Why did feminist narratives become so common in left-leaning newspapers and publications?
What are the historical causes of modern-day online sj?
I remember it getting big in, like, 2012-ish? Maybe a touch earlier than that? It was sort of “indie” in the 5-10 years before that and those people gradually filtered into industry. As to “why” – I think it was one-third a backlash against the style of “post-discrimination” liberalism and crudity that dominated in the 90s, one-third online venues bringing formerly disparate interest groups together (since “women” are a pretty big interest group), and one-third an explosion of professional-class university-educated women transitioning out of campus and into the “real world”.
I definitely don’t think there’s been any sort of “takeover” or whatever, though, it’s more the opposite – the media took over feminism because it was a temporarily useful marketing vector. I think the rank-and-file are true believers but they’re basically just “local guides” for the zeitgeist and will have to adapt or quit once it falls out of fashion.
This is a very different kind of answer, but it’s worth noting:
Social justice theory is an incredibly compelling set of ideas.
(This is double-true if it’s a weird new exciting thing, instead of a well-established popular ideology with lots of visible failures under its belt, and back in the 2010-ish era it was a weird new exciting thing for most of the people being exposed to it.)
It provides an intuitively-accessible framework for looking at the world that isn’t necessarily obvious but that feels obvious in retrospect. It convincingly accounts for many different phenomena that don’t otherwise make sense. It’s widely-applicable enough that, as an enthusiastic new initiate, you feel like it must be able to explain everything.
It’s like neoclassical economics, or basic evolutionary theory.
“Some people have privilege, and thus wield social power over others” does broad intellectual work in the same way that “people respond to incentives” or “selection causes reproductive systems to move towards local fitness” do broad intellectual work.
So, like those other ideas, it developed a cult following. Its cultural positioning was such that the cult was going to spread through the media rather than (say) the halls of business. And the rest is history.