The Cultural Politics of Femvertising: Selling Empowerment (Palgrave Studies in (Re)Presenting Gender) 3030991539, 9783030991531

Table of contents :
Contents
Notes on Contributors
List of Figures
Chapter 1: Introduction
Part I: East Asia
Chapter 2: Victoria’s Secret Goes to China: Femvertising and the Failed Promise of Empowerment
Postfeminism Within and Outside China
Unpacking Modelling in Femvertising: Docile Bodies?
Chinese Models and Whiteness Debates
The Visibility of Chineseness and Cultural Appropriation
Femvertising: From Bodily Property to Psychological Regulation
Conclusion
Chapter 3: “Beauty Is Growing Up”: A Critical Case Study of Femvertising in Contemporary South Korea
Women’s Representation in Advertising
Textual Analysis
Rationale
Agelessness, Careers, and Femininity
Discussion and Conclusion
Bibliography
Chapter 4: Empowerment in the Pills: Reproductive Rights and Postfeminist Rage in Modern China
Neoliberal Sensibilities and the Selling of Women’s Sexual Autonomy
Femvertising in Crisis: Failed Transformation and Nationalist Postfeminist Rage
‘Childbearing is up to me’
Conclusion: Coexisting (Post)feminisms and the Same-old Tricks of (Pseudo) empowerment
Chapter 5: Glocalization, Marketization and Politicisation: Femvertising at a Crossroad in China
Feminism and Femvertising in China: The Political, Cultural, Economic, and Professional Contexts
Methodology
Findings
Strong, Ambitious and Talented Women: Adidas (1999); Nike (2012)
Modern, Confident and Self-loving Women: Whisper (2007); Xi’an Janssen (2017)
Strong-Willed and Rebellious Women: SK-II (2016); Ant Financial (2018)
Discussion: Chinese Female Subjectivity at the Crossroad
Conclusion
Part II: Anglo-America
Chapter 6: What Does It Take to Be ‘Savage’?: Diversity, Empowerment and Representation in Rihanna’s Savage × Fenty Fashion Show
Chapter 7: The Impact of Femvertising on Pink Breast Cancer Products in Australia
Know Your Herstory
Case Studies
Pinkwashing: Breast Cancer Advertising in Australia
Conclusion
Chapter 8: “Stay Woke. Make Moves” Branding for a Feminist Future Amidst Pandemic Precarity
Locating Feminist Branding
‘Go Go Goalgirls!’
Radical Politics in a Branded Landscape
The Business of Female Empowerment
Pandemic Precarity
Conclusion
Chapter 9: “We Are What We Do”: Postfeminism and Nostalgia in Bank Femvertising
Austerity and Banking in the UK
Austerity Culture, Women and Mumpreneurialism
Feminist Visibilities and the Representation of the Suffragettes
“We Are What We Do”
Sylvia Pankhurst
“We Are Heroes”: Bravery and Nostalgia
Processions
Conclusion
Bibliography
Part III: South America
Chapter 10: The Femvertising of Beauty: Rhinoplasty of the Negroid Nose in Brazil
Beauty and Class
Hegemonic Beauty
Plástica e Beleza: ‘The Magazine That Will Change You!’
Missing Persons: Black Women Unseen in Mainstream Brazilian Media
Rhinoplasty of the Negroid Nose
Conclusion
Chapter 11: Femvertising and Commodity Feminism: The Brazilian Context
Femvertising and Commodity Feminism: Encounters and Departures
Final Considerations
Index

Citation preview

PALGRAVE STUDIES IN (RE)PRESENTING GENDER SERIES EDITOR: EMMA REES

The Cultural Politics of Femvertising Selling Empowerment Edited by Joel Gwynne

Palgrave Studies in (Re)Presenting Gender Series Editor Emma Rees Institute of Gender Studies University of Chester Chester, UK

​ he focus of Palgrave Studies in (Re)Presenting Gender is on gender and T representation. The ‘arts’ in their broadest sense – TV, music, film, dance, and performance – and media re-present (where ‘to represent’ is taken in its literal sense of ‘to present again’, or ‘to give back’) gender globally. How this re-presentation might be understood is core to the series. In re-presenting gendered bodies, the contributing authors can shift the spotlight to focus on marginalised individuals’ negotiations of gender and identity. In this way, minority genders, subcultural genders, and gender inscribed on, in, and by queer bodies, take centre stage. When the ‘self’ must participate in and interact with the world through the body, how that body’s gender is talked about – and side-lined or embraced by hegemonic forces – becomes paramount. These processes of representation – how cultures ‘give back’ gender to the individual – are at the heart of this series. More information about this series at https://link.springer.com/bookseries/16541

Joel Gwynne Editor

The Cultural Politics of Femvertising Selling Empowerment

Editor Joel Gwynne National Institute of Education Nanyang Technological University Singapore, Singapore

ISSN 2662-9364     ISSN 2662-9372 (electronic) Palgrave Studies in (Re)Presenting Gender ISBN 978-3-030-99153-1    ISBN 978-3-030-99154-8 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-99154-8 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover illustration: GeorgePeter / Getty Images This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG. The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

Contents

1 Introduction  1 Joel Gwynne and Crescencia Chay Part I East Asia  15 2 Victoria’s Secret Goes to China: Femvertising and the Failed Promise of Empowerment 17 Xintong Jia 3 “Beauty Is Growing Up”: A Critical Case Study of Femvertising in Contemporary South Korea 39 Hyejin Jo 4 Empowerment in the Pills: Reproductive Rights and Postfeminist Rage in Modern China 57 Runchao Liu 5 Glocalization, Marketization and Politicisation: Femvertising at a Crossroad in China 75 Yan Wu

v

vi 

Contents

Part II Anglo-America  97 6 What Does It Take to Be ‘Savage’?: Diversity, Empowerment and Representation in Rihanna’s Savage × Fenty Fashion Show 99 Jane Lian and Joel Gwynne 7 The Impact of Femvertising on Pink Breast Cancer Products in Australia115 Catarina Agostino and Renee Middlemost 8 “Stay Woke. Make Moves” Branding for a Feminist Future Amidst Pandemic Precarity141 Hannah Curran-Troop, Rosalind Gill, and Jo Littler 9 “We Are What We Do”: Postfeminism and Nostalgia in Bank Femvertising163 Jessica Martin Part III South America 191 10 The Femvertising of Beauty: Rhinoplasty of the Negroid Nose in Brazil193 Carole Myers 11 Femvertising and Commodity Feminism: The Brazilian Context215 Soraya Barreto Januário Index235

Notes on Contributors

Catarina  Agostino is a doctoral candidate at the University of Wollongong. Her research interests are in the disciplines feminism and celebrity studies, with a particular focus on breast cancer representation in the media. Crescencia Chay  is a graduate of the Teaching Scholars Programme at the National Institute of Education, Singapore. Her research interests lie in the fields of feminism and gender studies, and her work has been published in Film International. Hannah  Curran-Troop  is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Sociology at City, University of London and she also works at the Gender and Sexualities Research Centre. Her PhD researches feminist creative and cultural enterprises in London, with particular interests in affective labour, contemporary feminism, precarity, and neoliberalism in London’s creative industries. Jo Littler and Rosalind Gill are joint supervisors to this project. Rosalind Gill  is Professor in the Department of Sociology and Director of the Gender & Sexualities Research Centre at City, University of London. Some of her books include Gender and Creative Labour (Wiley, 2015), Aesthetic Labour: Beauty Politics in Neoliberalism (Palgrave, 2017), Creative Hubs in Question: Place, Space and Work in the Creative Economy (Palgrave, 2019) and The Confidence Cult(ure) (Duke UP, forthcoming).

vii

viii 

NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

Joel  Gwynne is an Associate Professor at the National Institute of Education, Singapore, where he teaches cultural studies and literature. His edited books include Postfeminism and Contemporary Hollywood Cinema (Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), Ageing, Popular Culture and Contemporary Feminism (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), and his research has been published in Feminist Theory, Feminist Media Studies, Journal of Contemporary Asia and Journal of Gender Studies. Soraya Barreto Januário  is an Adjunct Professor at the Federal University of Pernambuco, Brazil, where she teaches advertising and gender studies. Her books include Masculinity in (re)construction: gender, body and advertising (Labcom, 2016), and Women in field: the ethos of women soccer fã from Pernambuco (Fontanelle, 2019). Xintong Jia is a doctoral candidate in Sociology at City, University of London. Her research interests center around media and gender, Foucauldian theory, (post)feminism in China, and consumer culture. Xintong  Jia  is a doctoral candidate in Sociology at City, University of London. Her project examines reality dating shows to explore female subjectivity and the changing gender relations in contemporary China, shifts in the way that intimacy is practised, and the dynamics of (post)feminism. Her research interests centre around media and gender, (post)feminism in China, consumer culture, and qualitative research methods. Prior to coming to City, Xintong received an MA in Media and Cultural Studies, a BA in Media and Communication Studies, and worked as a journalist and a micro filmmaker. Hyejin  Jo  is a doctoral candidate in the School of Communication at Simon Fraser University, Canada. Her research interests are broadly popular culture, feminism, and ICT. Jane Lian  is an English Language and Literature teacher in Singapore. She graduated from the Teaching Scholars Programme at National Institute of Education, and she was the recipient of the British Council Book Prize in 2021. Her research interests lie in the fields of feminism and gender studies. Jo Littler  is Professor in the Department of Sociology and Director of the Gender & Sexualities Research Centre at City, University of London. Her books include Radical Consumption? Shopping for Change in

  NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS 

ix

Contemporary Culture (Open UP, 2008) Against Meritocracy (2018) and the co-written Care Manifesto (Verso, 2020). Runchao Liu  is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Media, Film, and Journalism Studies at the University of Denver and a visiting scholar at the Asian/Pacific/American Institute at New  York University. Liu specializes in critical cultural studies with a primary focus on the intersectional politics of subcultural media and alternative activisms. Liu also serves as a co-editor of Teaching Media Quarterly. You may find her/their published and forthcoming academic writings in Cinéma & Cie, Critical Asian Studies, M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture and edited collections Critical Race Media Literacy and Sound Affects: A User’s Guide. Jessica  Martin is a Lecturer in Sociology and Social Policy at the University of Leeds, UK. She is assistant editor for the European Journal of Cultural Studies and her research include gender and inequality, nostalgia and politicised mediations of feminism in popular culture. Renee  Middlemost  is a Lecturer in Communication and Media at the University of Wollongong, Australia. Her research focuses on fan participation, celebrity, and popular culture, and has been featured in collections The Routledge Companion to Cult Cinema; Intercultural Communication, Identity, and Social Movements in the Digital Age; Crank It Up: Jason Statham - Star!; Aussie Fans: Uniquely Placed in Global Popular Culture; and Gender and Australian Celebrity Culture. Her recent work has been published in journals including Celebrity Studies, M/C Journal, and the Australasian Journal of Popular Culture. She is the co-founder of the Fan Studies Network Australasia, and a co-editor of Participations: Journal of Audience and Reception Studies. Her monograph on The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert is forthcoming with McGill Queens University Press. Carole  Myers  is a doctoral candidate at the University of Manchester where she researches Latin American cultural studies. Her main research interests include beauty, race, class and gender in Brazil, with a specific focus on the practice, media representation and consumption of rhinoplasty.

x 

NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

Yan Wu  is an Associate Professor in Media and Communication Studies, Swansea University. Her research interests centre on the social impacts of media and communication in China with a focus on digital media and communication technologies. Her publications appear in journals such as New Media and Society; Global Media and China; International Journal of Digital Television, Modern Communication (现代传播) and as book chapters in Media and Public Sphere (Palgrave Macmillan 2007), Climate Change and Mass Media (Peter Lang 2008), Migration and the Media (Peter Lang 2012), and Public Diplomacy and the Politics of Uncertainty (Palgrave Macmillan 2021).

List of Figures

Fig. 2.1 Fig. 2.2 Fig. 6.1 Fig. 9.1 Fig. 10.1 Fig. 10.2 Fig. 10.3 Fig. 10.4

Chinese model He Sui (third on the right) at VS show, 2018 25 Elsa Hosk is wrapped in a dragon at VS show, 2016 28 The runway is constructed with flora and fauna as a female utopia104 NatWest Processions promotional poster 177 Look like a star article. Plástica e Beleza (issue 134, 2013) 200 Double-page spread from cover story featuring Luiza Valdetaro. (Plástica e Beleza, issue 136, 2013) 201 Cover of Raça magazine edition 186 (Alcântara, Fernanda. “A Bela Da Bahia.” Raça, ed. 186. 2014, 36–41) 205 Header image from Facebook group “Rinoplastia Nariz Negroide” (https://www.facebook.com/groups/ 1274432482580750/permalink/3229610923729553) (currently offline) 206

xi

CHAPTER 1

Introduction Joel Gwynne and Crescencia Chay

Neoliberalism can be broadly defined as a political and economic rationality that privileges free market enterprise, privatisation and deregulation, resulting in the shifting of social responsibility away from the state and onto the individual. Yet beyond this economic paradigm, societal attitudes have also transformed to reflect the values of individualism, exceptionalism, autonomy, and self-empowerment needed to sustain the economic model. Today, neoliberalism has largely eclipsed its original associations with American and British conservatism  – typified by Reagan and Thatcher’s policies in the 1980s  – and has become romanticised in the public imagination as a cultural disposition necessary to achieve selfhood, liberation, and empowerment. Despite these promises, neoliberalism and consumer culture prove to be oppressive in their exclusion of social groups that cannot meet the standards of individual responsibility and autonomy.

J. Gwynne (*) National Institute of Education, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore, Singapore e-mail: [email protected] C. Chay Independent Scholar, Singapore, Singapore © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 J. Gwynne (ed.), The Cultural Politics of Femvertising, Palgrave Studies in (Re)Presenting Gender, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-99154-8_1

1

2 

J. GWYNNE AND C. CHAY

On the level of the individual, neoliberalism is also problematic for consumers who strive towards both an arbitrary goal of self-empowerment and an upward mobility that cannot be fully reached; indeed, for it is the very nature of consumer capitalism to create new demand and new aspirations to ensure that consumers remain perpetually unfulfilled and striving for new social and economic goals. In this cultural and political milieu, feminism occupies a fraught, uneasy space in public and political discourse. Catherine Redfern and Kristin Aune argue that in contemporary cultures that promote neoliberal, late capitalist sensibilities of individualism and meritocracy, women have been implicitly and sometimes explicitly encouraged to distance themselves from feminism in order to present themselves as ‘empowered’, agentic individuals.1 This postfeminist rhetoric depoliticises the ideas and ideologies of feminism and its collective goals and distils it into a commodity value which therefore ‘fetishizes feminism’.2 The commodification of feminism is further manifest in the appropriation of feminist ideologies to market female empowerment in the form of beauty, fashion, and household products. Indeed, the ‘visibility’ of women in media and popular culture does not translate into equality for the sexes, nor does it prove that women are free from (implicit and overt) oppression and violence.3 Since meaning production operates within social and historical contexts, media representation is not exempt from the considerations of the marketplace.4 In consumer society, the objectification of women is continually repackaged and reinvented to take on associations of empowerment and self-­ actualisation through advertising. The female body becomes a ‘battleground’ curated and policed by patriarchal forces and institutions that sell and market these products.5 Redfern and Aune argue that this ‘body fascism’ is the result of the ‘profound cultural devaluation’ of women’s bodies’ perpetuated by advertising.6 The body becomes an object to be shaped and controlled in order to ‘validate’ oneself as an ‘autonomous being’.7 These notions of empowerment are divorced from the collective gains that first and second-wave feminism were working towards, instead focusing on reinforcing a neoliberal culture of individualism and choice that continuously reproduces these cultural attitudes. The societal construct of attractiveness which is so central to advertising is also indicative of other social inequalities such as ageism, racism, and ableism that proliferate media representation. In neoliberal, late capitalist economies, physical attractiveness or ‘beauty’ is commodified into a ‘currency system’,8 and the beauty myth seeks to dictate the behaviour of

1 INTRODUCTION 

3

women, more so than just their appearance.9 As such, by ‘assigning value to women in a vertical hierarchy’ through a ‘culturally imposed physical standard’, the unequal power relations between the sexes are reaffirmed through consumer culture.10 And yet, at the same time, fashion and makeup industries claim to offer consumers a ‘democratic space’ for the creation and enaction of ‘individual identities’ which appeal to the neoliberal imperative.11 The drive to aestheticise feminism through commodity narratives and media representation has fostered a culture of inadequacy amongst women made all the more visceral in the context of today’s technological and scientific advancements in cosmetology and cosmetic surgery. This puts women in the precarious position of being bombarded with messaging dictating their consumption of goods and services and therefore their identities and self-esteem. In the context of advertising, the politics of neoliberalism have infused new complexities within a medium that has historically been problematic. Indeed, the history of advertising has been characterised by the proliferation of stereotypes pertaining to gender, social class, nationality and ethnicity, and the dominance of such stereotypes can be explained through their operation as expedient ways for producers to sell ideas to consumers in a simplified manner.12 The vast body of scholarship concerning gender stereotypes specifically is concerned with the ways in which social attributes are assigned differentially to men and women in ways that may promote sexism and misogyny, particularly with regard to physical characteristics and occupation status.13 More problematically, it remains clear that the vast majority of advertising has remained committed to reinforcing rather than challenging such stereotypes,14 thus even in social contexts where women may have some kind of employment outside of the home, adverts are more likely to represent women within the domestic space. As Martin Eisend has argued, such representations may become harmful when they lead to expectations and judgements from social actors which may restrict life opportunities,15 thus eliminating gender stereotypes has become a priority for gender and social policy in many nations around the world.16 Advertisements are ‘vehicles for commodity narratives’ which are inextricably intertwined with the neoliberal values of the marketplace.17 These commodity narratives perpetuate ideologies that control the behaviour of consumers through (1) engendering lack and desire and (2) promising the fulfilment of such desires through the marketed product. Advertisements themselves operate on the basis of interpellation, identification and

4 

J. GWYNNE AND C. CHAY

misrecognition, totemism, and differentiation. The advertisements interpellate the spectator-consumer by carving out an imaginary subject in the ad (through composition and linguistic choices such as ‘you’) that the consumer exchanges places with. Through the construction of a mirror image through the juxtaposition of disparate signifiers, the consumer identifies themselves as whole and experiences a sense of (illusory) unity that can only be achieved through the purchase of the product advertised.18 Through totemism and differentiation, both the product and the image become the stand-in for ideologies and values. Particular emphasis is placed on highlighting sexual difference, where femininity is signified and constructed by the accentuation of specific parts of the female body. This is manifest in the ‘visual dissection of the female body into zones of consumption’, with advertisers manipulating frame and composition to accentuate parts of the female body that bring the spectator-consumer’s attention to these signifiers of sexual difference.19 As such, representations of womanhood and femininity tend toward the hypersexualised or hyper-­ performative, privileging the feminine and other notions of sexual difference. Encoded in this system of signs are ideologies related both directly and implicitly to the political, sexual, and cultural subservience of women. Over the last twenty years, ‘femvertising’ has emerged as a primary challenge to stereotypes within advertising. While the existence of feminist messages within advertising predates the term  – which debuted on the lifestyle website SheKnows in 2014 during a panel discussion on contemporary advertising,20 – the years which followed witnessed an explosion of campaigns such as P&G/Always’ Like a Girl’, Pantene’s ‘Labels Against Women’, and Sport England’s ‘This Girl Can’. These campaigns have proven both popular and effective,21 as evidenced by the ‘Like a Girl’ campaign in particular which has over 70 million views on YouTube as of October 2021. While a number of factors may account for the popularity of femvertising – not least the uplifting messages of positivity and empowerment encoded in the campaigns – research has established that consumers are particularly drawn to the ways in which femvertising is proactive in challenging stereotypes that are specifically created by the advertising industry, a strategy which is oppositional to conventional reactive advertising.22 The positive reception to femvertising by consumers is, of course, a boon for brand sales, and it is within the context of the commodification of feminism where much of the criticism of femvertising lies. Brands which align themselves with femvertising strategies have been positioned as

1 INTRODUCTION 

5

self-­serving, as having no real desire to enact structural change and are instead motivated solely by profit accumulation.23 Moreover, these brands compromise on the ethical sourcing of labour to keep production costs low despite priding themselves on upholding social corporate responsibility and the upliftment of marginalised social groups.24 Brands outsource their supply chains to the developing world where labour is much cheaper, exploitative, and abundant.25 An example of such a brand are the popular “This is What a Feminist Looks Like” merchandise which utilises underpaid and exploited female migrant factory workers.26 By presenting the consumption of products as a solution to the real world problems which women face, scholars have highlighted the uncomfortable cohabitation of feminist values and corporate capitalism.27 While advertising delineates femininity through the curve of the female body and other signifiers of sexual difference, commodified feminism in advertising and the mass media has been depicted through neoliberal values such as ‘independence, participation in the work force, individual freedom, and self-control’,28 and is therefore a gendered reimagining of the ‘Western male ethic of possessive individualism’.29 In catering to today’s markets, advertisers conflate these signs of femininity and feminism to ‘bridge the ideological distance’ between the two.30 As such, women’s choices in the marketplace are positioned from the perspective of choice, even though this may not be entirely so. As such, the coalescing of commodified feminism and hypersexualised/hyper-performative femininity results in a postfeminist subject constructed through the phallogocentricism of neoliberal values. Brands utilising femvertising espouse ideologies that seem innocuous but continue to reproduce insidious and damaging messages that perpetuate systemic structures of oppression and a culture of rampant consumerism. ‘Woke’ corporate aesthetic strategies package neoliberal, post-racial, and post-feminist ideologies in a manner which highlight the brand’s corporate identity as a potential ally of disenfranchised social groups (such as people-of-colour, women, and the LGBTQ community, and/or individuals whose identities overlap amongst these categories). Yet such companies still privilege capitalism and the free market, thus widening profit margins and expanding privatisation at the cost of the earth’s ecosystem, disenfranchised social groups and the labour of the people.31 Critics have focused on the appropriation of social justice and politics in the femvertising and branding efforts of ‘woke’ companies, especially those whose consumer base comprise of middle-class working women. This is particularly prevalent amongst masstige brands like Glossier and Fenty Beauty which are

6 

J. GWYNNE AND C. CHAY

deemed more prestigious than mass-market drugstore makeup/skincare products but are still sold at price points considerably lower than luxury/ designer items.32 These brands are particularly popular amongst middle to upper middle class working women who are have the desire and means to access neoliberal goals of upward mobility.33 Glossier describes itself as a ‘people-powered beauty eco-system’,34 espousing an ethos rife with connotations of empowerment that promise to put the consumer at the centre of its operations, with pithy slogans such as “skin-first, makeup second”,35 “[y]ou look good” and “democratize beauty”.36 It is clear that the brand utilises targeted language that seeks to instil confidence in the brand as one invested in the self-empowerment of the individual consumer – messages that align with a postfeminist, neoliberal imperative. With its sleek, understated pink aesthetic, the brand has quickly amassed a cult following amongst Gen Z and millennial consumers which has allowed Glossier’s femvertising and branding efforts to be primarily facilitated through word-­ of-­mouth and beauty influencers on social media platforms like Instagram and TikTok. Yet, the apparently progressive values of such brands are often undercut by controversy, such as accusations of insufficient support provided to employees-of-colour who have experienced microaggressions and aggressive racism in their affluent New  York and Los Angeles stores.37 This is despite Glossier’s celebration of inclusivity as one of its core values, in addition to a one million dollar pledge to support anti-Black racism causes in the wake of the murder of George Floyd, and the funding support to Black-owned businesses through the Glossier Grant Initiative.38 Sceptics may suggest that this funding drive has been a response to the criticism the brand has received regarding its lack of diversity in its product range with regards to skin tone shades for people-of-colour.39 Fenty Beauty – another masstige brand which prides itself on its inclusivity by leveraging on the use of social media to showcase its products for varied ethnicities, body types, and gender identities – was accused of appropriating Japanese culture when they launched the sale of ‘Geisha Chic’ highlighters. Evidently, as with traditional advertising, ethical capitalism and the femvertising involved in such transactions of product and intersectional politics also hinge on a ‘racialized and gendered difference’.40 Brands have also been criticised for reaffirming the postfeminist, neoliberal notion that ‘achievement, social change and overcoming inequality’ can be achieved through ‘individual ambition and consumption’ instead of actual structural changes and improvements.41 Such femvertising and

1 INTRODUCTION 

7

branding operate within the domains of ‘neoliberal feminist privilege’,42 and these postfeminist conceptualisations of ideal womanhood neglect to give voice to the disenfranchised in question or only privilege ‘select’ groups of women.43 Brand such as THINX who have engaged in political engagement in the era of Trumpism have been accused of ‘“trying to capitalise on a wave of Trump-induced feminist outrage”’.44 Lisa A. Daily utilises Teju Cole’s assessment of ‘The White-[Saviour] Industrial Complex’ in explaining the phenomenon: ‘[it] is not about justice. It is about having a big emotional experience that validates privilege’45 and affirms the spectator-­consumer and her consumption of goods. As such, the mediated ethics of commodity feminism and intersectionality uphold these paternalistic and Anglocentric ideals of neoliberalism that ensure the continued success and reproduction of consumer capitalism. And yet, despite the clear problems, the effects of femvertising are not entirely harmful, and the strategies such adverts adopt possess much potential for transformative change in gender and social relations. Studies have shown that there are indeed positive effects on the self-esteem of adolescents who view femvertising in a controlled setting.46 Utilising the Rosenberg Self-Esteem Scale, Neema Varghese and Navin Kumar conclude that in highly patriarchal and socially caste societies such as India, exposure to femvertising that includes women portrayed in roles outside of the home, and men taking up caregiver duties such as ‘home making and child or elderly care’, has a positive effect on adolescents regardless of gender.47 It is this spirit of attempting to identify the transformative potential of femvertising that drives many of the chapters in this book, particularly those which focus on geographical locales and cultures that have been largely neglected in existing scholarship which primarily focuses on femvertising in the global North, particularly in dominantly English-speaking Anglo-American contexts. Indeed, in attempting to redress this scholarly imbalance, the first section of this book explores the operations of femvertising in East Asia. Xintong Jia’s chapter opens this section by exploring how the Victoria’s Secret brand adopts femvertising strategies to sell commercialised forms of sexiness, inclusiveness and diversity to consumers in mainland China, and the extent to which these strategies are successful in appealing to Chinese consumers. Jia asks the following important questions: How does the brand appropriate the Chinese aesthetic of female beauty? What kind of female gendered subjectivity does the brand endeavour to promote? How should power relations within the context of

8 

J. GWYNNE AND C. CHAY

femvertising be viewed in the era of globalisation? By examining the representation of Chinese models in advertising campaigns, in addition to the use of traditional Chinese cultural symbols in fashion shows, Jia brings a critical race perspective to the analysis and argues that Victoria’s Secret employs highly restricted ideas of Chineseness despite claiming to be culturally inclusive. Moving away from the representation of fashion models yet remaining within the fashion industry, Hyejin Jo analyses Sulwhasoo’s ‘Beauty is Growing Up’ campaign in South Korea. The chapter addresses the following question: How does female empowerment, as projected in this particular example of femvertising, reinforce the traditional normative feminine values embedded in contemporary Korean society? Through an analysis of the ways in which four female celebrities discuss important milestones and experiences in their lives, Jo demonstrates how femininity is connected to the concept of agelessness and represents a limited understanding of empowerment expressed in terms of stereotypical beauty standards. The chapter argues that the message of the campaign fails to explicitly address the gap between the traditional gender roles that older sectors of Korean society value most and the shifting attitudes towards gender embraced by younger generations. While the first two chapters in the section on East Asia focus on differing aspects of the fashion industry, Runchao Liu continues this section by exploring reproductive rights in China with reference to the marketing of the oral contraceptive Yasmin, and the problems inherent in the marketing of a transformation narrative on the basis of the self-governance of one’s ovary and hormones. Liu examines a ranges of television commercials – those received positively and those received negatively by audiences in mainland China –and argues that despite the changing messages and audience reception to Yasmin’s femvertisements from 2016 to the present, these commercials and promotional materials have consistently propagated a neoliberal rhetoric that oral contraception affords both material and immaterial benefits. The chapter additionally analyses social media responses to the television commercials, identifying an echo chamber of ‘postfeminist rage’ and neoliberal ethics for a modern Chinese audience, further objectifying women’s sexual agency and making this kind of femvertising manoeuvre a challenging problem to deconstruct. It concludes that the Yasmin campaigns exemplify a cultural politic of femvertising with Chinese characteristics, grafting feminist rhetoric onto the state project of postfeminism.

1 INTRODUCTION 

9

Complementing the chapters by Jia, Jo and Liu, the next chapter in the section analyses several advertisements from mainland China within a range of genres, rather than focusing on one specifically. Yan Wu analyses the marketing of sports, skincare, sanitary and financial services products, in order to investigate how feminism is employed to serve the global market and local political culture. She asks the following questions: What is the typology of feminist subjectivity as represented in these advertisements? In what ways have local political and cultural values shaped the global brands’ femversiting campaigns? The chapter argues that the ideological mechanics of China’s state feminism provide endorsement for female empowerment through marketing certain aspects of gender equality in civic life, yet without fundamentally challenging the patriarchal political and cultural system. Wu demonstrates how femvertising practices in China focus on a set of codes surrounding relational female liberation, which in turn represent a compromised effort of individual empowerment mediated by local political and cultural traditions. In doing so, the chapter highlights how the global influence of feminist ideas is shown to be in negotiation with local political culture via state endorsement of traditional cultural values such as familial harmony, filial piety, self-cultivation, diligence, and perseverance. Moving away from East Asia, the next section in the book focuses on femvertising in Anglo-American contexts, and begins with Jane Lian and Joel Gwynne’s chapter on the fashion and cosmetics brand Fenty. Sharing Xintong Jia’s interest in the purported inclusive politics invoked by global brands, Lian and Gwynne appraise the successes and failures of Fenty’s ‘femvertising’ strategy and the authenticity of the brand by analysing the performance of the Savage x Fenty fashion show. Lian and Gwynne argue that the choreography of the show is in concert with feminist ideals of female solidarity, and that the diverse cast of models and the aesthetics of performance function to minimize – even if they cannot entirely negate – the objectification that is typified in more conventional fashion shows. Ultimately, the chapter concludes that in its operation within a heteronormative media landscape, the Savage x Fenty show represents a bold diversion in its portrayal of a diversified female empowerment that is not contingent upon the presentation of a svelte, white femininity and compulsory sexiness. The next chapter in the section investigates the femvertising of breast cancer awareness in Australia, and is the first chapter in the book to consider how feminist ideology is infused into a non-fashion/beauty context:

10 

J. GWYNNE AND C. CHAY

healthcare promotion. Considering that the primary target audience for breast cancer awareness campaigns are women, one would expect such campaigns to employ feminism in highly meaningful and productive ways. And yet, Catarina Agostino and Renee Middlemost argue that many campaigns are highly problematic when they are co-opted by corporations to meet their social responsibility obligations. Agostino and Middlemost assert that through ‘pinkwashing’ – the promotion of goods and services using the breast cancer ribbon – corporations are ostensibly showcasing their concern for women’s health, while at the same time advertising their products and services via messaging that is often harmful and infantilising. This next chapter in the section is the first chapter to focus on the corporate world of entrepreneurship, and examines bold feminist creative enterprises which aim to influence brand strategies. The chapter focuses in particular on Goalgirls, which styles itself as a team of ‘co-rebelles’ and ‘disruptors’ seeking to challenge sexist advertising and develop ‘experiential marketing, digital campaigns, brand building and activism for a conscious generation’, and to promote a different form of creative agency for clients wishing to profit from ‘woke’ consumers. Curran-Troop, Gill and Littler argue that while Goalgirls departs from the strategies of mainstream agencies which are cynically reinventing their branding – as we have seen elsewhere in this book  – there are nevertheless tensions within which Goalgirls operates, between a ‘commitment to radical social transformation and an investment in capitalist models; tensions between a critique of ‘toxic’ productivity cultures and a need to work endlessly to stand out in a crowded market; and tensions between a desire for flat, collective forms of organisation, and the reality of operating in a commercial context characterised by endemic precarity, intensified by the pandemic’. Continuing the exploration of femvertising in a corporate context, the next chapter in the book examines the ways in which financial institutions capitalize on enacting a feminist identity, in spite of their own chequered histories in perpetuating gendered inequalities. Jessica Martin draws on critical and visual discourse analysis of the NatWest “We are what we do” and “Processions” campaigns to illustrate how aspects of postfeminism are deployed within femvertising. Through setting the context of the intensification of mumpreneurial, gendered narratives of resilience during austerity, Martin argues that recontextualising the nostalgic image of the suffragettes functions in strategic ways that enables NatWest to position themselves as a feminist institution, while crucially escaping the scrutiny

1 INTRODUCTION 

11

and structural organisational change that this entails. In so doing, the chapter demonstrates how postfeminism is able to adapt its discourses to retain its hegemonic hold on popular culture even in climates such as austerity in the UK, by incorporating notions of nostalgia and British history alongside discourses of women’s empowerment and independence. The final section of the book moves our attention away from Anglo-­ American national contexts, towards South America. Just as the section on East Asia began with an exploration of ethnocentric fashion norms, so too does Carole Myers’ opening chapter on the femvertising of cosmetic surgery in Brazil. The chapter examines femvertising through social media and dissects the practice of aesthetic rhinoplasty in women with a ‘negroid nose’, commonly seen in those with African heritage. In a country where over 50% of the population identifies as non-white, beauty ideals are linked to white privilege and black inferiority, leaving black women at the bottom of society. While beauty standards have frequently embodied a fair-skin, European aesthetic, the chapter demonstrates how rhinoplasty became more accessible to many black women in the early 2000s when a new black middle-class emerged. And yet, Myers showcases how racialised marginalisation has persisted and is evident in rhinoplasty femvertising which continues to target Caucasian consumers. And finally, taking a sweeping look at femvertising across multiple contexts in Brazil, the final chapter in the book carries out content analysis of 123 advertisements across broad categories such as beauty and financial independence, and asks the following question: What feminist narratives appear in Brazilian advertising, and do some genres have stronger feminist messaging than others? Soraya Barreto Januário concludes that feminist agendas are most evident in the discourses surrounding the ideas of entrepreneurship and independence, while comparatively lacking in the beauty and fashion industries.

Notes 1. Catherine Redfern and Kristin Aune, Reclaiming the F Word: Feminism Today. (London: Zed Books, 2013), p. 176. 2. Robert Goldman, Deborah Heath, and Sharon L.  Smith ‘Commodity Feminism’, Critical Studies in Mass Communication, 8 (1991), p. 336. 3. Redfern and Aune, p. 8. 4. Annette Kuhn, The Power of the Image: Essays on Representation and Sexuality. (Abingdon: Routledge, 1985), p. 8.

12 

J. GWYNNE AND C. CHAY

5. Redfern and Aune, p. 18. 6. Ibid, p. 24. 7. Goldman, Heath, and Smith, p. 338. 8. Naomi Wolf, The Beauty Myth, (London: Vintage, 1991), p. 12 9. Ibid, p. 14. 10. Ibid, p. 12. 11. Redfern and Aune, p. 24. 12. Johnson, G.  D., & Grier, S.  A. (2012). ‘What about the Intended Consequences?’ Journal of Advertising 41(3), 91–106. 13. Knoll, S., Eisend, M., & Steinhagen, J. (2011). ‘Gender roles in advertising: Measuring and comparing gender stereotyping on public and private TV channels in Germany’. International Journal of Advertising, 30(5), 867–888. 14. Eisend, M. (2010). ‘A meta-analysis of gender roles in advertising’. Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science. 38(4), 418–440. 15. Ibid. 16. Bissell, K., & Rask, A. (2010). ‘Real women on real beauty: Self-­ discrepancy, internalisation of the thin ideal, and perceptions of attractiveness and thinness in Dove’s Campaign for Real Beauty’. International Journal of Advertising 29(4), 643–668. 17. Robert Goldman, Deborah Heath, and Sharon L.  Smith (1991), ‘Commodity Feminism’, Critical Studies in Mass Communication, 8(1991), p. 337. 18. Judith Williamson, Decoding Advertisements: Ideology and Meaning in Advertising, (London: Marion Boyars, 1978). 19. Goldman, Heath, and Smith, p. 337. 20. Ciambrello, R. (2014). ‘How ads that empower women are boosting sales and bettering the industry’. Retrieved from http://www.adweek. com/news/advertising-branding/how-ads-empower-women-areboostingsales-and-bettering-­industry-­160539. 21. Schultz, E. J. (2014). ‘Ad age’s 2014 advertiser of the year: Under armour’. Retrieved from http://adage.com/article/news/marketer-­year-­armour/ 296088/ 22. Eisend, 2010. 23. Akestam, N., Rosengren S. and Dahlen, M. (2017). ‘Advertising ‘like a girl’: Toward a better understanding of ‘femvertising’ and its effects,’ Psychology & Marketing 34: 795–806. 24. Matt Beard. (2020). ‘The dilemma of ethical consumption: how much are your ethics worth to you?’ The Guardian. Retrieved from https://www. theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/feb/01/the-­d ilemma-­o f-­ ethical-­consumption-­how-­much-­are-­your-­ethics-­worth-­to-­you 25. Redfern and Aune, p. 30.

1 INTRODUCTION 

13

26. Lisa A.  Daily. (2019). ‘“We bleed for female empowerment”: mediated ethics, commodity feminism, and the contradictions of feminist politics’. Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies, 16(2), p.  144, https:// doi.org/10.1080/14791420.2019.1634276 27. Kate Hoad-Reddick, 2017. ‘Pitching the Feminist Voice: A Critique of Contemporary Consumer Feminism’. (PhD Thesis, University of Western Ontario) https://ir.lib.uwo.ca/etd/5093 28. Goldman, Heath, and Smith, 1991, p. 337 29. Ibid, p. 336. 30. Goldman, Heath, and Smith, p. 338. 31. Daily, p. 142. 32. Fei Qiao & Ye Wang (2019): ‘The myths of beauty, age, and marriage: femvertising by masstige cosmetic brands in the Chinese market’. Social Semiotics, p. 2. 10.1080/10350330.2019.1682279 33. Ibid. 34. Glossier [@glossier]. (n.d.). Posts [Instagram profile]. Retrieved November 18, 2020 from https://www.instagram.com/glossier/?hl=en 35. Ibid. 36. Glossier. “What Is Glossier – about us.” Glossier. Accessed November 14, 2021. https://www.glossier.com/about 37. Emma Hinchcliffe (2020), ‘Exclusive: Ex–Glossier employees describe a company that failed to support Black workers—even as it donated $1 million to racial justice causes’, Fortune, Accessed November 14, 2021, https://fortune.com/2020/08/18/glossier-­black-­workers-­donation-­ support-­black-­lives-­ceo-­emily-­weiss/ 38. Ibid. 39. Christine Jean-Baptiste, (n.d), ‘Glossier Brown’s Instagram community pushes for true diversity in beauty’, Nylon, Accessed November 22, 2021, https://www.nylon.com/beauty/glossier-­brown-­instagram 40. Daily, p. 147. 41. Francesca Sobande (2020), ‘Woke-washing: “intersectional” femvertising and branding “woke” bravery’, European Journal of Marketing, 54(11), 2723–2745. https://doi.org/10.1108/EJM-­02-­2019-­0134 42. Daily, p. 148. 43. Ibid, p. 150. 44. Ibid, p. 152. 45. Ibid, p. 150. 46. Neema Varghese and Navin Kumar (2020), ‘Femvertising as a media strategy to increase self-esteem of adolescents: An experiment in India’, Children and Youth Services Review, 113 (2020). 47. Ibid, p. 5.

PART I

East Asia

CHAPTER 2

Victoria’s Secret Goes to China: Femvertising and the Failed Promise of Empowerment Xintong Jia

As the largest US lingerie retailer, Victoria’s Secret is known for promoting a version of ‘sexy’ hyper-femininity. Victoria’s Secret was founded by Roy Raymond in 1977, galvanised by the idea to set up a store where men felt comfortable shopping for lingerie for women.1 The brand was sold to Leslie Herbert Wexner in 1982 and then VS became a lingerie powerhouse. VS’s success did not last. The company’s stock price has dropped sharply since 2015 and the annual fashion show was suspended in 2019.2 Reacting to recessionary pressures, Victoria’s Secret started to craft a new, confident and globalised version of femininity by expanding its criteria for lingerie model recruitment, especially in relation to race and ethnicity, sexuality and age. Models who are not in line with the previous tyranny of ideal beauty  and those with more racial and cultural particularities have been employed on stage, reflecting Victoria’s Secret’s utilisation of femvertising to appeal to an equally wide range of consumers. Since 2016, there has also been a proliferation of traditional Chinese cultural symbols, X. Jia (*) City, University of London, London, UK e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 J. Gwynne (ed.), The Cultural Politics of Femvertising, Palgrave Studies in (Re)Presenting Gender, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-99154-8_2

17

18 

X. JIA

such as Peking Opera costume, applied by VS, and increasing numbers of Chinese models walking for the brand, generating a discordant response in nationalists while also being accused of cultural appropriation in the Chinese media sphere. In recent years, a growing body of feminist and advertising scholarship is concerned with femvertising, understood as a practice combining female empowerment with advertising that strategically appropriates feminist values and utilises positive and pro-female messages, questions stereotypical views of women and sells anger about sexism.3 Targeting exclusively women, femvertising effectively builds and maintains a quasi-friendship relationship with its female customers, for example by enacting empathy with their insecurities. Femvertising accentuates empowering messages and encourages women to confidently believe in themselves and take positive control of their bodies and lives. In this chapter, femvertising thus refers to a manipulative advertising practice, primarily employed by international brands. They appropriate the buzz of feminism and utilise the insecurities of certain groups, and merchandise inspirational and affirmative messages to potential customers to sell products. Discourses of ‘porno chic’ and ‘striptease’ culture have made the sexualisation of culture influential and normalised.4 Women are sexually displayed in mass media  – women’s magazines, chick lit and commercial advertising. To some extent,  they are sexualised by men and by themselves, simultaneously. Femvertising has updated the sexualisation of culture from the critique of objectification to a sanguine celebration of female sexiness. Following the transnational #MeToo movement popularised in 2017, feminism has flourished and become popular and more accessible in different areas, ranging from celebrities’ speech and digital activism  to commodities. Feminism is enjoying increased ‘economies of visibility’ via corporate-friendly and media-friendly expressions in a context of capitalist marketability.5 In these circumstances, femvertising has come to prominence as brands desire to get in on some of the energy and cultural buzz of feminism. Femvertising reflects an epistemological transformation in the construction of gender and femininity in postfeminist media culture. Femvertising exercises an intersectional and decentralised approach while representing the ‘otherness’ by incorporating contemporary activism into neoliberal consumer culture. In this chapter, the Victoria’s Secret brand is used to examine the femvertising strategy adopted by advertisers concerning commercialised forms

2  VICTORIA’S SECRET GOES TO CHINA: FEMVERTISING AND THE FAILED… 

19

of sexiness, inclusiveness, and diversity, and its current strategy of appealing to Chinese customers. Research questions are: 1. How does Victoria’s Secret femvertising appropriate feminist values and female empowerment rhetoric to encourage brand consumption? 2. What are the implications of femvertising for racial and cultural issues when traversing Anglo-American contexts to China? To address above questions, media output of VS which contain female empowerment messages mainly targeted the younger generation of Chinese female customers from 2016 to 2020 were collected. These include images of Chinese models and traditional Chinese cultural symbols in VS fashion shows in 2016, 2017, and 2018;6 commercials showing ‘plus-size’ models from VS-related websites; and VS This is sexy campaign showing Chinese models and celebrities redefined female sexiness. These samples, all of which explicitly focus on femvertising, are the data corpus. I adopted discourse analysis, focusing on the constructions of femininities and sexiness in the texts, and visual analysis, focusing on the visual images of models and related cultural symbolism. I adopt a critical lens that pays attention to gender, race, and commodification processes and explore how Chinese-related items were selected and organised by VS to craft a version of Chineseness and to further enhance the brand’s popularity in China. How does VS appropriate the Chinese aesthetic of female beauty in a West-dominated stage? What kind of female gendered subjectivity does VS want to promote via femvertising? How should the power relations pursued within the field of femvertising associated with gender and race be viewed? Examining the case study of Victoria’s Secret’s entry to the Chinese market amid a construction of gendered, racialised and nationally-located femininity, this chapter shows not only how a particular type of sexually-­ empowered female subject is constructed or appropriated by the brand, but also brings a critical race perspective to understand the marketing strategy. I seek to contribute to literature about how femvertising is implicated in international circulation and trafficking of images of women and the feminist movement in order – strategically – to appeal to customers outside Anglo-American contexts. I look specifically at three tropes – the use of hyper-white yet visibly Chinese models, the selective appropriation of Chinese imagery, and the distinctive tone of the Chinese This Is Sexy campaign.

