#Shebelieves, But Does She? Examining The Impact Of The U.S. Women’s National Soccer Team’s Empowerment Campaign On The White Woman Millennial

Abstract

In 2015, the U.S. Women’s National Soccer Team (USWNT) launched the #SheBelieves campaign encouraging young women to continue believing in their goals and dreams (“WNT Launches #SheBelieves Initiative,” n.d.). #SheBelieves is thus an examplar of a promotional discourse which utilizes ideas of female empowerment in a manner that contributes to the constitution of the postfeminine, neoliberal, millennial subject identified by numerous scholars (Genz, 2009; McRobbie, 2009; Rottenberg, 2014). However, much of this scholarship ignores the fluid, and oftentimes contradictory, nature of subjectivity, and fails to acknowledge complexity of the 21st century woman’s lived experiences (Blackman, 2008; Weedon, 2004). Therefore, this thesis uses semi-structured small group interviews to answer to what extent, and in what ways have young white women experienced, and been interpellated by, the empowerment rhetoric and idealized postfeminine-neoliberal, millennial subjectivity, embedded within U.S. National Women’s Soccer #SheBelieves campaign? The results are mixed: women did exhibit elements of postfeminist and neoliberal sensibilities with regards to their personal engagement with U.S. Women’s National Soccer; yet, the women also showed significant resistance, and thereby considerable agency, to aspects of the #SheBelieves discourse.