Willfulness and the market: (post)feminist subjectivities and womens body work

Women, according to Ahmed (2014, 2017), are often judged as having "too much will" - obstinate and perverse in their sense of longing, independence, and contrariness, they are abject subjects. This characterization is especially true of women-identifying individuals whose feminist politics cause problems for powerful actors. In this chapter, I employ Ahmed's conceptualization of willfulness as a way of understanding women's embodied consumption in three markets: fitness, sex, and media. I show how consumer research has detailed women's resistance to gendered oppression, and how this resistance has unfolded as part of feminism's many varied iterations throughout the past century. While women's willfulness has often resulted in advances in equality, its most recent articulation as postfeminist bravado troubles a straightforward understanding of how bodies "should" move, feel, and look according to oft-accepted feminist politics. The chapter concludes by offering an agenda for future research on embodied consumption.