20 

X. JIA

Postfeminism Within and Outside China Since the early 1980s,7 postfeminism has gradually become the buzzword for describing the social and cultural climate in the English-speaking world within which young women no longer call themselves ‘feminist’ since they have been the beneficiaries of the old battles that the previous generation fought.8 Feminist activism is deemed unnecessary and thus negated. Postfeminism captures something that is going on beyond the terms of pro-feminist versus anti-feminist  – combining attitudes towards feminism’s past with the transformation of sex-positive femininity into popular culture  – than ‘the more familiar framing concept of “backlash”’ of second-­wave feminism.9 Postfeminist culture is based on the rejection and neglect of gender inequality and notions asserting that efforts to promote gender equality have become ‘a spent force’.10 Under the banner of empowerment, women are encouraged to believe that they are now ‘empowered’ and hence are positively incited to embrace the commercialised forms of femininity and celebrate seemingly autonomous pleasure through consumer engagement.11 The commercialised forms of sexuality and assertions of ‘girl power’ or ‘grrrl style’ are central to postfeminist narratives.12 The ostensible empowerment is based on consumer behaviour and lifestyle choice.13 Changing attitudes around the sexualisation of women in the second wave and the postfeminist era demonstrate the dynamics of sexuality and gender relations. In 1968, women organised the Miss America Protest to respond to the ‘beauty’ pageant and the antiquated and misogynistic attitudes towards women. Protesters discarded bras, makeup, and girdles to a ‘freedom trash can’ to show their refusal to being doubly victimised through their construction as sexual objects and as compulsorily heterosexual ones. In postfeminist media culture, contemporary women self-identify as powerful agents and are invited to be represented in a seemingly objectified manner indicating that they can ‘play with power taking it on and off at will’.14 As a quote from the film Crazy, Stupid, Love suggests, ‘The war between the sexes is over. We won – okay? We won the second women started doing pole dancing for exercise’.15 Rosalind Gill’s notion of ‘postfeminist sensibility’ opens up a heuristic approach to construe the commercialised femininity in media representation.16 Understanding postfeminism as a  sensibility highlights postfeminism as ‘a circulating set of ideas, images and meanings’ and provides a more open psychologic approach to explore affect and psychological

2  VICTORIA’S SECRET GOES TO CHINA: FEMVERTISING AND THE FAILED… 

21

construction in popular culture.17 It also shows that the sentiment of postfeminism has the potential to break through the constraint of geographical specific locations and is not exclusive to the ‘white and middle class by default’.18 Likewise, Joel Gwynne suggests that postfeminism as a cultural sensibility operates more commonly in economically prosperous neoliberal countries.19 Simidele Dosekun understands post-feminism as ‘a transnational circulating culture’ so that exploring post-feminism in the global South is seen as ‘making a deliberate and theoretically grounded assertion about globalisation, neoliberalism, and their cultural contradictions’.20 This perspective has enormous cultural resonance and reflects popular sentiments about gender and femininity across borders. It offers a rationale and a theoretical basis for exploring the sexually empowered version of femininity in a transnational context as the international brand Victoria’s Secret travels from America to China. In China, feminism has not gone through the same stages as those documented in Western feminist literature. Within the global traffic of postfeminism with its common issues but different contexts, China represents a complex battlefield where the amalgam of feminism and anti-­ feminism, ‘pseudo-feminism’, and the stigma of feminism are battling it out with competing voices. Feminism in China has followed a distinct pathway from socialist state feminism to a hyper-femininity, consumer-­ driven, and empowered version of post state feminism.21 In Maoist China (1949–1976), women’s liberation was associated with a top-down movement promulgated by the socialist state, rather than autonomous and participatory grassroots activism.22 Drawing on the key message that ‘times have changed  – men and women are equal’, state feminism championed the idea of gender parity and coined a neologism ‘half the sky’ referring to women and women’s contribution to nation building23 (i.e. feudal oppression was in the past and women were now able to ‘hold up half the sky’). State feminism’s emphasis on women’s participation in productive labour also allowed women not to be restricted to the domestic realm. The androgynous ‘iron girl’ working in traditionally masculine fields such as heavy machinery was the representative female image back then.24 In the post-socialist era, the move from a centrally planned economy to a market transition is proved indispensable in refashioning concepts of femininity through ‘a strategic use of the essentialism of the gender binary’.25 Post-socialist China has managed to combine neoliberal governmentality with the state-manipulated market economy in order to cooperate in tandem with the influx of global capital.

22 

X. JIA

Post-socialist China emphasises consumerism, individualism, and cosmopolitan subjectivities, implying a disjuncture with the highly politicised and collectivistic socialist era.26 Femininity is then characterised as womanly, beautiful, sexual, and hedonist. The emerging middle-class young women who own the consumerist agency and value personal gratification and aspirations become subjects of the globalised, glamorous, sexy, and empowered post state feminism. Implicitly they are also the targets of VS femvertising campaigns.

Unpacking Modelling in Femvertising: Docile Bodies? One of the main characteristics of femvertising is the reconfiguration of female bodies. Brands now have access to a range of depictions of what is attractive. Femvertising echoes the body positivity movement in social media, which involves divergence from the  restrictive body ideals and encourages more representations of women with diverse body sizes, ages, and ethnicities. The origin of the body positivity movement can be traced back to second-wave feminism’s resistance to the discrimination against fat bodies.27 In postfeminist media culture, women’s experience with sexualisation has been bound up with self-pleasing autonomy. Femvertising advertisements propagate the notion of ‘me-first’ and self-empowerment by recruiting female models who do not fit in to the narrow standards of sexual appeal by positioning them in sanguine forms of bodily exhibition. This happens gradually in underwear advertisements. For example, the Chinese lingerie brand NEIWAI launches ‘No body is nobody’ campaign, inviting a group of ordinary women to share their changing ideas of physical scars, body shaming, skin tone, and aging. The campaign highlights not only women’s self-acceptance and self-affirmation, but also the solidarity and sisterhood among women – all of which a contemporary woman should possess. Femvertising has transformed the advertising ideology from implying women as ‘raw material’ for men’s sexual imagery to underlining women’s self-consciousness as independent individuals whose power and pleasure are stitched with confidently bodily display and sexual explicitness.28 Femvertising is eager to define femininity in a more contemporary sense that centres the female body, affect, and women’s psychological construction.

2  VICTORIA’S SECRET GOES TO CHINA: FEMVERTISING AND THE FAILED… 

23

Invoking a Foucauldian term, models in neoliberal capitalism can be seen as possessing a ‘docile body’.29 Awareness of the permanent visibility of the docile body assures the automatic functioning of power. Referring power operates not in terms of coercion but through constructing and normalising a certain kind of subjectivity. ‘The body is docile that may be subjected, used, transformed, and improved’.30 Lingerie models’ gender performance reflects ways of ‘doing gender’ with imperatives of the feminine ideal although the ideal is constantly evolving.31 The way power acts has shifted from depicting women as docile bodies through the external male gaze to constructing women as autonomous individuals who are capable of making the right choice through an internalised narcissistic gaze.32 In femvertising, can the representation of hyper-femininity be seen as ‘women’s success’ or as retro-sexism in the era of postfeminism? Regarding models as ‘docile bodies’ is neither to deny their agency or autonomy as independent beings nor simplifying their subjectivities associated largely with their bodies. There is always a dichotomy of oppression/empowerment when describing the relationship between beauty norms and the female body. Toni Ingram suggests that beauty and the feminine body are ‘separate entities where beauty norms work to constrain, objectify or empower the feminine subject’.33 To understand the ways in which femvertising positions and represents female bodies, we need to consider both its content and the process or logic behind such commodification. Nowadays brands promoting  body appreciation and acceptance are more likely to be favoured by female customers. However, the celebration of female sexual agency with a distorted idea of freedom is problematic in femvertising. According to Hirshman, the concept of freedom is based on an individual level whereas ‘oppression acts across classes of people in ways that uniformly limit the possibilities of choice and action for individuals within the class’.34 Women’s decisions to embrace the commodity-driven femininity as individual and free choices cannot be accepted in isolation without considering the whole landscape of gender relations or women’s economic conditions. Ideals of empowerment and freedom are carefully wrapped up in sex-positive postfeminist rhetoric. For lingerie models, women’s value and career success are relentlessly bound up with how much they are seen as sexually alluring or confidently empowered. As Banet-Weiser points out, the main distinction between postfeminism and second wave feminist politics is the ‘focus on female individualism and individual empowerment’.35

24 

X. JIA

Femvertising falls into a trap of quasi-progress especially when it meets the intersectionality of class, sexuality, race and ethnicity even when it permits more inclusiveness than previously. The question is who is capable of being empowered and who has been made invisible. The role of a model is to prioritise women’s sexual attractiveness and encourage a self-­ determining confident mindset. The sexualisation of models is deemed to be a path to their empowerment. Provided with few choices, there is no space for women but to fall into line. The very notion of individualism should take into account individual’s preferences and allow greater diversity. To make it broader, as Butler suggests, ‘the point was not to prescribe a new gendered way of life that might then serve as a model for readers. Rather, the aim was to open up the field of possibilities for gender without dictating which kinds of possibilities ought to be realised’.36 In the next section, lingerie models of Chinese heritage in VS will be analysed.

Chinese Models and Whiteness Debates Since a postfeminist sensibility incorporates consumerism with the commodification of difference, how does femvertising advertisements  selectively use racial and cultural diversity when they are promoting a sexually empowered version of femininity? Some have argued that postfeminism reinforces existing power relations and reproduces inequality as postfeminist discourses function as mechanisms of power and exclusion.37 Researchers who have examined the racialised character of contemporary media and popular culture claim that postfeminism works to reproduce racial inequality by reinstituting (Western) whiteness as the dominant norm.38 In this section, I explicate how femvertising marks a racialised modernisation of femininity that re-centres whiteness by describing representations of Chinese models in Victoria’s Secret. Liu Wen and He Sui are the first two models of Chinese ethnicity walking for VS. Liu Wen is characterised by her Asian appearance – beige skin and slender eyes. He Sui’s features fit with an idealised whiteness as seen by her pale, flawless skin, as well as deep-set eyes with double-fold eyelids (see Fig. 2.1). On the runway of VS, He Sui was decorated in very feminine ways  – an innocent fairy seemingly unaware of the sexual cue she conveys and a luscious lady commanding the postfeminist ‘girl power’. Chinese media gave He Sui an approving sobriquet ‘Xiangu’ meaning ‘fairy’ being in favour of her idealised whiteness and slender female body which are key elements of her celebrity persona. They in turn bring her

2  VICTORIA’S SECRET GOES TO CHINA: FEMVERTISING AND THE FAILED… 

25

Fig. 2.1  Chinese model He Sui (third on the right) at VS show, 2018

many lucrative opportunities. Nevertheless, He Sui’s idealised whiteness is relatively unattainable for the majority of the Chinese public. To obtain and maintain such pale and immaculate skin demands ‘aesthetic labour’ which is a costly undertaking.39 It not only requires time, consumer spending, painful injections and constant scrutiny, but also the hard graft involved should be invisible.40 Whiteness or the pale skin tone in China is an embodiment of the social, cultural and economic process, with an explicit connection with femininity. In Maoist era, the ‘iron girl’ is identifiable by her bronze skin tone, associated with being working-class, a prominent and valued association within conventional socialist ideology. During the transformation of Chinese socialism, China pursues an alternative path towards modernity which cannot be achieved without a corresponding shift in class relations.41 In post-socialist China, the preference for the pale skin tone intersects with the long-standing preferable aesthetic of female beauty,42 the increasing influence of Western commodity capitalism, and expectations

26 

X. JIA

for women to be skilled make-up and technical masters. In addition, in the Chinese language, there is a dichotomy between expressions of whiteness and beige skin tone, where ‘whiteness’ refers to the pale skin tone while ‘black’ describes the beige tone. There is no appropriate or widely used word to describe beige skin tone. Whilst there has been a trend in Chinese social media promulgating the tanned skin, the preference for whiteness remains mainstream and dominant. This is illustrated by the popularity of whitening cosmetics and surgery in East Asian countries. Sun-tanned skin in the West is a symbol of fitness and beauty evoking images of holiday, while in East Asia dark skin largely implies working-class identity involved in excessive physical work.43 The representation of He Sui partly manifests the ‘post-feminist masquerade’44 and a ‘nostalgia for whiteness’ in Western media.45 The post-­ feminist masquerade refers to ‘a mask of feminine submissiveness’.46 It works as a knowing and self-chosen strategy for women to return to traditional modes of patriarchal authority. Thereby, women, and models in particular, find their reasons for wearing spindly stilettos which no longer means an oppressive force to them since it has been wrapped in a ‘choice’ rhetoric rather than an obligation and femininity has become a substitute authority.47 The post-feminist masquerade is highly visible across the commercial media field and gives the green light to ‘a nostalgic and light-­ hearted refrain of femininity’. McRobbie also argues that the resumption of whiteness is a de-ethnicised process since ‘dominant feminine-whiteness becomes an invisible means of rolling back on anti-racism’.48 In recent years, representations of whiteness as well as white models dominate Chinese shopping websites. In her writing about global chick lit and Chinese young urban women, Eva Chen argues that what the global chick lit propagates is not limited to ‘Western-defined and locally endorsed values of beauty and femininity’, but the idea of neoliberal and empowered women who feel pleasure and freedom through ‘consumption and progress in following Western commodities and values’.49 To some extent, the de-ethnicised mechanism of the nostalgia for whiteness chimes with the de-politicised process of postfeminist media culture as racial and sexual discrimination have both been silenced and made invisible. Apart from the social and cultural understanding of whiteness in China, and the nostalgia for whiteness in Western media culture, whiteness is also related to the mode of ‘glossiness’ in the visual media industry. Mehita Iqani uses the concept of ‘glossiness’ to refer to a variety of communication practices in which ‘smooth, shiny, seamless textures’ are applied in the

2  VICTORIA’S SECRET GOES TO CHINA: FEMVERTISING AND THE FAILED… 

27

construction of meanings of flawlessness.50 ‘The presence of glossiness in commercial imagery indicates a realm of fantasised perfection’. In the media industry, the glossiness mode co-exists with the discourse of consumerism, and the former contributes to the power of the latter.51 With the help of airbrushing techniques, the glossiness mode has become a routine in the visual industry. Meanwhile, the amount of work required to create ideal images is also invisible to consumers. Representations of He Sui personify the mechanics of glossiness in terms of her idealised whiteness and thus encourage a form of active engagement with the viewers. Hyperreal images of He Sui signify a sense of perfection to which customers (mainly Chinese females) are invited to aspire and secure access to. In this sense, women who fall into the trap are still fearful subjects, driven by the consumption and pursuit of ‘complete perfection’.52

The Visibility of Chineseness and Cultural Appropriation In post-socialist China, the representation of gender is partly guided by a combination of ‘Western modernity and Chinese “traditionality”’.53 After the 2016 VS lingerie show, the brand was accused of cultural appropriation by Chinese media as a result of the segment ‘Road Ahead’ that drew inspiration from Chinese culture. The accusation of cultural appropriation illustrates a divergence in tastes and judgements across cultures. Besides, audiences tend to find cultural products with high cultural specificity less appealing and difficult to identify with because of the lack of contextual and background knowledge.54 Modifying dragon and Peking Opera costume imagery to skimpy lingerie looks manifests the collision and fusion of traditional Chinese culture with the sexualisation of culture in the West (see Fig. 2.2). Lingerie cannot be considered a fitting tribute to the more reserved and conservative context of traditional Chinese culture. Notions of individualism and self-empowerment in the postfeminist media culture conflict with the collective values emphasised and promoted in Peking Opera. Furthermore, 2016 was the first year that four Chinese models walked at VS fashion show. VS opened the first lingerie store in Shanghai in February 2017 and held the annual fashion show in Shanghai at the end of the same year. Victoria’s Secret’s strategies indicate an emergent trend that the Eurocentric fashion industry is bending to the tastes and rhythms of Chinese culture.

28 

X. JIA

Fig. 2.2  Elsa Hosk is wrapped in a dragon at VS show, 2016

The global cultural economy is inundated with ambiguities, ironies, and tension when cultural commodities travel to distinct contexts outside their origins. In VS fashion show, the visibility of Chineseness reflects VS’s tactic of making its products more attractive to its key audiences. Appadurai argues that in the late capitalism, ‘pastiche and nostalgia are central modes’ in the globalised image production and reception process.55 VS represents an imagined visual world which is constituted by ‘the historically situated imaginations of persons and groups spread around the world’.56 The boundary between the real world – the global order and landscape – and the imagined landscape is blurred. The highly stereotyped interpretation of Chinese culture by VS helps viewers to construct their fantasies of China. In VS, racial unity becomes ‘a purely aesthetic category’.57 Models

2  VICTORIA’S SECRET GOES TO CHINA: FEMVERTISING AND THE FAILED… 

29

from diverse racial and national backgrounds are all positioned in ‘a formation of homogenous individuality’ and are attached to identical aspirations and dreams – being confident and sexy.58 It might be argued that this is simply what fashion shows do – creating a fantasy of femininity. But it is the racialised and ethno-nationalist specificities that VS offers that are so striking. Representations of race and gender function as a form of ‘cultural capital’ as well as a mode of consumption aligning with the twofold ‘postrace’ and postfeminist media culture.59 Banet-Weiser delineates that in the contemporary American media culture where there is a trend to incorporate non-white narratives in advertising and merchandise, since representations of race and ethnicity are marketed by media industries as ‘cool, authentic, and urban’.60 Race and gender have similarly been crafted as commodities. More importantly, lingerie models in VS, with diverse racial and cultural backgrounds, are all simultaneously constrained by the femvertising market constraints and benefited from the ‘postfeminist sexual contract’.61 Here we ask: has the sexually empowered female subjectivity become a globalised identity? Whether the commodification of female sexiness has been globalised? Within the discourse of ‘commodification of otherness’, authentic national culture becomes a spice used to liven up the dull dish that is mainstream white culture.62 Regardless of whether its lingerie design inspiration is Eastern or Western in origin, the commodification of difference is becoming globalised and consistent. More seriously, inspired by Gill and Kanai,63 the inclusiveness of racial and cultural difference in femvertising moves the critique beyond simple notions of visibility/invisibility, since difference has been depoliticised to be represented.

Femvertising: From Bodily Property to Psychological Regulation Since 2019, VS marketing demonstrates a shift towards using more down-­ to-­earth and close-to-reality representations of models, reflected by the newer femvertising strategy of recruiting models who do not fit the traditional moulds and letting women redefine sexiness. In one VS advertisement entitled ‘find the size for your perfect teddy’, a ‘plus-size’ model Candice Huffine advises that most of VS teddies range in size from XXS to XXL.  This shows that the era for exclusively slim models has gone and more inclusiveness and normalisation are welcomed.

30 

X. JIA

The brand also launched a series of femvertising advertisement named This Is Sexy. They invited Chinese actresses and celebrities to redefine sexiness under the slogan of ‘Break the norms and stereotype of sexiness. You can define sexiness’. Chinese actress Zhou Dongyu featured with her child-like face and slim body. In the commercial, she stated: I like myself and all my parents give me – my personality and my body. I think sexiness is a wonderful thing. I am not sexy in a traditional-defined way – not like the “S” [she lifts her hand to gesture an “S” in the air]. From my perspective, being sexy is feeling comfortable and not catering to the norm. Sexiness is naturally released. Now I feel I’m quite sexy. It’s for us to define sexiness, rather than it defines us…Be the most comfortable self and be confident – this is sexiness.

Likewise, Chinese model He Sui also shared her opinion about sexiness: Sexiness is more like an attitude. Sexiness is what real life looks like. Why should I be perfect? It’s good not to be perfect. I’m getting used to accepting my imperfections – this attitude is sexy. Of course, I don’t want wrinkles. But when I have wrinkles, they are the trace of time – that’s sexy.

These femvertising texts demonstrate progress in the way that the pressure to be beautiful is challenged by women and the ‘realm of fantasised perfection’ is abandoned.64 However, femvertising images demonstrate little change from the cult of perfection era. If the audio track is removed from the video, the visual track can be applied to any advertising promoting the old-fashioned ideals of female beauty. Besides, postfeminist contradictions are also reflected in the femvertising strategy. Within a postfeminist sensibility, appeal to feminist politics has been muted and then transmuted into a more individual and sex-positive version. Female empowerment has been depoliticised and then closely connected to women’s personal choices and the ability to consume, not to social or cultural structures. Femvertising has updated the notion of women’s self-surveillance from the physical level to psychological regulation. Femvertising narratives offer women and girls a postfeminist mantra of how to think, feel, and live, with a particular focus on the issue of ethical standard. In an advertisement about diet and shape control, being on diet is tied to discourses of self-discipline and positively controlling one’s life, while refusal to lose weight is encoded with self-abandonment and degradation.

2  VICTORIA’S SECRET GOES TO CHINA: FEMVERTISING AND THE FAILED… 

31

Femvertising does not represent a straightforward departure from outdated, restrictive standards of female beauty. The femvertising narratives described above deliver ideas that being sexy is not restricted to the physical level and updates the definition of female sexiness to a new terrain of mental power, an ideology, and an attitude modification. Female sexiness is positioned and transfigured, by femvertising, as a commodity, a limited edition that is accessible only to those who can consume it. In Gill and Elias’s words, ‘no longer is it enough to work on and discipline the body, but in today’s society the beautiful body must be accompanied by a beautiful mind, with suitably upgraded and modernised postfeminist attitudes to the self’.65 In femvertising, being sexy is to feel you are sexy; is to parade your imperfections with a sense of ‘realness’; is to be confident and believe you are irreplaceable. A female’s sexiness is signalled by the display of her body with a positive and self-assured attitude. If this attitude is adopted, body sizes, ages, ethnic and class background are no longer obstacles on the road to individual sexiness. Women are required to work on and remake their subjectivities to stay positive and confident as femininity is not merely a physical property. Patriarchal and neoliberal governmentality has extended the territory from women’s bodies to women’s minds.

Conclusion In this chapter, Victoria’s Secret’s most recent femvertising strategies have been examined while capturing the Chinese market via a specific construction of gendered, racialised, and nationally located femininity. Models of Chinese ethnicity and traditional Chinese cultural symbols were applied to contribute to apparent racial and cultural diversity. Victoria’s Secret used relatively restricted ideas of Chineseness to be inclusive and compatible. This in turn was criticised as Orientalist interpretation and cultural appropriation deficient in contextual and historical knowledge. Besides, the shift towards hyper-white imagery marks a racialised modernisation of femininity. More recently, Victoria’s Secret enlarges the potential scope of female sexiness and redefines sexiness as a form of positive, confident, and self-­ assured attitude. Femvertising by Victoria’s Secret has transformed female sexiness into a commodity that is available only to those able to consume it. This shift has updated the neoliberal governmentality from disciplining women’s bodies to regulating women’s psychological life. Situating femvertising into the postfeminist media culture, I have argued that discourses of women’s empowerment and liberation are

32 

X. JIA

closely linked to their rates of consumption, psychological strength, and individual attitude. Women are invited to positively believe that they are empowered, thus it is their free will to choose what time to be feminine and what time to be ambitious. Concepts of individualism, self-­ empowerment, and personal choice – all in a depoliticised rhetoric – imply the retreat of gender politics from the political and collective endeavour. On the stage of Victoria’s Secret fashion shows, models with racial and cultural particularities are celebrating the same – yet different – version of femininity and are attached to identical aspirations. Femvertising has been found to reinforce existing power relations and reproduce inequalities by commodifying racial and cultural difference and making it shallow and depoliticised. Where is the dividing line separating the empowered from the powerful? Contemporary women are endowed with consumer agency thus they are incited to empower themselves via consuming. A plethora of female agency discourses in femvertising has distorted the real meaning of agency, which lies with the producer and associated elements that constitute production, rather than the consumer.66 For Chinese women, if embracing a Western version of hyper-femininity signifies an imperative path towards modernisation, cosmopolitan, and female emancipation, where should Chinese female gendered subjectivity be located within the collision and fusion of cultures? More  media  reception studies  on the emerging and distinctive Chinese postfeminist sensibilities are required to answer this question. Finally, in femvertising, not only have structural differences been attached to aesthetic meaning, the potential threat to women has also been made invisible. We are witnessing a popular culture of commercial femininity, wondering how empowering it is for young women to ‘flash’ their breasts on the runway.67 Returning to the question raised at the beginning of this chapter – Can the representation of hyper-femininity be seen as ‘women’s success’ or as retro-sexism in the era of postfeminism, in February 2020, a report entitled ‘Angels in Hell: The Culture of Misogyny Inside Victoria’s Secret’ in The New York Times revealed the entrenched culture of misogyny, bullying and harassment of models and employees in Victoria’s Secret. Witnesses to the sexual harassment advised that ‘the abuse was just laughed off and accepted as normal. It was almost like brainwashing’.68 Victoria’s Secret annual lingerie show used to be a cultural spectacle and a big hit, whereas it has been suspended since 2019. Is

2  VICTORIA’S SECRET GOES TO CHINA: FEMVERTISING AND THE FAILED… 

33

hyper-femininity along with the stereotypical male fantasy being anachronistic? Thus, a more ‘authentic’ and normalised display of femininity is gaining global popularity. I conclude that actions of femvertising are used to construct a carefully packaged form of commercialised sexiness, as Victoria’s Secret enters China.

Notes 1. Althea A. Fung, ‘The Untold Truth of Victoria’s Secret’, The List (April 18, 2017). Accessed October 16, 2020, https://www.thelist.com/38724/ untold-­truth-­victorias-­secret/ 2. Silver-Greenberg Jessica, Rosman Katherine, Maheshwari Sapna, and Stewart James, ‘“Angels” in Hell: The Culture of Misogyny Inside Victoria’s Secret’, New York Times. (February 1, 2020). Accessed October 16, 2020. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/01/business/victorias-­ secret-­razek-­harassment.html 3. Nina Åkestam, Sara Rosengren, and Micael Dahlen, ‘Advertising “Like a Girl”: Towards a Better Understanding of ‘Femvertising’ and Its Effects’, Psychology and Marketing 34, no.8 (2017): 795–806. Sara Champlin, Yvette Sterbenk, Kasey Windels, and Maddison Poteet, ‘How brand-cause fit shapes real world advertising messages: a qualitative exploration of “femvertising”’, International Journal of Advertising 38, no. 8 (2019): 1240–1263. Yang Feng, Huan Chen, and Li He, ‘Consumer Responses to Femvertising: A Data-mining Case of Dove’s ‘Campaign for Real Beauty’ on YouTube’, Journal of Advertising 48 (2019): 292–301. Rosalind Gill and Ana Sofia Elias, ‘“Awaken your incredible”: Love your body discourses and postfeminist contradictions’, International Journal of Media and Cultural Politics 10, no.2 (2014): 179–188. Fei Qiao and Ye Wang, ‘The myths of beauty, age, and marriage: femvertising by masstige cosmetic brands in the Chinese market’, Social Semiotics (2019): 1–23. 4. Rosalind Gill, “From sexual objectification to sexual subjectification,” Feminist Media Studies 3, no.1 (2003). Brian McNair, Striptease Culture: Sex, Media and the Democratisation of Desire (London: Routledge, 2002). Brian McNair, Porno? Chic! How pornography changed the world and made it a better place (London and New York: Routledge, 2013). 5. Sarah Banet-Weiser, Empowered: Popular Feminism and Popular Misogyny (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2018): 21. 6. No VS fashion shows have taken place since 2019, so there is no available data after 2018.

34 

X. JIA

7. The term ‘postfeminism’ was first used in Susan Bolotin’s article ‘Voices from the Post-feminist Generation’ in New York Times on 17th October 1982. Postfeminism was used to refer to a new kind of politics which was about feminism but repudiating the anger and resentment associated with feminism. 8. Angela McRobbie, The Aftermath of Feminism (London: Sage, 2009). Yvonne Tasker and Diane Negra (eds.) Interrogating Postfeminism: Gender and the Politics of Popular Culture (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007). 9. Susan Faludi, Backlash: The Undeclared War Against Women (Vintage: London, 1992). Tasker&Negra, Interrogating Postfeminism, 1. 10. McRobbie, The Aftermath of Feminism, 12. 11. Rosalind Gill, ‘Postfeminist Media Culture’, European Journal of Cultural Studies 10, no.2 (2007): 147–66. Michelle M. Lazar. ‘Entitled to consume: postfeminist femininity and a culture of post-critique’, Discourse and Communication 3, no.4 (2009): 371–400. McRobbie, The Aftermath of Feminism. 12. Ednie Kaeh Garrison, ‘U.S.  Feminism-Grrrl Style! Youth (Sub)Cultures and the Technologics of the Third Wave’, Feminist Studies 26, no.1 (Spring, 2000). 13. Anderson, Modern Misogyny. 14. Zaslow, Feminism, Inc, 3. 15. Glenn Ficarra and John Requa, Crazy, Stupid, Love (US: Warner Bros. Picture, 2011), film. 16. Gill, ‘Postfeminist Media Culture’, 147. 17. Sarah Banet-Weiser, Rosalind Gill and Catherine Rottenberg, ‘Postfeminism, popular feminism and neoliberal feminism? Sarah Banet-­ Weiser, Rosalind Gill and Catherine Rottenberg in conversation’, Feminist Theory, 21, no.1 (2020): 5. 18. Tasker&Negra, Interrogating Postfeminism, 3. 19. Joel Gwynne, ‘Japan, postfeminism and the consumption of sexual(ised) schoolgirls in male-authored contemporary manga’, Feminist Theory 14, no.3 (2013): 325–343. 20. Simidele Dosekun, ‘For Western Girls Only? Post-feminism as transnational culture’, Feminist Media Studies 15, no.6 (2015): 960, 972. 21. State feminism was initially a Scandinavian creation used for explaining the cases of state socialism. See Helga M. Hernes, Welfare State and Woman Power: Essays in State Feminism (Oslo: Norwegian University Press, 1987). In this chapter, socialist state feminism refers to the ‘institutionalisation of feminism in state agencies’ which was promoted by socialist state’s gender

2  VICTORIA’S SECRET GOES TO CHINA: FEMVERTISING AND THE FAILED… 

35

policies. See Zheng Wang, Finding Women in the State (Oakland: University of California Press), 7. 22. Jie Yang, ‘“Re-employment Stars”: Language, Gender and Neoliberal Re-structuring in China’, in Words and Material Girls: Language, Gender and Global Economies, ed. Bonnie, S.  McElhinny (Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 2007), 72–103. 23. ‘Times have changed – men and women are equal’ is from Mao Zedong’s speech with the youth in the Ming Tombs Reservoir in June 1964. See Long Live the Victory of Mao Zedong Thought (Beijing: Nanjing Military Command, 1969), 243. 24. Dai Jinhua argues that from a male perspective, the Maoist era was a de-­ sexualised era while from a female perspective, it was a masculinised process. See Dai Jinhua, Gendering China (Taipei: Erya Press Ltd., 2008), 78. I use ‘androgynous’ to describe ‘iron girls’ because ‘iron girls’ shared almost same figures as men on posters. Also, the notion of ‘androgynous’ offers more possibilities for decoding the ‘iron girl’ images. 25. Mayfair Yang, ‘From gender erasure to gender difference: State feminism, consumer sexuality, and women’s public sphere in China’, in Space of Their Own: Women’s Public Sphere in Transnational China, ed. Mayfair Yang (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1999): 47. 26. Lisa Rofel, Desiring China. Experiments in Neoliberalism, Sexuality, and Public Culture (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2007). 27. Alicia Stevens and Scott Griffiths, ‘Body Positivity in Everyday Life’, Body Image 35 (2020): 181–191. 28. Laura Mulvey, ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’, Screen 16, no.3 (1975), 17. 29. Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (London: Allen Lane, 1977), 11. 30. Ibid., 136. 31. Candace West and Don H.  Zimmerman, ‘Doing Gender’, Gender and Society 1, no.2 (June 1, 1987): 125–51. 32. Robert Goldman, Reading Ads Socially (London: Routledge, 1992). 33. Toni Ingram, ‘“I feel pretty”: Beauty as an affective-material process’, Feminist Theory 0, no.0 (2021), 2. 34. Nancy J.  Hirshman, ‘Choosing Betrayal’, Perspectives on Politics 8, no.1 (2010), 274. 35. Banet-Weiser, ‘What is your flava?’, 208. 36. Butler, Gender Trouble, viii. 37. Tasker&Negra, Interrogating Postfeminism. Sarah Projansky, Watching Rape (New York: New  York University Press, 2001).

36 

X. JIA

38. Banet-Weiser, ‘What’s your flava?’. Tricia Rose, The Hip Hop Wars (New York: Basic Books, 2008). Kimberly Springer, ‘Divas, Evil Black Bitches, and Bitter Black Women’, in Interrogating Postfeminism, ed. Yvonne Tasker and Diane Negra (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007), 249–77. 39. Ana Sofia Elias, Rosalind Gill and Christina Scharff, Aesthetic Labour: Rethinking Beauty Politics in Neoliberalism (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017). 40. Gill, ‘Postfeminist Media Culture’. Wolf, The Beauty Myth. 41. David Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism (New York: Oxford University Press Inc., 2005). 42. Hiroshi Wagatsuma, ‘The Social Perception of Skin Colour in Japan’, Daedalus 96, no.2 (1967): 407–443. 43. Graefer, ‘White stars and orange celebrities’. 44. The idea of ‘post-feminist masquerade’ is taken from Riviere’s essay ‘Womanliness as a Masquerade’ in 1929 which describes a notion of femininity as a masquerade. This idea has a psychoanalytic origin: as Riviere (1929: 35) argued, ‘women who wish for masculinity may put on a mask of womanliness to avert anxiety and the retribution feared from men’. 45. McRobbie, The Aftermath of Feminism, 66, 41. 46. Ibid., 66. 47. Ibid., 65–66. 48. Ibid., 41. Vron Ware, Beyond the Pale: White Women, Racism and History (London: Verso, 1992). Richard Dyer. White: Essays on Race and Culture (London: Routledge, 1997). 49. Eva Chen, ‘Shanghai(ed) Babies: Geopolitics, Biopolitics and the Global Chick Lit’, Feminist Media Studies 12, no.2 (2012): 215. 50. Mehita Iqani, Consumer Culture and the Media: Magazines in the Public Eye (UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 96. 51. Ibid. 52. Joan Rivière, ‘Womanliness as a Masquerade: 1929’, In Formation of Fantasy, ed. Victor Burgin, James Donald and Cora Kaplan (London: Methuen, 1986): 42. 53. Yun Shao, Fabrice Desmarais and Kay Weaver, ‘Chinese advertising practitioners’ conceptualisation of gender representation’, International Journal of Advertising 33, no.2 (2014): 337. 54. Colin Hoskins and Rolf Mirus, ‘Reasons for U.S. dominance of the international trade in television programmes’, Media, Culture & Society 10 no.4 (1988): 499–515.

2  VICTORIA’S SECRET GOES TO CHINA: FEMVERTISING AND THE FAILED… 

37

55. Arjun Appadurai, Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalisation (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), 30. 56. Ibid., 33. 57. Henry Giroux, Consuming social change: The United Colours of Benetton (London: Routledge, 1994): 189. 58. Rosalind Gill and Akane Kanai, ‘Affirmative Advertising and the Mediated Feeling Rules of Neoliberalism’, in Neoliberalism and the Media, ed. Marian Meyers (New York: Routledge, 2019): 142. 59. Banet-Weiser, ‘What’s Your Flava?’, 203. 60. Ibid., 204. 61. McRobbie, ‘Top Girls? Young women and the post-feminist sexual contract’. 62. Springer, ‘Divas, Evil Black Bitches, and Bitter Black Women’, 205. 63. Gill & Kanai, ‘Affirmative advertising and the mediated feeling rules of neoliberalism’. 64. Iqani, Consumer Culture and the Media, 96. 65. Gill & Elias, ‘Awaken your incredible’, 185. 66. Appadurai, Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalisation. 67. McRobbie, The Aftermath of Feminism. 68. Silver-Greenberg, et al., ‘“Angels” in Hell’.

CHAPTER 3

“Beauty Is Growing Up”: A Critical Case Study of Femvertising in Contemporary South Korea Hyejin Jo

In contemporary advertising worldwide, the practice known as “femvertising” has been recognized for some time as a highly effective strategy to leverage feminist values by appearing to challenge traditional female stereotypes.1 Following the success of the Dove “Real Beauty” campaign, launched in 2004, many advertisers in the West adopted messages of female empowerment in their product campaigns. In South Korea (hereafter Korea), advertisers were slow to grasp the potential of femvertising, but recently advertising strategies that appear to critique or overturn traditional female beauty standards, for example, around ageing and body image, have become popular. I argue that the limitations of the femvertising strategies prevent them from posing a truly radical challenge to traditional patriarchal values in Korea. By textually deconstructing one notable case of recent femvertising in Korea, the Sulwhasoo “Beauty Is Growing Up” campaign,

H. Jo (*) Simon Fraser University, Burnaby, BC, Canada © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 J. Gwynne (ed.), The Cultural Politics of Femvertising, Palgrave Studies in (Re)Presenting Gender, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-99154-8_3

39

40 

H. JO

I will show that apparent messages of female empowerment can still have the effect of promoting traditional female beauty standards and heteronormative feminine values. The “Beauty Is Growing Up” campaign is significant because Sulwhasoo is a Korean-based global beauty brand as well as a major cosmetic brand within Korea. Its adoption of female empowerment as a marketing strategy thus reflects both a shift in Korean advertising culture and the global scope of the femvertising trend. This case study, however, reveals that, despite its progressive, cosmopolitan image, femvertising can perpetuate systemized and stereotypical femininity. In analyzing the Sulwhasoo “Beauty Is Growing Up” campaign, this chapter addresses the following questions: (1) How is femininity represented in the campaign? and (2) How does female empowerment, as projected in this example of femvertising, reinforce the traditional normative feminine values embedded in contemporary Korean society? By means of these questions, the chapter explores how feminist awareness and practice have evolved in Korea in relation to femvertising’s purported intention to empower females. The chapter thus aims to construct a new critique of stereotyped gender representation in the age of post-feminism. The chapter argues, first, that the Sulwhasoo campaign conveys a limited understanding of femininity expressed in terms of stereotypical beauty standards. Second, it argues that the message of the campaign fails to explicitly address the gap between the traditional gender roles that older sectors of Korean society value most and the contemporary gender awareness embraced by younger generations. This chapter thus presents a critical perspective on female empowerment in a contemporary Korean advertising practice that has been constructed in the context of a globalized advertising industry influenced by rapidly changing notions of gender across the world and over the generations. Advertisements are significant as cultural texts because they present a compressed version of hegemonic meanings shared by a particular society and culture. Femvertising therefore provides a window into the sociocultural implications of the images of female empowerment that it projects. These implications have yet to be critiqued adequately by media and cultural studies scholars, a gap this chapter addresses in the context of commodity feminism.

