All Under the Same Sky? Celebrity Philanthropy and the Transnational Market for Women’s Empowerment

This chapter provides an attempt to enable a productive conversation between the budding, interdisciplinary research field of celebrity studies, humanitarianism, and activism and feminist international political economy scholarship. It focuses on the Same Sky shopping initiative – a New York-based ethical trade and shopping initiative supported by a philanthropic foundation with the same name. The chapter explores the case of Same Sky as a springboard to develop a feminist critique of the type of empowerment promoted by Francine LeFrak and Same Sky. It suggests that attempts to harness the market for empowerment reinforce class, gender, and racial inequalities in production, social reproduction, and consumption, directing attention away from the structures and institutions that produce these. The ethics of women’s empowerment promoted within the Same Sky trading scheme is firmly rooted in market mechanisms and the wage relation rather than questioning the transformative qualities of consumerism or the notion that poverty alleviation can come from a wage.