The Business of Feminism: Rhetorics of Identity in YouTube's Beauty Community seeks to understand an online community comprised of millions of women who watch and sometimes produce videos about makeup and fashion. I present case studies of two Asian-American women who describe their roles in building identity, community, and entrepreneurial enterprises in the community--actions that are as essential to their survivance and cultural sustainability as to their financial stability. I explore the tension between this community's highly commercial nature (its members, many of whom are entrepreneurs profiting from YouTube's Partner Program, often participate in dominant discourses of female gender performance and consumerism) and its uses for women of color as a space to use rhetorical moves to build for themselves and others positions of power and expertise. My theoretical framework for understanding this phenomenon draws from post-positivist realist theories of identity that account for the experiences of the women in the beauty community. I interrogate the uses of theories that espouse a fluid, postmodern/cyborg feminism for understanding this phenomenon; such theories assume identities that are largely inaccessible to women of color, who cannot escape their material, embodied, marked identities. Post-positivist realist theories afford an experience-based approach to identity that assumes that we can learn about the nature of power and conditions of oppression from the experiences of others. This orientation serves as the foundation for the way I understand and approach identity and feminism in this project. Data for this study consists of participants' transcribed YouTube videos and three rounds of interviews. Methods include a coding scheme that I developed for analysis of the videos, as well as interview scripts. The beauty community is a space in which feminist rhetorical practices occur alongside and intertwined with commercial and professional activity. Feminisms practiced in this community do not always align with the feminist theory of the academy. My findings therefore introduce a complicating narrative, to cyberfeminism in particular, and make visible a rhetoric of identity operating in this community that I believe can generate new work on digital identity. This work has implications for feminist as well professional writing studies in understanding of how minority women situate themselves in positions of power in online settings. In this community, commercial and identity- building activities are not mutually exclusive. They exist perpetually in tension with each other. I present data in which it is apparent that women use storytelling as a rhetorical move to construct their identities as gendered, raced minorities. I also argue that the women in the beauty community can be considered professional writers, whose work I refer to as technical communication in the vernacular. I offer implications of this study for understanding feminist rhetorical theory, cyberfeminism, and professional and technical writing studies.
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