3  “BEAUTY IS GROWING UP”: A CRITICAL CASE STUDY OF FEMVERTISING… 

41

Women’s Representation in Advertising Advertising is “a powerful cultural institution” that both reflects and formulates social norms and ideologies.2 At the same time, it is a representative example of popular culture and has historically legitimized traditional binary gender roles through the sociocultural meanings that it portrays.3 Gendered practices in advertising are rooted in sexist and misogynist structures embedded in the organization of society and in women’s lived experience of the world.4 The stereotypical representation of women in advertising therefore goes deeper than the strategies of femvertising are able to reach. As a result, challenging traditional women’s representation in advertising through femvertising is arguably doomed to fail. Nevertheless, many scholars in media and cultural studies, as well as of advertising specifically, have long focused simply on gender representations in advertising. In contemporary advertising, audiences are often still presented with women in subordinate roles such as servers of children and husbands, caregivers generally, or housekeepers. Liu argues that these traditional ways of representing women are intended to imply that women’s “natural” role is as good daughters, wives, and mothers and thereby to strengthen patriarchy and heteronormative familial values in society.5 Liu points out these stereotypical roles reinforce both consumer culture and traditional heteronormative ideas about women.6 More recently, however, advertisers have found ways to portray the ideal woman as both careerand family-oriented by incorporating images of professionally successful career women who manage to be strong women at work as well as at home.7 Despite this seemingly progressive evolution in women’s representation, in most advertising, women are still objectified and commodified, presented in terms of sexually desirable bodies. This sexualization, objectification, and commodification of women and their bodies is not a new issue in advertising of course. However, despite all the apparent advances in women’s social and economic status since feminists first critiqued this facet of the advertising industry, the problem persists. Even in some products or brands specifically targeted at women, traditional concepts of femininity, as a fashion practice, are presented as historically and culturally natural, as if simply an aspect of creation.8

42 

H. JO

Advertising is deeply involved in the creation and promotion of beauty standards.9 By showing models fulfilling these ideal standards, advertising pushes women viewers to compare themselves with the perfect, retouched images of the models.10 This inevitably encourages low self-esteem and anxieties about body image.11 Moreover, these unattainable beauty standards also glamorize youth and exploit anxieties about aging embedded in anti-aging products marketed as solutions to the problem of aging.12 This is an especially salient point with respect to Sulwhasoo’s femvertising because the brand specifically targets older, upper-middle-class women by embedding a concept of the “elegant” beauty of older women as a key selling point. Banet-Weiser and Portwood-Stacer observe that neoliberalism endorses feminism in a limited way by supporting “DIY (do-it-yourself) culture among young women who self-identify as feminists.”13 Femvertising is located in this context. The term itself, in fusing feminism and advertising, takes up the feminist trope of female empowerment.14 According to SheKnows Media, a trailblazing women’s media company,15 femvertising implies a rejection of gender stereotypes and traditional beauty standards. In keeping with this, femvertising is fleshed out not only by messages of “self-love and self-care”16 but also by “pro ageing”17 and “women wellness”18 messages. The theme of the Dove campaign is that women are beautiful just as they are. Consumers have responded positively, and the brand has come to be seen as one that resists socially constructed, restrictive norms of femininity. The campaign reimagines femininity as inclusive of diverse body shapes and sizes, ethnicities, skin colours, and social classes and has therefore been perceived as progressive in promoting female confidence, solidarity, and self-esteem.19 The advertising industry as a whole, and the media generally, has paid close attention to the success of the campaign’s critique of traditional beauty standards.20 In a neoliberal consumer culture, selling products by using feminist ideas and tropes is a deeply influential discourse within mainstream media.21 As Goldman notes, “[a]dvertising representations of women have become a significant part of the historical circumstances that condition women’s consciousness of everyday life.”22 However, the feminism projected by these representations “is a feminism tailored to the demands of the commodity form.”23 Although the Dove campaign has been the subject of a number of feminist writings on the ideology of beauty standards and gender norms,24 the important question is whether, and to

3  “BEAUTY IS GROWING UP”: A CRITICAL CASE STUDY OF FEMVERTISING… 

43

what extent, feminism is commodified in the campaign. When feminism is presented as a commodity, feminist signs and values are visually fetishized.25 Ever since the Dove campaign proved successful, the global advertising industry has been keenly interested in the selling power of feminism.26 According to Goldman et  al., commodity feminism is any promotional strategy in which feminist signs are attached to commodity brand names.27 Thus, despite its fame as a sign of corporate conversion to feminism, the Dove campaign cannot escape criticism as a form of commodity feminism. Examples of commodity feminism such as Dove’s “Real Beauty” campaign nevertheless generate a feeling of empowerment among women.28 Thus, commodity feminism promotes both a feminist position and feminism-­driven consumption, but in the process, feminism is appropriated by advertisers and even by consumers themselves. As a result, in commodity feminism, feminism’s radical critique of structural, gender-based inequalities no longer poses a threat to the patriarchal practices and hegemony embedded in capitalism.29 Feminism becomes just another form of branding to promote a product. It depoliticizes feminism and femininity.30 As a theoretical framework, however, commodity feminism provides a powerful means of analyzing and critiquing women’s representation in femvertising and femvertising as a branding strategy.

Textual Analysis As advertising relies heavily on visuals, analyzing visual imagery in advertisements is at the centre of contemporary advertising studies. Various methods are useful for deconstructing the codes, symbols, and meanings embedded in the visuals of advertisements. One important method is textual analysis of imagery.31 As McKee explains, the term text includes advertisements, music videos, films, magazines, and television programs – anything that can be visualized.32 Textual analysis involves analyzing any and all meanings that we produce in relation to reality in order to better comprehend the cultures and ideologies embedded in texts – more precisely, in cultural texts.33 Many scholars in media studies, cultural studies, advertising studies, and communication studies have long used textual analysis to interpret visual texts. Textual analysis can be particularly useful in uncovering “latent meaning, but also implicit patterns, assumptions and omissions of a text,”34 as

44 

H. JO

well as understanding a text’s cultural contexts. Textual analysis is thus a qualitative method located within a cultural-critical paradigm that enables interpretations of both what and how texts mean.35 Analyzing texts is a process of selecting what is valuable in reading; textual analysis is therefore strategic.36 In addition, the process of textual analysis includes recoding.37 According to Wernick, “advertising does not simply echo the values it uses but processes them.”38 For example, traditional gender stereotypes are transformed from “fixed positions” into “floating signifiers” and then combined as “arbitrary predicates” for tactical marketing purposes.39 Hence, textual analysis of advertisements is a way of decoding and recoding the social meanings and values perpetuated by marketing.

Rationale This chapter uses textual analysis to analyze Sulwhasoo’s recent “Beauty Is Growing Up” campaign in relation both to femvertising as a globalized advertising strategy and to ongoing local debates on feminism in Korea. The Sulwhasoo campaign has had two phases – an initial phase in June 2020 and a second that began in April 2021. This chapter discusses six video clips uploaded on Sulwhasoo’s YouTube channel that reflect an important contemporary trend of female empowerment in Korean media and culture. The  primary questions of this chapter  are aimed at investigating the textual elements of the campaign in terms of construction and deconstruction of meanings as identified by Stern, including themes, messages, and strategies in relation to visualization. Stern’s approach is similar to Barthes’s practice of connotation and denotation.40 Five of the six clips are from the first phase of the campaign, while one is from the new, second phase released in 2021. Each of the first four clips from the first phase features a well-known Korean celebrity woman, respectively, singer So Yoon Hwang, actress Jeong-eun Lee, musician Kyung-Wha Chung, and model Kyung-a Song. The fifth clip combines images from the four previous clips. The clip from the campaign’s second phase shows a variety of unnamed women. None of the clips demonstrates more than a very limited understanding of femininity, which Sulwhasoo has nevertheless constructed purportedly to portray female empowerment. In fact, the ads enforce a narrow perspective on women’s representation merely as a form of commodity feminism.

3  “BEAUTY IS GROWING UP”: A CRITICAL CASE STUDY OF FEMVERTISING… 

45

Agelessness, Careers, and Femininity Sulwhasoo is a global cosmetic brand whose mother company, Amore Pacific, uses many iconic female celebrities as models in its branding. Amore Pacific primarily targets women and offers product lines for women of various ages. However, it mainly appeals to women in their forties and older. Therefore, it is not surprising to see women in their forties or older in the “Beauty Is Growing Up” campaign, although Sulwhasoo has also attempted to enlarge its target audience to women of various ages. The four celebrity protagonists of the first phase of the campaign are used not to promote new products but rather to promote Sulwhasoo’s turn toward a new construction of femininity. However, in the context of commodity feminism, the newness is questionable because the brand targets mostly older women, and its brand concept is “agelessness beauty.” Whereas anti-­ aging beauty products typically sell themselves as aids to help one look young, the Sulwhasoo campaign constructs a positive discourse around aging in relation to women’s careers. Sulwhasoo presents itself as a brand that wants to turn the traditional sexist discourse around women’s aging from one that stigmatizes aging to one that endorses the value of aging in relation to women’s beauty and femininity. Actress Jeong-eun Lee, who appears in the first episode of the Sulwhasoo campaign, is a woman in her forties. It is interesting to see how this first episode goes about suggesting that women whose appearance does not fit that of a typical fashion model model are nevertheless beautiful. The opening scene is a close-up of Lee’s face with text on the left side of the screen referring to her appearance and body shape. The text notes that her face and body are inadequate for a beauty model, but that Sulwhasoo is nevertheless confident about framing her as a beautiful woman even though she is neither young, pretty, nor slim. These are normative feminine values shared as sociocultural meanings in a male-dominant society. In this context, Lee is rather attractive, but the clip suggests that her attractiveness can only be equivalent to “beautiful” if Sulwhasoo defines Lee as beautiful. Sulwhasoo’s message is that Lee’s inadequacy as a typical model empowers other “imperfect” women. Moreover, Lee then informs the viewer that her confidence in her appearance has grown along with her career. In the second clip, So Yoon Hwang, a female musician in her twenties, talks about her music and her present and future life. Unlike the first clip, Hwang’s clip emphasizes youth and gender but does not focus on her

46 

H. JO

body shape or appearance. Hwang’s self-presentation does not conform to traditional ideas of femininity; she is not feminine enough in these terms. The ad also shows her playing an electric guitar, an instrument typically associated with rock and metal genres, which have tended to exclude women. Hwang’s clip also takes a very different view of youth and aging than Lee’s. The text makes it clear that good days will not last forever and identifies the good days with youth. Youth, though desirable, will not last forever and cannot be recaptured. The clip implies that youth is invaluable, but that aging is a natural event that people cannot avoid or negotiate; one has no choice but to age. Hwang’s storyline ties in quite weakly with female empowerment, therefore. Hwang is the only one of the four women featured in this phase of the campaign who is still in her twenties. As Generation Z (henceforth Gen Z) has a different point of view toward youth and gender roles, Hwang is being used to illustrate Gen Z’s rapidly changing perception of beauty, youth, and traditional gender roles. Kyung-a Song, a top fashion model, appears in the third clip, which highlights her dual role as a fashion icon and a mother who still influences the fashion scene. Song sarcastically notes that modeling work is usually reserved for young women but that she nevertheless remains a top model and still has impact on the fashion scene. At the same time, she is a successful working mom. In the fashion industry, which has much in common with the beauty industry, Song positions herself as a model who has forged her own path even though she is now older than other top models and a mother. However, her ability to combine the two roles and flourish in her career despite her age is utopian; it is only possible because of the difference between her privileged status and that of other women. In the opening scene of the fourth clip, Kyung-Wha Chung, a legendary violinist and professor of music, states that people cannot control their age. She is well-aware of her age and of how aging can affect every aspect of a woman’s life, but the theme of the episode is that ageing is natural and confers a more profound beauty. The narrative focuses on Chung as an ordinary elderly woman who is still eagerly developing herself even though she has already reached a peak as a performer celebrated by audiences worldwide. Chung notes that she still has a long way to go, although many people already call her a legend. The message is that there is no limit to personal growth, so everyone should embrace the passing of time. Aging is not a choice, but Chung’s beauty is not going away. It is, as the campaign says, growing up. In other words, the campaign sees growth as a

3  “BEAUTY IS GROWING UP”: A CRITICAL CASE STUDY OF FEMVERTISING… 

47

natural part of aging because growing up takes time. The narrative also implies that a woman’s beauty (and thus a woman’s normative femininity as seen by society) is not linked only to appearance, which keeps changing over time. Aging is more than just a matter of changing appearance. Growth accompanies the change. What is interesting in Chung’s clip is that her message on beauty and aging comes from an elitism related to the ideals of elegant femininity and gracious beauty of the upper-middle-class women that Sulwhasoo’s branding targets. Her background is not described in the clip, but her position as a professor of music implies how power and privilege affect the discourse of older women’s ageing and femininity. Most Korean women of the same age as Chung were not able to go to college or university. Historically, women have been regarded as housewives and caregivers who should sacrifice their own interests in order to care for their families. Traditional, patriarchal Korean society did not want women to be educated, and it was difficult for women, especially from lower-class backgrounds, to get much formal education. Opportunities to go to college or university were especially limited, and it was even more difficult to go abroad in order to study music as Chung did. Chung has paved a legendary path as a violinist, but her career has largely developed in Western countries. Most Korean women in their seventies have not had opportunities like hers. Chung’s clip suggests that ageing itself empowers women, but her example does not reflect the experience of women from less privileged social classes. Feminine values work differently for women in different social classes, and in this clip, the narrative of ageing and femininity is limited to upper-middle-class women who can afford to cultivate their personal development and “wellness.” For the second phase of the “Beauty Is Growing Up” campaign, in 2021, Sulwhasoo has uploaded only one clip so far. It features a group of unnamed women and further develops the theme of ageing as equivalent to growing up. The clip shows women going about their lives and links this life-storytelling to the Sulwhasoo brand as a proponent of women’s beauty. The first scene takes place in a forest setting and asks, “Is there a good time for beauty?” The scene rapidly switches to a display of Hanbok, Korean traditional clothing, which is connected to the forest as an aspect of nature to be conquered and at the same time conveys a sense of historical and cultural authenticity. Then, in a scene depicting flawless white porcelain superimposed on an image of woman, a narrator says, in answer to the original question, “Not really.” The message is that women, when in

48 

H. JO

tune with nature, possess a beauty like that of porcelain, which grows more valuable as time goes by. The text in the next scene – “Your beauty does not stop at a particular moment and is not affected by ageing” – underscores this message. The imagery accompanying this text first depicts two women, one a career woman, perhaps a CEO or a fashion designer in her fifties or older, the other a young dancer, and then a group of high school girls and young children in ballet outfits at a ballet barre. This image then overlaps with that of the dancer. The ad emphasizes women’s lives embedded in the construction and development of beauty, femininity, and Sulwhasoo’s brand philosophy. Later, it shows a curvaceous woman and a skinny woman in high heels, before closing by turning once again to nature and the dancer with a text stating that beauty is growing up for everyone. The ad’s storyline refers to women’s lives, but it proposes a limited perception of femininity with stereotypical signs of femininity.

Discussion and Conclusion This chapter has examined how the Sulwhasoo campaign “Beauty is Growing Up” reinforces traditional feminine stereotypes, values, and norms in its representations of femininity. Femininity is connected to the concept of agelessness in the campaign. The four women talk about their past, present, and future careers. This storytelling emphasizes that age is not a barrier for women but a natural fact of nature and that is impossible to conquer nature perfectly, but possible to blend with nature as a naturally aging woman. The narrative thus values youth in a reverse way, but at the same time, it shows that since ageing cannot be overcome, it needs to be embraced. The clip implants a subjectivity of ageism defined as “the system of inequalities based on one’s membership into a particular age category.”41 Women’s ageing is considered as an inequality issue by a male-dominant society because young feminine women are valued by the male gaze. Moreover, ageing women have traditionally been seen as peripheral in the marketing of beauty products and brands. An ideal agelessness has been cherished in anti-ageing discourse. The same ideal is promoted in this campaign through female empowerment. Still, with the limitation of ageing, women have to be regarded as beautiful in any woman and of all ages. The campaign is merely an attempt at a paradigm shift from anti-­ ageing to pro-ageing in order to commodify women’s wellness. This

3  “BEAUTY IS GROWING UP”: A CRITICAL CASE STUDY OF FEMVERTISING… 

49

paradigm shift relies heavily on commodity feminism because it sells traditionally visualized femininity to feminist “wannabes” (younger women who see themselves as empowered). In reality, however, the paradigm is not a means of empowerment but a repetition of traditional femininity. Thus, “Beauty is Growing Up” arguably fails to articulate a critical conception of new femininity through female empowerment. This chapter argues that commodity feminism remains a problem in contemporary advertising despite femvertising’s image as a progressive alternative to traditional advertising’s sexism and as a discourse of feminist awareness and practice. Femvertising reinforces the commodity feminism embedded in women’s beauty products and brands. The chapter uses a prominent example of femvertising in Korea to show that its apparent reimagining of femininity does not in fact challenge traditional gender roles. Although Western in origin, this observation throughout the chapter is also related to women’s beauty standards facilitated by Korean popular cultural products such as K-pop and K-drama. Hence, it is important to examine femininity and the emergence of themes of female empowerment in femvertising in relation to other cultural sectors in Korea. Future research should examine how female empowerment as visualization is embedded in the production and distribution of other cultural K-content, including K-pop and K-drama. Further research is also needed into the adoption and reception of imagery of female empowerment in contemporary advertisements and their impact on Korean women. It should also investigate changes in feminine ideals in other Asian countries that may be influenced by Korean cultural products in which similar feminist discourses occur.

Notes 1. Nina Åkestam, Sara Rosengren, and Michael Dahlen, “Advertising ‘Like a Girl’: Toward a Better Understanding of ‘Femvertising’ and Its Effects,” Psychology & Marketing 34, no. 8 (2017): 795–806, https://doi. org/10.1002/mar.21023; Duan, Xu, “‘The Big Women’: A Textual Analysis of Chinese Viewers’ Perception Toward Femvertising Vlogs,” Global Media and China 5, no. 3 (2020): 228–46, https://doi. org/10.1177/2059436420934194 2. Richard Pollay, “The Distorted Mirror: Reflections on the Unintended Consequences of Advertising,” Journal of Marketing 50, no. 2 (1986): 18–36, https://doi.org/10.1177/002224298605000202. See also Katy

50 

H. JO

Snell and Wan-Hsiu Sunny Tsai, “Beauty for Asian American Women in Advertising: Negotiating Exoticization and Americanization to Construct a Bicultural Identity,” Advertising & Society Quarterly 18, no. 3 (2017), https://doi.org/10.1353/asr.2017.0022; Wan-Hsiu Sunny Tsai, Aya Shata, and Shiyun Tian, “En-Gendering Power and Empowerment in Advertising: A Content Analysis,” Journal of Current Issues & Research in Advertising 42, no. 1 (2021): 19, https://doi.org/10.1080/1064173 4.2019.1687057 3. Yuri Cha and Sun Young Choi, “Exploring the Active and Influential Groups in South Korean Digital Femvertising Based on Approach to Motivation of Self-Identity: Between ‘the Faux’ and ‘the Real’ Focused on the Perspective of Social Identity Theory,” Korean Journal of Journalism and Communication Studies 65, no. 1 (2020): 190–235, https://doi. org/10.20879/kjjcs.2021.65.1.190 4. Eve Shapiro, Gender Circuits: Bodies and Circuits in a Technological Age, 2nd ed. (New York, NY: Routledge, 2015). 5. Fengshu Liu, “From Degendering to (Re)Gendering the Self: Chinese Youth Negotiating Modern Womanhood,” Gender and Education 26, no. 1 (2014): 18–34, https://doi.org/10.1080/09540253.2013.860432 6. Liu, “From Degendering to (Re)Gendering the Self,” 30. 7. Kineta H.  Hung,  Stella  Yiyan Li, and  Russell W.  Belk, “Glocal Understandings: Female Readers’ Perceptions of the New Woman in Chinese Advertising,” Journal of International Business Studies 38, no. 6 (2007): 1034–51, https://doi.org/10.1057/palgrave.jibs.8400303 8. Shapiro, Gender Circuits, 22. 9. Jennifer Millard, “Performing Beauty: Dove’s ‘Real Beauty’ Campaign.” Symbolic Interaction 32, no. 2 (2009): 146–68. 10. Marsha L Richins, “Social Comparison and the Idealized Images of Advertising,” Journal of Consumer Research 18 (1991): 71–82, https:// doi.org/10.1086/209242 11. Millard, “Performing Beauty,” 147; Lisa M. Groesz, Michael P. Levine, and Sarah K. Murnen, “The Effect of Experimental Presentation of Thin Media Images on Body Satisfaction: A Meta-Analytic Review,” International Journal of Eating Disorders 31, no. 1 (2001): 1–16, https://doi. org/10.1002/eat.10005; Emma Halliwell and Helga Dittmar, “Does Size Matter? The Impact of Model’s Body Size on Women’s Body-Focused Anxiety and Advertising Effectiveness,” Journal of Social and Clinical Psychology 23 (2004): 104–22; Eaaron Henderson-King and Donna Henderson-King, “Media Effects on Women’s Body Esteem: Social and Individual Difference Factors,” Journal of Applied Social Psychology 27, no. 5 (1997): 339–418, https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1559-­1816.1997. tb00638.x

3  “BEAUTY IS GROWING UP”: A CRITICAL CASE STUDY OF FEMVERTISING… 

51

12. Justine Coupland, “Gendered Discourses on the ‘Problem’ of Ageing: Consumerized Solutions,” Discourse & Communication 1, no. 1 (2007): 43–54, https://doi.org/10.1177/1750481307071984; Ann Brown and Tess Knight, “Shifts in Media Images of Women Appearance and Social Status from 1960 to 2010: A Content Analysis of Beauty Advertisements in Two Australian Magazines,” Journal of Aging Studies 35 (2015): 74–83, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jaging.2015.08.003 13. Sarah Banet-Weiser and Laura Portwood-Stacer, “The Traffic in Feminism: An Introduction to the Commentary and Criticism on Popular Feminism.” Feminist Media Studies 17, no. 5 (2017): 884–88, https://doi.org/10.108 0/14680777.2017.1350517. See also Angela McRobbie, Be Creative: Making a Living in the New Culture Industries (London: Polity, 2016). 14. Banet-Weiser and Portwood-Stacer, “The Traffic in Feminism,” 886; Andi Zeisler, “Empowertise me!” Bitch Magazine 71, May 4, 2016, https://www. bitchmedia.org/article/empowertise-­me; Alan Abitbol and Sternadori, Miglena. “Championing Women’s Empowerment as a Catalyst for Purchase Intentions,” International Journal of Strategic Communication 13, no. 1 (2018): 22–41, https://doi.org/10.1080/1553118X.2018.1552963; Namhyun Um, “Case Analysis Study of Global Femvertising Campaign for Female Empowerment,” Journal of Digital Convergence 18, no. 7 (2020): 389–95. 15. Davida E. Arnold, “SheKnowsMedia,” MediaVillage, https://www.mediavillage.com/channel/sheknows-­media/?type=latest&page=1 16. Audre Lorde, Burst of Light: Essays (Ann Arbor, MI: Firebrand Books, 1988); Sara Ahmed, Living a Feminist Life (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016); Banet-Weiser and Portwood-Stacer, “The Traffic in Feminism,” 885–86. 17. Dakyung Jung, “아름다움은 자란다; 안티-에이징에서 프로-에이징으로 [Opinion: Beauty Is Growing Up: From Anti-Ageing to Pro-Ageing],” Art Insight, September 12, 2020, para. 2, https://www.artinsight.co.kr/news/ view.php?no=49808 18. Joongangilbo. “요즘 뜨는 광고 키워드 #우먼웰니스 [Popular Keywords in Advertising, Woman Wellness],” Joongangilbo, May 20, 2021, para.1, https://news.joins.com/article/24062613 19. Theresa Howard,“Ad Campaign Tells Women to Celebrate Who They Are,” USA Today, July 8, 2005, www.campaignforrealbeauty.com/press. asp?section=news&id=3073; Susanna Schrobsdorff, “Summer of Dove,” Newsweek, Aug. 2, 2005, accessed June 30, 2021, ­https://www.newsweek.com/summer-dove-117775 20. Millard, “Performing Beauty,” 151.

52 

H. JO

21. Catherine Rottenberg, “The Rise of Neoliberal Feminism,” Cultural Studies 28, no. 3 (2014): 418–37. 22. Robert Goldman, Reading Ads Socially (London: Routledge, 1992). 23. Goldman, Reading Ads Socially, 130. 24. Sigal, Barak-Brande and Einat Lachover, “Branding Relations: Mother– Daughter Discourse on Beauty and Body in an Israeli Campaign by Dove,” Communication, Culture & Critique 9, no. 3 (2016): 380, https://doi. org/10.1111/cccr.12111 25. Goldman, Reading Ads Socially, 130–153. 26. Ibid. 27. Robert Goldman, Deborah Heath, and Sharon Smith, “Commodity Feminism,” Critical Studies in Mass Communication 8, no. 3 (1991): 335–37, https://doi.org/10.1080/15295039109366801 28. Dara Persis Murray, “Branding ‘Real’ Social Change in Dove’s Campaign for Real Beauty,” Feminist Media Studies 13, no. 1 (2013): 87, https:// doi.org/10.1080/14680777.2011.647963 29. Goldman, Reading Ads Socially, 130–153. 30. Ibid. Reading Ads  Socially. 31. Suman Mishra, “Globalizing Male Attractiveness: Advertising in Men’s Lifestyle Magazines in India,” International Communication Gazette 83, no. 3 (2021): 280–98, https://doi.org/10.1177/1748048521992498 32. Alan McKee, Textual Analysis: A Beginner’s Guide (London: SAGE, 2003). 33. McKee, Textual Analysis: A Beginner’s Guide, 8–31. 34. Elfriede Fürsich, “In Defense of Textual Analysis,” Journalism Studies 10, no. 2 (2009): 238–52, https://doi.org/10.1080/14616700802374050 35. Gillian Dyer, Advertising as Communication (New York, NY: Routledge, 1982); Mishra, “Globalizing Male Attractiveness.” 36. Fürsich, “In Defense of Textual Analysis,” 241. 37. Andrew Wernick, Promotional Culture: Advertising, Ideology, and Symbolic Expression (London: SAGE, 1991); Richard Elliott, Susan Eccles, and Michelle Hodgson. “Re-Coding Gender Representations: Women, Cleaning Products, and Advertising’s ‘New Man’,” International Journal of Research in Marketing 10, no. 3 (1993): 311–24,  https://doi. org/10.1016/0167-8116(93)90013-O. 38. Elliot et  al., “Re-Coding Gender Representations: Women, Cleaning Products, and Advertising’s ‘New Man,’” 314. See also Wernick, Promotional Culture, 260–79. 39. Ibid. 40. Barbara B. Stern, “Textual Analysis in Advertising Research: Construction and Deconstruction of Meanings,” Journal of Advertising 25, no. 3 (1996): 61–73, https://doi.org/10.1080/00913367.1996.10673507;

3  “BEAUTY IS GROWING UP”: A CRITICAL CASE STUDY OF FEMVERTISING… 

53

Roland Barthes, Image, Music, Text: Essays Selected and Translated by Stephen Heath (New York, NY: Hill and Wang, 1977). 41. Teri Del Rosso, “There’s a Cream for That: A Textual Analysis of Beauty and Body-Related Advertisements Aimed at Middle-aged Women,” Journal of Women & Aging 29, no. 2 (July, 201): 185–97, https://doi. org/10.1080/08952841.2015.1125698

Bibliography Abitbol, Alan, and Miglena Sternadori. “Championing Women’s Empowerment as a Catalyst for Purchase Intentions.” International Journal of Strategic Communication 13, no. 1 (2018): 22–41. https://doi.org/10.1080/1553 118X.2018.1552963. Ahmed, Sara. Living a Feminist Life. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016. Åkestam, Nina, Sara Rosengren, and Michael Dahlen. “Advertising ‘Like a Girl’: Toward a Better Understanding of ‘Femvertising’ and Its Effects.” Psychology & Marketing 34, no. 8 (2017): 795–806. https://doi.org/10.1002/mar.21023. Arnold, Davida E. “SheKnowsMedia.” MediaVillage. https://www.mediavillage. com/channel/sheknows-­media/?type=latest&page=1. Banet-Weiser, Sarah, and Laura Portwood-Stacer. “The Traffic in Feminism: An Introduction to the Commentary and Criticism on Popular Feminism.” Feminist Media Studies 17, no. 5 (2017): 884–88. https://doi.org/10.108 0/14680777.2017.1350517. Barak-Brandes, Sigal, and Einat Lachover. “Branding Relations: Mother-Daughter Discourse on Beauty and Body in an Israeli Campaign by Dove.” Communication, Culture & Critique 9, no. 3 (2016): 379–94. https://doi. org/10.1111/cccr.12111. Barthes, Roland. Image, Music, Text: Essays Selected and Translated by Stephen Heath. New York, NY: Hill and Wang, 1977. Brown, Ann, and Tess Knight. “Shifts in Media Images of Women Appearance and Social Status from 1960 to 2010: A Content Analysis of Beauty Advertisements in Two Australian Magazines.” Journal of Aging Studies 35 (2015): 74–83. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jaging.2015.08.003. Cha, Yuri, and Sun Young Choi. “Exploring the Active and Influential Groups in South Korean Digital Femvertising Based on Approach to Motivation of Self-­ Identity: Between ‘the Faux’ and ‘the Real’ Focused on the Perspective of Social Identity Theory.” Korean Journal of Journalism and Communication Studies 65, no. 1 (2020): 190–235. https://doi.org/10.20879/kjjcs.2021.65.1.190. Coupland, Justine. “Gendered Discourses on the ‘Problem’ of Ageing: Consumerized Solutions.” Discourse & Communication 1, no. 1 (2007): 37–61. https://doi.org/10.1177/1750481307071984.

54 

H. JO

Del Rosso, Teri. “There’s a Cream for That: A Textual Analysis of Beauty and BodyRelated Advertisements Aimed at Middle-aged Women.” Journal of Women & Aging 29, no. 2. (2016, July): 185–97. 10.1080/08952841.2015.1125698. Duan, Xu. “‘The Big Women’: A Textual Analysis of Chinese Viewers’ Perception Toward Femvertising Vlogs.” Global Media and China 5, no. 3 (2020): 228–46. https://doi.org/10.1177/2059436420934194. Dyer, Gillian. Advertising as Communication. New York, NY: Routledge, 1982. Elliott, Richard, Susan Eccles, and Michelle Hodgson. “Re-Coding Gender Representations: Women, Cleaning Products, and Advertising’s ‘New Man.’” International Journal of Research in Marketing 10, no. 3 (1993): 311–24. https://doi.org/10.1016/0167-­8116(93)90013-­O. Fürsich, Elfriede. “In Defense of Textual Analysis.” Journalism Studies 10, no. 2 (2009): 238–52. https://doi.org/10.1080/14616700802374050. Goldman, Robert. Reading Ads Socially. London: Routledge, 1992. Goldman, Robert, Deborah Heath, and Sharon Smith. “Commodity Feminism.” Critical Studies in Mass Communication 8, no. 3 (1991): 333–51. https://doi. org/10.1080/15295039109366801. Groesz, Lisa M., Michael P.  Levine, and Sarah K.  Murnen. “The Effect of Experimental Presentation of Thin Media Images on Body Satisfaction: A Meta-Analytic Review.” International Journal of Eating Disorders 31, no. 1 (2001): 1–16. https://doi.org/10.1002/eat.10005. Halliwell, Emma, and Helga Dittmar. “Does Size Matter? The Impact of Model’s Body Size on Women’s Body-Focused Anxiety and Advertising Effectiveness.” Journal of Social and Clinical Psychology 23 (2004): 104–22. Henderson-King, Eaaron, and Donna Henderson-King. “Media Effects on Women’s Body Esteem: Social and Individual Difference Factors.” Journal of Applied Social Psychology 27, no. 5 (1997): 339–418. https://doi.org/10.1111/ j.1559-­1816.1997.tb00638.x. Howard, Theresa. “Ad Campaign Tells Women to Celebrate Who They Are.” USA Today, 2005. www.campaignforrealbeauty.com/press.asp?section=news& id=3073. Joongangilbo. 요즘 뜨는 광고 키워드 #우먼웰니스 [“Popular Keywords in Advertising,” Woman Wellness]. May 20, 2021. https://news.joins.com/ article/24062613. Jung, Dakyung. “오피니언: 아름다움은 자란다; 안티-에이징에서 프로-에이징으 로 [Opinion: Beauty Is Growing Up: From Anti-Ageing to Pro-Ageing].” Art Insight, September 12, 2020. https://www.artinsight.co.kr/news/view. php?no=49808. Hung, Kineta H, Stella Yiyan Li, and Russell W. Belk. “Glocal Understandings: Female Readers’ Perceptions of the New Woman in Chinese Advertising.” Journal of International Business Studies 38, no. 6 (2007): 1034–51. https:// doi.org/10.1057/palgrave.jibs.8400303.

3  “BEAUTY IS GROWING UP”: A CRITICAL CASE STUDY OF FEMVERTISING… 

55

Liu, Fengshu. “From Degendering to (Re)Gendering the Self: Chinese Youth Negotiating Modern Womanhood.” Gender and Education 26, no. 1 (2014): 18–34. https://doi.org/10.1080/09540253.2013.860432. Lorde, Audre. Burst of Light: Essays. Ann Arbor, MI: Firebrand Books, 1988. McKee, Alan. Textual Analysis: A Beginner’s Guide. London: SAGE, 2003. McRobbie, Angela. Be Creative: Making a Living in the New Culture Industries. London: Polity, 2016. Millard, Jennifer. “Performing Beauty: Dove’s ‘Real Beauty’ Campaign.” Symbolic Interaction 32, no. 2 (2009): 146–68. Mishra, Suman. “Globalizing Male Attractiveness: Advertising in Men’s Lifestyle Magazines in India.” International Communication Gazette 83, no. 3 (2021): 280–98. https://doi.org/10.1177/1748048521992498. Murray, Dara Persis. “Branding ‘Real’ Social Change in Dove’s Campaign for Real Beauty.” Feminist Media Studies 13, no. 1 (2013): 83–101. https://doi.org/1 0.1080/14680777.2011.647963. Pollay, Richard. “The Distorted Mirror: Reflections on the Unintended Consequences of Advertising.” Journal of Marketing 50, no. 2 (1986): 18–36. https://doi.org/10.1177/002224298605000202. Prior, Molly. “Dove Ad Campaign Aims to Redefine Beauty.” Women’s Wear Daily, September 30, 2006. www.campaignforrealbeauty.com/press.asp?id=1707& length=short & section=news. Richins, Marsha L. “Social Comparison and the Idealized Images of Advertising.” Journal of Consumer Research 18 (1991): 71–83. https://doi.org/10.1086/ 209242. Rottenberg, Catherine. “The Rise of Neoliberal Feminism.” Cultural Studies 28, no. 3 (2014): 418–37. Schrobsdorff, Susanna. “Summer of Dove,” Newsweek, Aug. 2, 2005. Accessed June 30, 2021. https://www.newsweek.com/summer-­dove-­117775. Shapiro, Eve. Gender Circuits: Bodies and Circuits in a Technological Age, 2nd ed. New York, NY: Routledge, 2015. Snell, Katy, and Wan-Hsiu Sunny Tsai. “Beauty for Asian American Women in Advertising: Negotiating Exoticization and Americanization to Construct a Bicultural Identity.” Advertising & Society Quarterly 18, no. 3 (2017). https:// doi.org/10.1353/asr.2017.0022. Stern, Barbara B. “Textual Analysis in Advertising Research: Construction and Deconstruction of Meanings.” Journal of Advertising 25, no. 3 (1996): 61–73. https://doi.org/10.1080/00913367.1996.10673507. Sulwhasoo. “Sulwhasoo Beauty Is Growing Up | Jeong-eun Lee.” YouTube video, 0:51. June 9, 2020a. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ElSlm-­3QIxw Sulwhasoo. “Sulwhasoo Beauty Is Growing Up | So Yoon Hwang.” YouTube video, 0:55. June 12, 2020b. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v= sFhbP3dxS7w

56 

H. JO

Sulwhasoo. “Sulwhasoo Beauty Is Growing Up | Kyung-a Song.” YouTube video, 0:40. June 12, 2020c. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AlIBX4nNMaw Sulwhasoo. “Sulwhasoo Beauty Is Growing Up | Kyung-Wha Chung.” YouTube video, 0:46. June 12, 2020d. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lmrgx b3pfD4 Sulwhasoo. “Sulwhasoo Beauty Is Growing Up | All.” YouTube video, 1:23. June 12, 2020e. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5erhr7Mi2lU Sulwhasoo. “Sulwhasoo Beauty Is Growing Up | The Second Phase of the Campaign.” YouTube video, 0:54. April, 11, 2021. https://www.youtube. com/watch?v=tLsBuOwOHKc Tsai, Wan-Hsiu Sunny, Aya Shata, and Shiyun Tian. “En-Gendering Power and Empowerment in Advertising: A Content Analysis.” Journal of Current Issues & Research in Advertising 42, no. 1 (2021): 19–33. https://doi.org/10.108 0/10641734.2019.1687057. Um, Namhyun. “Case Analysis Study of Global Femvertising Campaign for Female Empowerment.” Journal of Digital Convergence 18, no. 7 (2020): 389–95. Wernick, Andrew. Promotional Culture: Advertising, Ideology, and Symbolic Expression. London: SAGE, 1991. Zeisler, Andi. “Empowertise me!” Bitch Magazine 71, May 4, 2016. https:// www.bitchmedia.org/article/empowertise-­me.

CHAPTER 4

Empowerment in the Pills: Reproductive Rights and Postfeminist Rage in Modern China Runchao Liu

A TV commercial (TVC) of Yasmin contraceptive pills became a trending topic on Chinese social media Sina Weibo in June 2020 after a viral post called out its sexist messages. In the TVC, a glamorous-looking woman who appears to be the homewrecker of a young adult couple provokes the wife by claiming to be able to entertain the husband by telling jokes and playing games with him, asking if the wife can do the same. The woman is later revealed to be a metaphor of the husband’s smartphone addiction. Portrayed as a stereotypical, not well-maintained married woman, the wife throws a box of Yasmin on the table and responds, ‘I can take these, can you?’ Instantaneously, the ‘homewrecker’ transforms back to a smartphone and then the couple reconcile, suggesting that taking Yasmin helps the wife regain her lover’s attention. The commercial’s broadcast amidst a popular reality TV show Sisters Who Make Waves, a groundbreaking show

R. Liu (*) University of Denver, Denver, CO, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 J. Gwynne (ed.), The Cultural Politics of Femvertising, Palgrave Studies in (Re)Presenting Gender, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-99154-8_4

57

58 

R. LIU

that features female celebrities over 30 while targeting a mature female demographic, has afforded it a far-reaching circulation to reach a relevant audience. Disguised as overcoming smartphone addiction with a poor representation of gender relations and women’s sexual agency, the commercial has received heated criticisms from mainstream media, influencers and Weibo users. Interestingly, the commercial appears to have greatly deviated from Yasmin’s 2016 TVC for the Chinese market, which has an unmistakable theme of female empowerment with a slogan of ‘Beyond good enough, empowering you to blossom’. A few months after the 2020 backlash, Yasmin released a promotional video to celebrate 60 years since the first birth control pill was approved. The promo video acts as a radical statement tacitly responding to the backlash, hailing a series of stories of ‘life is up to me’, including ‘childbearing is up to me’. Yasmin is a leading product of oral contraception and belongs to the German multinational enterprise Bayer AG, specialized in life sciences and one of the world’s largest pharmaceutical companies. Bayer’s connections with China started in 1882 through trading textile dyes, and China is now one of its largest global markets. Bayer’s immensely successful business in China always depends on following Chinese traditions and government’s policies. Dissecting Yasmin’s ‘successful’ and ‘unsuccessful’ commercials for the Chinese market affords a unique angle to understand the intersection of reproductive politics, a market-state-(post-)feminist complex and female empowerment campaigns in modern China. It also sheds light on a post-­ feminism with Chinese characteristics. Despite the changing messages and audience reception to Yasmin’s femvertisements from 2016 to the present, these commercials and promotional materials have consistently propagated a consumerist idea that Yasmin brings both material and immaterial benefits. On the surface, the 2016 TVC’s call for self-transformation touts the neoliberal ideals of free choice and life balance by empowering women to pursue ‘new’ feminine ideals and become well-rounded modern women who can have it all through managing the self. However, the underlying logic is not fundamentally different from that of the 2020 TVC, which is contingent upon one willingly objectifying their body. This chapter examines and compares the messages of Yasmin’s commercials in the ways they represent women’s sexual agency and reproductive rights as a source of empowerment. Although the 2020 controversial commercial is often seen as a retrograde step, I unmask a consistent, albeit changing, maneuver of objectifying

4  EMPOWERMENT IN THE PILLS: REPRODUCTIVE RIGHTS… 

59

women’s sexual agency as material and immaterial power in Yasmin’s commercials. This chapter also discusses the rhetoric of social media criticisms of the 2020 commercial, which I argue tends to create an echo chamber of postfeminist rage and neoliberal feminist ethos for a modern Chinese audience, further objectifying women’s sexual agency and making this kind of femvertising maneuver an exceptionally challenging problem to deconstruct.

Neoliberal Sensibilities and the Selling of Women’s Sexual Autonomy Yasmin’s 2016 TV commercial for the mainland China market has an unmistakable theme of female empowerment with a slogan of ‘Beyond Good Enough; Empower You to Blossom’. This 90 seconds TVC aims to ‘inspire a new generation of young Chinese women to fulfil their potential’, says Arthur Tsang, chief creative officer of BBDO Beijing, the creative agency behind this campaign.1 The commercial mobilizes the gendered meanings of the Chinese language to expand the definitions of Chinese women. It does so by first illustrating how the Chinese character for “woman” (nv) has been used as part of other characters to fixate women as wives (qi), mothers (ma), delicate (jiao), and alluring (mei) for thousands of years. The commercial then declares that women are much more than these stereotypes through a montage to redefine femininities, stressing that women are able to achieve unlimited potential, create their own empire, exceed societal expectations, and lastly, to do anything possible. To illustrate these possibilities, in the following scenes, we see a woman practicing aerial rope acrobatics, a woman receiving a curtain call at her runway show, a woman climbing to the top of a mountain, and a woman photographing and riding a motorcycle on a beach. Ultimately, the commercial seeks to portray alternative femininities to empower women to pursue ‘beyond good enough’. Similar to many femvertising campaigns in China depending on tactical symbolism to speak to millennial women while navigating a convoluted system of ideology,2 Yasmin integrates neoliberal solutions in its pseudo-­ feminist yearnings constructed to empower women to, instead of breaking the mold, add more to the mold. The 2016 TVC has an alternative title: 90-Seconds Principles for Goddess Transformation (90 miao nvshen jinjie faze). Here, Yasmin interpellates ‘goddesses’ who have strong willpower

60 

R. LIU

to work hard towards ‘beyond good enough’. The alternative title aligns with the campaign’s target audience, ‘modern women who have a high expectation of themselves and strive to be their best in exchange for a high quality of life’.3 Educated, career-driven, and financially independent women born in the 1980s and 1990s are often the target audience of femvertising in the Chinese market.4 However, Yasmin appeals to this demographic not through challenging conventional gender norms but through consolidating them as the very foundation of each of the four alternative female characters, viewing societal expectations of women in a positive light and extolling them as essential virtues that would make one ‘good enough’. The montage of four types of alternative femininities all start with the narrator declaring ‘I am not simply alluring/a wife/delicate/a mother; I am/can also…’ For instance, the narrator states that ‘I am not simply going to marry; I can also build my own empire’ while a woman fashion designer receives a curtain call.5 The rhetorical structure endorses a postfeminist sensibility that ‘women can have it all’, where the conventional route of marriage is still an essential part of a woman’s life and does not hinder one’s potential of achieving unconventional goals. The celebrated ‘new’ femininities not only leave the heteropatriarchal structure of society untouched but also further normalize the domesticized gender roles assumed on women. Indeed, the slogan is ‘beyond good enough’, not ‘redefine what is good’. Those who do not perform a traditionally valued Chinese womanhood are left in an awkward position, where it seems that they are not even eligible to pursue a fuller life. They are not ‘good enough’. What distinguishes Yasmin’s ‘Beyond Good Enough’ from other femvertisements in China is its implicit yet more profound objectification of women’s sexuality, including sexual and reproductive agency. At first glance, the 2016 TVC is similar to its precedents such as SKII’s ‘Change Destiny’ campaign in delivering contradictory visual versus verbal messages.6 The commercial employs an empowering narrative that encourages women to pursue unconventional paths. This narrative, however, is weakened by the commercial’s female casts all surrendering to desirable physical characteristics in a stereotypical sense, such as porcelain pale skin, big eyes, narrow faces and a slender body shape.7 The celebration, as well as objectification, of such beauty standards is best illustrated in the multiple slow-motion and close-up shots employed to present the female body in the first scene of alternative femininities, where an artist performs aerial acrobatics in a pair of fitted athletic shorts and sports bra. The scene ends

4  EMPOWERMENT IN THE PILLS: REPRODUCTIVE RIGHTS… 

61

with a close-up showing Chinese characters ‘female strength’ (nv li) appearing like a tattoo on the artist’s ultra-flat abdomen while the camera lingers on her spinning body in slow motion. Not only does the scene predicate female strength on conventional beauty standards that eulogize delicate (jiao) and alluring (mei) women, it also invites the male gaze that views certain types and parts of female bodies as sources of pleasure and empowerment, obfuscating the commercial’s target audience. Different from cosmetic brands’ femvertising that fetishizes consumption-based self-management of women’s physical appearance as the ultimate self-­ empowerment and solution to sexism and misogyny, Yasmin calls for self-­ governing of one’s hormones and ovary as the very pathway to looking conventionally good while freely choosing unconventional life paths. Yasmin enables the tacit micro-management of organs, turning one’s sexual and reproductive agency into a material power that one can deploy to ‘succeed’ in a heteropatriarchal neoliberal society with a false sense of autonomy. The ways new femininities are represented in this commercial echo the rise of a pseudo-feminist agenda and a revival of patriarchy in post-reform China, promoted by women-focused KOLs such as Mimeng and Ayawawa, that further domesticates women and encourages them to exploit what is believed to be female privilege.8 However, this kind of objectification runs deeper than a superficial sexualization of the body as it disintegrates and consequently dehumanizes and depoliticizes the body. With the backlash against Yasmin stirred up by a viral post calling out the issues of its 2020 TVC, the 2016 TVC gained some concomitant attention. In contrast, overwhelmingly positive comments on the 2016 commercial attests to both its success as femvertising and the co-existence of various and oftentimes contradictory discourses about women’s liberation in modern China. Shortly after the 2020 TVC went viral for its problematic content, a Weibo micro-influencer with over 80 thousand followers under the username “misogynist culture boycotter” (yannv wenhua dizhizhe) called attention to the 2016 TVC as a counterexample, commending it being a positive case of women-focused advertising. Weibo users under this post reflect the same sentiment. The top three most liked comments respectively call out the 2020 TVC as a huge step backward, reaffirm that this commercial is ‘normal’ and praise ‘infinite female potential’ as a ‘cool’ concept, which is stylized as a combination of Chinese character nv and the symbol of infinity ∞ at the end of the commercial. These affirmations are not unforeseen when considering the broader digital and cultural context, neither is the silence on the commercial’s

62 

R. LIU

advocacy of conventional femininities. Pervaded by influencers promoting ‘self-discipline is freedom’ (zilv ji ziyou) and chick flicks selling the empowering image of urban female professionals who enjoy the discursive power when it comes to romantic relationships, marriage and reproduction,9 contemporary Chinese popular discourses feed into the entrepreneurship fantasy of free choices and self-realization as unsusceptible to institutionalized inequity. How consumers respond to an idealized autonomous womanhood constructed in the 2016 TVC allows us to glimpse how the branding of neoliberal feminism ethos is digested in the modern Chinese society.10 Behind these neoliberal yearnings is a postfeminism with Chinese characteristics that has been growing: the institution of marriage and motherhood is essentialized as part of the very basis of everyday life, while related systemic issues such as reproductive labor, workplace sexism and economic complications of marriage are singled out as class issues resolvable on an individual level.

