksala 2011). They no longer settle with a happy home; they too want money, power, and success (ibid.). New, normative behaviors are ration- alized by stating that it is their own choice, and no longer the men’s. So, women no longer have long, manicured nails because their male partners find it arousing, but since it has become a sign of professional and financial success.

However, Oksala (2011) warns us that we should not be tricked into thinking that the connection between femininity and subservience and dependency has totally disappeared; for some individuals to be able to be self-centered and autonomous, others need to be self-sacrificing to

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24 make the system work: “As long as our life form is fundamentally centered on families and a gendered division of the sensibilities and activities of the subjects, the neoliberal, purely self- interested feminine subject would signal the collapse of our social order” (ibid.,116) Instead, the caring work of today is to a larger extent bought relatively easy with the “subordination and exploitation of others” (Oksala 2013, 42).

A concept closely related to neoliberal feminism is various types of “toxic femininities”; one that has been paid less interest to than the rising discourse about “toxic masculinity” (Gill and Scharff 2011, 2). Unpacking various types of neoliberal femininities can however offer a “powerful way to understand how some approaches to gender keep us locked in a toxic system”

(McCann 2020, 22). Normativity is thus favorably studied through the notion of neoliberal femininity, drawing on theories of femininity, including hegemonic, normative, toxic and pa- triarchal femininity (McCann 2020). Hegemonic femininity is described as Gill and Scharff (2011) as formed by a categorization into the groups of “man” and “women”, assuming them to be homogenous. However, these interrelated types of femininity are formed by privileged, social and economic positions, which create an ideal, and a dominant picture of how a success- ful woman should be (Schippers 2007). The notion of entrepreneurial femininity is closely related to these concepts, serving to maintain existing nationalist imaginaries (such as the

“American dream”) that maintain the existing capitalist class structure (McCann 2020).

Postfeminism – a neoliberal kind of feminism

The type of feminism being born out of the neoliberalist discourse is commonly referred to as postfeminism (Gill and Scharff 2011), and has been argued to be the most beneficial way to characterize fourth wave feminism (Rivers 2017). As with neoliberalism, it has been concep- tualized in multiple ways. The most common two are however 1) a (positive) developmental phase in feminism, and 2) a contemporary attitude towards feminism commonly circulated in media culture, according to which feminism has served its purpose, as we are now in a state of equality (Aronson 2003). The second, more common definition is the one I am applying in this study, where the prefix “post” signals that women can now spend their time doing something else than fighting for women’s rights (ibid.). This shift has, by some, been described as moving from “victim feminism” toward “power feminism” (Rivers 2017), or alternatively, that the word “feminism” has been replaced by buzz words for feminine individualization, such as choice and empowerment. In her book The aftermath of feminism, Liesbet van Zoonen (1994) argues that young postfeminists view feminism as a battle fought by their mothers or older

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25 sisters, who had “struggles of a different kind”. The feminist is increasingly seen as an old, unglamorous, angry woman: someone who young women do not wish to be associated with (ibid). Besides, part of postfeminist discourse can be to see it as offensive to separate individuals into groups based on gender, race or sexuality, as these labels would limit women to only their gender, whereas “women are people!” (Fahlgren, Giritli Nygren, and Johansson 2016).

Another development that feminism has undergone is the appropriation of feminism: some- thing that been referred to as pinkwashing (Orser, Coleman, and Li 2020). This signifies what happens when institutional practices recuperate feminist values for non-feminist ends, for example, the advertising industry, appropriating feminism for commercial gains (Lazar 2006;

Talbot 1998; Gill 2003). Pinkwashing can also be used for persuasive effect by governments and other institutions, acknowledging the existence of feminist (or anti-racist/anti-homopho- bic) discourse for pragmatic reasons and to create beneficial self-image, which can be even more harmful (Lazar 2007). To exemplify, a study done in 2020 examined pink washing by digital woman-focused capital funds (WFCFs) and revealed that a minority of these truly aimed at enhancing digital and financial inclusion for women.

3.3 Mapping the knowledge gap

In this literature overview, I have established that there is a scarcity of studies on female and feminist economy within media studies and beyond. There is thus a need for a friendly alliance between research into economy and feminism within media studies (Riordan 2002). Studies on capitalism’s impact are needed, as it plays a part in maintaining masculine hegemony (Waring 1999). Furthermore, there is a lack of careful, detailed empirical studies of neoliberalism “on the ground” and in action” (2011, 7).

