“When it suits me, I'm a feminist:” International students negotiating feminist representations

SynopsisThis paper explores young women international students' negotiation of and resistance to feminist identities. Providing a global context to “I'm not a feminist, but” literature, this research builds on social movements, feminist, postfeminist, third wave, and feminist media literature. Based on individual interviews with thirteen women attending Goldsmiths College, University of London, I find evidence that transnational stereotypes of U.S. feminists are pervasive and contribute to these women's resistance to feminist identities. Despite the interviewees' differing cultural backgrounds, they shared strikingly similar understandings of feminism. Such narrow conceptions of the feminist collective identity stand in opposition to the ways feminism is practiced on a day-today basis, and contribute to a complex negotiation of the feminist identity.