Femvertising in Crisis: Failed Transformation and Nationalist Postfeminist Rage ‘For men, no interesting souls can compete with a vagina without a condom. Women need to buy our oral contraceptive should you want to please a man.’ This is how one of the most liked comment (n=4386, as of February 2021) summarizes what this Weibo user sees as the 2020 TVC’s central idea under the original viral post that triggers the backlash against Yasmin in June 2020.11 The 2020 commercial calls for close family relationships in a modern society full of increasingly distractive technologies, and it does so by borrowing the femvertising narrative that women are in control of their bodies and suggesting that Yasmin helps bring families closer through improving sexual intimacy in marriage. Although, as demonstrated before, the 2016 campaign also promotes the concept that women can pursue a greater life through the self-management of one’s body, the key difference that has made the 2020 campaign a case of femvertising in crisis lies in a lack of women’s perspective, engendering an uncensored delivery of sexualizing and objectifying women in favor of male pleasure. In other words, it is not the patriarchal objectification of female bodies but the patriarchal justification behind this objectification that enrages many female audiences, which begs the question of who benefits (more) in a narrative construct.

4  EMPOWERMENT IN THE PILLS: REPRODUCTIVE RIGHTS… 

63

Like the makeover paradigm popularized in chick flicks and television programs, a narrative of feminine transformation is essential to construct postfeminist female agency, through which female protagonists gain an upward mobility as to one’s socioeconomic and heterosexual capital by adhering to conventional gender regimes.12 Different from makeover programs, the feminine transformations well-received in the 2016 TVC are done through consuming Yasmin and ‘reinventing’ one’s ovary, which then affords seemingly unlimited social and political autonomy at the expense of sexual and reproductive autonomy. In comparison, the 2020 TVC fails to deliver this transformation for both female protagonists. One female protagonist is the literal reification of a smartphone and ends up disappearing altogether, while the wife remains as a servile, frumpy mess. If anything, the transformation is enacted on the male protagonist when he is rewarded with more sexual and domestic capital for his own issue of smartphone addiction. However, more likely than not, married women, as opposed to their husbands, are the action party to implement contraception, considering that married women in China had a contraceptive prevalence rate of 89% in 2010, the highest in the world.13 Understood in the context of modern China, a male-pleasure narrative in a contraceptive commercial that is undergirded by derogatory depictions of women is likely to backfire. As what many Weibo users have pointed out, the commercial more likely empowers men and has mistaken its target audience. The 2020 TVC misses a key ingredient of feminine transformation to successfully deliver a message of female empowerment, but why only the 2020 commercial receives backlash for its objectification of women warrants further discussion. Although the 2016 commercial similarly perpetuates stereotypical roles and characters of womanhood such as wife and feminine allure to make seemingly liberal statements like the 2020 precedent does, only the latter came under fire. The positive reviews of the 2016 commercial in part speak to middle-class Chinese women’s ‘unspoken covenant with the state/party’, where they ‘surrender their democratic rights, avoid political protest against patriarchal hierarchies and ignore the social injustice experienced by a vast number of lower-class women’,14 in exchange for a higher quality of life and social status. The class specification of postfeminist subjects in China and their direct relationship with the market-state complex makes this notably distinct from Western enactments of postfeminism.15 As with that in the West and other Asian countries, China’s beauty economy promotes investment in one’s appearance as a means of self-actualization and a (false) source of

64 

R. LIU

economic success.16 Besides the apparent reason that the 2020 commercial represents women in visually, ethically and thus socioeconomically unflattering ways, the backlash also unravels young and professional women’s dissatisfaction with the commercial’s failure to picture the ‘benefits’ of being in a complicit relationship with the state-sanctioned postfeminist agenda. A nation-wide postfeminist agenda has been set after China has achieved a nominal gender equality through a top-down movement of socialist state feminism of the Mao era from 1949 to the late 1970s via legal provisions and national propaganda such as ‘women hold up half the sky’.17 The paradigm of feminine transformation within the contemporary postfeminist ethos of China, therefore, is a nationalist political promise that proffers a false sense of female agency. The failure to deliver this, or as least the blueprint for this, runs the risk of losing a large female demographic’s tacit consent to heteropatriarchal gender norms. Understood in this context, the media and digital sphere rage stimulated by Yasmin’s 2020 TVC is a nationalist postfeminist rage, calling out Bayer’s failure in echoing the upward mobility of modern Chinese women and following the latest market-state directions towards ‘sheconomy’, a term that business experts use to describe China’s rapidly growing women-­ focused market.18 Bayer’s sales revenue in the Greater China area reached 3.724 billion euros in 2019. The immense business success of Bayer in China has always been contingent upon adhering to traditional Chinese social values and integrating into the government’s macroeconomic policies by forming strategic alliances. For instance, Bayer partnered up with leading academic institutes such as Tsinghua University and Peking University to work on pharmaceutical innovation. It is also a long-term supporter for the ‘Go West’ initiative, a strategic and cooperative partnership between Bayer and China’s National Health and Family Planning Commission, launched in 2007 to provide medical training for physicians and medical staff in the underserved rural areas of western China. As to the 2020 Yasmin TVC, Bayer clearly endeavors to follow China’s Advertising Law and walk around the State Administration for Market Regulation’s banning of sexually suggestive commercials by strategizing the metaphor of smartphone addiction. Doing so, it also seeks to avoid stirring up controversies around the cultural taboo discourses such as sex and feminism,19 a tendency common amongst Chinese advertising practitioners.20 However, Bayer has failed to calculate the complex relationship between urban women and the party-state, essentializing this relationship as merely patriarchy-driven. Particularly, Bayer has failed to grasp that

4  EMPOWERMENT IN THE PILLS: REPRODUCTIVE RIGHTS… 

65

while Chinese citizens are largely satisfied with the ethical balance between individual autonomy and state governing, a sense of reproductive autonomy still matters for them.21 The nationalist underpinning of the (post)feminist rage against Yasmin can be best illustrated by angry netizens. One of the most representative comments under the original viral post comes from a Weibo user who dares Bayer to release the 2020 TVC in Europe or the United States, calling the commercial an act of bullying of Chinese women and assuming that Chinese women have no self-esteem. However, not all social media comments so directly conjure up a nationalist agenda. More prevalently and subtly, the postfeminist sensibility of the backlash is manifested in a common rhetoric that frames Yasmin’s sexist and misogynist narrative as an ‘outdated’ issue. By simultaneously calling out the sexist and objectifying gaze and positioning it as something that people in modern China should not be witnessing, these online discourses promote a quintessential postfeminist culture that considers and naturalizes certain aspects of feminism while dismissing in-depth structural critiques.22 Moreover, these discourses normalize a post-(state-socialist-)feminist status of Chinese women and the implicit, mutually ‘beneficial’ relationship between women and the state. For example, it is common to find comments suggesting such mentality: Sample comment 1: This is so disgusting. It is 2020. Why do people still promote this kind of values? Sample comment 2: Seeing this commercial in 2020 is disgusting. Sample comment 3: Have Qing Dynasty zombies eaten the strategic planning team’s brain? Such nationalistic sentiment is reminiscent of early modern Chinese feminism, which was born alongside the fight for national independence in the late nineteenth century.23 After the Chinese Communist Party took power in 1949, socialist feminists started launching campaigns promoting women’s rights in social, political and domestic contexts through the state-­ sponsored institution All-China Women’s Federation.24 These actions firmly institutionalized the link between the state and women’s liberation. The state-feminism relationship in recent times has become entangled with digital nationalism and the market-state complex. One notable phenomenon, indeed a postfeminist media culture, is online influencers’ upholding of nationalistic sentiments for socioeconomic gain.25 Another

66 

R. LIU

epitome is the 2019 ‘Fangirl Expedition’: a group of Chinese fangirls passed China’s Great Firewall to social media platforms banned in China with memes and posts to condemn protesters amidst the height of Hong Kong Anti-Extradition Law Amendment Bill Movement.26 Similar to the Yasmin backlash, the expedition was also a grassroots action. This well-­ organized volunteer event was praised by the Chinese Communist Youth League via its official Weibo account. However, as anarcho-feminists insist, changes made under a nationalist-feminist regime are ultimately for Chinese power as a nation but ‘the liberation of one oppressed element in society depended on the liberation of all’.27 The government crackdown on contemporary feminist activism and nationalism-characterized misogyny rampant on social media have laid bare the unsustainability of such a state-(post)feminism relationship for the sake of women’s liberation.28 While a state-sponsored postfeminist ethos has permeated every major dimension of modern China’s gender discourse and a large female demographic either consciously or unconsciously expects to benefit from a market-­party-state complex, this unique context also allows some local expressions that are intervening and beneficial for its own citizens. To begin with, besides calling out obvious issues with the 2020 Yasmin TVC, it is also common to find Weibo users voluntarily research and share information regarding alternative birth control pills, methods and usages as concrete ways to protest against Yasmin. Such online discourses have complicated patterns of commodity activism as a neoliberal branding strategy that combines activism and consumer behavior.29 Through supporting various competing brands, such consumer behavior turns commodity activism into a decentered and in a way anti-consumption tool of protest. Although consumer boycotts in China have been historically associated with anti-imperialist and nationalist sentiments,30 the case with Yasmin shows a greater tolerance of the national origin of suggested alternative products and a greater emphasis on women’s autonomy when it comes to executing a boycott. Moreover, unlike a Chinese neoliberal feminist agenda that seeks to construct a ‘feminized male ideal’ through housetraining one’s husband/ partner,31 critics of Yasmin with a greater sense of gender equity also point out the equally pernicious stereotyping of the male protagonist of the 2020 TVC. Such criticism unravels that the revival of patriarchy in post-­ reform China exploits both women and men.32 Furthermore, the backlash against Yasmin reminds the public of the unnatural coupling of consumption and female empowerment commonly employed by more successful

4  EMPOWERMENT IN THE PILLS: REPRODUCTIVE RIGHTS… 

67

femvertising campaigns. However, unlike how Western neoliberal feminism paradoxically facilitated more aggressive feminist activism like the #MeToo movement and Women’s March,33 China at the moment is not culturally or politically ready to (re-)embrace feminism as a desirable identity. This contrasts the rising phenomenon of popular feminism mediated by celebrity effect in the West, where the label of ‘feminist’ has become an unexpected source of sociopolitical capital.34 Much like its official postfeminist status, feminism in contemporary China often signifies either an outdated pursuit, a foreign thought, a stigmatized label or a symbol of Western-influenced conspiracy dividing Chinese women and men.35 As many scholars have suggested, what is currently rising is a pseudo-­feminism with local forms of postfeminist ideologies, which centers on an autonomous womanhood ideal constructed by a market-party-state economy under the shadow of transnational influence of industrial marketization and a history of socialist state feminism.36

‘Childbearing is up to me’ Upon the 2020 World Contraception Day on 26 September, 3 months after its TVC controversy earlier this year, Yasmin released a promotional video for the Chinese market to celebrate the 60th anniversary of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration approved birth control pill. Direct language of women’s sexual pleasure and reproductive autonomy have been consistently missing or toned down in Yasmin’s Chinese TVCs in recent years. This promo video is the first time that Yasmin openly engages the subject of childbearing as a selling point, as opposed to implying societal and familial ‘benefits’ of managing one’s ovary or condomless sex. Entitled Life is Up to Me (rensheng you wo), the video starts with a message, ‘offer women more choices, let you control your life’, then proceeds with four mini-stories respectively showing ‘life is up to me’, ‘love is up to me’, ‘childbearing is up to me’ and ‘intimacy is up to me’. Tellingly, the promo video drastically diverts from the 2020 TVC and constructs a distinctive women-centered narrative of empowerment. Given the ambiguous messages and attitudes that advertising practitioners tend to adopt regarding female sexual and reproductive agency, these are important and radical messages. Nevertheless, the delivery of these messages once again evidently seeks to comply with the larger political context of China’s family planning policies.

68 

R. LIU

In particular, while the slogan of ‘childbearing is up to me’ (shengyu you wo) aims to fully empower women with reproductive agency, ostensibly including the agency of not having children, the mini-story is entangled with the then-latest two-child policy effective since 2016. A two-child policy replaced the one-child policy written into the constitution in 1982 and was quickly replaced by a three-child policy in 2021 to address the continuing ageing issue in China. Caught between these moments, this segment of the promo video tells a story where the female protagonist executes her reproductive agency and, with full support of her husband, decides to get an MBA degree before carrying a second child. This storytelling is not that different from the 2016 TVC in that they both naturalize, instead of interrogating, the institution of marriage and motherhood as harmoniously integrated into an autonomous modern womanhood whereby women’s bodies, when strategized ‘properly’, can bring familial and socioeconomic benefits. However, as one Weibo user comments under the promo video, ‘What women need is the freedom of not bearing children, not how many children to bear’. The idealized concept of ‘childbearing is up to me’ that Yasmin promotes, yet again, is an example of femvertising with Chinese characteristics that grafts feminist rhetoric onto the state project of postfeminism.

Conclusion: Coexisting (Post)feminisms and the Same-old Tricks of (Pseudo) empowerment The backlash against Yasmin is an epitome of when femvertising and reproductive politics intersect in modern China and the co-existence of competing discourses of neoliberal feminism and postfeminism in the Chinese digital public sphere. Yasmin’s 2016 TVC and its 2020 promotional video exemplify more expected formulations of femvertising through constructing an ideal of autonomous modern womanhood and maneuvering a feminine transformation narrative on the basis of the self-­ governance of one’s ovary and hormones. The failure of the 2020 TVC, while similarly encouraging women to take the benefits from managing one’s body and sexuality, attests to the importance of a women-centered narrative and the often-downplayed significance of a tacit state-(post-) feminist relationship for femvertising practitioners in modern China. Moreover, the overtone of Yasmin’s commercial narratives, as with other contraceptive femvertisements, always inevitably relies on simultaneously decomposing and objectifying the body by virtue of consuming Yasmin to

4  EMPOWERMENT IN THE PILLS: REPRODUCTIVE RIGHTS… 

69

enable one to mobilize their sexual and reproductive agency for material and immaterial gains. Despite this central logic, the 2016 TVC is still overwhelmingly well-received by the same audience harshly condemning the 2020 TVC for being men-pleasing and sexualizing the female protagonist. Within the context of a neoliberal pseudo-feminist media environment, Chinese women are encouraged to develop interdependent gender relations while focusing on self-empowering entrepreneurial and beauty endeavors as ‘quick’ solutions to gender inequality.37 This dual approach to pursuing womanhood, simultaneously (self-deceptively) autonomous and dependent,38 has deepened the interweaving of China’s heteropatriarchal values, state-sanctioned postfeminist project and market-­ party-­state relations, thus making this kind of femvertising campaigns exceptionally difficult to grasp by the root.

Notes 1. BBDO New York, ‘BBDO Beijing Isn’t Settling for Second Best in New Bayer Pharma Campaign’, Little Black Book (9 November 2016), https:// www.lbbonline.com/news/bbdo-­beijing-­isnt-­settling-­for-­second-­best-­in-­ new-­bayer-­pharma-­campaign (accessed 24 February 2021). 2. Fei Qiao and Ye Wang, ‘The Myths of Beauty, Age, and Marriage: Femvertising by Masstige Cosmetic Brands in the Chinese Market’, Social Semiotics, 6 November 2019, 4. 3. BBDO New York, ‘BBDO Beijing’. 4. Qiao and Wang, ‘The Myths of Beauty, Age, and Marriage’, 2. 5. The official English translation embedded in the commercial video released by Yasmin does not well reflect the actual Chinese language used by voiceover. For example, the official translation given for this line is ‘I won’t be defined by “marriage”. I will create my own empire as well’. While the English translation implies a critique of marriage by framing it as a social institution essentializing the ways women are defined, the actual Chinese line orients towards simply stating the fact that women get married with an implication that marriage is essential for women: ‘I am not simply going to marry’ (wo buzhi yao jiaren). Since my study focuses on how Chinese audience receives Yasmin commercials, I choose not to engage with the official English translation and instead use my own translation to better capture the connotation and rhetorical pattern of the original Chinese voiceover. The commercial with Chinese and English subtitles can be found here: Siyuan Li, ‘Beyond Good Enough  – Yasmin Concept Video 不止于此’, YouTube (29 September 2016), https://www.youtube.com/watch?v= JQ3wM-­mA4eY (accessed 24 February 2021).

70 

R. LIU

6. Cara Wallis and Yongrong Shen, ‘The SK-II #changedestiny Campaign and the Limits of Commodity Activism for Women’s Equality in Neo/ Non-­Liberal China’, Critical Studies in Media Communication 35, no. 4 (8 August 2018): 376–89; Qiao and Wang, ‘The Myths of Beauty, Age, and Marriage’. 7. Eric P.H. Li, Hyun Jeong Min, and Russell W. Belk, ‘Skin Lightening and Beauty in Four Asian Cultures’, ed. Angela Y. Lee and Dilip Soman, NA – Advances in Consumer Research 35 (2008): 444–49; Meng Zhang, ‘A Chinese Beauty Story: How College Women in China Negotiate Beauty, Body Image, and Mass Media’, Chinese Journal of Communication 5, no. 4 (2012): 437–54. 8. Altman Yuzhu Peng, ‘Neoliberal Feminism, Gender Relations, and a Feminized Male Ideal in China: A Critical Discourse Analysis of Mimeng ’s WeChat Posts’, Feminist Media Studies 21, no. 1 (2 January 2021): 115–31; Altman Yuzhu Peng, A Feminist Reading of China’s Digital Public Sphere (Cham: Springer International Publishing, 2020); Angela Xiao Wu and Yige Dong, ‘What Is Made-in-China Feminism(s)? Gender Discontent and Class Friction in Post-Socialist China’, Critical Asian Studies 51, no. 4 (2 October 2019): 471–92; Harriet Evans, ‘Sexed Bodies, Sexualized Identities, and the Limits of Gender’, China Information 22, no. 2 (2008): 361–86. 9. Shu-Mei Shih, ‘Towards an Ethics of Transnational Encounter, or “When” Does a “Chinese” Woman Become a “Feminist”?’, Differences 13, no. 2 (1 January 2002): 11; Sara Liao, ‘Wang Hong Fashion Culture and the Postfeminist Time in China’, Fashion Theory, 15 July 2019, 8. 10. Xu Duan, ‘“The Big Women”: A Textual Analysis of Chinese Viewers’ Perception toward Femvertising Vlogs’, Global Media and China 5, no. 3 (1 September 2020): 229; Peng, ‘Neoliberal Feminism, Gender Relations, and a Feminized Male Ideal in China’; Lisa Rofel, Desiring China: Experiments in Neoliberalism, Sexuality, and Public Culture, Perverse Modernities (Durham: Duke University Press, 2007). 11. The original Weibo post can be found: https://weibo.com/2219832827/ J6iCg4XOI. 12. Joel Gwynne, ‘The Girls of Zeta: Sororities, Ideal Femininity and the Makeover Paradigm in The House Bunny’, in Postfeminism and Contemporary Hollywood Cinema, ed. Joel Gwynne and Nadine Muller (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 60–77; Sarah Gilligan, ‘Performing Postfeminist Identities: Gender, Costume, and Transformation in Teen Cinema’, in Women on Screen: Feminism and Femininity in Visual Culture, ed. Melanie Waters (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 167–81.

4  EMPOWERMENT IN THE PILLS: REPRODUCTIVE RIGHTS… 

71

13. Jinke Li et al., ‘A Review of Contraceptive Practices among Married and Unmarried Women in China from 1982 to 2010’, The European Journal of Contraception & Reproductive Health Care 18, no. 3 (June 2013): 148–58. 14. Shih, ‘Towards an Ethics of Transnational Encounter’, 8. 15. Fan Yang, ‘Post-Feminism and Chick Flicks in China: Subjects, Discursive Origin and New Gender Norms’, Feminist Media Studies, 9 July 2020, 1–16; Liao, ‘Wang Hong Fashion Culture and the Postfeminist Time in China’. 16. Crystal Abidin and Joel Gwynne, ‘Entrepreneurial Selves, Feminine Corporeality and Lifestyle Blogging in Singapore’, Asian Journal of Social Science 45, no. 4–5 (2017): 385–408; Jie Yang, ‘Nennu and Shunu: Gender, Body Politics, and the Beauty Economy in China’, Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 36, no. 2 (2011): 333–57; Gary Xu and Susan Feiner, ‘Meinü Jingji/China’s Beauty Economy: Buying Looks, Shifting Value, and Changing Place’, Feminist Economics 13, no. 3–4 (2007): 307–23; Jin Lee and Claire Shinhea Lee, ‘Feeling Bad Can Be Good?: Audience Research on Korean Reality Makeover Shows, Get It Beauty and The Body Show’, Critical Studies in Media Communication 34, no. 3 (27 May 2017): 250–63. 17. Liao, ‘Wang Hong Fashion Culture and the Postfeminist Time in China’, 9; Irene Eber, ‘Images of Women in Recent Chinese Fiction: Do Women Hold up Half the Sky?’, Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 2, no. 1 (1976): 24–34; Mayfair Mei-hui Yang, ‘From Gender Erasure to Gender Difference: State Feminism, Consumer Sexuality, and Women’s Public Sphere in China’, in Spaces of Their Own: Women’s Public Sphere in Transnational China (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1999), 35–67. 18. Stella Qiu and Christian Shepherd, ‘In China, Retailers Cash in on “She” Economy for Women’s Day’, Reuters (8 March 2018), https://www. reuters.com/article/us-­womens-­day-­china/in-­china-­r etailers-­cash-­in-­ on-­she-­economy-­for-­womens-­day-­idUSKCN1GK0OS (accessed 28 June 2021). 19. Geng Cui and Xiaoyan Yang, ‘Responses of Chinese Consumers to Sex Appeals in International Advertising: A Test of Congruency Theory’, Journal of Global Marketing 22, no. 3 (2009): 229–45; Rofel, Desiring China; Chengting Mao, ‘Feminist Activism via Social Media in China’, Asian Journal of Women’s Studies 26, no. 2 (2 April 2020): 245–58; Xiao Han, ‘Searching for an Online Space for Feminism? The Chinese Feminist Group Gender Watch Women’s Voice and Its Changing Approaches to Online Misogyny’, Feminist Media Studies 18, no. 4 (4 July 2018): 734–49.

72 

R. LIU

20. Yun Shao, Fabrice Desmarais, and C.  Kay Weaver, ‘Chinese Advertising Practitioners’ Conceptualisation of Gender Representation’, International Journal of Advertising 33, no. 2 (January 2014): 329–50. 21. Baoqi Su and Darryl R.  J. Macer, ‘A Sense of Autonomy Is Preserved under Chinese Reproductive Policies’, New Genetics and Society 24, no. 1 (1 April 2005): 15–29. 22. Diane Negra and Yvonne Tasker, ‘Introduction: Feminist Politics and Postfeminist Culture’, in Interrogating Postfeminism: Gender and the Politics of Popular Culture (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007), 1–27; Angela McRobbie, ‘Post-feminism and Popular Culture’, Feminist Media Studies 4, no. 3 (2004): 255–64. 23. Peter Zarrow, ‘He Zhen and Anarcho-Feminism in China’, The Journal of Asian Studies 47, no. 4 (1988): 796–813; Charlotte L. Beahan, ‘Feminism and Nationalism in the Chinese Women’s Press, 1902-1911’, Modern China 1, no. 4 (1 October 1975): 379–416. 24. Zheng Wang, Finding Women in the State: A Socialist Feminist Revolution in the People’s Republic of China, 1949-1964 (Oakland, California: University of California Press, 2017). 25. Liao, ‘Wang Hong Fashion Culture and the Postfeminist Time in China’. 26. Phoebe Zhang and Laurie Chen, ‘The Emergence and Evolution of China’s Internet Warriors Going to Battle over Hong Kong Protests’. South China Morning Post (3 September 3 2019), https://www.scmp. com/news/china/society/article/3024223/emergence-­and-­evolution-­ chinas-­internet-­warriors (accessed 29 June 2021). 27. Zarrow, ‘He Zhen and Anarcho-Feminism in China’, 796–97. 28. Han, ‘Searching for an Online Space for Feminism?’; Wang Zheng, ‘Detention of the Feminist Five in China’, Feminist Studies 41, no. 2 (2015): 476–82; Altman Peng, ‘Digital Nationalism vs. Gender Politics in Post-­Reform China: Gender-Issue Debates on Zhihu’, Global Media and Communication, 2020; Yalan Huang, ‘War on Women: Interlocking Conflicts within The Vagina Monologues in China’, Asian Journal of Communication 26, no. 5 (2 September 2016): 466–84. 29. Sarah Banet-Weiser and Roopali Mukherjee, ‘Introduction: Commodity Activism in Neoliberal Times’, in Commodity Activism: Cultural Resistance in Neoliberal Times, ed. Roopali Mukherjee and Sarah Banet-Weiser, Critical Cultural Communication (New York: New York University Press, 2012), 1–17. 30. Karl Gerth, China Made: Consumer Culture and the Creation of the Nation, 224 (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard Univ. Press, 2003); Karl Gerth, ‘Consumption and Nationalism: China’, in The Oxford Handbook of the History of Consumption, ed. Frank Trentmann, vol. 1 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 419–33.

4  EMPOWERMENT IN THE PILLS: REPRODUCTIVE RIGHTS… 

73

31. Peng, ‘Neoliberal Feminism, Gender Relations, and a Feminized Male Ideal in China’. 32. Fengshu Liu, ‘Chinese Young Men’s Construction of Exemplary Masculinity: The Hegemony of Chenggong’, Men and Masculinities 22, no. 2 (2019): 294–316. 33. Sarah Banet-Weiser, Rosalind Gill, and Catherine Rottenberg, ‘Postfeminism, Popular Feminism and Neoliberal Feminism? Sarah Banet-­ Weiser, Rosalind Gill and Catherine Rottenberg in Conversation’, Feminist Theory 21, no. 1 (1 January 2020): 3–24. 34. Sarah Banet-Weiser, Empowered: Popular Feminism and Popular Misogyny (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2018). 35. Rofel, Desiring China; Huang, ‘War on Women’; Peng, ‘Digital Nationalism vs. Gender Politics in Post-Reform China’. 36. Duan, ‘“The Big Women”’; Yang, ‘Post-Feminism and Chick Flicks in China’; Peng, A Feminist Reading of China’s Digital Public Sphere. 37. Peng, ‘Neoliberal Feminism, Gender Relations, and a Feminized Male Ideal in China’; Liao, ‘Wang Hong Fashion Culture and the Postfeminist Time in China’; Duan, ‘“The Big Women”’. 38. Fengshu Liu, ‘From Degendering to (Re)Gendering the Self: Chinese Youth Negotiating Modern Womanhood’, Gender and Education 26, no. 1 (2 January 2014): 18–34.

CHAPTER 5

Glocalization, Marketization and Politicisation: Femvertising at a Crossroad in China Yan Wu

The term ‘femvertising’, or female empowerment advertising, was first used at SheKnows Media Advertising Week panel in 2014.1 As an integrated marketing communication strategy, femvertising injects empowerment discourse in advertising and distinguishes itself as a unique media genre. Femvertising campaigns such as Dove’s the Real Beauty (2004) challenge female stereotypes and have a positive impact on consumers’ emotional connection to brands.2 Before the introduction of the term ‘femvertising’, other terms such as ‘commodity feminism’3 and ‘feminist consumerism’4 were used to describe marketing strategy focusing on pro-­ feminist brand promotion communication practices. The various forms of ‘marketplace feminism’5 shares the similar feature with which feminism is commercialised as a marketing tool without collective political movement and social aims.6

Y. Wu (*) Swansea University, Swansea, UK e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 J. Gwynne (ed.), The Cultural Politics of Femvertising, Palgrave Studies in (Re)Presenting Gender, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-99154-8_5

75

76 

Y. WU

This chapter aims to investigate an under-researched area of Chinese femvertising. The author sourced Advertising Museum of China database and analysed 6 commercials released between 1995 to 2019 on the theme of ‘women’, ‘female’ ‘women + advertisement’, ‘care and love for women’ (guān ài nǚ xìng). Via an investigation into how feminism serves the global market and local political culture, the chapter concludes that the ideological mechanics of China’s state feminism and the global Third Wave feminist movement provide endorsement for female empowerment in certain aspects of gender equality in civic life without fundamentally challenging the patriarchal political and cultural system. Femvertising practices in China focus on a set of codes surrounding relational female liberation, which shows a compromised effort of individual empowerment mediated by local political and cultural traditions.

Feminism and Femvertising in China: The Political, Cultural, Economic, and Professional Contexts From a political perspective, feminism in China reflects how global social movement concepts are reimagined and practiced locally and how the Communist Party of China (CPC) has incorporated elements of state feminism in liberating women while rejecting the influence of the global Third Wave.7 Even since the establishment of the People’s Republic of China in 1949, the CPC has promoted a form of state feminism. The 1954 Constitution guaranteed women’s equal rights in Article 86: ‘Women enjoy the same rights as men in participating in the political, economic, cultural, social and familial lives. Marriage, family, mothers and children are protected by the State’.8 All-China Women’s Federation, a state-­ sponsored organization, has been an official organization in promoting gender equality via its state-approved newspaper Chinese Women’s Daily. This top-down state feminism does enable women’s equal access to civic life. In the most recent UN Gender Inequality Index, China was listed 86 out of 189 countries as one of the ‘high human development countries’ based on its notable achievements of gender equalities in health, education, political representation, economic activities, etc.9 However, the CPC treats ‘feminism’ with suspicion and regards it as too ‘Western, narrow and bourgeois’ and therefore ‘gender equality’, instead of female empowerment, was used in official terminology, reflecting ‘the control of women by an authoritarian socialist patriarchy’.10 The

5  GLOCALIZATION, MARKETIZATION AND POLITICISATION… 

77

Fourth UN Conference on Women in Beijing in 1995 marked a turning point in the history of Chinese feminism, signalling the connections between Chinese feminism and the Third Wave. As Wang and Zhang point out, ‘the conference provided an opportunity for Chinese feminists to legitimate NGOs in China [and] provided conceptual framework for Chinese feminist activists [who are] eager to break away from or transform a Marxist theory of “equality between men and women”’.11 This transformation took place in the same period when China became increasingly incorporated into the world economy, globalization brought about convergent lifestyle, and digitalization altered civic participation and social movement worldwide. Chinese feminist NGOs have experienced a wave of development and facilitated public embracement of transnational feminists’ concepts. Digital media in particular enabled Chinese young feminists to be better connected to the world and design their own empowerment strategies, which could potentially threaten the state control. Young feminists used Weibo (the Chinese equivalent to Twitter), and WeChat (the Chinese equivalent to WhatsApp) as tools for ‘feminist awaking’ and aimed to transform their encounters with sexism, discrimination and patriarchal values in everyday life.12 Such empowerment strategies were met with a government crackdown and the banning of feminist NGOs from social media platforms. The most prominent recent example was the ‘feminist five’ group,13 signalling a conflictual bifurcation of Chinese feminism between the official discourse and the rebellious grassroots discourse. From an economic perspective, the Communist ideology remains committed to the patriarchal economic structure.14 Judith Stacey notes that patriarchal family unit is the basis for Communist collective economy, which reinforces a man’s position as head of the kinship family and therefore the holder of the collective economic power.15 In many ways the state feminism is failing women as a disadvantaged social group, which has been evidenced in ‘high unemployment, poor labour conditions, lack of protection for rural migrants, the commercialisation […] of femininity, and ultimately the erasure of the problem of gender inequality from public domain’.16 China’s economic reforms taking off in the late 1970s marked the “semi-takeover” of global capitalism and had the effect of “re-energising China’s capitalist revolution”.17 The ‘socialist market economy’ was adopted in 1992, paving way for China’s membership in global economic organizations, and opening the country to Western style consumerism. As

78 

Y. WU

Zhao and Belk record, Chinese consumers started enjoying being able to access to a wide range of consumer goods from both home and aboard, not without the ‘widespread public confusion about the apparent inconsistency between a communist legacy emphasizing austerity and equalitarianism and an emerging consumerist ethos celebrating individual hedonism and distinction seeking through consumption’.18 Significantly, the rising middle class is eager to construct its identity through purchasing power, driven by the desire for global cosmopolitan membership as well as luxury goods for the sake of prestige.19 The impact of the globalisation and market economy on Chinese women is multifarious. On the one hand, women living in poverty and discrimination are presented with opportunities for improving life chances; on the other hand, market economy co-exists with the patriarchal social structure and can even reinforce patriarchal cultural values.20 Chinese femininity is shaped culturally as moral codes regulating individuals’ relations to her family and society.21 Among the ‘five relationships’ as described by Confucians, husband/wife relationship entails hierarchy, which is mirrored accordingly in the ruler/subject relationship in society.22 The anti-feudal revolution led by the CPC liberated women to a degree, but had not challenged Confucian cultural values.23 The incorporation of Chinese feminism into the global feminist movement in the 1990s somewhat enabled cultural transformations in China, offering an opportunity for feminists to contest the patriarchal culture. Feminist NGOs have been organized at the grassroot level to tackle issues such as domestic violence; provide vocational and leadership training among women; establish women’s and gender studies programs in universities and organize women-centred cultural productions such as the Chinese version of the Vagina Monologues.24 In the media sector, although Chinese media are still under the constant surveillance from the government, they have obtained a certain amount of financial independence to meet the audience market demand.25 Advertising has become the backbone of media economy since the late 1970s, taking place under the universal push towards globalisation, privatisation and deregulation in the communication field.26 As Jing Wang observes, despite its fast growth, the advertising industry has been balancing precariously as a corporate sector situated within the Communist media system, facing the ‘paradoxical responses of different local players within the sector to global advertising practices’.27

5  GLOCALIZATION, MARKETIZATION AND POLITICISATION… 

79

Scholarly interest in gender and advertisements is rooted in the belief that advertisements sell not only products, but also manufactured identities and ideology.28 Within such a framework, the selective representation of values from society in gendered advertisements offers a ‘hyper ritualization of the world’,29 which presents a system of hierarchy in which certain values are emphasized and others are suppressed. By presenting a kind of ‘realism’ conforming to the logics of market and commercialism, the advertising industry moulds consumers’ perception of accepted gender identities, and could reinforce the status quo of the patriarchal society.30 In China, traditional women’s interests based on conventional femininity have been actively centralized in advertising to reinforce the subordinate position of women under patriarchy ideology. Female consumers are addressed by media as representatives of the “category of women,” defined in terms of embodied difference (such as maintenance of femininity), the gendered division of labour (such as childcare), or romantic pursuits (such as heterosexual relationships).31 Careers for women are represented as dull, anti-social, punitive, and threatening to the ‘real’ happiness associated with relationship and family.32 The dominant female representation in Chinese advertisement includes the following three constructions of feminine identity.33 The first is the construction of nurturing mothers and loving wives – women who represent an idealized middle-class housewife identity. They are dependent on men, featured with domestic responsibilities and traditional gender virtues. The second is the construction of beautiful divas or ‘flower vases’ – women who are young, slender and glamourous. The third is the construction of urban sophisticates – women living in metropolitan cities and enjoying comfort and luxurious living under the influence of globalization. Beyond these stereotypes, strong women who are ‘talented, ambitious and independent’ do exist in advertisements, but the percentage of such representation is small (12%).34 In particular, very few women are shown as professionals and women rarely appear in advertisement featuring technology related products.35 There has been a small body of literature on Chinese femvertising. Duan’s research examines a femvertising vlogger’s social media postings and argues that femvertising practices promote the myth of self-­ empowerment through consumption.36 Teng et  al.’s study of consumer responses to femvertising concludes that women’s empowerment messages can enhance positive attitudes towards the brand and increase the desire to purchase the products.37 Qiao and Wang’s study of SK-II’s 2016

80 

Y. WU

femvertising film Marriage Market Takeover reveals the inauthenticity of the ‘independence’ or ‘freedom’ message in the film, and argues that visual signs comply with the stereotypes of women’s beauty, age and gender roles.38 Despite the growing academic interest in Chinese femvertising, the Chinese translation of femvertising (nǚxìng zhǔyì gua ̆nggào or nǚquán zhǔyì gua ̆nggào) has not been used in the advertising industry. In fact, the industry has been carefully steering away from the politically sensitive phrase of ‘feminism’ or ‘female empowerment’. The recently promulgated Advertising Law 2015 Article 3 explicitly stipulates that the content of advertising must ‘meet the requirement of building Socialist Spiritual Civilization and promoting excellent traditional Chinese culture’.39 People’s Daily, the CPC organ published an opinion piece in 2015 criticising the inauthentic western style femvertising in promoting consumerism in China. The author argues that real feminists ‘ask for “rights”, not “power”; ask for equality, not the enslavement of the other gender’,40 which echoes strongly with the national policy emphasizing gender equality instead of female empowerment. Identifying the evident gaps in current literature, this chapter examines the articulation of feminist subjectivity in six female-centred advertisements by considering the following research questions: What is the typology of feminist subjectivity as represented in these advertisements? In what ways have local political and cultural values shaped the global brands’ femversiting campaigns?

Methodology This research takes a qualitative approach in examining the feminist discourse in contemporary advertisements in China. Samples were selected from the audio-visual advertisement category from the Advertising Museum of China archive 1995–2019. For the purpose of researching how commercial brands engage with local political culture, the author eliminated publicity propaganda from the state media campaigns. Key word search ‘feminist/feminism advertisement’ (nǚxìng zhǔyì guănggào or nǚquán zhǔyì guănggào) generated no results, which to a degree reflects the politically sensitive nature of feminism in China. The following search terms: ‘women’, ‘women + advertisement’, and ‘care and love for women’ (guān ài nǚ xìng) were used and followed by a screening of the samples that focus on Chinese women as central character(s).

5  GLOCALIZATION, MARKETIZATION AND POLITICISATION… 

81

The following six short films were selected for analysis: Year

Title

1999 ‘No Hands’ 2007 2011

2012 2016

2018

Brand/Product

Adidas sports products Standing Up Whisper sanitary products Little V’s Diary Daktacort pharmaceutical products Nike: Li Na Nike Women sportswear Marriage SK-II skincare Market Takeover The woman Ant financial who plays with technology her phone

Company

Length (min/ second)

Character

Adidas AG (Germany) Procter & Gamble (US) Xian Janssen Pharmaceutical Ltd. Nike, Inc. (US)

00′35″

Sun Wen

00′ 30″

Multiple

01′56″

Model

01′01″

Li Nan

Procter & Gamble (US)

04′21″

Multiple

Ant Group

04′02″

Ma Huijuan

Multimodal analysis was applied to the study of the six commercials as audio-visual media employs multiple modes simultaneously in constructing meaning. The multimodal approach firstly considers how signs are used in combination, and how visual elements such as symbols, images and soundtracks work in combination as the metaphorical associations that connotate particular ideas,41 revealing the choices made by the producer of the text.42 By bringing together signs and their connotations, visual media (including advertising) shape a particular message and create contemporary ‘myths’.43 Secondly, narratology is used to offer ‘a critical vantage point’44 in the analysis. In particular, Tzvetan Todorov’s seminal work on the role of equilibrium as ‘existence of a stable but not static relation between the members of a society’ in narrative structure provides the guiding framework of analysis.45 When the plot moves from one equilibrium to another, narrative structure create ‘a process of degeneration and a process of improvement’.46 Following the shifting narrative structure, television commercials utilize audiovisual codes to provide ‘comparison and augment’, illustrating the products’ beneficial effects, while promoting a particular set of ideologies.47 Via an examination of the expression of feminist subjectivity in these commercials, this chapter maps out the typologies of feminist

82 

Y. WU

subjectivity in contemporary Chinese femvertising campaigns and scrutinize how local political and cultural values shape the global brands’ marketing communication.

