Man Up, Woman Down: Mama Grizzlies and Anti-Feminist Feminism during the Year of the (Conservative) Woman and Beyond.

Online conversations addressing Sarah Palin and her vice-presidential candidacy, as well as attempts to consider both in the context of popular understandings of feminism, are often grounded in a longstanding history of anti-feminist discourse, one in which women and feminists are often depicted as contradictions and stereotypes. Palin herself becomes an oxymoron-she is not only a woman politician, but she is a conservative feminist, a "pretty" feminist who defies long-held stereotypes of feminists' appearance, and one who casts other women's feminism in an oxymoronic light. As oxymoronic, Palin's candidacy operates as a (re)definitional moment: a rhetorical opportunity to play with the meaning of feminism, its intersection with politics, and understandings of who can be a feminist. Out of this play develops a new concept, what I call "Socially Conservative Feminism," a term and practice enabled by the rhetorical operations of oxymoron and redefinition. As Palin and her candidacy defied definition, both offered discursive opportunities to redefine feminism, including engaging stereotypes, delineating in-groups and out- groups, appropriating the legacy of feminism within the United States, and prescribing what constitutes feminist action and support. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]