Further, even though women’s internet cultures have been studied to some extent, scholars have addressed a continued lack of research about the meaning of safe spaces for women online and their experiences of them (Lewis et al, 2015). Clark-Parsons (2018), Pruchniewska (2019) and Lewis et al. (2015) point out that the lack of empirical focus on digital, feminist rooms, means that “safe spaces” has become at the same time overused and undertheorized, as relatively little attention has been paid to explore the meaning and experience of these. In this study, I aim to let all these fields converge, as I conduct a feminist study on women’s safe spaces centered around money, from the perspective of neoliberalism.

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4. METHODS AND METHODOLOGY

In this study, I conduct a feminist critical discourse analysis, applied to materials gathered through 1. A netnography and 2. Focus group interviews. Using a triangulation of methods aims at collection a rich and varied material, instead of relying on a single type of data (Alves- son, Gabriel, and Paulsen 2017), which enhances the quality of interpretative research (Mar- shall and Rossman 1989).

4.1 Netnography

A netnography follows, to a large extent, the same principles as an ethnography. It however distinguishes itself by taking place in the digital world, which allows for the researcher to gather data despite not being physically present (Berg 2015). Over the course of the semester, I ob- served the activities in Economista as a way to gather data and to study frequently occurring themes, whereas a classical netnography might be even more focused on the creating of culture and a common identity. However, my approach has been extensive and interactive, as I have been a member, “experiencing” the culture passively for three years, and actively for almost half a year.

In the beginning of my thesis writing, I conducted a kind of passive netnography, as recom- mended by Norris and Jones (2005), observing the activities in the group. This was a good way to get an idea about the contours of the group (ibid.) Over the months, I observed recurring themes in the posts and the discussions in the comments sections. The main advantage for this method was that it allowed “non-intrusive”, natural data (Berg 2015), as I adapted the passive

“fly on the wall” approach, in my case a digital wall, to avoid researcher bias. I sometimes actively went into the group to study it, but more often, posts naturally occurred in my Face- book feed. Because of Facebook’s algorithms, showing the user content that they engage in more, my feed was soon covered in Economista-posts. This selection also shows posts that get many likes and comments more frequently, which, too, created a “natural selection” of the most

“active” posts. Each time I observed something relevant or when a topic seemed to create a lot of discussion and/or emotions, I saved it into a folder on Facebook.. Ultimately, about a hundred posts were saved, from the beginning of January, until the end of May.

When I wrote to one of the group owners, Pingis Hadenius, to ask for permission to 1. Do a netnographical study of the group (of course anonymizing posts) and 2. Publish a post looking

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27 for focus groups participants, I received a somewhat ambiguous answer: “Hi. What you analyze in the group, I cannot approve or not approve. Up to you. We cannot admit surveys since it would make ten/day”. Reflecting back and forth on how to interpret the answer I received from Pingis, and how to conduct my research while still following ethical guidelines, I decided to not use direct quotes from the group in my netnography, or to study or follow any particular individuals. I would rather reproduce and discuss identified themes presented in a purely de- scriptive way, combining these with data and quotations from the focus groups. There will be more reflection on this in the subchapter 4.5 about ethics and limitations, and in the analysis.

4.2 Focus groups

Focus groups are an often-used method in feminist research (Zoonen, 1994), and was the best option to gather data from several members in a limited time frame. In focus groups, interactive practices can also be reconstructed in a more “realistic” way than in individual interviews (ibid.). Conducting them online was the best solution in the current pandemic situation, as these do not depend on a physical presence (Reisner et al. 2018).

My solution for finding members to the focus groups was to use a snowball sampling, which means contacting people that I was already familiar with, to then let them contact others (At- kinson & Flint, 2001, 1). I had 74 Facebook friends who were members in Economista and contacted some, trying to choose mainly people that I have had no or little contact with in the last few years and, had them recommend acquaintances who could be participants. This was not difficult: some even spontaneously recommended friends that they thought would find it interesting to participate, before I had the chance to ask. These people thus acted as “gatekeep- ers” between me and a potential participant, which is positive as some kind of connection to a new person makes people feel safer (Ackerly and True 2010). Only once, I encountered the suspicion that Berg (2015) warned about when informing people about a scholarly presence, which can trigger resistance or suspicion. It was when I contacted a fifty-seven-year-old woman, who only vaguely knew who the person who recommended her was. She wanted a lot of questions answered, such as why her, why Economista, what was the focus of my paper, which were my opinions about the group, was I a feminist, etc. It later turned out that taking the time to answer all those questions and making her feel safe enough to participate finally paid off, as her critical nature was an interesting contribution to the discussions in focus group two.