Findings Strong, Ambitious and Talented Women: Adidas (1999); Nike (2012) Both Adidas and Nike’s advertisements feature celebrated Chinese female athletes sponsored by the brands respectively. Female athletes in China outperform their male counterparts in almost every discipline, yet female athletes in general earn less and receive less sponsorship.48 By featuring strong, ambitious, and talented female athletes, these brands do not only support elite sportswomen but also challenge the cultural stereotypes associated with conventional feminine beauty. Adidas’ ad was released immediately after the national women’s football team’s success as runners-up at 1999 FIFA women’s World Cup. The ad focuses on team Captain Sun Wen who is one of the world’s all-time greatest players. The opening scene features Sun and her family from her childhood. Sun was asked by a male family member to ‘catch the ball by hands’, but each time, she headed the ball back powerfully, displaying raw talents. The film quickly flash-forwards to 1999 showing Sun in action, heading a goal in the semi-final against the US team, and ends on a freeze-­ frame on the product slogan ‘Forever Sport’. The 35-second short film features Sun as the hero travelling through the story time from childhood to adulthood, achieving her professional climax. Despite the lack of explicit female empowerment slogan, this ad celebrates a female character who is strong, talented, determined, achieved, and not following instructions from a male. In a similar fashion, Nike’s 2012 advertisement features tennis player Li Na who became the first Asian tennis player winning a Grand Slam singles event at the French Open in 2011 and rose to world top 10 in ranking. Different from Adidas’ silence heroine, Nike’s film is built upon Li narrating her own story: To be in the top 10 [of WTA ranking], has always been my dream, so I put up with injuries and illness and a really tough training schedule. And when I finally achieved it, I felt that all the effort I’d put in was worth it. But now,

5  GLOCALIZATION, MARKETIZATION AND POLITICISATION… 

83

I’m probably under even more pressure than before. I have to practice harder and put in more effort in order to maintain my ranking. […] I believe everyone has a goal. As you strive to achieve it, you must continue to work hard until you’ve reached it.

The story Li narrates, juxtaposed with scenes of Li training and playing, undercuts values associated with traditional gender roles found in advertisement. Li’s role demonstrates ambition, diligence, and physical and mental strength. In particular, the film features several close-ups of Li’s muscular, toned body covered in perspiration, which contradicts strongly the fair-skinned, slender, and glamorous image of Chinese diva or ‘flower vase’ in advertisement.49 Modern, Confident and Self-loving Women: Whisper (2007); Xi’an Janssen (2017) ‘Modern women’,50 ‘new women’,51 or ‘urban sophisticates’52 are all used to describe a young generation of women who are well-educated, financially independent, and enlightened by feminist ideas. Media representation of such a demographic often shows their resistance to the traditional culturally defined femininity under the influence of globalization.53 Whisper’s ad combats period shame and Xi’an Janssen’s ad promotes female hygiene, both targeting a young generation of female consumers who are not afraid of openly discussing menstruation and sexual health. The representation of contemporary young women in these ads, however, shows a mixed message of embracing contemporary feminist ideas while preserving traditional femininity. Whisper’s 2007 ad features multiple young female models. The film starts with a scene featuring three young women riding bikes uphill and standing on the top of a mountain to enjoy the urban landscape below. A female voice-over narrates, ‘Stand up, I want to see further’. Scene two features a young woman at a lecture hall, standing up and challenging the elderly male professor. The same female voice-over narrates, ‘There’s nothing fearful about speaking your mind’. The first two scenes evidently demonstrate messages of female empowerment and challenge the patriarchal power relationship, echoing the brand values of unleashing women’s potential.54 The three young women’s clothing in particular includes hat, trouser braces, blouse, shirt and tie, exhibiting strong visual symbolics of being gender neutral or female masculinity.

84 

Y. WU

However, the third scene of a wedding surprisingly reverts back to conventional femininity. The scene starts with a shot of a bride throwing the bouquet in the air, followed by a medium shot of the three women standing up from guest seats, running after the bouquet, and ends with one of them catching it. The same female voice-over is heard: ‘Sitting there, you can only admire others; I want to stand up and get my own opportunity’. The film ends with a freeze-frame of Whisper’s new line of sanitary products with the narrator’s voiceover ‘Let’s stand up together, beautifully’. Various conventional codes associated with traditional femininity are detected from this scene including the narrative of romance emphasizing the importance of heterosexual marriage; personal code stressing competitive individualism; and the salience of beauty within the message accentuating that appearance is utmost important.55 Xi’an Janssen’s Little V’s Diary is revolutionary in the sense that it is the first advertisement explicitly discussing female vaginal health and promoting self-love and sex positivity. The short film uses the first-person narrative androgenizing vagina: I am not part of your external physical appearance. I love you deep down. We are never apart, but sometimes we seem to be miles away. In your eyes, I’m uncomplicated, but sophisticated. I am the source of your charm, but also the abyss of your sins. I make you proud sometimes, but embarrass you at others. I’m gentle and lovely, but wild and untameable. Just like this, we experience happiness and pains in life. I am your little V. Give me love, you will gain happiness and joy in return.

The film is imbued with signs and symbols including white colour, lotus flower, animals, brown rot in the peach connotating sexual purity, enjoyment, temptation, and vaginal disease respectively. The use of mirror images in the film creates perfect symmetrical reflection of the model, symbolizing the unity of self and inner self (in this case, the vagina). The door is symbolic in that the female protagonist (the model) walks out of the door at the opening scene and returns through the door before reuniting with her inner self in the final scene.This taboo-breaking film at the same time shows its limits. The use of English letter V for vagina (instead of the Chinese term yı ̄n dào) as the key word appeals to young urban professionals who are familiar with English language and western culture, while avoiding offending audiences who might disapprove the open discussion of sex-related issues. Meanwhile, despite the efforts made in this

5  GLOCALIZATION, MARKETIZATION AND POLITICISATION… 

85

film to celebrate sex positivity and vagina pride, it is at the same time regards vagina as a source of embarrassment and even ‘sins’. The first-­ person narrative of ‘abyss of sin’ was juxtaposed with a nightclub scene with flames flaring in the background – triggering natural association with hell and punitive suffering, demonstrating a persistent conversative viewpoint on women’s lack of chastity. Strong-Willed and Rebellious Women: SK-II (2016); Ant Financial (2018) SK-II’s Marriage Market Takeover tackles an issue of marriage discrimination against professional women in China. Since its release on 6 April 2016, SK-II ad attracted over 1.4 million online views and thousands of comments on Chinese social media platforms in two days with majority of the internet users supporting the ‘leftover women’.56 The documentary-­ styled commercial starts with the observation of state of disequilibrium featuring nondiegetic soundtracks of parents urging the female protagonists to get married. The scene ends with the voice-over: ‘you are now a leftover woman (Shèng Nǚ)!’ The ‘leftover’ carries a strong patriarchal ideology in which women are treated as objects to be chosen or even purchased by men on the marriage market. The search for a new equilibrium, or the attempt to repair the disruption, starts with the scene in which female protagonists provide their own understanding of life, career, marriage, and the label of ‘leftover women’. The female characters are shown as well-educated, professionally successful, and enjoying cosmopolitan life, friendship and even single womanhood. The documentary records these women’s awoken feminist consciousness with self-fulfilment, belief in making their own choices, and the consequential resistance to marriage shaming. The film ends with the re-establishment of a new equilibrium when the female characters go to People’s Park marriage market57 in Shanghai to communicate their ideas to their parents. The marriage market was taken over by large-sized posters celebrating strong career women. One poster featuring Li Yuxuan (the only named character in the film) reads, ‘I don’t want to get married for the sake of marriage’. The new equilibrium was achieved when parents choose to accept their daughters’ choices, visualized in the scenes in which parents and daughter locked in an embrace. The film ends with one of the ‘leftover’ women summarising herself as ‘confident, independent, and life-loving’.

86 

Y. WU

The film evidently demonstrates contemporary Chinese women’s resistance to the conservative cultural tradition viewing women’s value only in marriage. However, the choice of pursuing personal freedom is not unreservedly celebrated. Instead, this choice is carefully evaluated and strategically balanced against familial responsibilities. One ‘leftover’ woman confessed: ‘For Chinese children, filial piety (xiào) is the ultimate respect you could show to your parents. Choosing not to get married is a lack of filial piety (bú xiào) …. Maybe I’m too selfish. I want to tell them [parents]: “I am sorry!”’ before bursting into tears on camera. Despite the ‘happy ending’, the film highlights two mothers’ comments in the final scene. One mother says, ‘Mum will always support you till you find the right one in your life’. Another adds, ‘Leftover women are successful women. Leftover men should make more efforts [in winning their hearts]’ even though her daughter in the previous scene stating: ‘I’m free and I enjoy my single womanhood’. The commercial therefore concludes with an ambiguous message—it indicates that despite their resistance, the ultimate destination for these ‘leftover women’ is still marriage yet makes the point that ‘leftover men’ should be equally held responsible for their inability to secure the affections of women. The less well-known The Woman Who Plays with Her Phone by Ant Financial is a rare femvertising film casting the rebellious character in the rural setting. The film starts with the nondiegetic sounds codes from the nameless female character, narrating her life story: That day, I stopped going to school. I was eager to shape my life, but in the end, I was shaped by life. I was turned into someone’s wife, and someone’s mother. My name was forgotten.

The opening scene shows the disruption of equilibrium and presents a serious social problem of high dropout rate of schoolgirls in rural China. The search for a new equilibrium is conducted by the protagonist via a series of activities to achieve personal transformation. She received a phone as gift from her family: I have my first ever smartphone in life. It means communication tools for others, but for me, it brings all the sunshine into my life. I play with it when I work or break. I am on my phone day and night. I even made special trips to the nearby town to get free Wi-Fi. I turned into a weirdo on the phone in other people’s eyes.

5  GLOCALIZATION, MARKETIZATION AND POLITICISATION… 

87

The character is portrayed as rebellious as her activities undercut the traditional feminine values which belong to a devoted wife and a caring mother. The film features a scene showing family conflict when her husband bellows, ‘Don’t forget that you are a peasant. You only care about playing on your mobile phone now!’The first-person narration continues to portray a lonely heroine offline, but an emerging writer online. She is perceived as a ‘weirdo’ by her fellow villagers but is nevertheless supported by her readers from the social networking website Qzone (the Chinese equivalent to MSN space) where she posts her blog articles regularly. Her readers from various parts of China have donated money to buy her books, mobile phones and unlimited data to support her.58 Her quest for identity is through writing: My writing dream granted me a kingdom. In that kingdom, there exists no discrimination or sympathy. Everyone is noble and free, holding their heads high. […] Finally, it came the day when the words in my mobile phone turned into a book. I found the lost self, and my own name.

A medium shot is used to emphasize the female protagonist and her husband by giving them an equal presence on screen, enhancing interactive body language. She passes her book to him, as if she is seeking his approval. The camera zooms in, showing the book title and the name on the cover: Ma Huijuan, the name of the heroine. Ma’s quest concludes with the publication of her book and the establishment of her new identity as a writer. The new equilibrium celebrates this accomplishment in a restrained manner as Ma carries on her narration: ‘The Life goes on. My name is Ma Huijuan. I’m still that woman who plays with her phone all the time’. The film ends with a message: ‘female equality and development is the index of a society’s progress. Changes start from raising awareness and giving support’.

Discussion: Chinese Female Subjectivity at the Crossroad It is evident that the triumph of marketization and globalization has facilitated the dissemination of feminist ideas in China. Along with the rising economic power of women in almost every sector, rose the popularity of commercials celebrating female achievements, sex positivity, and autonomous choices. All six femvertising commercials focus on women as key

88 

Y. WU

characters, grant women narrative agency through devices such as voice-­ overs. Female characters are portrayed as talented, confident, strong, ambitious, determined, diligent, and self-loving. However, female empowerment discourse in femvertising is based on consumer citizenship, featured with inclusivity and exclusivity at the same time. At a price of £145 for a 40 ml Signs Up-lifter serum, SK-II products are high-end cosmetic luxury brand and are beyond the normal reach of average consumers. In challenging the marriage shaming of professional women in their 30s, the SK-II ad at the same time constructs a myth that the SK-II skin eliminates lines, wrinkles and the signs of time, appealing to the niche market. The beauty of the female protagonists emerges in the SK-II sponsored poster exhibition in the final scene. The use of sunshine is uplifting as well as enhancing the skin quality of the leftover women, making their faces slightly overexposed, which gives less visible detail of the texture and makes skin look smoother and more illuminating. Media, once again, becomes the site of “the production and reproduction of social division [that] are increasingly feminized” and reflect “how the social categories of class are now materialized through reference to the female body”.59 Meanwhile, Chinese local cultural practices and political control limit the discursive practice of female empowerment, resulting in limited expression of female subjectivity in femvertising. The limitations can be evidenced in the lack of representation of female bonding and an emphasis on family bonding in these advertisements. Female bonding is often a key theme in female-centred media text in the Anglo-American world.60 Femvertising campaigns in Anglo-American countries often deploy a narrative centring on multiple characters of various ethnic background, and contain plots where the characters become conscious of their own strength, push limits and regain confidence in conventional male-dominated areas. Both the Whisper and the SK-II commercials feature multiple female characters, but there is little interaction among the characters. The final scene in Whisper’s ad in which the three women fight for the bridal bouquet further reinforces competitive individualism as a female stereotype.61 For advertisements featuring a single character, the heroine is presented as achieving professional success through diligence and individual efforts. Ma Huijuan in Ant Financial film is particularly portrayed as eccentric and lonesome, epitomizing the courageous but lonely heroine who dares to challenge the status quo.

5  GLOCALIZATION, MARKETIZATION AND POLITICISATION… 

89

Family bonding, instead, is heightened in these commercials, constituting part of the female subjectivity. In the Adidas ad, the opening scene of Sun as a child playing football with a family member sets the tone for her future career success. In the SK-II ad, the quest narrative is built upon the heroines’ desire to communicate their ideas to their parents. This desire is so compelling that it propels the heroines into the narrative, and rewards them in the end with the acceptance of their lifestyle from their parents. In the Ant Financial ad, despite the scene showing conflict between the heroine and her husband, the husband is portrayed as ‘the donor’ who gives the heroine a ‘magical object’ (the smartphone) to achieve her special power and complete her quest.62 At 00′35″, the scene shows a close-up of a child’s hand passing a smartphone to Ma, ‘Mum, this phone is to you, from Dad’. Contrary to the plot narrative emphasizing spousal support and family bonding, Ma in fact revealed in several interviews that she bought herself the first mobile phone from selling vegetables as she believes that ‘owning a mobile phone is a woman’s rights to embrace freedom’.63 In this ad, Ma’s quest concludes with the publication of her first book, resulting in stronger family bonding. At 02′26″ into the film, the scene shows that Ma silently hands the book to her husband, and he takes the book off her hand with a sense of reverence, symbolising the resolve of the spousal conflicts. Family bonding is also reflected in the choice of language. The SK-II Chinese title is She Finally Goes to the Marriage Market, connotating that it is the daughters who are propelled by the desire to seek understanding from their parents while avoiding the rebellious connotation in the English title Marriage Market Takeover. In a similar fashion, Xi’an Jassen’s commercial uses the English letter V for vagina instead of the Chinese terminology to avoid the possible offense to audience for touching upon an issue conventionally known as cultural taboo.

Conclusion Despite the lack of formal employment of the term ‘femvertising’ in Chinese advertising industry, femvertising practice in reality started in 1999 and has offered a focal point for public discussion by breaking cultural taboos, raising awareness of social issues, and celebrating women’s talents, strength, and achievements. Via an examination of six female-centred commercials sampled from the Advertising Museum of China archive, the chapter concludes that there are three typologies represented regarding  female subjectivity in

90 

Y. WU

Chinese femvertising: (1) strong, ambitious and talented women; (2) modern, confident and self-loving women; and (3) strong-willed and rebellious women. By delivering pro-feminist messages, the global brands emotionally connect with the stakeholders by tapping into ‘an inner need to develop one’s full capabilities’,64 meeting the self-esteem characterised by sovereignty, success, and prestige. Female subjectivity articulated in these commercials constitutes part of the global feminist discourse emphasising women’s struggle against sexual abuse, patriarchal ideologies and continuing gender inequality. Nevertheless, values of individual choice, personal transformation, and consumer citizenship embedded in femvertising have fundamentally challenged the validity of a collective feminist identity, and dissolved the ground for coordinated activities for women’s empowerment and liberation. Furthermore, female subjectivity articulated in these commercials is at the same time a unique product under the influence of global feminist activism, China’s economic success, traditional cultural values and authoritarian political constraints. Chinese femvertising practice reveals how media institutions serve the global market values while localising the forms of femversiting expression. Via delivering female empowerment messages, femvertising can be used effectively to build intimacy with the potential consumers, establish brand loyalty and change attitudes in the long-term. Chinese femvertising commercials feature local characters and often employ a documentary style when narrating female protagonists’ journey to empowerment. The authentic nature of self-narrative and documentary recording heightens Chinese women’s unique position in the global feminist movement, with the goal of awaking a feminist consciousness. In featuring real life characters, these commercials also ensured that unconventional female beauty was represented and celebrated. In particular, the two athletes from the Adidas and Nike advertisements feature women in action. Their muscular and tone body, sweat-covered face without makeups undercut conventional feminine beauty norms. However, femvertising’ empowering potential is much limited. The regulating beauty ideology can still be detected from these commercials and women characters in femvertising are still represented as young, healthy, and fit. Similar to other technological means such as photoshops in magazine advertisement, these audio-visual advertisement features a careful manoeuvre of camera and the use of light resembles fashion photograph to enhance the characters’ youthfulness. The employment of fashion photograph in femvertising shows that the intention of beauty

5  GLOCALIZATION, MARKETIZATION AND POLITICISATION… 

91

products as well as visual media is to demonstrate that the ageing body ‘is a failed body that must be rejected, camouflaged, and technologically altered’.65 As McRobbie argues, the inauthenticity of commodity feminism lies in its ‘utilizing a faux-feminist language of “empowerment of women” so as to defuse, refute and disavow the likelihood of a new solidaristic vocabulary being invented which would challenge these emerging forms of gendered, racialized and class inequalities’.66 Studying Chinese femvertising cannot overlook the buttressing role of the state in proactively promoting a form of state-feminism which contradictorily co-exists with Confucian cultural values. By promoting a Confucianism-oriented value system emphasizing family harmony and filial piety, the ideological mechanics of Chinese state feminism could restrain or even punish autonomous grassroots feminist activism. The Chinese female subjectivity expressed in these commercials focuses on relational female empowerment which shows a compromised effort of individual empowerment mediated by patriarchal cultural tradition. Values emphasized in advertising are often based on the needs of social solidarity (i.e. love, family, kinship, etc.), which in itself could be seemingly ideologically neutral,67 but intrinsically pro status quo. Meanwhile, the rebellious female character suffers from the “lonely heroine syndrome”, relying on the transformation of distinct aspects of an individual’s life as the springboard to personal fulfilment and family harmony. Chinese femvertising practice, consequently, shows a compromised female subjectivity, carefully balanced among the pulling forces of market, politics, cultural traditions, and global influence. This chapter sheds new light on understanding femvertising in China through the prism of global, local, and political considerations. In summary, the global influence of feminist ideas is shown as a negotiation with local political culture in Chinese femvertising practice. With the state endorsement, traditional cultural values such as familial harmony, filial piety, self-cultivation, diligence, and perseverance, modify the universal application of female empowerment on discursive practices locally. It is not possible to focus solely on a particular form of femvertising without considering the full range of forces that shape the current femvertising in China. Beyond apparent marketing strategies and textual devices, the most important connection between femvertising and gender roles is that the primary focus of Chinese femvertising is not simply on the woman but on the woman’s place in the society and her relationship to others. Since female bonding is largely absent in the Chinese femvertising, family

92 

Y. WU

bonding is highlighted to bridge global feminist ideas and the Chinese traditional culture values. For Chinese women featured in the femvertising commercials and those receive these commercials, their identities are constructed as something undeniably contemporary but arguably feminist at the same time.

Notes 1. Nina, Bahadur, “‘Femvertising’ Ads Are Empowering Women—And Making Money for Brands,” Huffpost, last modified October 13, 2014, https://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/entry/femvertising-­a dvertising-­ empowering-­women_n_5921000?ri18n=true 2. Nina Åkestam, Sara Rosengren and Micael Dahlen, “Advertising ‘Like a Girl’: Toward a Better Understanding of ‘Femvertising’ and its Effects,” Psychology & Marketing 34, no. 8 (2017): 795–806. Victoria E. Drake, “The Impact of Female Empowerment in Advertising (Femvertising),” Journal of Research in Marketing 7, no. 3 (2017): 593–599. 3. Robert Goldman, Deborah Heath and Sharon L.  Smith, “Commodity Feminism,” Critical Studies in Mass Communication 8, no. 3 (1991): 333–351. 4. José Johnston and Judith Taylor, “Feminist Consumerism and Fat Activists: A comparative study of grassroots activism and the Dove Real Beauty campaign,” Signs 33, no. 4 (2008): 941–966. 5. Andi Zeisler, We Were Feminist Once: From Riot Grrrl to CoverGirl ®, the Buying and Selling of a Political Movement (New York: Public Affairs, 2016). 6. Fei Qiao and Ye Wang, “The Myths of Beauty, Age and Marriage: Femvertising by Masstige Cosmetic Brands in the Chinese Market,” Social Semiotics 32, no.1 (2019): 35–57.  7. Zheng Wang, “‘State Feminism’?: Gender and Socialist State Formation in Maoist China,” Feminist Studies 31, no. 3 (2005): 519–551. Zheng Wang and Ying Zhang, “Global Concepts, Local Practices: Chinese feminism since the Fourth UN Conference on Women,” Feminist Studies 36, no.1 (2010): 40–70. 8. “Constitution of the People’s Republic of China (1954),” www.npc.gov. cn., last modified September 20,1954, http://www.npc.gov.cn/wxzl/ wxzl/2000-­12/26/content_4264.htm 9. “Human Development Reports,” United Nations Development Programme, accessed February, 25, 2021, http://hdr.undp.org/en/composite/GII 10. Wang and Zhang, Global Concepts, 45–48. 11. Ibid., 41 and 48.

5  GLOCALIZATION, MARKETIZATION AND POLITICISATION… 

93

12. Leta Hong Fincher, Betraying Big Brother: The Feminist Awakening in China (London: Verso, 2018). 13. On March 7, 2015, five young feminist activists Wu Rongrong, Zheng Churan, Wang Man, Wei Tingting, and Li Tingting were arrested for planning to organize an advocacy event against sexual harassment on public transportation. They were held in detention for 37  days before being released on bail on April 13 under international pressure. Source: People of the Week: The Feminist Five from China Digital Times. https://chinadigitaltimes.net/2018/02/people-­week-­feminist-­five/ 14. Margery Wolf, Revolution Postponed: Women in Contemporary China (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 1985). 15. Judith Stacey, Patriarchy and Socialist Revolution in China (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983). 16. Chun Lin, “On Feminism and China: Foot-binding as an Aesthetic, History and Dialogue,” Research of Note: Special Section on Women 15, no. 3, (2008): 14–16. 17. Minxin Pei, From Reform to Revolution: The Demise of Communism in China and the Soviet Union (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994), p. 84. 18. Xin Zhao and Russell W.  Belk, “Politicizing Consumer Culture: Advertising’s Appropriation of Political Ideology in China’s Social Transition,” Journal of Consumer Research 35, no. 2 (2008): 231–244, 233. 19. Nan Zhou and Russell W. Belk, “Chinese Consumer Readings of Global and Local Advertising Appeals,” Journal of Advertising 33, no. 3 (2004): 63–76. 20. Theodore Levitt, “The Globalization of Markets,” The Mckinsey Quarterly, Summer (1983): 2–20. Yan Wu, “Drop Dead Gorgeous ... and Remain Voiceless: The Web Presence of Chinese Women in the Global Economic Recession,” Feminist Media Studies 9, no. 3 (2009): 374–378. 21. Susan Brownell, and Jeffrey N.  Wasserstrom. “Introduction: Theorising Femininities and Masculinities”, in Chinese Femininities Chinese Masculinities: A Reader, eds. Susan Brownell and Jeffrey N. Wasserstrom. (London: University of California Press, 2002), pp. 1–42. 22. Robert Weatherley, “Harmony, hierarchy and duty based morality: The Confucian antipathy towards rights.” Journal of Asian Pacific Communication 12, No. 2 (2002): 245–267. 23. Wolf, Revolution Postponed, 1985. 24. Wang and Zhang, Global Concepts, 43. 25. Yuezhi Zhao, Media Market and Democracy: Between the Party Line and the Bottom Line (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1998). 26. Zhao, Media Market and Democracy,1998.

94 

Y. WU

John Lent, “The Mass Media in Asia,” in Communicating Democracy: The Media and Political Transitions, ed. Patrick H.  O’Neil (London: Lynne Rienner Publishers Inc., 1998), pp. 147–170. 27. Jing Wang, “Framing Chinese Advertising: Some industry perspectives on the production of culture,” Continuum: Journal of Media & Cultural Studies 17, no. 3 (2003): 247–260, 248. 28. Erving Goffman, Gender Advertisements (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1979). Michael Schudson, Advertising, the Uneasy Persuasion: Its Dubious Impact on American Society (New York: Basic Books, 1986). 29. Goffman, Gender Advertisements, 84. 30. Goffman, Gender Advertisements, 1979. Alice E. Courtney and Sarah Wernick Lockeretz, “A Women’s Place: An analysis of the roles portrayed by women in magazine advertisements,” Journal of Marketing Research 8, no. 1 (1971): 92–95. Myra MacDonald, Representing Women: Myths of Femininity in the Popular Media (London: E. Arnold, 1995). Diane Barthel, Putting on Appearances: Gender and Advertising (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1988). Jean Kilbourne, Can’t Buy My Love: How Advertising Changes the Way We Think and Feel (New York: TouchStone, 1999). 31. Susanna Paasonen, Figures of Fantasy: Women, Cyber discourse and the Popular Internet, (Turku: Annales Universitatis Turkuensis, 2002), p. 30. Wu, Drop Dead Gorgeous, 2009. 32. Wu, Drop Dead Gorgeous, 2009. 33. Kineta Hung and Yiyan Li, “Images of the Contemporary Woman in Advertising in China: A content analysis,” Journal of International Consumer Marketing 19, no. 2 (2006): 6–28. Jingyao Xu, “Female Stereotypes in Chinese TV advertisement and breakthrough,” Youth Journalists 2, (2015): 44–45. [in Chinese] Kineta H.  Hung, Stella Yiyan Li and Russell W.  Belk, “Global Understandings: Female readers’ perceptions of the new woman in Chinese advertising,” Journal of International Business Studies 38, (2007): 1034–1051. Nanzhu Wang, “Representation of Women in cinema and TV Advertisement: A Feminist Critique,” Communication and Media Forum 4, no. 3 (2021): 122–123. [in Chinese] 34. Hung and Li, Images of the Contemporary Woman, 2006. Hung, Li and Belk, Global Understandings, 2007. 35. Xu, Female Stereotypes, 2015.

5  GLOCALIZATION, MARKETIZATION AND POLITICISATION… 

95

36. Duan Xu, “‘The Big Women’: a Textual Analysis of Chinese viewers’ perception Toward Femvertising Vlogs,” Global Media and China 5, no. 3, (2020): 228–246. 37. Fei Teng, Junsheng Hu, Zhansheng Chen, Kai-Tak Poon, and Yong Bai, “Sexism and Effectiveness of Femvertising in China: A Corporate Social Responsibility Perspective,” Sex Roles 84, (2021): 253–270. 38. Qiao and Wang, The Myths of Beauty, 2019. 39. “Advertising Law of the People’s Republic of China (full text),” www.gov. cn, last modified April 25, 2015, http://www.gov.cn/xinwen/2015­04/25/content_2852914.htm 40. Hongbin Hou, “The Beijing News: ‘Feminism’ demand rights, not power”, http://www.people.com.cn/, last modified March 09, 2015, http://opinion.people.com.cn/n/2015/0309/c1003-­26660157.html. 41. David Machin, Introduction to multimodal analysis (London: Hodder Arnold, 2007), p. 11. 42. Gunther Kress and Theo van Leeuwen, Reading Images: The Grammar of Visual Design (London: Routledge, 2006), p. 2. David Machin and Andrea Mayr, How to Do Critical Discourse Analysis: a Multimodal Introduction (London: SAGE, 2012), p. 9. 43. Roland Barthes, Image, Music, Text (London: Fontana Press 1977), p. 45. 44. Sarah Kozloff, “Narrative Theory and Television,” in Channels of Discourse, Reassembled, ed. Robert C. Allen (London: Routledge,1992), p. 68. 45. Tzvetan Todorov (translated by Arnodl Weinstein), “Structural Analysis of Narrative”, NOVEL: A Forum on Fiction 3, No. 1 (1969): 70–76, p. 75. 46. Ibid. 47. Sarah Kozloff, Narrative Theory and Television,1992, p. 68. 48. Ying Yang, “The Widened Gap between Male and Female Athletes: How far are we from equal pay in sports?”, http://finance.sina.com.cn/, last modified April 14, 2019, https://finance.sina.com.cn/roll/2019-­04-­14/ doc-­ihvhiqax2478277.shtml 49. Hung and Li, Images of the Contemporary Woman, 2006. Xu, Female Stereotypes, 2015. 50. Shoma Munshi, Images of the Modern Woman in Asia: Global Media, Local Meanings (London: Routledge, 2013). 51. Shulin Gong, “When the Gendered Millennial Goes Global,” JOMEC Journal 15, (2020): 1–22. DOI:10.18573/jomec.202 52. Hung and Li, Images of the Contemporary Woman, 2006. Hung, Li and Belk, Global Understandings, 2007. 53. Gong, When the Gendered Millennial Goes Global, 2020. 54. “About”, whisper, https://whisper.co.in/en-­in/about-­us 55. Angela McRobbie, Feminism and Youth Culture (London: Palgrave, 2000).

96 

Y. WU

56. Alexandra Ma, “Heart-breaking Video Lifts Up ‘Leftover’ Chinese Women Shamed For Being Single.” HuffPost, last modified April 09, 2016, https://www.huffingtonpost.com.au/entry/china-­leftover-­women-­sk-­ii-­ video_n_570547d6e4b0537661887453 57. People’s Park is a public park in Huangpu District, Shanghai, China. Ever since 2004, hand-written marriage advertisement listings have been publicly displayed on Sundays in the Park, often by urban singletons’ parents, in order to find a suitable match for their children for the purpose of marriage. 58. Enjie Zhang, “After Breaking 11 Mobile Phones for Writing, Ma Huijuan joined the China Writers Association.” ChinaDaily.com.cn last modified August 24, 2021, https://cn.chinadaily.com.cn/a/202008/24/ WS5f4754afa31008497842198b.html 59. McRobbie, Feminism and Youth Culture, 127. 60. Patricia White, “Feminism and Film,” in Oxford Guide To Film Studies, eds. John Hill and Pamela Church Gibson Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), pp. 117–131. Jane Arthurs, “Sex and the City and Consumer Culture: Remediating Postfeminist Drama.” From Feminist Media Studies, Vol. 3, No. 1 (2002), pp. 81–96. 61. McRobbie, Feminism and Youth Culture, 2000. 62. Vladimir Propp, (1927). Morphology of the Folktale. Trans., Laurence Scott. 2nd ed. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1968 63. Zhang, ChinaDaily.com.cn, August 24, 2021. 64. Tom Duncan, Principles of Advertising & IMC (Chicago: McGraw-Hill, 2004), p. 290. 65. Laura Hurd Clarke and Meredith Griffin, “The Body Natural and the Body Unnatural: Beauty Work and Aging,” Journal of Aging Studies 21, (2007): 187–201, 190. 66. McRobbie, Feminism and Youth Culture, 135. 67. Schudson, Advertising, the Uneasy Persuasion, 221.

PART II

Anglo-America

CHAPTER 6

What Does It Take to Be ‘Savage’?: Diversity, Empowerment and Representation in Rihanna’s Savage × Fenty Fashion Show Jane Lian and Joel Gwynne

Fashion shows are performances oriented around the pleasures of adornment, cosmetics and consumption. They are primarily, but by no means exclusively, created by women for women, and function to market products and entertain audiences, representing important locations for examining notions of style, body image and agency, simply because fashion remains one of the primary means through which women construct their identity.1 If style is a way that the values, structures, and ideology of a given society are aesthetically conveyed and received,2 then the experience of choosing how to fashion oneself becomes a crucial way to name oneself, mark oneself, disguise oneself and engage in multiple and conflicting social

J. Lian Independent Scholar, Singapore, Singapore J. Gwynne (*) National Institute of Education, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore, Singapore e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 J. Gwynne (ed.), The Cultural Politics of Femvertising, Palgrave Studies in (Re)Presenting Gender, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-99154-8_6

99

100 

J. LIAN AND J. GWYNNE

discourses.3 This experience can be highly liberating and agentic, and a perception of identity in which gender is seen as a matter of performance rather than a fixed state of being allows us to understand the consumer activity of purchasing clothes as, more specifically, part of the process of constructing one’s gender identity. Yet, in the age of global neoliberalism, it is important to refrain from naive optimism regarding the empowering possibilities of fashion, for as Rebekah Willett observes, consumption is frequently framed by a positive requirement to better ourselves through our purchases, so much so that it is “difficult to choose not to consume at all”.4 Even though consumers may subjectively experience pleasure – and interpret this pleasure as a form of agency – when choosing and buying clothes, scholars such as Arjun Appadurai argue that images of agency “are increasingly distortions of a world of merchandising so subtle that the consumer is consistently helped to believe that he or she is an actor, where in fact he or she is at best a chooser”.5 Fashion shows are practical locations to explore debates surrounding consumption and agency, for they appear to document dramatic and deliberate declarations of agency and self-expression through their construction of ‘commercial femininities’, a term used by Angela McRobbie6 to describe feminine subjectivities that are produced in media culture. Within the broader range of fashion, lingerie has historically been central to the construction of idealised femininity. From eighteenth-century corsets that tighten around the waist and lift the bust to Victorian close-­ crotched drawers that opened to represent sexual availability, lingerie has transhistorically traversed into a public and sexual realm rather than remain a private piece of garment for the woman. An analysis of the history of lingerie reveals that part of it, at least, has always been for the male gaze, and Jane Juffer has observed how even in more recent times within the context of the corporate world it has been commonplace for male employees to keep “a Victoria’s Secret catalog around the office” to “take the edge off an otherwise difficult day”,7 commensurate with the status of heterosexual femininity in society as a subject position more preoccupied with “making oneself desirable rather than feeling and expressing sexual desires”.8 Dee Amy-Chinn states that despite the sexual agency that models in postfeminist lingerie advertisements may appear to possess, the women situated in these advertisements are still offered up as objects for the male gaze. While lingerie advertisements can often be marketed as empowering, proliferating a discourse of liberation where women can “exploit their sexual appeal at the expense of men”,9 the appeal of these

6  WHAT DOES IT TAKE TO BE ‘SAVAGE’?: DIVERSITY, EMPOWERMENT… 

101

lingerie advertisements is still grounded in patriarchal privilege.10 Furthermore, the lingerie is presented through a body shape that is not representative of the vast majority of women; the supermodel’s body becomes the epitome of “a sleek, controlled figure” and neoliberal tendencies would consider these bodies as “essential for portraying success”,11 increasing the burden on the everyday woman to live up to these expectations. The construction of the supermodel’s body fulfills heteronormative ideals and the work that goes into achieving the perfect body is “time-­ consuming, expensive and sometimes painful”.12 Beauty becomes a body that is “depilated, liposuctioned, Botoxed” and “silicon-enhanced”,13 and plus-sized women are never accorded with sexual subjecthood or positioned in a desirable light. The tagline of the promotional trailer for Rihanna’s Savage  ×  Fenty Show  – “You are invited to a show made to celebrate everybody”  – is clearly a direct rebuke of conventional marketing strategies which have alienated the majority of female consumers. Rihanna’s foray into the fashion industry has been touted in the popular media as a game-changer, with her new line of lingerie targeting a diverse range of women with different body-types. This is also consistent with her makeup line, Fenty, which after its successful launch in 2017 launched an inclusive range of cosmetics and enabled women of colour to finally find a foundation shade that suited their skin tone. The appeal of the Savage × Fenty lingerie brand is perhaps elucidated in the performative nature of the Savage × Fenty fashion show a catwalk cum dance performance. This chapter will evaluate the success of Savage × Fenty’s ‘femvertising’ strategy and the authenticity of its brand, discussing how the message of inclusivity and diversity is communicated by analyzing the performance of the Savage × Fenty fashion show. The release of the Savage × Fenty lingerie line followed the exponential trend of success that Fenty Makeup saw during its launch in 2017. The main reasons for their success were cited in the consistency of the brand’s ideology, which was created to be inclusive while remaining affordable and high quality. Fenty was celebrated one month into its launch as its best-­ selling product, the Pro Filt’r Soft Matte Longwear Foundation, resonated with black women particularly. Black women with darker, ebony skin tones have historically struggled to find a foundation that matches their skin, given how the makeup industry continues to privilege and market to fairer skin tones. Since the launch, women of colour were able to match even the most specific of colour, as observed from the modelling of the foundation by influencers such as Nyma Tang, whose skin tone is an

102 

J. LIAN AND J. GWYNNE

extremely unique shade of dark with “cool undertones”,14 and Krystal Robertson, a woman with albinism. In response to these products, consumers commented that they finally felt “worth it”.15 While many cosmetics producers remain discriminatory in their marketing as they appeal to a broad general majority, Rihanna’s brand was a statement “that women of colour deserve complex options”16 just as how fair-skinned women have consistently had access to innumerous shades of fair, beige and olive. This marketing strategy is in concert with Rihanna’s lingerie launch, which similarly appeals to women of all body types. The mode of advertising is similar to brand campaigns such as Dove’s “Evolution” (2006), P&G/Always’ “Like a Girl” and Pantene’s “Labels Against Women”. The concept of “femvertising” or female empowerment advertising are advertisements aimed at generating sales by targeting women. While it is only in recent years that ‘femvertising’ has come under increased scrutiny, Susan Douglas noted the emergence of this advertising trend as early as the 1980s: The appropriation of feminist desires and feminist rhetoric by Revlon, Lancome, and other major corporations was nothing short of spectacular. Women’s liberation metamorphosed into female narcissism unchained as political concepts and goals like liberation and equality were collapsed into distinctly personal, private desire. Women’s liberation became equated with women’s ability to do whatever they wanted for themselves, whenever they wanted, no matter what the expense.17

Douglas’ concern with feminism coopted by capitalism and consumerism holds even more traction in a contemporary climate that espouses neoliberal individualism as the primary route to empowerment. However, it is the inclusivity and diversity of Savage × Fenty that can be identified as an extremely successful example of femvertising since their marketing campaigns challenge traditional female advertising stereotypes by appealing to marginalised women who are sidelined by a consumerist majority. This is showcased in the Savage × Fenty fashion show, where Rihanna’s lingerie line displayed its collection of bras that range from sizes from 32A to 44DD and underwear ranging from XS to XXXL, with 90 different kinds of styles. The extensive nature of this collection went beyond just catering to a diverse range of body types as it is “concerned with the overall or holistic impression of the female”18 through repeated messages of empowerment during its campaign. The collection is not only visually appealing, but offers real solutions to plus-sized women who have consistently found

6  WHAT DOES IT TAKE TO BE ‘SAVAGE’?: DIVERSITY, EMPOWERMENT… 

103

it difficult to find quality, sexy lingerie that were not granny bras. The extensive choices present in the collection coheres with its brand ideology. The name Savage × Fenty brand is significant in its resignification of an otherwise negative term. While the term ‘savage’ is historically conceptualised as the antithesis of ‘civilized’, ‘savage’ now means ‘excellent’, ‘fierce’ - a reclamation of the once derogatory word. This positive, modern denotation possesses an even older heritage in second-wave feminist discourse if we call to mind the concept of the “Wild Woman”, coined by feminist Mary Daly who privileged what she termed ‘real’ females configured as “witches, nags and hags” compared to “man-made” females.19 While some have considered her celebration of the wild woman as extreme, her argument is predicated on the perception that the wild virility of women has been colonised/co-opted by patriarchy since women have internalised gendered expectations of femininity. The concept of the ‘savage’ opposes feminine concepts of passivity, submissiveness and dependence and is, for Daly, a true reflection of the essence of womanhood. Furthermore, the word ‘savage’ resembles the word ‘bitch’ which has been resignified under third-wave feminism, as a positive term rather than one which has been consistently used to insult strong women. Rihanna herself stated that the word ‘savage’ is “self-explanatory” and that it is a “confident word. It’s a word that is fearless” and that every woman “has a savage inside of them”.20 Here, the singer is referring to the well of unadulterated power that the term connotes. In this chapter, we will be examining a specific Fenty runway performance: ‘Enter the World of Savage  ×  Fenty’18 with Our Fave, Bella Hadid | Savage  ×  Fenty’. This runway, which features famous models such as Bella Hadid and Gigi Hadid, showcases lingerie models of different sizes, races, and ethnicities. The presentation of the lingerie on this runway elevates the superficial advertisement of a high-end brand, communicating messages of feminist empowerment. This chapter will explore how this unique runway functions to bridge the conscious gap between performer and viewer in its savage performativity, and represents a significant contrast from the conventional catwalk of most fashion shows. At the start of the video, the models emerge and appear to be moving idly in a hallucinative state, accompanied by a hypnotic and alluring soundtrack. What is stark and evocative is the set-up of the multi-­ dimensional stage filled with flora and fauna, metallic structures, a glasshouse and even small waterfalls. Throughout the performance the models are in constant interaction with these artefacts, creating sites of

104 

J. LIAN AND J. GWYNNE

meaning-­making (Fig. 6.1). Whereas conventional catwalks are long, linear stages illuminated by strong fluorescent lighting, the stage in the Savage  ×  Fenty fashion show is an art construction, a collision of manmade and natural structures. The difference in the stage presentation constructs a different kind of spectatorship for the audience. Using Victoria’s Secret as a point of comparison considering its similar status as a luxe lingerie brand, a catwalk on Victoria’s Secret is linear and placed on a much higher level above the audience. The stage is barred on both sides by barriers and security and the audience is seated at least a few metres away. As the size 0 model struts down the runway, her body becomes a spectacle for the audience with the lingerie on a tight thin body, along with the signature ‘angel wings’ on the model’s back. The model is at once distanced from the audience physically through the stage’s construction and appears superior to the audience symbolically in her elevated status as an angel. In contrast, the Savage × Fenty fashion show’s stage is constructed on a level closer to the audience. The audience is seen to be in close proximity with the artefacts, some even leaning against the props on stage as the models are performing. This democratisation of space positions the audience as equal, involving the audience as participants within the event space. The

