Common Property: Feminist Counterpublics, Rhetorical Infiltration, and the Saudi Partnership in Women’s Tennis

In 2024, the Women’s Tennis Association named Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund a global partner, and both the tour’s leadership and its critics defended their positions in the vocabulary of the organization’s 1973 founding. We argue that this episode is best understood not as a betrayal of founding values but as evidence that a feminist counterpublic’s idiom had become detachable from the participatory practices that once gave it force. Drawing on feminist counterpublic theory, we offer the concept of rhetorical infiltration to name that severance and its consequence. We trace the WTA’s movement from participatory founding practice to brand rhetoric, analyze the 2024 partnership as the occasion on which that movement became legible, and set the case against women’s football where collective practice has been retained. Our account attends to the Whiteness within which that founding was constructed and to Venus Williams’s leadership of the 2006 campaign for equal pay at Wimbledon after collective practice had lapsed. We conclude by specifying the conditions under which rhetorical infiltration occurs and extend the analysis to Title IX. The survival of a feminist counterpublic, we argue, cannot be read from its language but only from the practices that sustain it.