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28 Berg (2015) argues that multiple focus group are favorable, to use the knowledge that is developed in one as ground for the next one. I ended up with two focus groups à five members per group, all identifying as women. Wishing to achieve a spread in age, they ranged between being 24 and 57 years old. The first focus group discussion consisted mostly of younger women and the second one of older women. The digitality played an important role, as asserted by Reisner et al. (2018), as the participants all were in different parts of Sweden. The discussions were conducted on Zoom and took 1,5 hours each. Besides this, I conducted a separative, half-hour, complementary interview with the mentioned woman, who wished to expand on some topics, and ask me some follow-up questions.

The preparatory work before a focus group is referred to as “framing” by Krzyżanowski (2008, 166). Ultimately, the act of framing boils down to the “asking the right questions” (ibid.). I used Krzyżanowski’s three-step model for this by firstly establishing an overall theoretical framework and research questions, as presented in the introduction. Then, in creating a research guide, I let the findings from the netnography, combined with the overall theoretical framework and my research questions, guide the themes. In my case, this meant dividing the interview guide into two clusters of questions; one that had to do with collectivity and one that had to do with individualism. I also identified sub-themes, based on the netnography and the theory.

Aiming to achieve the balance between floating and planned prompts recommended by Zoonen (1994), I created a spacious, semi-structured interview guide, to allow for follow-up questions or unexpected turns in the discussion. After having conducted the first focus group, I let a few weeks go by to let the impressions of the first one “sink in”, as part of a knowledge developing process recommended by Berg (2015), where one gradually gains understanding for basic rea- soning in the empiric material, and then went back to the theory and research questions to further remodel them. This process of going back and forth between empiricism and theory is recommended by Krzyżanowski (2008) and informed a slightly different interview guide for the second focus group.

When having found participants, I created a chat group on Facebook where we decided on a time and date. This was also to create some familiarity in the group, allowing some interaction and for the participants to see each other’s names. I also provided information about the up- coming discussion and sent a short form for them to fill in (found in Appendix II), asking some background questions as well as for permission for me to use the materials in my research.

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29 With everyone present in the Zoom-room, we did a bit of small-talk about their connections to me and to the group, to again, create a comfortable, “consciousness-raising” atmosphere, as recommended by Reinhartz and Davidman (1992).

Previous analyses of focus groups show that online participants tend to give shorter comments compared with non-online groups (Schneider et al. 2002). Thus, I prepared my focus groups with this in mind, aiming to enhance the flow of dialogue by different means. For example, after an initial presentation, and asking for permission to record the discussion, I encouraged the participants to speak as freely and informally as possible, despite potential overlaps or in- terruptions that can happen due to technical issues. The request that seemed to have paid off, as the discussion ran more smoothly than was my previous experience with online focus groups.

One challenge for the moderator of a focus group is to make sure that not only the most out- spoken participants dominate the discussion, but instead “seek to encourage contributions from the more timorous” (Bloor et al. 2001, 49). This became apparent in the first discussion, where one participant was very active and had a lot to say on almost every topic, whereas another spoke much less frequently. Another risk with this method is that that informal or formal power relations might hinder some participants to share their opinion (Zoonen, 1994). If they are not entirely comfortable with each other, they might try to appear favorable in their answers. This can also occur in relation to the researcher, who can be perceived as an authority, creating a wish to be a “good respondent”, also known as “image management”. The risk however dimin- ishes in a group for only women, since the tendency to get interrupted is smaller than in a group with men and women (ibid.).

Below, the focus group participants are briefly presented.

Focus Group 1

Name Age Occupation and home town Education Membership

Jessica 24 Masters’ student in Uppsala, living in Stockholm 4–5 years 1–2 years Lisa 27 Studying to become a medical doctor in Uppsala > 5 years 3–4 years

Wilma 28 Sustainability manager in Stockholm 4–5 years 1–6 months

Agnes 32 CFO in Stockholm 3 years 1–2 years

Anna-Karin 47 Principal at a school and self-employed financial coach in Skåne

4–5 years 1–2 years

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30 Focus group 2

Name Age Occupation and home town Education Membership

Katja 26 Administrator in Stockholm > 5 years 1–2 years

Alice 33 Doctoral researcher in Uppsala > 5 years 1–2 years

Mia 49 Project manager in Stockholm > 5 years 1–2 years

Ronja 53 Workshop manager in Stockholm > 5 years > 5 years Camilla 57 Self-employed. financial coach in Stockholm 4–5 years 3–4 years Figure 1: Presentation of focus group participants