Fig. 6.1  The runway is constructed with flora and fauna as a female utopia

6  WHAT DOES IT TAKE TO BE ‘SAVAGE’?: DIVERSITY, EMPOWERMENT… 

105

presentation here perhaps represents the unconscious ideology of the Fenty brand, which places an emphasis on it being a brand for everyone. Furthermore, the fact that the stage that is filled with elements of nature suggests a representation of an all-female paradise or utopia. This is evinced through the commentary which begins in the background at 4:52: “The Houris of Paradise are the ideas which at once appear in one’s essence when one feels desire”, alluding to the heavenly angel ‘Houri’ in Islamic culture. As the models walk throughout segments of the fashion show with their arms stretched out in worship at 5:00, surrounded by sounds of nature, the possibility of the stage representing paradise is heightened. Houris are symbolic iterations of chaste virgins who are depicted to be voluptuous and alluring women. The use of a symbol that is dichotomous in its representation of purity and sexuality might be contentious in the progressive campaign that is the Fenty brand. However, it becomes clear that the message at the end of the voiceover is focused on communicating how all females can achieve “the idea of an angel” (5:13) with its diverse casting, as compared to Victoria’s Secret where a distinct, select few are chosen to adorn the lingerie in fashion shows. Indeed, there is a lack of women of colour in Victoria’s Secret fashion shows as they are typically depicted to be fair-skinned and white. Thus the presentation of an all-­ female paradise in the Savage  ×  Fenty show serves its politics of representation. The diverse cast of models and the performance through which the lingerie is presented functions to minimize, even if it cannot entirely negate, the objectification that is typified in fashion shows. Women of different sizes, races, ethnicities and skin colour strut, dance and claim the space present during the performance. The Savage × Fenty show has also included people with disabilities and people of different sexualities, such as amputee Mama Cax, who had her right leg amputated after being diagnosed with bone cancer, and trans model Isis King. The diverse representation in the cast is reflected in the varied movement of each dance, which destabilises the rigid and individualistic nature of the conventional catwalk. Choreographer Parris Goebel, who herself possesses a curvaceous body-type, stated in an interview with CR Fashion Book that “I want the dancers to feel like they were doing something different and not just the same old walk”.21 The diversification is further seen in the employment of dancers who are regular people amongst professional lingerie models. Stuff, Life & Style even went as far as to describe the cast as an “army of models”22 emerging at the start of the show, befitting the discourse of

106 

J. LIAN AND J. GWYNNE

female empowerment. This is in comparison to brands such as Calvin Klein and Victoria’s Secret, which have been gaining controversy in the past few years for the lack of representation in their product range.23 Studies have found that the consistent reflection of a singular body type on media or a high-end platform such as Victoria’s Secret leads to “reduced body satisfaction” and “opportunities of self-development”24 in their audience, which incites them to seek more realistic alternatives. Savage × Fenty’s realistic representations on a powerful public platform thus furthers its ideology of female empowerment. The models dance in abstract movements, pausing at times and interacting with the stage and the props. No longer remaining a presentation of lingerie on bodies, the performance is a form of artistic representation. The synesthesia of movement becomes a site of contemplation for the audience and invites them to participate and reflect on the meaning of the performance. Depending on where each viewer at the live show is seated, they all have a different experience, similar to an interactive exhibit at a museum. The conceptualisation of the performance moves the audience’s attention away from the objectification of the female bodies and refocuses it on the dancing, mitigating the contentious nature of lingerie advertisements. The dancers in the Savage × Fenty show, rather than being passive objects of the male gaze are depicted as active, independent and sexually powerful. This is observed in the explosion of movement which begins at 2:18, where the dancers are observed to be in contorted shapes and are immersed in athletic movement. The technicality of the moves in timestamps 8:18–8:32, 8:54–9:04 and 10:28–10:30, showcasing the ability of the dancers to perform regardless of their size, is emblematic of female strength. The dancing is not sexual as one might expect from a show with semi-naked dancers but remains in the realm of contemporary movement. The show is not predictable in its presentation of lingerie as the shifting tone of the performance resists the superficial, stoic perfection present in fashion shows. A backtrack of laughter begins at 6:39 and the models begin to prance around, depicting a fun-filled, women-exclusive paradise. They are captured in an unadulterated state of joy. At 10:30 there is a more sombre and lilting quality to the music and the dancers’ bodies are contorted in different ways (10:32, 11:00 and 11:39) where their expressions are filled with anguish. The emotive nature of the performance is arresting and might even be deemed as unappealing or inaccessible in a conventional setting. However, the manner in which the models’ bodies are filled with exertion and how their sweat and intensity can be contrasted

6  WHAT DOES IT TAKE TO BE ‘SAVAGE’?: DIVERSITY, EMPOWERMENT… 

107

with the airbrushed and poreless perfection on the faces of typical models, accentuating the modus operandi of the performance as means of resisting the male gaze. It explicates a message that beauty can be a multitude of contradictions and provides a degree of immersion for its audience. The choreography in the Savage × Fenty show is in concert with the notion of female solidarity. The women are always in interaction with each other and are posed in intimate positions, again differing from the individualistic presentation in a regular runway walk. There are moments when the dancers are seen to be walking in tandem and supporting each other (1:15, 1:39, 2:03, 0:57) or holding hands (0:47), a commentary on female solidarity and strength. The dancers are leaning against the glass wall, on the table and top of each other (6:15). At the end of the show, the joining of hands by the diverse cast of models represents a sisterhood that affirms the solidarity of the women and their experience. It is a commentary on women who are worthy of being recognised no matter their size or colour. This is further highlighted through the meditative commentary that begins at 12:20 which seems to urge the people present to seek their newly realised dreams, where “a dawn of a new day is a dawn of a new start...now that you are in the dawn. Hence you hold and now have a much brighter and better day”. The performers are in a state of awakening at 12:55 and seem to be unfamiliar, seeking and searching until they find the security in the joined hands of their fellow “sisters”. At this point, they are posed in different human chains of solidarity, allowing the audience to be immersed in a state of reflection at the performance that was just held. The presentation of female strength is notable in the use of pregnant dancers as well. There is not only a showcase of a pregnant Caucasian dancer but a Black pregnant dancer at timestamps 3:16 and 8:15 respectively. The inclusion of pregnant dancers further attests to the commentary of female strength in its representation of motherhood. Traditional gendered roles have diminished the sexuality of a pregnant woman, where the mother does not exist as herself, but as a baby-maker in society. Pregnant women with natal figures are often excluded from discourses of sexuality as they are supposed fulfill the role of a nurturing caretaker. The mother is supposed to be the epitome of self-sacrifice where her world is centered around the birth of her child - there is no attention or time to spend on her vanity. However, the emergence of new maternal publicity in contemporary times has signalled a new era of maternal representation, where the maternal is no longer confined to the “traditionally domestic or child-oriented spaces”.25 Besides the Savage × Fenty show’s inclusion of

108 

J. LIAN AND J. GWYNNE

pregnant dancers, the presentation of pregnant beauty has proliferated with the rise of pregnant celebrities daring to document their pregnancy on a public platform. This has resulted in a change in the way contemporary social values are distributed to the public, where pregnancy is no longer an abject physical shape, but is fashionable and sexy. The inclusion of a Black pregnant dancer further diminishes the notion that only “specific types of pregnant bodies are beautiful and/or sexually desirable”, ones that are “white, tight, youthful”.26 The change in attitudes towards the presentation of maternity is observed in the inclusion of pregnant dancers within the show as they become symbols of resilience to the watchful audience. With the discourse of empowerment that Savage × Fenty uses to target its consumer base, the question lies in whether Rihanna is employing “commodity feminism” in an attempt to sell its products. “Commodity feminism” refers to the manner in which advertisers incorporate the “cultural power and energy of feminism” which represents nothing more than “faux empowerment” if it remains just another marketing strategy focused on appealing to ideologically-conscious females.27 It is reasonable for consumers to be suspicious of Rihanna’s brand considering her status as a celebrity, since celebrity lines are often seen as vanity projects, not serious contenders within an industry.28 Prominent examples include Kylie Cosmetics and Kim Kardashian’s KKW Beauty; celebrity brands that have received negative reviews because of their aggravated prices, poor quality and unprofessional customer service. Raking in a huge $72 million in the first month of its sale (Schallon 2018), the Fenty brand is ultimately a company that has succeeded in producing consumer goods which have chosen to ride on the current discourse of empowerment present in contemporary advertising. While Fenty as a brand appears to have lived up to its claims of inclusive representation within the context of its fashion show, as has been discussed, the politics of representation espoused by the Fenty performance are not without limitations, especially when considering the models who have been chosen as frontliners. Bella Hadid remains as the main model of the performance, even with its diverse cast of models. Even the title proclaims “Enter the World of Savage  ×  Fenty ‘18 with Our Fave, Bella Hadid”. One might question the conscious choice of Bella Hadid as the face of the show despite the show’s promotion of body positivity and diversity, since she is observed to possess the ideal body type. Moreover, as Bella Hadid struts through the three-dimensional stage from 3:38 to 4:55,

6  WHAT DOES IT TAKE TO BE ‘SAVAGE’?: DIVERSITY, EMPOWERMENT… 

109

the dancers are either posed in irregular streamlined shapes or walk around her in odd stances. They are almost presented as props to centralise her as the main model. And yet, despite the limitations in the politics of representation, Fenty should be recognized for its consistency in other aspects of its commercial marketing. A notable example is the unedited photos of models who are promoting the Fenty brand. Model Aweng Mayen Chuol’s facial scars were left unairbrushed when she modelled for the luxury fashion line and Mama Cax, the amputee model who was cast for the show, gave positive comments regarding her experience. During her lingerie fitting, Mama Cax had originally found difficulties finding the right lingerie fit even after she was presented with three different choices. Rather than be forced into a disagreeable outfit, her feedback was catered to and she was able to find a piece that she felt confident in. She stated in an interview that, “you can tell if you’re being tokenised, rather than being represented for who you are” when you work for a brand, citing that she felt as if she was treated as a “person” rather than being used for visibility. While the feminist authenticity of the brand can be under scrutiny as Fenty remains an enterprise that targets consumers through marketing strategies, the brand has at least been consistent in their ideology of empowerment. To conclude, in the global mediascape, lingerie advertising can be positioned as one of the many sites which employ a discourse of empowerment to sell its products, particularly in ways which conflate sexuality and agency. This linkage of sexuality, strength and independence can be seen as one of the many ways in which women are now pressured in postfeminist media culture to perform sexuality as a central component of their feminist identity. It is in this way that the message of feminism has arguably been co-­ opted and undermined by capitalism and consumer culture; being a strong, independent woman appears contingent upon one’s ability to present a particular form of feminist and feminine sexualised identity. Feona Attwood (2011: 203) has observed how discourses of sexual presentation and agency are “part of a broader shift in which older markers of femininity such as homemaking skills and maternal instincts have been joined by those of image creation, body work and sexual desire.”29 Rosalind Gill and Christina Scharff have similarly positioned the emergence of such new femininities as symptomatic of a cultural postfeminism in which women who do not identify with feminism as a political movement locate empowerment through a neoliberal embrace of a perpetually self-­regulated and practiced sexual presentation.30 In postfeminist culture, the visual

110 

J. LIAN AND J. GWYNNE

presentation of the self figures as a form of empowered existential assertion; women learn that in order to be strong and independent, then they must “be seen,” whether on the screen of a television or a computer, or in the pages of a magazine. The projection of such a narrow feminist identity  – one predicated on the kinds of visual display evinced in lingerie advertisements – is evidence of a specific form of femininity in which the “postfeminist subject … is incited to be compulsorily sexy”.31 In its operation within this media landscape, the Savage × Fenty show is explicit in its portrayal of diversified female empowerment that is not contingent upon either the presentation of a svelte, white femininity, nor does it incite compulsory sexiness. The unconventional nature of the fashion show borders on theatrical art and is effective in negating the objectification of the models’ bodies. The diverse cast of models and the use of unique, technical choreography reclaims the lingerie fashion show for the female gaze, calling for a reassessment of sexiness and validating the worth of different bodies in society. While one must understand that the discourse on faux empowerment is still valid given Fenty’s role as a producer, Rihanna’s revolutionary makeup and lingerie line remains a bold and unapologetic presentation of diversity. It may be easy for some to critique and condemn all forms of fashion advertising which centralise the female body, especially for critics attentive to the limited terms of neoliberal agency. Scholars such as Rosalind Gill have described the neoliberal feminine subject as an identity position that embraces, affirms and reifies an insidious cultural shift whereby women no longer submit to the external male judging gaze but to a self-policing narcissistic gaze. Shelley Budgeon rejects the agentic possibilities of bodily presentation as seen in lingerie advertisements, contending that this form of agency is contingent upon “self-objectification and dependence upon the approving gaze of others”.32 In this model of social power, women are offered the promise of autonomy by voluntarily objectifying themselves and actively choosing to employ their capacities in the pursuit of a feminine appearance and a sexualized image. In counterpoint to these positions, we would like to suggest that critics often overlook the extent to which women consciously perform identities, especially in the context of a fashion show. Similarly, it is important not to (mis)understand the sexual presentation of the self as a fixed expression of finite, authentic selfhood. To place too much importance on the feminine identity presented in a fashion show fails to respect the performer as a shifting, temporal construct that, while shaped by real-world discourses, is not ultimately defined

6  WHAT DOES IT TAKE TO BE ‘SAVAGE’?: DIVERSITY, EMPOWERMENT… 

111

and fatalistically governed by those discourses. In the Savage  ×  Fenty show, it would be a mistake to situate the models as blindly manipulated by consumer culture, since the diversity and aesthetics make it clear that specific narratives of normativity are being challenged. To conclude that these subject positions signal subservience to a culture of commercial hypersexuality only serves to disenfranchise women by locating them as passive victims of the machinations of society, rather than active manipulators of identities. Perhaps more significantly, by deliberately drawing attention to multiple forms of feminine subjectivity expressed through their stage performance, the models raise important questions surrounding foundational feminist challenges against the objectification of women. While critics such as Budgeon echo this debate by criticizing the proud, self-assertive display of the female body as nothing more than self-­ objectification, they fail to explain why objectification is a problem when it occurs in contexts where visual engagement is the only possible means of interaction, and by doing so neglect the complexities of the conventions of viewing. The visual medium of the fashion show surely complicates the issue of objectification, simply because fashion shows are created for the primary purpose of visual consumption. Voyeurism is central to the experience of watching a fashion show, and the audience is aware that what is presented on the stage is a self-conscious and artfully conceived construction and, most significantly, only one aspect of the models’ identities.

Notes 1. Gleeson, K and H. Frith. ‘Pretty in Pink: Young Women Presenting Mature Sexual Identities’ in A. Harris (ed.), All About the Girl: Culture, Power and Identity. (London and New York: Routledge, 2004): 103–113. 2. Ewen, S. All Consuming Images: The Politics of Style in Contemporary Culture. (New York: Basic Books, 1988/1999). 3. Zaslow, E. Feminism Inc: Coming of Age in Girl Power Media Culture. (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009): 46. 4. Willett, R. ‘Consumer Citizens Online: Structure, Agency and Gender in Online Participation’, in D. Buckingham (ed.), Youth, Identity and Digital Media. (Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 2008): 49–69. 5. Appadurai, Arjun. Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions in Globalization. (Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press, 1996): 42. 6. McRobbie, Angela. Feminism and Youth Culture. (London: Macmillan, 2000).

112 

J. LIAN AND J. GWYNNE

7. Juffer, J. ‘A Pornographic Femininity? Telling and Selling Victoria’s (Dirty) Secrets’. Social Text 48: 27–48 (1996). 8. Gill, R. ‘Empowerment/Sexism: Figuring Female Sexual Agency in Contemporary Advertising’. Feminism & Psychology 18(1): 45 (2008). 9. Amy-Chinn, D. ‘This is just for me(n): How the regulation of post-­feminist lingerie advertising perpetuates woman as object’. Journal of Consumer Culture 6(2): 162 (2006). 10. Ibid., 165. 11. Ibid., 173. 12. Gill, 2008, 56. 13. Ibid., 57. 14. Schallon, L. (2018). ‘One Year Later, This Is the Real Effect Fenty Has Had on the Beauty Industry’. Glamour. Retrieved from https://www. glamour.com/story/fenty-­beauty-­rihanna-­legacy. Accessed March 2020. 15. Ibid. 16. Labouvier, C. (2017). ‘How Rihanna’s Fenty Beauty Is Changing The Conversation About Beauty’. Allure. Retrieved from https://www.allure. com/story/how-­rihanna-­fenty-­beauty-­has-­changed-­the-­beauty-­industry. Accessed March 2020. 17. Douglas, S.J. Where the Girls Are: Growing Up Female with the Mass Media. (New York: Three Rivers Press, 1995): 246. 18. Åkestam, N., Rosengren, S., & Dahlen, M. ‘Advertising “like a girl”: Toward a better understanding of “femvertising” and its effects’. Psychology of Marketing, 34: 798 (2017). 19. Daly, M. Gyn/Ecology: The Metaethics of Radical Feminism. (Boston: Beacon Press,1979), 1–18. 20. Hamilton, G. G., Italie, L., & McConnell, G. (2019). ‘God gifted genius’: Rihanna heaps praise on Parris Goebel after fashion show success.’ Stuff Life & Style. Retrieved from https://www.stuff.co.nz/life-­style/fashion/115982662/god-­g ifted-­g enius-­r ihanna-­h eaps-­p raise-­o n-­p arris-­ goebel-­after-­fashion-­show-­success. Accessed March 2020. 21. Glass, J. (2019). ‘Rihanna collaborator Parris Goebel on Savage x Fenty’s groundbreaking fashion show’. CR Fashion Book. Retrieved from https:// www.crfashionbook.com/culture/a29116160/rihanna-­parris-­goebel-­ savage-­x-­fenty-­dance-­nyfw/. Accessed March 2020. 22. Hamilton, G. G., Italie, L., & McConnell, G. (2019). 23. Hanbury, M. (2018). ‘The CEO behind Victoria’s Secret is slamming Trump while ignoring a huge flaw in his own business’. Retrieved from https://www.businessinsider.sg/victorias-­secret-­lack-­of-­diversity-­2018-­1? r=US&IR=T. Accessed March 2020. 24. Åkestam, N., Rosengren, S., & Dahlen, M. (2017).

6  WHAT DOES IT TAKE TO BE ‘SAVAGE’?: DIVERSITY, EMPOWERMENT… 

113

25. Tyler, I. (2011). ‘Pregnant Beauty: Maternal Femininities under Neoliberalism’ in R.  Gill and C.  Scharff (eds.) New Femininities: Postfeminism, Neoliberalism, Subjectivity. (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 21–36. 26. Ibid. 27. Gill, 2008. 28. Labouvier, 2017. 29. Attwood, F. ‘Through the Looking Glass?: Sexual Agency and Subjectification Online.’ in R. Gill and C. Scharff (eds.) New Femininities: Postfeminism, Neoliberalism, Subjectivity. (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 209. 30. R. Gill and C. Scharff (eds.) New Femininities: Postfeminism, Neoliberalism, Subjectivity. (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 1–17. 31. Harvey, L. and R. Gill. “Spicing it Up: Sexual Entrepreneurs and The Sex Inspectors,” in R. Gill and C. Scharff (eds.) New Femininities: Postfeminism, Neoliberalism, Subjectivity. (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 58. 32. Budgeon, S. ‘The Contradictions of Successful Femininity: Third-Wave Feminism, Postfeminism and ‘New’ Femininities.’ in R. Gill and C. Scharff (eds.) New Femininities: Postfeminism, Neoliberalism, Subjectivity. (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 279–292.

CHAPTER 7

The Impact of Femvertising on Pink Breast Cancer Products in Australia Catarina Agostino and Renee Middlemost

Given the recent #MeToo and Times Up movements, and the growing mainstream interest in femvertising since 2014, one might anticipate a change of attitudes towards the representation of women in advertising – this is sadly not the case. The Bavarian Bier Cafe in Sydney, Australia was called out in 2014 for its vilifying and degrading marketing campaign that compared women to meat. The advertisement, featuring two buxom women flanking a man with a tray of pork ribs in front of them, reads: ‘We’ve got the best racks1’ – referencing the cut of meat and the women’s breasts. After intense social media backlash, the Bavarian decided to ‘pay off’ their debt to women by committing to donate $1 from every serving of ribs sold to Treasure Chest Charity – an Australian charity which raises funds for breast cancer survivors to undergo breast reconstruction surgery. This move was labelled as sleazy and exploitative2; it is nothing but insulting to try to rectify sexual exploitation of women by throwing coins at a breast cancer charity.3 However, it is not uncommon to find breast cancer

C. Agostino (*) • R. Middlemost University of Wollongong, Wollongong, NSW, Australia © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 J. Gwynne (ed.), The Cultural Politics of Femvertising, Palgrave Studies in (Re)Presenting Gender, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-99154-8_7

115

116 

C. AGOSTINO AND R. MIDDLEMOST

fundraisers being marred by hypocrisy, insincerity, and a facetious ‘pro-­ women’ agenda in Australia. Framed in an Australian context, this chapter takes a particular interest in the use of feminist advertising as problematic for breast cancer advertising. This research focuses on the use of pink and the practice of pinkwashing (the promotion of goods and services using the breast cancer ribbon). Australia has been highlighted in this study as breast cancer is the most commonly diagnosed cancer in the country4 – the frequent occurrence of the disease has led to high rates of support for breast cancer charities. In comparison to mainstream breast cancer awareness and prevention campaigns, both femvertising and pinkwashing take a ‘by women, for women’ approach. As we will argue – femvertisements, despite their best efforts, are not always executed tactfully. Despite a few successful advertising campaigns that truly empowered women and girls, femvertisements are just as guilty of perpetuating harmful information about women. The practice of femvertising has evolved to its current use as a buzzword for corporations to meet their corporate social responsibility obligations, and feminists have begun to resist. We contend that this is the connection between femvertising and pinkwashing: in chasing corporate social responsibility, harmful, infantilising, and pinkwashed advertisements have become the ‘norm’ for breast cancer advocacy. Feminist theory informs both femvertising and pinkwashing, and provides the central thread connecting these two emerging fields of research. The use of feminist discourse in femvertising is at odds with many advertisements of pink breast cancer products, which tend to be targeted towards men; treat women as commodities, ‘just breasts’, and/or infantilise and ‘girl’ women. Ironically, though breast cancer advertisements are often targeted at men, men with breast cancer are excluded from receiving the same awareness, fundraising, and support that women with breast cancer do. Pink breast cancer advertisements are frequently hyper-feminised and pink, focused on empty awareness. If the advertisements do not feature women, there is almost always a representation of the female form with crude allusions to breasts, including deflated balloons, rotted fruit, and burst airbags to ‘stand in’ for human women. It is also popular to use sexist puns or slogans in these advertisements, such as ‘good things come in pairs5’ or ‘save a life, grope your wife’.6 However, it is impossible to unpack the sexism within breast cancer advertisements without firstly examining the misogyny ingrained in the advertising industry at large. As both femvertising and pinkwashing have, to date, received little scholarly

7  THE IMPACT OF FEMVERTISING ON PINK BREAST CANCER PRODUCTS… 

117

attention particularly in an Australian context, this chapter is intended as a first step towards problematising these trends in advertising as a feminist issue effecting real women on a global scale. This research attempts to connect feminist theory, femvertising, and pinkwashing in order to address this ‘gap.’

Know Your Herstory In 2014, media activist Jean Kilbourne stated that even after 40 years of researching advertising, the image of women is now worse than ever.7 Women’s bodies are dismembered and insulted for advertising and there is still a strong emphasis on physical perfection.8 Kilbourne explains that: Girls are getting the message these days just so young, that they need to be impossibly beautiful. Hot, sexy, extremely thin – they also get the message that they’re going to fail, there’s no way they’re going to really achieve it.9

Women have faced sexism and misogyny in advertisements since the late nineteenth century – as Freeman contends, ‘… the face and form of an attractive woman has proved irresistible to advertisers.’10 Thus, modern sexism calls for modern feminism. The fourth wave of feminism has been characterised as a resurgence of feminist activism beginning in 2012, driven primarily by the internet and fourth wave feminist campaigns including SlutWalk,11 the Mattress Performance/Carry That Weight,12 the Women’s Marches13 (including the inception of pussy hats14), #FreeTheNipple,15 the #MeToo and Time’s Up movements,16 the creation of Laura Bates’ Everyday Sexism Project,17 and of course, femvertising. Martin & Valenti18 and Maclaran19 argue that the increased use of the internet has facilitated a global online community of feminists, and fourth wavers utilise social media to call out issues impacting women. Online feminism has transformed the way advocacy and action function within the feminist movement and has become a new engine for contemporary feminism20 and has increased the reach of fourth wave feminists such as CaShawn Thompson,21 Celeste Liddle,22 Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie,23 Feminista Jones,24 Jessica Valenti,25 Kira Cochrane,26 Laura Bates,27 Roxane Gay,28 and Tarana Burke.29 Fourth wave feminism is not free from critique however, and has become widely regarded as being for white, middle class women30 and

118 

C. AGOSTINO AND R. MIDDLEMOST

equated with white and celebrity feminism. White women with a strong social media presence dominate the fourth wave, often setting the tone for debates around equality by silencing others.31 Hobson,32 Brewer & Dundes,33 and La Rosa34 have called out white feminism as insincere and self-serving following the resurgenence of the #BlackLivesMatter movement. White and celebrity feminism follow a subset of feminist politics that erases important racial histories and denies intersectional differences between women35 whilst enjoying the privileges of beauty, fame, and finance.36 Additionally, the fourth wave has seen a rise in the digitalisation of trans-exclusionary radical feminist (TERF) ideologies,37 especially in debates concerning transgender women in ‘women’s’ spaces.38 The use of pink pussy hats as a symbol of protest at the 2017 Women’s March against former United States’ President Donald Trump was also critiqued for its transphobic connotations. Grisard39 suggested that the hats ‘stood in’ as a symbol for white female genitalia, and in turn, equated white cisgender womanhood with femininity. As the debates shaping feminism intersect and transform with rapidly changing societal issues, so too are these discourses activated in consumer culture and advertising. The critiques of fourth wave feminism are not unlike critiques levelled against femvertising  – although both the fourth wave and femvertising have the power to make changes, some facets of their ideology have been perceived as self-serving. The concept of femvertising began to gain prominence in 2014 after SHE Media CEO Samantha Skey coined the term in reference to advertising that empowers women and girls.40 Femvertising has been described as having the ability to equate products with feminist ideology such as choice and empowerment41 and is a key exemplar in brand advocacy.42 However, femvertising has been labelled as an advertising appeal (due to its rising popularity) rather than an ideological movement which commodifies feminism.43 Hoad-Reddick44 argues that femvertising overtly addresses injustices towards women by offering its products as a solution – she contends that femvertising’s existence is evidence that in a capitalist patriarchy, even feminism is for sale. Pinkwashing predates the rise of femvertising, and yet the two are inextricably connected. Critiques of pinkwashing emerged during the 2000s; it is defined as the promotion of consumer goods and services using the pink breast cancer ribbon.45 Early accounts of breast cancer advocacy campaigns show that the disease was perceived as a ‘dream’ cause and was described as a feminist issue without politics or controversy.46 Consequently, pinkwashing was shaped by the social construction of breast cancer  – a

7  THE IMPACT OF FEMVERTISING ON PINK BREAST CANCER PRODUCTS… 

119

once invisible disease became the most publicised health issue of the early 2000s, creating a long-lasting impact on family, politics, law, medicine, and the arts.47 Of this period Pezzullo wrote: ‘More people than ever before have begun to talk about breast cancer, a feminist accomplishment in itself.’48 However, in the past ten years, pink ribbon culture and pinkwashing has evolved as a commercial behemoth, and as such encompassed both positive and negative reflections. While some cite the pink ribbon as a sign of strength and hope (Harvey & Strahilevitz,49 Steele50), others have voiced their concern over the dangers of the pink ribbon, stating that breast cancer themed commodities associated with hegemonic femininity are problematic as they depend on the infantilisation of women (Ehrenreich,51 King,52 Mart & Giesbrecht,53 Quincey et al.,54 Sheehan & Berg55). Similar ideas about the limitations of pinkwashing have been developed by Davis & Lubitow56 and Sirjue & Turner57 who claim pink themed breast cancer products limit awareness by focusing on ‘the cure’ and divert women’s time and energy away from asking critical questions. Pinkwashing has been described as ‘like a cancer itself58’, as its relentless spread across a litany of products has added a global barrier to genuine breast cancer prevention.59 Pinkwashing is not about companies profiting from pink breast cancer products – rather, it is a complicated combination of women’s politics, capitalism, and advertising theory. The connection between feminist theory, femvertising, and the theorisation of pinkwashing products is very much an emerging field. This chapter aims to outline a model to fill these gaps and put these concepts into dialogue.

Case Studies Women’s early portrayal in advertising was dictated by gender stereotypes, and fell into four categories: sexual objectification, sex-role stereotyping, maternal and marital roles, and labour in the home and workforce.60 However even when advertisements are not explicitly misogynistic, they can still perpetuate harmful information about women – despite the rise of femvertising. In this section I will offer a brief case study of two campaigns which have used femvertising ideals to varying degrees of success: Dove’s campaign for Real Beauty and Thinx’s For People with Periods campaign. One of the most prominent examples of early efforts to combat unrealistic portrayals of women was Dove’s 2004 ‘The Real Truth About Beauty’ study. The opening of the study explains that:

120 

C. AGOSTINO AND R. MIDDLEMOST

The diversity of human beauty has been strained through a sieve of culture, status, power, and money and what has emerged is a narrow sliver of the full panorama of human visual splendour.61

The Dove study contends that beauty has become synonymous with physical attractiveness, and that women blame the ‘perpetuation of inauthentic beauty62’ on pop culture and the mass media. The publication of the study marked the beginning of Dove’s ongoing campaign for Real Beauty, a worldwide marketing operation that focused on celebrating women of all shapes, skin colours, and sizes. Dove’s first iteration of the Real Beauty campaign began with ‘tick box’ billboards displayed in the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom in 2004–2005. These advertisements showed ‘real’ women who did not fit the standards of ‘conventional’ beauty – being older, shorter, or bigger than a standard model. The billboards asked passers-by to interact with the advertisements, and provide an evaluation of the models via ‘ticking’ one of the boxes: Fat or Fit? Withered or Wonderful? Grey or Gorgeous? Passers-by were encouraged to text their vote to a listed number, which generated over 1.5 million visits to the Real Beauty website.63 The response to this campaign was mixed – on one hand 1.5 million people were ready to talk and discuss issues pertaining to women, but early critics were quick to point out the hypocrisy of the campaign, as Unilever, who owns Dove, is also the parent company of Fair & Lovely (a skin whitening cream) and SlimFast (diet programs and meal replacement products), products specifically targeted towards changing women’s appearances to fit the conventional standard of beauty. Despite these early efforts, over its 15-year long history the Real Beauty campaign has not been free from controversy and has faced intense criticism over its ‘creative’ choices. One of its most notorious blunders was an advertisement from 2017. In the video ad, a Black woman transforms into a white woman after using Dove soap, which prompted social media outrage and questioning over the message of the advertisement. This was not the first incident where Dove had ranked Black women against white women – a 2011 ad for body lotion showed a ‘before and after’ comparison, where the Black woman was shown ‘before’ with undesirable dry skin and the white woman was shown ‘after’ with perfect smooth skin. One tweet summarised these blunders: ‘Okay, Dove...one racist ad makes you suspect. Two racist ads makes you kinda guilty.’64

7  THE IMPACT OF FEMVERTISING ON PINK BREAST CANCER PRODUCTS… 

121

Dove again faced criticism in 2017 when they released limited edition bottles of body wash to represent different body types. The bottles were either tall and thin, short and round, or had ‘curves’ and were sold with the tagline: Beauty Breaks the Mould. Zimmerman argued that equating women with ‘a parade of injection-molded, quality-checked plastic packages65’ will never incite a body-positive culture. Despite its controversial history, the Real Beauty campaign is still active in 2021 and is considered the originator of contemporary femvertising for its efforts to include a message about ‘beauty’ in all ‘shapes and colours.’ The widespread backlash to Dove’s Real Beauty campaign led women to question the possibility of a new era of feminist (or female centred) ideals in advertising. In 2014, SHE Media – a digital company that creates content specifically for women focused on beauty, entertainment, and health  – conducted a study which surveyed 628 women about feminist advertising.66 The results of the survey were discussed and positively received at the 2014 New York Advertising Week. This event is where the term ‘femvertising’ was coined. In an era where there is mounting pressure on brands to assume corporate social responsibility, many brands have begun to use advocacy to improve their relationships with consumers.67 While accurate female representation in advertising is desirable, one must question the true intentions of companies using femvertising: are brands using the concept to show their support for women, or are brands noticing that the trend is popular and serves their agenda of selling products? This is an important distinction, particularly when considering the rise of advertising that claims to ‘empower’ women, and/or is being used to advocate for women’s causes such as breast cancer fundraising. In 2015, Thinx launched the For People with Periods campaign. Thinx is an American manufacturer of feminine hygiene products and underwear specifically designed to be worn during menstruation. The company gained notoriety due to their provocative advertising campaigns – which included images of yonic pink grapefruit, dripping egg yolk, and text that read: Period Proof Underwear that Protects You From Leaks and Sometimes the Patriarchy.68 The campaign was highly successful, highlighted in an article by digital news site Bustle, which discussed the implications of the company in sparking a new dialogue about period shaming, allowing Thinx to have ‘the last laugh’ at their critics.69 According to Thinx, their provocative imagery is ‘all euphemisms and winks to the camera70’ about the reality of having your period. As I will demonstrate, the same approach in breast cancer products has vastly different

122 

C. AGOSTINO AND R. MIDDLEMOST

outcomes – either women’s breasts are positioned as a ‘wink to the camera’ for men; or breasts are omitted entirely. Femvertisements that use sex appeal are opportunities for feminist media to equate products with principles of feminist ideology, like choice and empowerment.71 Taking the lead from Thinx, in 2019 Australian feminine hygiene brand Libra replaced blue liquid with blood in their campaign #bloodnormal. Libra’s messages of: ‘Periods are normal, showing them should be too72’ and ‘Contrary to popular belief, menstrual blood is not blue73’ takes aim at period-shaming. While some viewers claimed the advertisements were off-putting and compared them to showing used condoms, others celebrated the #bloodnormal campaign for attempting to destigmatise periods.74 Despite the perceived authenticity of femvertising, the practice has been critiqued. Hoad-Reddick75 argues that femvertising overtly addresses injustices towards women and offers its products as a solution. She states that femvertising sells a specific kind of neoliberal feminism that relies on the support of capitalism – which has strong links to white feminism.76 She notes that feminist advertisements, with all their punch, are just that: advertisements. As discussed, the Real Beauty campaign has faced several serious critiques regarding portrayals of women of colour – the failure of the campaign was that when Dove attempted to align their company with feminist values like self-respect and personal strength, they refused to acknowledge the beauty industry is a major contributor to women’s low self-esteem and self-worth.77 Femvertising is arguably being used as a mere buzzword for corporations to meet their corporate social responsibility obligations, and feminists have begun to resist it. Women’s reception to femvertising may differ based on the role that feminism, female empowerment, and gender equality play in different countries.78 In the West, despite appearing infrequently in academia, resistance to femvertising has a strong online presence. Since the official creation of the term in 2014, blogs and news sites have been publishing articles highlighting why femvertising does not work. In 2014, Clementine Ford described femvertising as a ‘monetised rhetoric of empowerment79’ and an ‘uneasy marriage between feminism and capitalism.’80 In 2015, Nosheen Iqbal wrote for The Guardian about femvertising, musing that: We will see more drives to sell young women empowerment through individual brands or projects. Likely ones with catchy slogans that can take off

7  THE IMPACT OF FEMVERTISING ON PINK BREAST CANCER PRODUCTS… 

123

on Twitter and ignore any boring analysis of gender inequality in favour of feeling good.81

A key issue for femvertising is that the emerging choice for women is the choice between no representation, or misrepresentation.82 In the following section I will argue that some of the same practices used in femvertising are also used in pinkwashing – where companies use the rhetoric of female empowerment to exploit consumers using a ‘for women, by women’ approach.

Pinkwashing: Breast Cancer Advertising in Australia The popularity of pinkwashed products, particularly those linked to breast cancer fundraising, has appeared infrequently in academic research, but has been extensively explored in blogs, news sites, and breast cancer action groups. The first application of the term pinkwashing to refer to breast cancer advocacy products appeared in 2002 and is credited to American watchdog organisation Breast Cancer Action (BCA), established in 1990. The term pinkwashing was first highlighted in their campaign Think Before You Pink (2002 – present), which is a direct response to their concerns regarding the large number of pink ribbon products being made. BCA defines pinkwashing as: A company or organization that claims to care about breast cancer by promoting a pink ribbon product, but at the same time produces, manufactures and/or sells products that are linked to the disease.83

Think Before You Pink now serves as an umbrella term for 18 other anti-­ pinkwashing campaigns championed by BCA, which call out the empty awareness of the pink ribbon, exploitation of breast cancer and customer’s goodwill by large corporations, carcinogenic pink products, sexism and objectification of women’s bodies, and misinformation about the disease. The pink ribbon as we know it today was not always a symbol of tyrannical optimism, nor was it an opportunity to feature thin, white women fighting ‘like a girl84’ or ‘thinking positively85’ to prevent breast cancer. Taylor & Knibb conducted a study that revealed breast cancer advertisements often project images of women who are healthy, happy, and triumphant, and feature sexual themes around breasts.

124 

C. AGOSTINO AND R. MIDDLEMOST

These images can be alienating to those who are struggling with side effects of treatment or fear of recurrence, who don’t feel ‘well and whole’, or who simply do not find getting cancer to be an overall net positive experience in their lives.86

In 1991, American breast cancer activist Charlotte Haley created the first peach coloured ribbon for breast cancer awareness, inspired by the success of the red HIV/AIDS ribbon. Haley’s simple peach ribbon represented action, people power, and a call for meaningful change; whereas today’s pink ribbon is a representation of the beautification, romanticisation, and commercialisation of breast cancer. Haley rejected an offer made by Self magazine and Estée Lauder in 1992 to partner on a ribbon campaign, telling the companies they were too commercial.87 However, Self and Estée Lauder wanted their own breast cancer ribbon, and legal counsel revealed that by changing the colour of the ribbon they could continue with their campaign. Self and Estée Lauder held all female focus groups to help them decide on the new colour and pink – specifically pastel pink – was unanimously chosen as it was considered to be comforting, reassuring, and non-­ threatening.88 In Western cultures, pink is heavily associated with ‘fun, independence and confidence’89 and creates ‘a connection between femininity and its stereotypical values.’90 The pink ribbon may have been chosen to represent a combination of comfort, reassurance, fun, and hyper-femininity – but the sentiment is laden with irony, as cancer is anything but. There is no shortage in choice of pink ribbon products: cosmetics, food, clothing, accessories, motor vehicles, tools, handguns, novelty items, sexual health products, homewares, personal breathalysers, and many more. Significantly, the pink ribbon symbol is not regulated by any agency, meaning it can be used on any merchandise – including products that are toxic and carcinogenic. The late Barbara Brenner, previously the executive director of BCA, writes: Of course the easiest way to support the cause, as we’ve been repeatedly told, is to buy something with a pink ribbon on it. Or, almost as good, carry something pink to show how much you care about women’s lives.91

Brenner’s words drive home the hypocrisy at the crux of pinkwashing: large corporations profiting from the mindless consumption of material objects simply because they have a pink ribbon on them. Davis & Lubitow

7  THE IMPACT OF FEMVERTISING ON PINK BREAST CANCER PRODUCTS… 

125

report that breast cancer is useful for corporate marketing campaigns because it is a familiar disease that invokes memories of beloved family and friends and has a very low risk of alienating potential consumers, unlike HIV/AIDS, or other ‘uncomfortable’ diseases.92 Elevating pink and pink branded products above the cause they ‘support’ may cause sympathetic customers to turn away from the issue of breast cancer, as the cause becomes secondary to the colour and products. While pinkwashing was initially an American phenomenon, Australia has not been immune to a wave of pink breast cancer products. There are four major breast cancer organisations in Australia: Breast Cancer Network Australia (BCNA), National Breast Cancer Foundation (NBCF), McGrath Foundation, and Cancer Australia. These organisations, excluding government owned Cancer Australia, sell a multitude of pink products between them. In Australia official pink products are goods such as clothing, work wear for labour, cosmetics, and miscellaneous novelty items (pins, wristbands, etc.). In addition to these pink products, the above four breast cancer organisations also have corporate partnerships with various businesses  – including with organisations that sell products with toxic chemicals and carcinogens known to cause cancer, including: Estée Lauder, Ford Australia, SMS Mining Services, Pfizer pharmaceuticals, and BP Australia. To assess the impact and influence of pink themed advertisements and products on consumers, primary research was conducted in the form of a focus group, the results of which I explore below. A textual analysis via a focus group was held for this study on May 30th, 2019. Fairclough93 and Creeber94 highlight the limited scope of textual analysis, noting that it should be used with other analytical methods. Criticism of textual analysis is related to the validity and relevance of the researcher conducting the analysis. Researchers risk ‘prescribing a universal reader…implying that readers, regardless of age, gender, social class and race, will read a text in exactly the same way’.95 Despite this, Ettinger & Maitland-Gholson96 argue that textual analysis holds an important place in methodologies of analysis and interpretation, as it provides opportunities to consider the symbolic messages in texts and images. Mckee97 notes textual analysis is not about finding the correct interpretation, but rather understanding the context that surrounds the text – particularly the wider public context in which it is being circulated. Mckee’s interpretation of textual analysis is key to this chapter. To avoid the problem of assigning a universal reader through my own interpretation of the texts, a focus group was conducted to gain an

126 

C. AGOSTINO AND R. MIDDLEMOST

understanding of how audiences respond to pinkwashed Australian breast cancer advertisements. Participants provided a textual analysis of each advertisement and reflected on the implications of pinkwashing in Australia. Interested participants were recruited from the University of Wollongong via social media, providing a convenience sample of 7 participants: 2 males and 5 females. The limitations of this study lay within the sample size – students and staff were chosen as participants as part of a convenience sample due to the short nature of this study. The majority of participants were females under the age of 25. Although this study is limited, it was only ever intended to lay the groundwork for more complete research in the future. Furthermore, I had initially planned for a larger range of participants, but despite rigorous promotion of the focus group and providing incentives to encourage attendance, recruitment issues proved to be too great. Morgan98 notes that recruitment is the most common failure of focus groups. However, an advantage of focus groups is that participants can provide rapid feedback for the researcher on the validity of the research99 and – despite small numbers – focus groups can generate more ideas because of synergy among the participants.100 Participants were provided with a consent form and detailed information sheet on the day of the focus group. The questions and images used in the sessions were approved by the University of Wollongong’s Human Ethics and Research Committee. During the focus group, qualitative data was gathered about participants’ thoughts on femvertising and three specific breast cancer advertisements (discussed below). After the opening conversation, I initiated a general discussion shaped around participant’s perception of the colour pink, breast cancer, and expectations for breast cancer advertisements. Participants unanimously answered that they believed pink was a highly feminised colour, and it was very prevalent in breast cancer advocacy, advertisements, and events. One participant suggested that the number of pink products available may lead consumers to think breast cancer is more common than it actually is  – other participants agreed that they perceived it as a very common disease. This comment reflected the results of a study by Jones et al.,101 who found that a large proportion of Australian women indicated they believed they were at risk for breast cancer because it was ‘common’ and believed that because they are like most women, they are at ‘average’ risk for developing breast cancer. Participants also discussed the familiarity of the disease, and how this impacts their feelings about pink products and breast cancer:

7  THE IMPACT OF FEMVERTISING ON PINK BREAST CANCER PRODUCTS… 

127

It feeds into ‘oh, it’s saving the whales’ – you don’t know anybody who owns a whale. Whereas everybody knows someone or knows someone who knows someone who has had some kind of cancer, it’s very relatable. My grandmother is actually going through chemo[therapy] for the third time for breast cancer at the moment, whenever they do the breast cancer advertisements I always feel bad about not buying it…it’s almost like a guilt trip.

