Today, empowerment is most common as a feminist concept - or at least as a brand identity alluding to feminism. Here as well, the discourse of empowerment is driven by a celebration of individual participation in structures of authority, and less by a critique of the structures themselves. [...] what arose as a critique of the insidious operation of power at the level of the street, the school, the home, and the body - grasping the political in the personal, in short - has become another way of disguising the political by exalting the personal. As Tolentino puts it, "'empowerment' invokes power while signifying the lack of it. It functions like an explorer staking a claim on a new territory with a white flag."