4.3 Feminist critical discourse analysis

Critical discourse analysis (CDA) is a good way of scrutinizing normalization processes, in the Foucauldian sense (Fahlgren, Giritli Nygren, and Johansson 2016). CDA has its roots in critical theory of the Frankfurt School, Marxist ideas on ideology in society, and Foucault’s concepts of discourse as shaping knowledge (Krzyżanowski 2010). Despite being under the same um- brella, CDA does not form any homogeneous research, but can rather be seen as a “group of research traditions, which, however, often build on a similar philosophical background” (ibid., 68). However, as the “critical” in the title suggests, they have in common that they examine the role of discourse in producing and sustaining unequal power relations, as well as construc- tions of individual and collective identities (Krzyżanowski 2010).

CDA can be successfully combined with an explicitly feminist approach, creating a feminist critical discourse analysis. It is a “critical perspective on unequal social relations sustained through language use” (Lazar 2007, 1), and can be used to identify multifaceted and subtle facts that we take for granted about gender, as well as how hegemonic power is being discursively produced, sustained, negotiated, and challenged in different contexts and communities (ibid.) In order to challenge normalization processes and their effects, these need to be made visible, so that new discussions can take place and new stories be told (Fahlgren, Giritli Nygren, and Johansson 2016).

Feminist scholar Michelle Lazar (2007) outlines five key principles for feminist discourse praxis. Firstly, it can be seen as analytical activism, as it is criticizing a patriarchal world order.

Secondly, it sees gender as an ideological structure. Thirdly, she brings up the complexity of gender and power relations, which can show in more subtle forms in (late) modern societies.

To demystify these can be important in our present time, where institutionalized power asymmetries between (and among) groups of women and men are complexly intertwines with other

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31 social identities. These asymmetries are also experienced in different ways for different groups of women. Feminist CDA, then, would suggest a perspective that “is comparative rather than universalizing, and attentive to the discursive aspects of the forms of oppression and interests which divide as well as unite groups of women” (Lazar 2007, 149). The fourth principle is about discourse in the (de)construction of gender, as a feminist CDA has the view that every act of meaning-making (in speech or text) contributes to a reproduction and maintaining of the social order, or in a resistance and transformation of that order. As a fifth principle, it has critical reflexivity as a praxis: an element in any feminist research so vital, that it gets the fol- lowing subchapter dedicated to it.

One way to operationalize a critical discourse analysis is also through Carol Bacchi’s What’s the problem represented to be? method. It was designed to scrutinize policies but can also be used on other materials, to see what assumptions are being made about a problem and its solution, and how these mirror ways of viewing human beings and their perception of knowledge (Bacchi 2006). The problematization is central in this approach, and also the first step in this method: How is the problem represented? Secondly: which assumptions are taken for granted in the formulation of the problem? What does this have to say about the view of human beings and knowledge production? What is taken for granted here in form of the solution? The term discourse becomes relevant here, when asking which “truths” exist? By scrutinizing this, we can dispel the “reality” portrayed in a specific context. Another aspect in this step is to look at which silences exist in the problem. What has not been problematized? Is it possible to view the problem from another angle? Here, Bacchi speaks of limitations in the phrasing of the prob- lem. In the last step, the lived effects that come from the solutions presented in step two are addressed: material consequences that a specific phrasing of a problem has in the materialism of everyday life (Bacchi 2009). This step is based on Foucault’s concept of governmentality, which means that the solutions presented to the problem gives the impression of generosity and freedom but are in reality steering people to adapt to the ideas and seemingly obvious assumptions found in step two.

I let the feminist CDA inform my coding, operationalizing it by using a grounded theory, meaning that the researcher’s observation and analysis of empirical data is the ground for knowledge, while the theoretic literature is also being woven in. My approach was abductive; inductive since the empiric materials collected guided the findings, and deductive, since I had “steering”

theories, from which I aimed to explain the group (Timmermans and Tavory 2012). As a first

Who is the Economista?

Department of Informatics and Media

Master’s Programme in Social Sciences, Digital Media and Society Specialization

Two-year Master’s Thesis

Who is the Economista?

- The Paradox of Feminism: Collectivism and Individualism Within an Online Group for Female

Private Investors

Student: Nathalie Saller Supervisor: Matilda Tudor

Spring 2021

Abstract

Acknowledgements

Table of contents

List of figures and tables

1. INTRODUCTION

2. BACKGROUND

3. EXISTING RESEARCH AND THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK

4. METHODS AND METHODOLOGY