When asked about their expectations for breast cancer ads, participants unanimously agreed that they expected an upbeat tone, with pink heavily featured, and messages of self-empowerment to be featured. Participants acknowledged they did not see similar advertising techniques for any other cancers.Following this initial discussion, participants were asked to respond to three Australian breast cancer advertisements they had not previously seen. Two central themes emerged from the discussions of the advertisements: the role of male spaces and the nonchalant approach to breast cancer. • Shannons: Take Your Tops Off102 This advertisement is from specialist car insurance company Shannons 2019 ‘Take Your Tops Off’ event, hosted in Tasmania, Australia. Shannons, despite not directly promoting hyper-masculinity, is closely related to Australia’s masculine ‘car culture.’ Motorsports are regarded as being an integral part to the Australian identity, with competitive motor racing popularised in the 1920s.103 Stereotypical Australian car culture often involves the tough, beer loving ‘Aussie bloke’ in activities such as hooning (deliberate reckless driving such as drag racing and burnouts), car shows and festivals, and Supercar/motorsport events  – which are often decorated with young, attractive women to compliment the motor vehicles. This advertisement features a woman styled in a glamourous 1950s fashion, sitting in a vintage car. The text that dominates the image reads ‘Take Your Tops Off’ with ‘Convertibles for Breast Cancer Research’ in much smaller font. In the top left corner, there is a pink ribbon symbol with text that reads: ‘Proudly supporting the National Breast Cancer Foundation. 100% of all funds will be donated to the NBCF.’ Focus group participants unanimously agreed that this advertisement was targeted at men, signified by the sexual play on words, the sultry looking woman as the centrepiece, and the decision to combine a car show (particularly in an

128 

C. AGOSTINO AND R. MIDDLEMOST

Australian context) with breast cancer fundraising outside of October (breast cancer awareness month in Australia.) I think it appeals to the male fantasy more than the actual research, you can see it’s a vintage photo, it’s a woman done up in a 50s style, its old cars, so it’s more like an excuse to have the fantasy. It’s an effective advertisement for the wrong reasons. They have a whole bunch of trophies and prizes, it’s sort of like ‘we just needed an excuse to hold this event for guys, so we’ll just say it’s about breast cancer.’

The above comment in particular reflects the results of a study by Quincey et al.,104 which revealed that ‘existing ideologies about breast cancer and femininity oppose central masculine ideals and social constructions of what it means to be a man.’ Participants shared a unanimous disliking of the crude phrase ‘take your tops off’, with two participants stating that it made the disease feel like a joke, and that they would not have known the event was for breast cancer at first glance. • Bisley Workwear: Are You Man Enough?105 This advertisement by workwear company Bisley features two men (one of the men is Australian television personality Scott Cam) and one woman smiling with their arms around each other, wearing various pieces of pink high-visibility clothing designed for physical labour. Various pieces of text in the advertisement state: ‘Are you man enough?’, ‘Real Men Wear Pink’ and ‘In the mines. In the office. In the factory. Real Men are wearing pink to find a cure for the women in their lives.’ The pink ribbon is featured, but it is very small compared to the other elements. When shown this advertisement, participants overwhelmingly voiced their disdain of the use of the phrases ‘man up’ and ‘breast cancer experience.’ One participant stated that breast cancer is not an experience, but rather a deadly disease. The phrases featured in the advertisement were linked by many participants to encouraging toxic masculinity aligned with stereotypical gender roles, via the use of ‘man up’ etc. Participants said the phrasing of the advertisement was aggressive, inappropriate, lip service, and a bizarre call to action – one which did not seem to ‘match’ the cause.

7  THE IMPACT OF FEMVERTISING ON PINK BREAST CANCER PRODUCTS… 

129

Are you man enough to wear a colour? It’s so many phobics – scared of women, scared of anyone who’s not cisgender, scared of anyone flamboyant, and they’re trying to put it in the workplace as if they’re doing something noble. It’s not even a fully pink shirt, only half the sleeves and midriff are pink…we don’t want the blokes [men] to be too girly. It’s not even including men in the discussion, they need their own separate, manly discussion.

Thus, the advertisement was rendered the least successful and least popular for its ‘call to action.’ This finding echoes the research by King who states that using phrases along the lines of ‘real men wear pink’ suggests an alternative version of masculinity  – one that is sensitive, compassionate and charitable – in which men are rewarded for having good character and are seen as embracing ‘humanistic values’ like performing charitable work.106 Neither King or I are suggesting it is emasculating to be perceived as sensitive, compassionate, or charitable – but the false set-­up of those values is how men are represented in breast cancer ads. • Tooborac Hotel: ‘Tooby Booby’ Fundraising Event This advertisement was created by Tooborac Hotel, a country pub in Victoria, Australia. The advertisement is dominated by a large pink bra that features the text ‘Tooby Booby: A beer festival to support cancer research107’, with one word on each cup. The breast cancer ribbon has been placed in the centre of the bra but is barely noticeable, in addition to two small Cancer Council logos in the bottom left corner. The festival was held on January 26th, which is Australia Day.108 A second image was attached to this advertisement – the image was a cartoon of a woman with large breasts serving a beer to a woman with small breasts, who asks the question: ‘Do you serve little ones?’ Initial laughter from participants was followed by confusion after reading the message of the poster. Participants questioned the use of the pink ribbon being incorporated into the bra image, in addition to the small cartoon that was used as a secondary image on the original poster. None of this is making me feel in the slightest bit charitable. I don’t want to give these people any of my money, and if they did have it, I’d ask for it back.

130 

C. AGOSTINO AND R. MIDDLEMOST

At least breast cancer research is in readable writing, but it’s dominated by a giant pair of boobs.

The insult of female bodies in the advertisement for this event, even in a ‘humorous’ style, rendered this event distasteful for my focus group participants, and most likely, those fighting breast cancer. As stated earlier in this chapter – women’s breasts are continually positioned as a ‘wink to the camera’ for men. These comments reflect the research completed by Kilbourne109 about women in advertising – as stated earlier in this chapter, women’s bodies are dismembered and insulted in advertisements (this ad uses a bra/breasts only to represent women), and there is a strong emphasis on physical perfection (breast size/‘Do you serve little ones?’). Participants also discussed the decision to hold the event on Australia Day (January 26th), stating the event in question was clearly targeted at men from a country demographic – Australians who live in the country/outback are stereotyped as being uncultured and of lower socio-economic status, and frequent participants in drinking culture. It’s Australia Day! They’re going to be at a pub anyway.

Alcohol is viewed as an intrinsic part to Australian culture and is acceptable at almost all occasions110 – particularly Australia Day, as it is widely regarded as a day to party and drink heavily. People will go there and drink their hearts out and not realise they’re raising funds for breast cancer.

The Tooby Booby advertisement exemplifies pinkwashing, defined by BCA as ‘a company or organization that claims to care about breast cancer by promoting a pink ribbon product, but at the same time produces, manufactures and/or sells products that are linked to the disease.’111 This breast cancer beer festival is attempting to raise funds for breast cancer research, but is serving alcohol, a known carcinogen that is a confirmed risk factor for causing cancer.112 Following the review of the three advertisements, a closing discussion was held in which further remarks could be made, or previous points clarified. Participants unanimously agreed that all of the advertisements shown during the session were targeted at men and had very little to do with healthcare, women, or breast cancer. Participants also commented on the role of pink in the advertisements and how it

7  THE IMPACT OF FEMVERTISING ON PINK BREAST CANCER PRODUCTS… 

131

effects the image of breast cancer, concluding that this type of advertising would never appear with any other cancer. The following comments echoed the findings of Taylor & Knibb’s study, which found that breast cancer advertising did not reflect reality, especially regarding the experience of breast cancer survivors.113 Their study revealed that the use of pink products and events were perceived as overcommercialised, and were simply used as props, especially during October. Cheap and reductive, it’s so transparently marketing. They’re either making crass jokes about women or they’re infantilising them. Blue for boys, pink for girls…it was like men sat down and said, ‘what do we know about women?’ All of these examples are quite coy or even sexist. I think it [breast cancer] gets a lot of time and attention that other cancer charities don’t get.

These final comments reflect the ideas put forward by Gupta, discussed earlier in this chapter – that the issue for women in advertising seems to be either no representation or misrepresentation. The above three ads either omit women entirely, replacing them with items of femininity, or glamourise and misrepresent them in relation to breast cancer.When discussing pink breast cancer products, participants shared that they felt guilt when viewing the products, identifying that while breast cancer may be ‘horrible and horrific’ there were plenty of other cancers that did not receive the same attention. Furthermore, they identified that the advertisements shown during the focus group were sexist, doing a disservice to breast cancer, and were catering to men – despite not discussing male breast cancer. Although it seems bleak, as I will suggest in the conclusion, I envision several areas for future development of ads that truly speak to women fighting cancer.

Conclusion Femvertising can represent all women in a positive way – if it is done right. This is the same of breast cancer advertisements. By comparing and contrasting various femvertising campaigns, it was revealed that some femvertisements – like Thinx’s For People with Periods and Libra’s #bloodnormal

132 

C. AGOSTINO AND R. MIDDLEMOST

campaigns – exemplified the idea that femvertisements can positively portray women and girls, focus on removing traditional social taboos related to women, and portray women as having a more powerful societal role. A starting point for future research of this kind may look deeper into the influence of femvertising. These ‘good’ elements of femvertising – despite not being executed effectively at present – are female empowerment, body positivity, intersectionality, real feminist discourse, and the end goal of truly progressing the image of women in advertising. If this is established, the model can be extended to learn how this ‘new’ femvertising can positively influence breast cancer advertising. Additionally, the results of the focus group (though limited) were enlightening. This research method was beneficial as it generated synergy among participants, which helped to build an early understanding of how Australian audiences understand the messages being communicated in pinkwashed breast cancer advertisements. The particular study was limited by time constraints, attendance rates, and a narrow range of participants. However, this chapter was intended only to lay the groundwork for future research of this kind, so it should be noted that a much wider sample of men and women from varying age and cultural demographics should be approached for qualitative data collection over a longer period of time. However, by putting these theoretical frames into conversation, I hope to open the door for further research. If femvertising and breast cancer advertising can inform each other, there can be a pathway forward that may be able to empower all women in advertising, and begin the end of patronising, infantilising, and sexist breast cancer advertisements. Pinkwashing may not cease to exist completely – but breast cancer ads may stop positioning women’s breasts as a ‘wink’ to the camera, stop using cheap jokes and inappropriate slogans, allow men to see themselves portrayed authentically (including men with breast cancer), and begin to subdue the influence of pink ribbon culture. This new genre of ads may be able to realistically represent breast cancer and actually empower the women they claim to represent. Focus Group Questions What do you think when you see this? I’m going to read the text that accompanies this advertisement. Please write down any keywords that stand out to you.

7  THE IMPACT OF FEMVERTISING ON PINK BREAST CANCER PRODUCTS… 

133

Do you think this an effective advertisement? Please explain why. Do you think there are any issues with this advertisement? Please explain why.

Notes 1. Melinda Liszewski, ‘Bavarian Bier Cafe ‘best rack’ ad treats women like meat,’ Collective Shout, last modified October 26, 2014, accessed February 13, 2021, https://www.collectiveshout.org/bavarian_bier_ cafe_best_rack_ad_treats_women_like_meat 2. Sarah Oakes, ‘Bavarian Bier Cafe called out for sexist and exploitative ads,’ Daily Life, last modified October 26, 2014, accessed February 13, 2021, http://www.dailylife.com.au/news-­and-­views/news-­features/ bavarian-­bier-­cafe-­called-­out-­for-­sexist-­and-­exploitative-­ads-­20141027­11cfk6.html 3. ‘Bavarian Bier Cafe ‘best rack’ ad treats women like meat,’ Collective Shout, 2014. 4. ‘Cancer in Australia statistics’, Cancer Australia, accessed February 3, 2021, https://www.canceraustralia.gov.au/affected-­cancer/what-­cancer/ cancer-­australia-­statistics 5. Enas Abd Elrahman, ‘Cancer Awareness Campaigns,’ Behance, accessed April 10, 2021, https://www.behance.net/gallery/64538873/Cancer-­ Awareness-­Campaign 6. Bridget Fitzgerland, ‘Save a life, grope ya wife’ slogan cuts through to promote breast cancer awareness in rural Victoria,’ ABC, accessed April 10, 2021, https://www.abc.net.au/news/rural/2016-­11-­29/check-­ your-­boobs-­silage-­message-­promotes-­breast-­cancer-­awareness/8073802 7. Jean Kilbourne, ‘The dangerous ways ads see women,’ May 2014, TEDx video, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uy8yLaoWybk 8. Ibid. 9. Ibid. 10. Judith A.  Freeman, ‘The distorting image: women and advertising, 1900–1960,’ (PhD Thesis, University of Massachusetts, 1984) https:// scholarworks.umass.edu/theses/1529 11. Jo Reger, ‘Micro-Cohorts, Feminist Discourse, and the Emergence of the Toronto SlutWalk,’ Feminist Formations 26, no. 1 (2014): 49–69. 12. Shayoni Mitra, ‘It Takes Six People to Make a Mattress Feel Light...’: Materializing Pain in Carry that Weight and Sexual Assault Activism,’ Contemporary Theatre Review 25, no. 3 (2015): 386–400.

134 

C. AGOSTINO AND R. MIDDLEMOST

13. Rachel E. Presley and Alane L. Presswood, ‘Pink, Brown, and Read All Over: Representation at the 2017 Women’s March on Washington,’ Cultural Studies ↔ Critical Methodologies 18, no. 1 (2018): 61–71. 14. Banu Gökarıksel and Sara Smith, ‘Intersectional feminism beyond U.S. flag hijab and pussy hats in Trump’s America,’ Gender, Place, & Culture 24, no. 5 (2017): 628–644. 15. Annadıs G. Rudolfsdottir and Asta Johannsdottir, ‘Fuck patriarchy! An analysis of digital mainstream media discussion of the #freethenipple activities in Iceland in March 2015,’ Feminism & Psychology 28, no. 1 (2015): 133–151. 16. Ksenia Keplinger, Stefanie K. Johnson, Jessica F. Kirk and Liza Y. Barnes, ‘Women at work: Changes in sexual harassment between September 2016 and September 2018,’ PLoS One 14, no. 7 (2019): 1–20. 17. Sheena J. Vachhani and Alison Pullen, ‘Ethics, politics and feminist organizing: Writing feminist infrapolitics and affective solidarity into everyday sexism,’ Human Relations 72, no. 1 (2019): 23–47. 18. Courtney E.  Martin and Vanessa Valenti, ‘#FemFuture: Online Revolution,’ New Feminist Solutions 8, (2012): 1–34. 19. Pauline Maclaran, ‘Feminism’s fourth wave: a research agenda for marketing and consumer research,’ Journal of Marketing Management 31, no. 15–16 (2015): 1732–1738. 20. Martin and Valenti, New Feminist Solutions, 1–34. 21. Cashawn Thompson, ‘Cashawn – Black History Untold,’ Black History Untold, accessed February 9, 2021, https://www.blkhistoryuntold. com/herstory/cashawn 22. Celeste Liddle, ‘Rantings of an Aboriginal Feminist,’ Black Feminist Ranter (blog) 2015, http://blackfeministranter.blogspot.com/p/ about-­black-­feminist-­ranter.html. 23. Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, ‘We should all be feminists | Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie | TEDxEuston’ April 2013, TEDx Talks video, https:// www.youtube.com/watch?v=hg3umXU_qWc&noredirect=1 24. Feminista Jones, Reclaiming Our Space: How Black Feminists Are Changing the World from the Tweets to the Streets (Boston: Beacon Press, 2019). 25. Jessica Valenti, Sex Object (New York: Harper Collins, 2016). 26. Kira Cochrane, All The Rebel Women (London: Guardian Books, 2013). 27. Laura Bates, ‘Everyday Sexism Project’, Everyday Sexism Project, accessed April 4, 2019, https://everydaysexism.com/ 28. Roxane Gay, Bad Feminist (New York: Harper Perennial, 2014). 29. Sandra E.  Garcia, ‘The Woman Who Created #MeToo Long Before Hashtags,’ The New York Times, last modified October 20, 2017, accessed February 9, 2021, https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/20/us/me-­ too-­movement-­tarana-­burke.html

7  THE IMPACT OF FEMVERTISING ON PINK BREAST CANCER PRODUCTS… 

135

30. Lola Okolosie, ‘Beyond ‘talking’ and ‘owning’ intersectionality,’ Feminist Review 108, no. 1 (2014): 90–96. 31. Ibid. 32. Janell Hobson, ‘Celebrity Feminism: More Than a Gateway,’ Signs: Journal of Women in Culture & Society 42, no. 4 (2017): 999–1007. 33. Sierra Brewer and Lauren Dundes, ‘Concerned, meet terrified: Intersectional feminism and the Women’s March,’ Women’s Studies International Forum 69, (2018): 49–55. 34. Laura La Rosa, ‘Trickle-down white feminism doesn’t cut it,’ Eureka Street 28, no. 12 (2018): 12–15. 35. Michelle Colpean and Meg Tully, ‘Not Just a Joke: Tina Fey, Amy Schumer, and the Weak Reflexivity of White Feminist Comedy,’ Women’s Studies in Communication 42, no. 2 (2019): 161–180. 36. Hobson, Celebrity Feminism, 1004. 37. Sally Hines, ‘The feminist frontier: on trans and feminism,’ Journal of Gender Studies 28, no. 2 (2019): 145–157. 38. Jennifer Earles, ‘The ‘Penis Police’: Lesbian and Feminist Spaces, Trans Women, and the Maintenance of the Sex/ Gender/Sexuality System,’ Journal of Lesbian Studies 23, no. 2 (2019): 243–256. 39. Dominique Grizard, ‘In The Pink of Things: Gender, Sexuality, and Race,’ in Pink: The History of a Punk, Pretty, Powerful Color, ed. Valerie Steele (New York: Thames & Hudson, 2018). 40. Samantha Skey, ‘#Femvertising’ iBlog Magazine, 2015, http://cdn.sheknows.com/corporate.sheknows.com/production/nodes/attachments/24521/iBlog_Magazine-­S heKnows-­F emvertisingFeature. pdf?1429105587 41. Suzy D’Enbeau, ‘Sex, Feminism, and Advertising: The Politics of Advertising Feminism in a Competitive Marketplace,’ Journal of Communication Enquiry 35, no. 1 (2011): 53–69. 42. Sara Champlin, Yvette Sterbenk, Kasey Windels and Maddison Poteet, ‘How brand-cause fit shapes real world advertising messages: a qualitative exploration of ‘femvertising’,’ International Journal of Advertising, (2019): 1–24, https://doi.org/10.1080/02650487.2019.1615294 43. Nina Akestam, Sara Rosengren and Micael Dahlen, ‘Advertising ‘like a girl’: Toward a better understanding of ‘femvertising’ and its effects,’ Psychology & Marketing 34, (2017): 795–806. 44. Kate Hoad-Reddick, ‘Pitching the Feminist Voice: A Critique of Contemporary Consumer Feminism,’ (PhD Thesis, University of Western Ontario, 2017) https://ir.lib.uwo.ca/etd/5093 45. Diana Ward, Deborah Burton and Helen Lynn, ‘Pinkwashing and the Breast Cancer Prevention Movement,’ Women and Environments 96/97, (2016): 18–22.

136 

C. AGOSTINO AND R. MIDDLEMOST

46. Jane S.  Zones, ‘Profits From Pain: The Political Economy of Breast Cancer Breast Cancer’ in Breast Cancer: Society Shapes An Epidemic, ed. Anne S. Kasper and Susan J. Ferguson (New York: Palgrave, 2000). 47. Anne S.  Kasper, Susan J.  Ferguson, Breast Cancer: Society Shapes an Epidemic (New York: Palgrave, 2000). 48. Phaedra C. Pezzullo, ‘Resisting ‘national breast cancer awareness month’: the rhetoric of counterpublics and their cultural performances,’ Quarterly Journal of Speech 89, no. 4 (2003): 45–365. 49. Jennifer A.  Harvey and Michal A.  Strahilevitz, ‘The Power of Pink: Cause-Related Marketing and the Impact on Breast Cancer,’ Journal of the American College of Radiology 6, no. 1 (2009): 26–32. 50. Valerie Steele, Pink: The History of a Punk, Pretty, Powerful Color (New York: Thames & Hudson, 2018). 51. Barbara Ehrenreich, ‘Welcome to Cancerland,’ Harper’s Magazine, November 2001. 52. Samantha King, Pink Ribbons, Inc. Breast Cancer and the Politics of Philanthropy (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006). 53. Sarah Mart and Norman Giesbrecht, ‘Red flags on pinkwashed drinks: contradictions and dangers in marketing alcohol to prevent cancer,’ Society for the Study of Addiction 110, no. 10 (2015): 1541–1548. 54. Kerry Quincey, Iain Williamson and Sue Winstanley, “Marginalised malignancies’: A qualitative synthesis of men’s accounts of living with breast cancer,’ Social Science & Medicine 149 (2016): 17–25. 55. Kim Bartel Sheehan and Kati Tusinski Berg, ‘Thinking pink? Consumer reactions to pink ribbons and vague messages in advertising,’ Journal of Marketing Communications 24, no. 5 (2018): 469–485. 56. Amy Lubitow and Mia Davis, ‘Pastel Injustice: The Corporate Use of Pinkwashing for Profit,’ Environmental Jusitce 4, no. 2 (2011): 139–144. 57. Jeanine Warisse Turner and Dean Sirjue, ‘Can a Pink Ribbon Actually Limit Awareness?,’ Health Communication 34, no. 1 (2019) 130–133. 58. Ward, Burton, Lynn, Women and Environments, 22. 59. Ibid. 60. Freeman, The Distorting Image: Women and Advertising, 34. 61. Nancy Etcoff, Susan Orbach, Jennifer Scott and Heidi D’Agostino, ‘The Real truth About Beauty: A Global Report,’ Dove, last modified 2004, accessed June 4, 2019, http://www.clubofamsterdam.com/contentarticles/52%20Beauty/dove_white_paper_final.pdf 62. Ibid. 63. Ana Cristina Amaral, ‘Dove Real Beauty Campaign: A Local Perspective,’ (Dissertation, Católica Lisbon School of Business & Economics, 2017) https://run.unl.pt/bitstream/10362/25593/1/Amaral_2017.pdf

7  THE IMPACT OF FEMVERTISING ON PINK BREAST CANCER PRODUCTS… 

137

64. Keith Boykin, ‘Keith Boykin On Twitter: Okay, Dove...One racist ad makes you suspect. Two racist ads makes you kinda guilty’ Twitter, last modified October 2017, accessed February 8, 2021, https://twitter. com/keithboykin/status/917048777864867840 65. Jess Zimmerman, ‘Dove’s dumb body wash bottles are an answer to a question nobody asked,’ The Washington Post, last modified May 10, 2017, accessed June 4, 2019, https://www.washingtonpost.com/posteverything/wp/2017/05/09/doves-­dumb-­body-­wash-­bottles-­are-­an-­ answer-­to-­a-­question-­nobody-­asked/?utm_term=.0d8b13f47a8f 66. Roo Powell, ‘How Ads That Empower Women Are Boosting Sales and Bettering the Industry’, Adweek, last modified October 3, 2014, accessed September 14, 2019, https://www.adweek.com/brand-­marketing/ how-­a ds-­e mpower-­w omen-­a r e-­b oosting-­s ales-­a nd-­b ettering-­ industry-­160539/ 67. Champlin, Sterbenk, Windels and Poteet, How Brand-cause Fit Shapes Real World Advertising Messages, 2. 68. ‘Mad (Wo)men: An Interview With The Team Behind *Those* THINX Ads’, Thinx, last modified July 6, 2017, accessed June 3, 2019, https:// www.shethinx.com/blogs/thinx-­p iece/mad-­w omen-­a n-­i nterview-­ with-­the-­team-­behind-­those-­thinx-­ads/ 69. Rachel Krantz, ‘THINX Underwear Ads On NYC Subway Are Up  — But The Company Has Another Big Announcement,’ Bustle, last modified November 10, 2015, accessed June 4, 2019, https://www.bustle. com/articles/122564-­thinx-­underwear-­ads-­on-­nyc-­subway-­are-­up-­but-­ the-­company-­has-­another-­big-­announcement 70. Ibid. 71. D’Enbeau, Sex, Feminism, and Advertising, 64. 72. ‘Blood Normal – Lovelibra’, Libra, accessed February 15, 2021, https:// lovelibra.com/au/blood-­normal/ 73. Ibid. 74. Mary Llyod, ‘Depicting blood during Libra commercial does not breach ethics code, watchdog rules,’ ABC News, last modified September 18, 2019, accessed September 25, 2019, https://www.abc.net.au/ news/2019-­09-­18/as-­standards-­r ule-­on-­period-­blood-­after-­complaints-­ over-­libra-­ad/11521530 75. Hoad-Reddick, Pitching the Feminist Voice, 42. 76. Ibid. 77. Caitlin M. McLeary, ‘A Not-So-Beautiful Campaign: A Feminist Analysis of the Dove Campaign for Real Beauty,’ (Honors Thesis, University of Tennessee, 2014) https://trace.tennessee.edu/utk_chanhonoproj 78. Champlin, Sterbenk, Windels and Poteet, How brand-cause fit shapes real world advertising messages, 4.

138 

C. AGOSTINO AND R. MIDDLEMOST

79. Clementine Ford, ‘The trouble with ‘femvertising,” Daily Life, last modified November 4, 2014, accessed August 20, 2019, http://www.dailyl i f e . c o m . a u / n e w s -­a n d -­v i e w s / d l -­o p i n i o n / t h e -­t r o u b l e -­w i t h -­ femvertising-­20141103-­11g801.html 80. Ibid. 81. Nosheen Iqbal, ‘Femvertising: how brands are selling #empowerment to women,’ The Guardian, last modified October 13, 2015, accessed August 20, 2019, https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2015/oct/12/ femvertising-­branded-­feminism 82. Shagun Gupta, ‘Femvertising: How Corporates Co-opt Feminism To Sell Us Things,’ Feminism India, last modified May 30, 2017, accessed February 18, 2021, https://feminisminindia.com/2017/05/30/ femvertising-­corporates-­feminism/ 83. ‘Think Before You Pink Toolkit’, Breast Cancer Action, accessed March 5, 2019, https://bcaction.org/site-­content/uploads/2010/11/2012-­ Think-­Before-­You-­Pink-­Toolkit.pdf 84. ‘Cancer Support Community | Explore Women’s Empowerment and Cancer Survivor Stories | Fight Like a Girl,’ Fight Like a Girl, accessed February 17, 2021, https://www.fightlikeagirlclub.com/ 85. ‘Think Before You Pink » Knot Our Pink Ribbon,’ Think Before You Pink, accessed February 17, 2021, https://thinkbeforeyoupink.org/past-­ campaigns/knot-­our-­pink-­ribbon/ 86. Kimberly A. Taylor and Jana N. Knibb, ‘Don’t give US pink ribbons and skinny girls: Breast cancer survivors’ evaluations of cancer advertising,’ Health Marketing Quarterly 36, no. 3, (2019): 186–202. 87. ‘In Memoriam: Charlotte Haley, Creator of the First (Peach) Breast Cancer Ribbon,’ Breast Cancer Action, last modified June 24, 2014, accessed July 6, 2019, https://www.bcaction.org/2014/06/24/ in-­m emoriam-­c harlotte-­h aley-­c reator-­o f-­t he-­f irst-­p each-­b reast-­ cancer-­ribbon/ 88. Lea Pool, Pink Ribbons Inc., (National Film Board of Canada, 2011) DVD. 89. Veronika Koller, ‘‘Not just a colour’: pink as a gender and sexuality marker in visual communication,’ Visual Communication 7, no. 4 (2008): 395–423. 90. Ibid. 91. Barbara Brenner, ‘Odds and Ends in the Pink Ribbons Wars,’ Barbara Brenner (blog), May 17, 2012, https://barbarabrenner.net/?p=591 92. Davis and Lubitow, Pastel Injustice, 141. 93. Norman Fairclough, Analysing Discourse: Textual analysis for social research, (London, Routledge, 2003). 94. Glen Creeber, ‘The Joy of Text?: Television and Textual Analysis,’ Critical Studies in Television 1, no. 1 (2006): 81–88.

7  THE IMPACT OF FEMVERTISING ON PINK BREAST CANCER PRODUCTS… 

139

95. Ibid. 96. Linda F. Ettinger, Jane Maitland-Gholson, ‘Text Analysis as a Guide for Research in Art Education,’ Studies in Art Education 31, no. 2 (1990): 86–98. 97. Alan McKee, ‘A beginner’s guide to textual analysis,’ Metro Magazine 127, (2001): 138–149. 98. David L. Morgan, ‘Reconsidering the Role of Interaction in Analyzing and Reporting Focus Groups,’ Qualitative Health Research 20, no. 5 (2010): 718–722. 99. Jennifer Cyr, ‘The Pitfalls and Promise of Focus Groups as a Data Collection Method,’ Sociological Methods & Research 45, no. 2 (2006): 231–256. 100. Louis J. Kruger, Rachel F. Rodgers, Stephanie J. Long & Alice S. Lowy, ‘Individual interviews or focus groups? Interview format and women’s self-­disclosure,’ International Journal of Social Research Methodology 22, no. 3 (2019): 245–255. 101. Sandra C.  Jones, Christopher A.  Magee, Lance R.  Barrie, Donald C. Iverson, Parri Gregory, Emma L. Hanks, Anne E. Nelson, Caroline L.  Nehill, and Helen M.  Zorbas, ‘Australian women’s perceptions of breast cancer risk factors and the risk of developing breast cancer,’ Women’s Health Issues 21, no. 5 (2011): 353–360. 102. ‘Shannons Take Your Tops Off for breast Cancer Research’, CharityDOs, accessed March 15, 2019, https://charitydos.com.au/do/30828-­ shannons-­take-­your-­tops-­off-­for-­breast-­cancer-­research-­2075 103. Annette Twyman, Sally Adair, Sally Dawson, Kirstin Gunether, Emily Casey, Alana Sivell, Johanna McMahon, Google Arts and Culture, accessed April 18, 2021, https://artsandculture.google.com/exhibit/motorsports-­ a u s t r a l i a n -­i d e n t i t y -­n a t i o n a l -­p o r t r a i t -­g a l l e r y -­o f -­a u s t r a l i a / rAKCP9gXSxMRLw?hl=en 104. Quincey, Williamson, and Winstanley, Marginalised Malignancies, 18. 105. Paul Skelton, ‘NBCF And Bisley Workwear Team Up To Challenge ‘Real Men’ To Wear Pink,’ Electrical Connection, last modified July 28, 2014, accessed March 15, 2019, https://electricalconnection.com.au/ nbcf-­and-­bisley-­workwear-­team-­challenge-­real-­men-­wear-­pink/ 106. King, Pink Ribbons Inc., 23. 107. ‘Tooby Booby Beer Festival,’ Heathcote, accessed March 15, 2019, http://www.heathcote.org.au/whats-­on/next-­7-­days/event/6210-­ tooby-­booby-­beer-­festival 108. Australia Day (January 26th) is heavily associated with drinking, overt nationalism, and ‘manliness’ – despite being the day that the country was invaded and colonised, beginning an endless period of mourning for Indigenous Australians.

140 

C. AGOSTINO AND R. MIDDLEMOST

109. Kilbourne, The Dangerous Ways Ads See Women, 2014. 110. Mike Reid, ‘Drinking-related lifestyles: exploring the role of alcohol in Victorians’ lives – Research summary,’ Vic Health, (2013) https://www. v i c h e a l t h . v i c . g o v . a u / -­/ m e d i a / R e s o u r c e C e n t r e / PublicationsandResources/alcohol-­m isuse/Drinking-­R elated-­ Lifestyles/Drinking-­related-­lifestyles_Summary.pdf?la=en&hash=1AFA 6D34119232A1EE0A7554292BD87AE3BFE353#:~:text=Alcohol%20 is%20an%20intrinsic%20part,at%20funerals%20or%20baby%20showers. 111. Think Before You Pink Toolkit, Breast Cancer Action, 2019. 112. Australian Institute of Health and Welfare, ‘Cancer in Australia 2019,’ Cancer Series 119, (2019): 7. 113. Taylor and Knibb, Don’t give US pink ribbons and skinny girls, 198.

CHAPTER 8

“Stay Woke. Make Moves” Branding for a Feminist Future Amidst Pandemic Precarity Hannah Curran-Troop, Rosalind Gill, and Jo Littler

We are a female-driven multi-brand. We run a creative agency, a purpose market-place and a co-work/life loft…we curate and we co-create… products and communication for the generation woke.1

This chapter builds on critiques of femvertising,2 radical consumption and anti-consumerism,3 cool or woke capitalism4 and commodity activism5 to look at the emergence of several new outspokenly feminist creative enterprises which seek to influence brand strategies and wider culture. These include the ‘female entrepreneur’ podcast FemGems and international co-­ working space for women The Wing. The chapter focuses in particular on Goalgirls, which styles itself as a team of ‘co-rebelles’ and ‘disruptors’ seeking to challenge sexist advertising, ‘pale-male-stale hierarchies’ and develop ‘experiential marketing, digital campaigns, brand building and activism for a conscious generation’.6 Set up in 2017  in Berlin, the

H. Curran-Troop (*) • R. Gill • J. Littler City, University of London, London, UK e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 J. Gwynne (ed.), The Cultural Politics of Femvertising, Palgrave Studies in (Re)Presenting Gender, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-99154-8_8

141

142 

H. CURRAN-TROOP ET AL.

organisation uses the tagline ‘we are in the business of female empowerment’ to promote a new and different form of creative agency: one appealing to clients seeking to profit from feminist and ‘woke’ consumers. In this chapter we look at how the Goalgirls’ ‘co-creagency’ has worked across multiple tensions which have been exacerbated during the Covid-19 pandemic. These include conflicts between corporate and activist identities, between individual and collective working, and between slowing down and speeding up ‘productivity culture’. We examine their distinctive ways of working and organising, their campaigns, and their self-­presentation in the advertising, branding, and marketing mediascape. How do feminism, activism and anti-capitalist values operate in this contradictory space? How are radical politics being reconfigured in a branded landscape? Considering how such tensions are identified and managed by Goalgirls and other enterprises, we argue that the pandemic has intensified existing conflicts between precarious labour, feminism and entrepreneurialism. The chapter is structured in four sections. First, we introduce notions of radical, cool or ‘woke’ capitalism, exploring the different ways that feminism’s intersection with capitalist enterprise have been understood. Most attention has been paid to the strategic co-option of feminist language and aspirations in consumer culture and branding, but increasingly we are witnessing the emergence of feminist creative enterprises involved in producing new cultural forms, organisational structures and ways of working. It is to the nature of these new and distinctive enterprises that we turn our attention in the second section of the chapter. Part three zooms in on our main case study, Goalgirls, arguing for the need to look not only at its products (through which it sells different forms of empowerment branding) but also at its work spaces, organisational forms (which parlay between corporate culture and activism), and its distinctive work cultures which blend feminist defiance with some of the keywords of contemporary positive psychology and the ‘self-help society’7 such as kindness, self-belief and radical vulnerability. The final substantive section of the chapter looks at how the multiple crises (health, economic and mental wellbeing) associated with the Covid-19 pandemic have impacted Goagirls practice and at how they are negotiating pandemic precarity. The chapter’s conclusion draws together these themes and outlines the key contributions and the questions they raise.

8  “STAY WOKE. MAKE MOVES” BRANDING FOR A FEMINIST FUTURE… 

143

Locating Feminist Branding There is a long history of capitalist enterprises making use of feminism and other social movements for change. In the early twentieth century, for example, products in the suffragette colours of purple, white and green were proudly sold by large metropolitan department stores such as Selfridges which relied upon affluent female customers for their trade. Indeed, this customer base was so important that department stores continued selling the products even when suffragettes smashed their windows in public protest against the patriarchy.8 From the late 1960s, capitalist enterprises in the Global North selectively tapped into the energies of the social justice movements in order to sell their burgeoning array of products. The ‘Post-Fordist’ consumer culture which was slowly emerging at that time was characterised by a diversification of product lines increasingly sold on the basis of lifestyle groupings, rather than the forms of ‘mass standardisation’ offered by Fordism, and innovative ways to target consumers were adopted. In the US, Virginia Slims famously marketed long thin cigarettes to women by offering them as a ‘reward’ for second-wave feminist struggle with the catchline ‘you’ve come a long way, baby’, while in the UK the slogan ‘A woman’s right to choose’ was used to sell everything from sanitary products to holidays.9 Through such forms capitalist enterprise has often intersected with feminism and other social movement struggles in flamboyant, yet selective ways. The sheer promotional power of these commercial vehicles has undoubtably helped mainstream ideas about equality, both by glamorising them as exciting, pleasurable and desirable and by normalising them  – making them part of everyday ‘common sense’—through ubiquitous images and messages. At the same time, questions have been asked across a range of disciplines about the limits of the extent of egalitarianism on offer: their character, politics, shape and influence.10 One answer to such questioning has been to situate the activity of the commercial enterprise in relation to both broader and specific social contexts. Both Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello, and Thomas Frank, argued that capitalism renewed itself in the post-Fordist moment by drawing on and commercialising the social justice movements.11 From the 1990s, forms of neoliberal commercial culture increasingly profited by cathecting themselves to forms of social egalitarianism which were very different to the social mores of 1980s Thatcherite and Reaganite conservatism. The emergence of ‘socially liberal neoliberalism’, via such figures as Tony Blair, Bill Clinton, and Angela Merkel enabled a new commercial vocabulary

144 

H. CURRAN-TROOP ET AL.

and relationship to social justice movements. Jim McGuigan, for example, termed the forms of commercial culture associated with Blairism and beyond ‘cool capitalism’.12 The expansion of the selling of ‘ethical commodities’ also burgeoned from the 1980s, taking a myriad of forms.13 Consumption was increasingly presented as a domain through which it was possible to be ‘radical’14 or an ‘agent of change’15 through, for example, the rise of corporate cause-related marketing in the form of pink products being sold ‘to fight breast cancer’16 or global development initiatives such as ‘The Girl Effect’.17 There has been a proliferation of terms designed to make sense of this contradictory cultural formation in which corporate endeavours have traded on radical ideas. The notion of ‘incorporation’ was important at an earlier moment (in the 1980s). Like that of ‘recuperation’ it was a means of describing how the ideas of radical social movements are taken up but emptied of their political force and tied back to the status quo. Myra MacDonald critiqued these ideas for their implication that meanings can be fixed once and for all.18 ‘Commodification’ re-emerged in the 1990s as a critical term for engaging with similar processes. Robert Goldman discussed a variety of ways in which advertisers selectively used feminism to engage with women consumers who were tired of ultra-thin models, perfect beauty and constantly with being told how to improve.19 The resultant ‘commodity feminism’20 took a wide variety of forms ranging from claiming that brands shared feminist anger, using feminist slogans, or attempting to create a suture between normative femininity and radical feminist politics. As Susan Douglas commented, through these processes, advertising agencies ‘figured out how to make feminism- and anti-­ feminism–work for them’: the appropriation of feminist desires ad feminist rhetoric by Revlon, Lancôme and other major corporations was nothing short of spectacular. Women’s liberation metamorphosed into female narcissism unchained as political concepts like liberation and equality were collapsed into distinctly personal, private desires.21

Since the early 2000s these trends coalesced in what became known as ‘femvertising’, a commercial form of address to women organised around a multiplicity of positive injunctions such as ‘You’re worth it’ and ‘This Girl Can’ and rebellious slogans emphasising power, rights and self-­ determination ‘My beauty, my say’, ‘Goodbye resolutions, hello empowerment’. One key motif of femvertising has been female self-confidence,

8  “STAY WOKE. MAKE MOVES” BRANDING FOR A FEMINIST FUTURE… 

145

figured through imperatives to ‘love your body’, feel beautiful at an age or size, and to be comfortable in your own skin. Via a loose constellation of ‘attitude’, ‘inspiration’ and ‘feeling good’, femvertising messages promote a kind of feminism lite centred on individual consumption and self-love. Increasingly these commercial messages have also promoted a loose assemblage of ideas about multi-culturalism and diversity, strategically deploying images of minoritized groups (people of color, disabled people, muslims, queer people) in commercial culture to ‘take diversity into account’ only to empty any particular differences of their meaning and social significance.22 Such campaigns frequently have a ‘postracial’ tenor, in which race is imagined no longer to be a live and active political force in society.23 These paradigms articulate race as a simplistic formula of visibility/invisibility and inclusion/exclusion within narrow terms of consumer citizenship24 that tend to reinstate whiteness and middle-class status as neutral norms and wealth as a universal, doable aspiration.25 When race is conceived in this flattened, ahistorical way, it is presented as a feature like any other that can be freely interacted, transacted, alienated.26 Race becomes simply a form of difference or brandable variation. It is ‘aestheticised’.27 Post-race re-envisions the scriptures of colour blindness by firmly acknowledging a specified range of racial differences that serve to disavow any vestige of their consequence for anyone--of any race  – who can fashion themselves as properly neoliberal subjects.28

As Anandi Ramamurthy and Kalpana Wilson29 have argued in relation to advertisements, this is demonstrably both a way of responding to activisms and social justice movements around race (and also class, sexuality and disability) while at the same time representing an upgrading of global capitalism in neoliberal forms.Over the past decade, as the effects of neoliberalism have bitten increasingly harder, savage inequalities became increasingly hard for commercial cultures to ignore. On the one hand there was a visible rise of right- wing nationalisms, virulent misogyny and troubling forms of populism, while at the same time struggles for justice for women, people of colour, and LGBTQ folk became ever more visible. After 2008, the ‘post-crash interregnum has produced a new formation which recognises intersectional injustice but promotes neoliberal marketisation as the solution’: what Jo Littler calls the ‘neoliberal justice narrative’.30 In this way, social justice struggles came to be resignified within, rather than against, neoliberal capitalism with ‘social causes reorient[ing]

146 

H. CURRAN-TROOP ET AL.

themselves to assimilate rather than oppose the logics of profits and capitalist gain’.31 As Akane Kanai and Rosalind Gill argue: Nondominant people are recast as visible, neoliberal subjects of potential value, their historical experiences of oppression intertwined with an associated generalised sense of positivity, possibility, belief in capitalist futurity, and commitment to self-work. While requiring further intensification of feeling rules that require confidence, ‘leaning in’, ‘hustling’, merging associations of diversity with capitalist aims, these now luminous subjects of woke capitalism are mobilised to add value to the affective plausibility of the new neoliberal meritocracy. They are offered as brand ambassadors not simply for particular corporates but for capitalism itself.32

These trends have become increasingly evident during the multiple crises associated with the Covid-19 pandemic, its associated intensification of inequalities, and the crises of care and mental health it has amplified. It has also been intensified in the wake of the resurgence of the Black Lives Matter movement after the killing of George Floyd by police in May 2020. As organizations have mobilised ideas about the ‘benign nature of contemporary capitalism’ and ‘its potential as a force for the advancement of global equity’,33 a growing body of scholarship looks critically at corporations scrambling to re-brand themselves as anti-racist, feminist or queer-­ friendly organisations. Recent work indicts companies from supermarkets to fashion chains for cynical ‘carewashing’34 or ‘wokewashing’,35 highlighting the racial and classed exclusions that exist despite ‘we are all in this together’ messages, or the disjuncture between brands’ caring or diversitypositive promotional messages and the unsafe and/or exploitative working conditions of their employees. For example, ASOS’s self-­branding under the slogan ‘Unity, Acceptance, Equality’ was developed at precisely the time the company was standing accused of ‘mistreating its workers with humiliating body searches, the use of security guards in the bathrooms, and punishing “flexi-shifts”’.36 Likewise as Jilly Kay and Helen Wood note, fast fashion brand Boohoo’s supposedly inspiring messages of hope and togetherness during the pandemic were revealed in mid 2020 to have been produced in dehumanising sweatshops, with workers paid a fraction of the legal minimum wage.37 Such critiques raise questions about the limits of ‘woke branding’ and of ‘radical consumption’. They also point to a neglected topic in studies of ‘femvertising’- namely, the issue of production. Given that capitalist

8  “STAY WOKE. MAKE MOVES” BRANDING FOR A FEMINIST FUTURE… 

147

commercialism is by definition structurally built on economic inequality, there have been crucial limits to the extent of egalitarianism on offer. It also means there are necessarily questions to be asked about who benefits and loses from these commercial forms -- and requires that we unpick the power dynamics and politics at play. Who produces the feminist or woke messages that dominate the contemporary mediascape? Under what conditions are they produced and to whom are they addressed? To be sure most are undertaken by huge corporate advertising companies such as WPP, Omnicom and Dentsu, or others such as BBH or Grey in a British context. But smaller, more social justice-oriented organizations are increasingly part of this ecology, situated in the broader emergence of ‘feminist cultural and creative industries’38 including Fem Gems, The Wing and Gal-Dem. It is to one of these – Goalgirls—that we turn our attention next.

