We bleed for female empowerment: mediated ethics, commodity feminism, and the contradictions of feminist politics

Discourses of female empowerment are increasingly prominent within ethical capitalism, which seeks to remedy global crises with private-sector solutions and their commodities. This article examines the intersecting manifestations of female empowerment, commodity activism, and ethical capitalism with case studies on Born Free Africa, a fashion collection combatting mother-to-child HIV transmission, and THINX, which sells period-proof panties. Each company articulates empowerment through a binary between the Western feminist savior and in-need woman of the global south. This article argues that this iteration of empowerment not only reinforces logics of neo-colonial capitalism, but also masks disciplinary regimes for individual feminine subjects.