‘Go Go Goalgirls!’

39

148 

H. CURRAN-TROOP ET AL.

One of our dreams is to tell stories about products, the other is to create products that are stories in themselves. And ultimately: to see those stories have an impact on the way we understand, act and see the world. and each other.40 Goalgirls is a creative agency specialising in experiential marketing, social media campaigns, and events. Established in Berlin in 2017 by two self-described ‘female founders’ and sisters, Helena and Kaddie Rothe, Goalgirls sets itself apart from the wider field of advertising and marketing companies with a particular mission: to tackle this male-dominated industry via their own business venture. Spearheaded by a ‘female-only team’, the Goalgirls agency pledges to ‘always make noise on behalf of women’, and ‘defeat sexist marketing and pale-male-stale hierarchies’ through working at the ‘intersection of products, communication and social justice’. Goalgirls promote their prowess for ‘nurturing hybrids of culture, politics and social impact’.41 This, they argue, enables them to influence audiences of ‘woke consumers’ by ‘tapping into’ and promoting messages of social justice through their social media and commercial projects. Through this tactic, Goalgirls has worked on a significant portfolio of ‘progressive brands’, including Armedangels, Bumble, Casper, Netflix and Mymuesli. Not only does Goalgirls’ social justice-oriented approach afford them powerful reach over ‘conscious’ audiences, their commitment to ‘community’ distinguishes them from other players in the advertising field. Describing themselves as the ‘sassy spirit of a 90s girl band’, Goalgirls’ collaborative organising and ‘women power’ are central features of the agency. In 2019 Goalgirls launched what it described as a ‘co-creagency’: a ‘sisterhood’ comprising almost 100 ‘female smart creatives’.42 In the same year, Goalgirls opened The Womb, their headquarters in Berlin’s central district. A coworking space-cum-events venue, The Womb promised to act as a hub, bringing together and housing this vast pool of creative women. In some sense, Goalgirls’ model borrows from and can be tied to the self-organised and networked feminist groups throughout the 1960s and 1970s within which, collective organising, connecting women, and sharing skills and resources were trademark features.43 In contrast to the more grassroots and anti-capitalist concerns characterising the Women’s Liberation Movement, however, the contemporary incarnation of Goalgirls places greater emphasis on the professional dimensions of collaborative female-relationships, and also on entrepreneurialism. In this way, Goalgirls’

8  “STAY WOKE. MAKE MOVES” BRANDING FOR A FEMINIST FUTURE… 

149

style of ‘disrupting the system’ is via ‘platforming female talent’, enhancing their industry employability through pitching workshops, providing informal networking opportunities, as well as offering the chance for women to showcase and receive feedback on their work. The agency combines ‘collective’ and ‘autonomous’ working styles, styles in which freelancers are both ‘empowered’ to work independently, yet ‘benefit’ from the ‘collaborative’ nature of the co-creagency. They characterise this as a ‘Holacracy’ or flat organisation. They stress that ‘feeling part of a team’ and ‘on board’ with the organisation are crucial for ‘nurturing a creative community’.44 What is striking is how Goalgirls seek to create an articulation between feminist values and organisational forms while operating as a commercial organisation working within the sphere of advertising and branding.

Radical Politics in a Branded Landscape Goalgirls: Here to dismantle archaic structures for equality45

Core themes animating the work of Goalgirls are concerns for social impact and ‘doing good’.46 Such impetus, which is regularly promoted across their multiple communication channels, governs the ways in which Goalgirls see their work as more than just a ‘fancy start up idea’.47 Rather, Goalgirls propose their agency represents ‘a pledge for a system change’.48 Such activist messages are both integral to and feature heavily throughout the curated content and products Goalgirls produce. So much so, they designed the hashtag ‘#experientialactivism’ as a way to communicate the political nature of their advertising style. In exploring further the specific ways Goalgirls reconfigure radical politics within a branded landscape, we turn our attention to the ‘woke marketplace’ section of their website. Here, they sell their own socially conscious, empowering Goalgirls merchandise, alongside an assortment of campaigns selling ‘products with values, made by people with spines’. Further examples of their woke and radical product lines include facemasks featuring the statements ‘patriarchy stinks’ and ‘racism is in the air’; wellness products with the taglines ‘emotionally available’ and ‘sometimes you just wanna feel more’49; and, for instance, a collaboration with fashion brand, Armedangels, explicitly offering ways to ‘consciously’ spend one’s money whilst acknowledging privilege and inequality:

150 

H. CURRAN-TROOP ET AL.

So, toxic for me is the belief that we can’t fix the problem anyways, I don’t want to compromise my stance. But that’s not true – the more we pay attention instead of looking away, we’ll spot all the things we can change. It doesn’t matter how privileged I am, or how privileged you are, or any of us here for that matter. As long as our privilege is built on inequality, we are not building a free and safe future for everyone. We all have to be more conscious and more aware about what we buy and understand where it’s from. Maximum profit but with social impact. We’re fighting everything toxic…50

51

Here, a language of combatting inequality and privilege on multiple levels is combined with the imperative to make ‘maximum profit’, which is not registered as in the least bit problematic or potentially contradictory. We can also note the strong resonances between Goalgirls activist and ‘wellness’ discourse52 in ‘fighting everything toxic’.53 Other instances of the ways Goalgirls blend radical and social-justice discourse with commercial endeavours can be seen through their response to Black Lives Matter protests following the murder of George Floyd in May 2020. In the wake of this growing activism, Goalgirls rapidly released a series of statements in support of BLM and anti-racist movements. These included pledges to ‘amplify people of colour’ through their platform; promises to ‘scan’ the brands they work with to ensure they are diverse and inclusive; donating profits from the Goalgirls shop to anti-racism organisations; ‘dedicating’ Goalgirls events to the BPoC community with the ‘intention to get educated by them’; as well as promising to review their own structures, educate themselves, and commit to anti-racism

8  “STAY WOKE. MAKE MOVES” BRANDING FOR A FEMINIST FUTURE… 

151

training.54 It is worth noting here that the organisation itself has remained noticeably white on its Instagram feed since these events. Within this flurry of accountability announcements, which dominated their social media channels over the summer of 2020, Goalgirls placed equal emphasis on the fact that they are always ‘learning’, that they ‘make mistakes’, whilst aspiring ‘to do better’ in their fight for social justice. Afterall, and as they so frequently point out, ‘radical vulnerability’ is at the ‘forefront’ of everything they do as an organization; they aspire to be ‘good people’, but are ‘definitely are growing people’.55 The phrase ‘radical vulnerabililty’, like ‘radical kindness56 has been deployed by a range of other grassroots activist organisations to indicate empathetic and learning forms of organisational practice; Goalgirls put the phrase on a bag that can be bought, turning the ethos into a portable commodity, one that can be used to advertise values, reflected through it’s transparent medium.

The Business of Female Empowerment More women at the top means female voices are being heard, and tell the stories that women want to hear.57

Platforming, promoting, and providing a whole host of affirmative mantras for women are the driving forces behind Goalgirls’ commercial work. They are, as they boldly state, ‘in the business of female empowerment’.58 As an advertising agency run by an all-female team, styled exclusively as ‘marketing by women for women’, Goalgirls claims a shared experience and empathy with their target audience. Through this unique expertise, Goalgirls have capitalised on ‘empowerment branding’ campaigns which make use of typical femvertising techniques such as ‘boosting’ women’s self-esteem and ‘eradicating’ their insecurities. This is most visible within the plethora of ‘body positivity’ discourse directing Goalgirls’ campaigns; Goalgirls products celebrating the female form, including a clitorial-shaped keyring, a breast-shaped plant pot, a ‘Lactation Latte’ drink; and Goalgirls branded stickers featuring the confidence taglines “self-love”, “light each others’ fire” and “hot as fuck”.59 This notion of ‘empowerment’ through consumption can even be seen in the ways in which Goalgirls choose and promote a specific style of workplace fashion. In a 2020 interview in Refinery 29, ‘Power Suit up! Strong business women talk about the power of fashion’, the Goalgirls sisters outline the potential of smart, bold, and ‘powerful’ clothing in helping women “be the most confident versions of

152 

H. CURRAN-TROOP ET AL.

themselves”.60 It offers a blend of 1980s business-suited feminist empowerment61 with contemporary ‘self-love’ and body-positive discourse62 alongside activist-infused ‘wokeness’.63 Embracing ‘empowerment’ and other feminist language is also integral to the ways Goalgirls advocates its collaborative work with female freelancers. In launching the agency, the Goalgirls sisters expressed their desire to provide a ‘platform that enables and boosts the confidence of female creatives’, encouraging them ‘to follow their dreams’, and to ‘work on projects they are passionate about’. In contrast to many other creative agencies, Goalgirls demands for ‘women to be heard in the creative process’, to be ‘valued for their talent’, thus empowering them to ‘make free choices in their work’. Such rhetoric around female self-confidence, self-determination, and overthrowing gendered workplace inequalities is most encapsulated in Goalgirls’ 2019 song and music video, A Letter to Mankind (The Empowerment Hyme). In this four-verse number, Goalgirls assertively express feminist aspirations to ‘take up more space’, ‘fight until our voices are being heard’ via the confident mantras ‘we’re at home in our skin’ and ‘I know what I’m worth’. With this ammunition, in the song’s final verse Goalgirls suggest radical, collective action to bring down the existing structures of patriarchy: Break up, blow up, build up, don’t stop We sip from your cup til we level up! We’re dancing on the glass ceiling til it shatters, Then we glue it back together to protect what really matters.64

The nature of the action needed is not specified, and perhaps the last sentence of the hyme hints at some of the contradictions implicit in this project (what exactly will be protected by that reconfigured glass ceiling?). Nevertheless, the radicalism of the sentiments expressed here by Goalgirls stand out from the wider corporate landscape in which they operate. In the next section, we consider how these imperatives have been shaped and pressured by the Covid-19 pandemic.

Pandemic Precarity The far-reaching, devastating and multiple crises evoked by the Covid-19 pandemic are widely acknowledged, as are its wildly uneven effects which exacerbate existing inequalities of gender, class and ethnicity.65 Simultaneously, the ongoing emergency has sharply exposed the fragility

8  “STAY WOKE. MAKE MOVES” BRANDING FOR A FEMINIST FUTURE… 

153

of the creative and cultural and ecosystem and greatly magnified the precariousness of jobs occupied by creative workers, freelancers, artists and small businesses comprising this industry.66 For a small enterprise like Goalgirls, whose financial security relies almost entirely on physical events, photoshoots, workshops, parties and video projects, repeated lockdowns have placed this organisation in an extremely compromised position regarding its present function and future continuity. This section maps the numerous ways Goalgirls have responded to the pandemic. In charting Goalgirls’ various and contrasting responses, we can already see how existing tensions between entrepreneurialism, feminism, and precarity are being drawn out and exacerbated in the face of the crisis. These have materialised in pressures to remain digitally ‘connected’ and support female freelancers throughout the lockdowns, to promote the commercial success of the organisation despite the wider economic emergency, an extended involvement with productivity culture, downsizing the coworking space and introducing new membership fees for their Goalgirls community, as well as pressures to raise awareness around wellbeing and mental health throughout these times, as explored in this section. #corona we‘re all in this together – don‘t panic, spread love, get digital… We need to create these unforgettable moments for the digital realm67

Like the majority of organisations, Goalgirls moved their activities online in March 2020. Within these initial moments, Goalgirls seemed to be demonstrating a heightened sense of responsibility to remain visible as an enterprise, whilst nurturing the ‘power of the internet’ to stay connected and bring a sense of ‘togetherness’ throughout this isolating period. Goalgirls also made use of social media technologies such as Instagram Live—the feature that allows users to stream videos and engage with their followers in real time—as a way of fostering a ‘shared experience’ with networks and followers. The notion of ‘collective care’ also featured heavily throughout these broadcasts, as well as rhetoric around prioritising kindness, empathy, and recognising the interconnected, global experience of the pandemic: if there‘s one thing we‘re feeling right now, it‘s that we’re an interconnected species – beyond our borders. it‘s a global pandemic and the world has shut down to protect each other  – let’s get behind the mission to develop a global empathy when we stand in solidarity… start caring beyond your fight for toilet paper or pasta #goalgirls68

154 

H. CURRAN-TROOP ET AL.

The vocabulary of caring and togetherness has been extended during the pandemic, and can be articulated in a number of ways, for different ends: whether as humanitarian expression; by lobbyists to pressure governments to socialise forms of welfare provision; or by corporations using ‘carewashing’ to brand themselves as caring whilst continuing to exploit workers and consumers.69 We can see in the quote above that Goalgirls offers a fusion of registers: the rallying call for action infused by political rhetoric of solidarity, of moving beyond individualism and borders, and a humanitarian recognition of our global species. At the same time, the forms of action it conducts and recommends at the level of cultural labour are riven with contradictions: between individualised profit-driven entrepreneurialism and sustaining broader, quasi-collective communities of precarious feminised labour. Similarly, in response to the context of the pandemic, Goalgirls organised an online ‘Fortunes Festival’ with the aim of bringing together their ‘Community of Female Creatives’.70 The events within this festival made use of digital platforms including Zoom, Google Hangouts, and Houseparty to allow their networks to ‘create/exchange/debate and read together’, as well as provide advice/support to small businesses and startups affected by Covid-19 through setting up a ‘digital ideation/design sprint with our co-rebelles community to come up with solutions together’.71 Further examples of Goalgirls’ commitment to community were exemplified in the launch of ‘DOMINO RISING’; a self-funded initiative launched on their LinkedIn page which raised money through paypal donations and aimed to financially help female freelancers in Berlin through coronavirus.72 In setting up and promoting this kind of support fund, Goalgirls have flagged the extremely precarious positions of the women in their community. Some of their social media posts also outline the extent of the testing conditions and uncertainty brought about by Covid-19: we‘re so exhausted of all these # toxic and #viral apocalypses we have to defeat in 2020”... we thought 2020 is going to be our best year, well it turns out it will be our hardest. as events and campaigns are being put on hold and we hear our creative community of 120 freelancers facing complete uncertainty73

Such moments of ‘radical vulnerability’ show how the enterprise has publicly acknowledged the damaging impact the pandemic is having on their work. In a similar vein, the agency spoke about the harmful effects of

8  “STAY WOKE. MAKE MOVES” BRANDING FOR A FEMINIST FUTURE… 

155

over-consuming social media within the lockdown, as well as the potential of slowing down and resisting pressures to be productive: don‘t let instagram stress you.... some of us can’t handle it all right now. and that’s okay. for the first time in three years we #goalgirls are forced to slow down. and after a first #quarantine week of fighting it, wanting to be even more innovative, learn all the skills and be sporty spice too: we‘re finally accepting that this is not about us… protect your mental health, be aware of what you‘re posting and consuming. slow down, use this time to think about all the things you’re no longer going to do after this is over because you realised you don’t need to74

There is a productive and laudable concern with the mental health of their community on display here, one which also reflects the particular pressures put on female social media users, particularly Instagram.75 At the same time, however, Goalgirls has also used social media to express their lockdown success: enabled them to reflect, refocus, learn, and ultimately, reimagine the conditions to increase resilience and ‘come out stronger’ post-pandemic. Such a response has materialised in an abundance of positive, motivating language across Goalgirls’ social media throughout these months, encouraging followers to ‘face the challenge’, ‘think quick on your feet’, acknowledging the fact that things ‘will be tough’ but ‘this too shall pass, it’s all temporary’. This approach was extended further in how they framed the expansion of their online shop in April 2020 as an ‘opportunity to invent, create and grow’ to then ‘channel their energy into selling products online’.76 This is an almost textbook example of what Angela McRobbie describes as the ‘p-i-r’ neoliberal gendered dynamic between the perfect, the imperfect and resilience,77 which as Goalgirls shows continues to be mobilised throughout the pandemic. It is not simply the expression of collective survival, but also the mobilisation of stories of success to ‘sell products online’—including themselves—which feature on their feed. An even more graphic example of Goalgirls’ extended involvement with pandemic productivity culture can be seen in the promotion and indeed celebration of their increased workload in June 2020. Goalgirls also announced they were hiring, releasing a series of job opportunities for ‘event runners’ with ‘the right mindset’ to work on their multiple and increasing projects throughout summer. The ‘right mindset’ presumably means both a commitment to a feminist ethos, and an investment in an always-on work culture. In an Instagram Story, the agency boldly stated

156 

H. CURRAN-TROOP ET AL.

We had such an amazingly productive day.... And after months of worrying we could potentially die, we are now inundated with work.78

As many feminist media scholars have pointed out, the cultural codes of Instagram require the curation of an accessible persona79 and the visible attempt to establish an ‘improved self’.80 Self-representation on social media has overwhelmingly worked to position what Alison Hearn terms the branded self as a striving commodity-sign,81 in which it is important for women in particular to be seen aspiring upwards for success.82 These combined cultures of representation facilitate and enable the gendered celebration of productivity culture. However, in drawing attention to Goalgirls’ multiple and complex digital responses, it’s important to note the significant changes the crisis has brought to the physical spaces the enterprise has occupied since the pandemic. In April 2020, during the peak of the global economic uncertainty, Goalgirls decided to pack up and leave their coworking space, The Womb. Although the move was framed in an optimistic light—‘everything happens for a reason, it was time to leave’83—this change has undoubtedly impacted the community dimension of Goalgirls’ distinct organisational culture. What once was a ‘female powered creative collective’ of 100+ freelancers, Goalgirls rapidly decreased when they moved into their new ‘Loft Space’ in July 2020. Not only did this new location provide limited workplaces, its inaccessible membership fee of €120 per month subsequently excluded the majority of the wider group. Further evidence of the ways in which the Goalgirls’ community has been hit hard in the wake of the pandemic can be seen in their December 2020 announcement to ‘pause’ the agency and focus on their individual journeys: believe it or not: 2020 was our year. as a team we have achieved more together than any other year: we’ve hustled through the crisis and managed to push through it. it was exhausting but we learnt a lot. about ourselves. 2020 was our year. that means 2021 will be my year. it will be kaddie’s year, helena’s year and tina’s year (and your year) – our year as individuals. we’ve put our needs and dreams to the sideline in 2020, we have decided we will catch up with our selfs in 2021. that’s why we’ve decided to press ‘hold’ on our creative agency and focus on our other ventures. ….and don’t forget: It’s all temporary. Including this break. thank you for all your empowering support! see you soon, xoxo #goalgirls84

8  “STAY WOKE. MAKE MOVES” BRANDING FOR A FEMINIST FUTURE… 

157

Amidst the compulsory expressions of optimism that social media demands of women and the narrative of multiple journeys coming to fruition, the diminishing size of the community and the precarity of the conditions necessary for its successful construction are also palpable.

Conclusion In this chapter we have contributed to the emerging body of critical scholarship on femvertising and corporate wokeness, and also to contemporary understandings of cultural and creative organizations. Our focus has been on a new type of creative enterprise that is feminist in its orientations and aims, but that also operates within profit-driven environments with commercial logics. We have argued that organisations such as Goalgirls represent a novel hybrid  – a ‘community-industry’85 that is shaped both by feminist principles and goals and by the ethos of neoliberal capitalism. It is complicated to read this. On the one hand it is worth noting how successfully Goalgirls operates as a ‘disruptor’ within the broader advertising and PR landscape, particularly in Berlin. Its success is all the more remarkable given the size of the organisation which has only four staff, yet, through its notion of co-creagency also involves a much wider community of feminist ‘creatives’. It also clearly occupies an activist and community space with an avowed commitment to openness, inclusivity and creating places and platforms. At the same time, the organisation might readily be seen by some as ‘cashing in’ on the current visibility of feminist, anti-racist and LGBTQ movements- echoing Sarah Banet-Weiser’s discussion of feminist visibility in which ‘the T-shirt [or in this case the tote bag or face mask] is the politics’.86 While certainly different from the large agencies cynically reinventing their branding along ‘woke’ lines in order to make money from the trends de jour, we have sought in this chapter to point to some of the tensions within which Goalgirls operate: tensions between a commitment to radical social transformation and an investment in capitalist models; tensions between a critique of ‘toxic’ productivity cultures and a need to work endlessly to stand out in a crowded market; and tensions between a desire for flat, collective forms of organisation, and the reality of operating in a commercial context characterised by endemic precarity, intensified by the pandemic. We also note various other distinctive features: the growing prominence of wellness and self-care concerns and their overlap with activism; the distinctive aesthetics of Goalgirls’ own branding and social media spaces; and the hyperbolic nature of bold and defiant

158 

H. CURRAN-TROOP ET AL.

intentions to ‘smash the patriarchy’ alongside more muted claims to ‘maximise the profits’. At the intersection of these trends and contradictions, Goalgirls represents one particularly telling site for the production of contemporary ‘femvertising’.

Notes 1. The ‘about’ section of Goalgirls website https://www.goalgirls.de/story 2. Gill, Rosalind and Elias, A.  Sofia, ‘Awaken your incredible’: Love your body discourses and postfeminist contradictions. International Journal of Media and Cultural Politics, 10 (2), pp. 179–188. (2014). 3. Littler, Jo, Radical consumption: shopping for change in contemporary culture. (Maidenhead: Open University Press, 2009); Binkley, Sam & Littler, Jo, Cultural Studies and Anti-Consumerism: A Critical Encounter, (London: Routledge, 2011). 4. McGuigan, Jim, Cool Capitalism. (London: Pluto, 2007); Winnubust, Shannon, Way too cool: selling out race and ethics, (New York: Columbia University Press, 2015). 5. Banet-Weiser, Sarah & Mukherjee, Roopali, Commodity Activism: Cultural Resistance in Neoliberal Times, (New York: New  York University Press, 2012). 6. Goalgirls website https://www.goalgirls.de/story 7. Gill, Rosalind & Orgad, Shani, Get Unstuck! Pandemic positivity imperatives and self-care for women, Cultural Politics, (2021). 8. Nava, Mica, ‘Modernity’s Disavowal: Women, the city and the department store’ in Mica Nava and Alan O’Shea (eds) Modern Times: Reflections on a century of modernity. Routledge. (1997). 9. Gill, Rosalind, Gender and the Media. (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2007). 10. De Grazia, Victoria &. Furlough, Elen, The Sex of Things: gender and consumption in historical perspective (Oakland: University of California Press, 1996). Scanlon, Jennifer, Gender and consumer culture reader (New York: NYU Press, 2000). 11. Boltanski, Luc and Eve Chiapello, The New Spirit of Capitalism (London: Verso, 2007). Frank, Thomas, The Conquest of Cool. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997). 12. McGuigan, Jim, Cool Capitalism. (London: Pluto, 2007). 13. Binkley, Sam & Littler, Jo, Cultural Studies and Anti-Consumerism: A Critical Encounter, (London: Routledge, 2011). Lewis, Tania and Emily Potter (eds), Ethical Consumption: A Critical Introduction (Oxford: Routledge, 2011).

8  “STAY WOKE. MAKE MOVES” BRANDING FOR A FEMINIST FUTURE… 

159

14. Littler, Jo, Radical consumption: shopping for change in contemporary culture. (Maidenhead: Open University Press, 2009). 15. Soper, Kate, Barnett, Clive and Littler, Jo ‘Consumers: agents of change?’ Soundings: A Journal of Politics and Culture, Issue 31 pp. 147–160, (2005). 16. King, Samantha, Pink Ribbons, Inc: Breast Cancer and the Rise of Philanthropy. (Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 2008). 17. Koffman, Ofra, and Gill, Rosalind, ‘The revolution will be led by a 12-yearold girl’: girl power and global biopolitics, Feminist Review, 105 (1) (2013). 18. Macdonald, Myra, Representing Women: Myths of Femininity in Contemporary Media. (London: Edward Arnold, 1995). 19. Goldman, Robert, ‘Commodity Feminism’. Critical Studies in Media Communication 8 (3): 333–351 (1991). 20. Ibid. 21. Douglas, Susan. (1994). Where the girls are: growing up female with the mass media. (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1994). 22. Naidoo, Roshi ‘Never mind the buzzwords’ in Littler, Jo, and Naidoo, Roshi (eds) The Politics of Heritage: The Legacies of ‘Race’ (London: Routledge, 2005). 23. Mukherjee, Roopali, Antiracism limited: A pre-history of post-race. Cultural Studies, 30(1), 47–77, (2016). 24. Banet-Weiser, Sarah, Kids rule!: Nickelodeon and consumer citizenship. (Durham: Duke University Press, 2007). 25. Sullivan, Shannon, Good White People: The Problem with Middle Class White Anti-Racism. (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2014). 26. Nakamura, Lisa, Digitizing Race: Visual Cultures of the Internet. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008). 27. Giroux, Henry, Benetton’s ‘world without borders’: Buying social change. The Subversive Imagination: Artists, Society, & Social Responsibility, 187–207. (1994). 28. Mukherjee, Roopali, Antiracism limited: A pre-history of post-race. Cultural Studies, 30(1), p 50 (2016). 29. Ramamurthy, Anandi., & Wilson, Kalpana, Racism, Appropriation and Resistance in Advertising. Colonial Advertising & Commodity Racism, 69(4) (2013). 30. Littler, Jo, Against meritocracy: Culture, power and myths of mobility. (London: Routledge, 2017). 31. Banet-Weiser, Sarah & Mukherjee, Roopali, Commodity Activism: Cultural Resistance in Neoliberal Times, (New York: New  York University Press, 2012). 32. Gill, Rosalind, & Kanai, Akane (2019). Affirmative advertising and the mediated feeling rules of neoliberalism in Meyers, M. (ed.) Neoliberalism and the Media, New York: Routledge, 131–145, (2019) p. 34.

160 

H. CURRAN-TROOP ET AL.

33. Ramamurthy, Anandi., & Wilson, Kalpana, Racism, Appropriation and Resistance in Advertising. Colonial Advertising & Commodity Racism, 69(4) (2013) p. 2. 34. Care Collective, The Care Manifesto. (London: Verso, 2020). 35. Sobande, Francesca, “Woke-washing: “intersectional” femvertising and branding “woke” bravery”, European Journal of Marketing, Vol. 54 (11), 2723–2745. (2020). 36. Kanai, Akane & Gill, Rosalind, Woke? Affect, neoliberalism, marginalised identities and consumer culture New Formations, (2020) xx. 37. Kay, Jilly and Helen Wood, Critical responses to Covid-19, European Journal of Cultural Studies 23(6):1019–1024 (2020). 38. Curran-Troop, Hannah, “Create, curate and empower”: Contemporary feminist creativity, neoliberalism and precarity in London’s creative industries, (PhD thesis, forthcoming). 39. Goalgirls coworking space, ‘The Womb’ shop front, sourced from Instagram https://www.instagram.com/p/B8OYTLCCfvY/ 40. Goalgirls Instagram post https://www.instagram.com/p/Bug Hc4kg1aj/ 41. The ‘about’ section of Goalgirls website https://www.goalgirls.de/story 42. The ‘creative community’ tab of Goalgirl’s website https://www.corebelles.com/ 43. Reckitt, Helena, The Art of Feminism: Images that Shaped the Fight for Equality, 1857–2017, (London: Tate Publishing, 2019). 44. The ‘creative community’ tab of Goalgirl’s website https://www.corebelles.com/ 45. Goalgirls Instagram post https://www.instagram.com/p/B3R7 PCYCM8j/ 46. The ‘about’ section of Goalgirls website https://www.goalgirls.de/story 47. Ibid. 48. Ibid. 49. Wellness products sold on Goalgirls’ ‘Woke Marketplace’ https://thefeelgoods.shop/collections/the-­aura-­company. 50. Goalgirls branded campaign with fashion brand, Armangels ‘We’re fighting everything toxic’ https://www.instagram.com/p/B3MlNLNl7OQ/ 51. Goalgirls facemasks sold on their website, priced at €15 per piece. 52. O’Neill, Rachel, Pursuing “Wellness”: Considerations for media studies, Television & New Media, 21 (6), 628–634 (2020). 53. Armangels x Goalgirls campaign ‘We’re fighting everything toxic’ https:// www.instagram.com/p/B3MlNLNl7OQ/ 54. Goalgirls Instagram post ‘A pledge to amplify the voices of BPoC’, https://www.instagram.com/p/CBLU0FGCYUI/ 55. Goalgirls Instagram post https://www.instagram.com/p/CA49­u2iOoW/

8  “STAY WOKE. MAKE MOVES” BRANDING FOR A FEMINIST FUTURE… 

161

56. Burton, Sarah ‘Solidarity, now! Care, Collegiality, and Comprehending the Power Relations of “Academic Kindness” in the Neoliberal Academy’, Performance Paradigm, 17 (2022). 57. Goalgirls short documentary ‘Goalgirls, doing whatever they want’ https://www.goalgirls.de/story 58. Goalgirls website landing page https://www.goalgirls.de 59. Goalgirls empowerment stickers, advertised on Instagram https://www. instagram.com/p/BueC70wACWw/ 60. Rothe, Kaddi, Powersuit up! Starke Business-Frauen sprechen über die Power von Mode, Available at: https://www.refinery29.com/de-­de/business-­ frauen-­ueber-­die-­power-­von-­fashion 61. Entwistle, Joanne, Fashion Theory. (London: Routledge, 2007). 62. Orgad, Shani. & Gill, Rosalind. The Confidence Cult(ure). (Durham: Duke University Press, 2022). 63. Sobande, Francesca, “Woke-washing: “intersectional” femvertising and branding “woke” bravery”, European Journal of Marketing, Vol. 54 (11), 2723–2745. (2020). 64. Goalgirls song ‘A letter to mankind - The empowerment hymn’ https:// www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ad5uVpj0k5M 65. Horton, Richard (2020) The COVID-19 Catastrophe, (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2020). Walby, Sylvia (2021) ‘The Gender of R: isolation, quarantine, care, public health and welfare in the reproduction rate of COVID’, Social Policy and Society, (forthcoming). 66. Chemam, Melissa ‘How the COVID-19 pandemic is destroying Britain’s creative industries’, Verso Books, 25 March. Available at: https://www.versobooks.com/blogs/4615-­how-­the-­covid-­19-­pandemic-­is-­destroying-­ britain-­s-­creative-­industries (Accessed: 29 April 2020). 67. Goalgirls Instagram post https://www.instagram.com/p/B9obb OKKs5f/ 68. Goalgirls Instagram post https://www.instagram.com/p/B-­pFO K6qfbG/ 69. Chatzidakis, Andreas, Jamie Hakim, Jo Littler, Catherine Rottenberg & Lynne Segal, From carewashing to radical care: the discursive explosions of care during Covid-19, Feminist Media Studies, 20:6, 889–895 (2020). Sobande, Francesca, ‘We’re all in this together’: Commodified notions of connection, care and community in brand responses to COVID-19, 23:6, pp. 1033–1037 (2020). 70. Goalgirls Fortunes Festival https://player.vimeo.com/video/406817995 71. Ibid. 72. Goalgirls ‘Domino Rising’ funding initiative https://www.linkedin.com/ company/co-­creagency-­by-­goalgirls/ 73. Goalgirls Instagram post https://www.instagram.com/p/B9reh9RKlb-­/

162 

H. CURRAN-TROOP ET AL.

74. Goalgirls Instagram post https://www.instagram.com/p/B-­pFO K6qfbG/ 75. Gill, Rosalind, Changing the perfect picture: Smartphones, social media and appearance pressures. Report produced for Parliamentay Inquiry into body image. (2021). 76. Goalgirls Instagram post https://www.instagram.com/p/B9uBIvGK3Fy/ 77. McRobbie, Angela, Feminism and the politics of resilience. (Cambridge: Polity, 2020). 78. Goalgirls Instagram story live broadcast June 20th 2020 https://www. instagram.com/heygoalgirls/ 79. Leaver, Tama et al., Instagram (Cambridge: Polity, 2020). 80. Prins, Annelot, Live-archiving the crisis: Instagram, cultural studies and times of collapse. European Journal of Cultural Studies 23(6)1046– 1053 (2020). 81. Hearn, Alison ‘Meat, Mask, Burden’: Probing the contours of the branded ‘self’. Journal of Consumer Culture. 8(2):197–217, (2008). 82. Littler, Jo, Against Meritocracy: Culture, power and myths of mobility. (London: Routledge, 2017). 83. Goalgirls Instagram post https://www.instagram.com/p/B_rxqRlKSYL/ 84. Goalgirls Instagram post https://www.instagram.com/p/CJLgh2 KqKaA/ 85. O’Neill, Rachel, Seduction: Men, Masculinity and Mediated Intimacy (Cambridge: Polity, 2018). 86. Banet-Weiser, Sarah, Empowered: popular feminism and popular misogyny. (Durham: Duke University Press, 2018).

CHAPTER 9

“We Are What We Do”: Postfeminism and Nostalgia in Bank Femvertising Jessica Martin

In 2016, UK bank Natwest released an advertising campaign in the UK titled “We are what we do”. The black and white footage in the advert demonstrates a blend of contemporary and historical scenes from Britain, with a narrator describing multiple and often contradictory personality traits which come to characterise the footage. When the advert declares “We are heroes” we see archival footage of suffragettes including Sylvia Pankhurst being arrested by police. In 2018, Natwest went on to create their “Processions” campaign, creating digital billboards featuring re-­ animated videos of Emmeline Pankhurst and Millicent Fawcett waving at crowds at various points on the centenary march, celebrating 100 years since some women achieved suffrage in the UK. This represents a clear move from Natwest to align their brand with suffragette history and iconography, a particular historical form of femvertising which seeks to focus on the gains of women and draws on particular notions of nostalgic British history and celebratory pride to do so.

J. Martin (*) University of Leeds, Leeds, UK e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 J. Gwynne (ed.), The Cultural Politics of Femvertising, Palgrave Studies in (Re)Presenting Gender, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-99154-8_9

163

164 

J. MARTIN

However, it can be argued that Natwest have contributed to an economic moment in Britain whereby women are disproportionately disadvantaged. As a subsection of the Royal Bank of Scotland which was understood to be one of the banks that contributed to the global economic recession, Natwest received a £37 billion government equity injection, perceived by many as a “bail-out”. In light of this, the Conservative and Liberal-­ Democrat government elected in 2010 ran on a platform of “slashing the deficit” and installed austerity measures of which it is estimated women will have borne 81% of the consolidation in personal tax rises and cuts to social security spending between 2010 and 2020.1 In this chapter, I will question how a financial institution such as NatWest comes to claim a feminist identity despite their complicity in generating gender inequality. I will draw on critical and visual discourse analysis of the Natwest “We are what we do” and “Processions” campaign to demonstrate how elements of the postfeminist sensibility2 are co-opted and discursively reinforced within femvertising even by institutions which contribute to material disadvantages for women. Through setting the context of the intensification of mumpreneurial, gendered narratives of resilience during austerity, I will demonstrate how the image of the suffragettes allow Natwest to position themselves as a feminist institution, whilst escaping the scrutiny and structural organisational change that this should entail. I will argue that postfeminism is able to adapt its discourses to retain its hegemonic hold on popular culture even in climates such as austerity in the UK, by incorporating notions of nostalgia and British history alongside discourses of women’s empowerment and independence.

Austerity and Banking in the UK There is an inherent relationship in the UK between banks, the global financial crisis of 2007/8, the global economic recession and the subsequent period of austerity pursued by the coalition government elected in 2010 in the UK. The global financial crisis of 2007/8 was a result of a variety of complex factors that led to a plunge in the mortgage related securities in the US, causing a crisis in the global economy, which includes speculative and risky activities pursued by the financial industry.3 Though the UK had followed the US model of a heavy reliance of the economy on a deregulated and globalised financial sector, the crisis in the UK that began in 2007 was ‘contained by financial rescues and recapitalization by the state at the cost of an increase in sovereign debt.’4 The Labour

9  “WE ARE WHAT WE DO”: POSTFEMINISM AND NOSTALGIA IN BANK… 

165

government that was in power at the time intervened heavily in the country’s economy, with an equity injection which came to be known as a bank bailout,5 and which economist Paul Krugman described as having “defined the character of the worldwide rescue effort, with other wealthy nations playing catch-up”.6 Here the notion of ‘bailing out the banks’ began to take hold across media, a discursive formation which laid bare the complicity of the banks in terms of creating the crisis and draining taxpayer funds to resolve it. It is important to establish the previous Labour government’s response to the financial crisis in order to understand the economic, social and political climate in which the 2010 Coalition Government’s introduction of austerity began. Despite assurances that austerity has come to an end from former Prime Minister Theresa May7 and more recently from chancellor Sajid Javid,8 the gender inequalities we saw in Britain during austerity continue to intensify, and have proven to have escalated even further during the current covid-19 pandemic. Women are now doing more unpaid work, at high risk of losing their job and more likely to be pushed further into poverty as a result of the Covid 19 pandemic’.9 In this sense, the climate of austerity continues, and I argue that the culture of austerity under which Natwest have released their suffragette inspired advertising, continues to thrive.

Austerity Culture, Women and Mumpreneurialism Building on the understanding of austerity policy outlined above, it is crucial that we conceptualise austerity not simply as a policy initiative, but as an ideological project with complex implications for culture. Rebecca Bramall provides a useful definition of austerity culture as “the historically informed practices, discourses, values, ideological elements, and representational strategies that arise in the new ‘age of austerity’, and serve to construct it”.10 One of the defining elements of austerity culture in terms of representations of women is the intensification of entrepreneurial discourses which are specifically gendered, against the backdrop of heightened gender inequality. Scholars have detailed the discursive formations of the mumpreneur, the bounce-backable women and the happy, thrifty housewife.11 What links these discursive formations are the notions of resilience, resourcefulness and maternal responsibility when it comes to mitigating the impacts of austerity policy. It is within this increasingly hostile labour

166 

J. MARTIN

market and an austerity culture which has been particularly difficult for women that mumpreneurialism has entered popular discourse, though mumpreneurialism is used in a number of ways throughout academia and popular culture that are often contested and contradictory. Kim Allen et al suggest that the mumpreneur contributes to a “postfeminist maternity demanded by neoliberal austerity”12 and reinforces a shifting of responsibility for the effects of austerity measures away from the state and onto the individual. In this sense, mumpreneurialism reinforces the individualisation found throughout popular culture during austerity, which suggests with resilience and a positive attitude, individuals can overcome the burdens of austerity initiated by the government. From 2015 onwards, Natwest bank, in partnership with the Daily Mail newspaper, have initiated their own “Mumpreneur of the year” award. The definition for this competition was “mothers setting up successful small businesses from home while raising a young family”. Whilst there was no explicit mention of the type of businesses mumpreneurs might run, the four women who were profiled in the advert for mumpreneur of the year all ran businesses that are distinctly domesticity related, ranging from a sewing expert who made innovative babygrows to an upholstery expert who made occasion chair covers, a chocolate maker and the creator of “Mrs Gleam”, a company specialising in home cleaning products that are safe to be used around children.13 This suggests that Natwest and the Daily Mail were looking for mothers who were not only creating their business from their home, whilst bringing up children, but were also focusing their entrepreneurial skills on domesticity related businesses. Jo Littler suggests that the convergence between mumpreneurial businesses and products typically aimed at women links together “discourses of feminised pleasure in consumption and pleasure in production”.14 By extension, the focus on domesticity related products by mumpreneurs solidifies the domestic space as a feminine space, and encourages consumers to understand mumpreneurs as not only competent business entrepreneurs but also as responsible mothers, though crucially still within the confines of traditional femininity. Though the domestic space can be understood in postfeminist terms as a desirable retreat from the public sphere,15 coverage of women who make the choice to stay-at-home often negates discussion of the wider factors influencing this choice including austerity related cuts to public services and increased redundancies which women are particularly susceptible to.16 In this way, we can understand brands such as Natwest encouraging entrepreneurial spirit amongst women in the

9  “WE ARE WHAT WE DO”: POSTFEMINISM AND NOSTALGIA IN BANK… 

167

domestic space, without necessarily acknowledging wider labour practices which disadvantage women, or providing a challenge to male-dominated industries such as their own. Through this mumpreneurial competition, Natwest instead reframe entrepreneurialism for women as intrinsically linked to femininity and domesticity, and are able to position themselves as celebrating women’s accomplishments without having to scrutinise their own working practices, culture or role in creating gender inequalities during austerity. Utilising the dominant narratives of female resilience, resourcefulness and entrepreneurialism under austerity by aligning themselves with mumpreneurialism is a branding exercise, which positions Natwest as women-friendly and even suggests a feminist identity. This, alongside the commodification of the suffragette identity explored next can be understood as paving the way for the banks use of suffragette femvertising.

Feminist Visibilities and the Representation of the Suffragettes Despite the interest in and rising visibility of the suffrage movement in both mainstream popular culture and academia, scholars have noted how academic focus tends to be on historical accounts of the movement, with little attention played to representations of suffragettes across the media landscape.17 Building on Van Dijks’ conception of mediated memories, Boyce-Kay and Mendes (2020) have examined mediated collective memories of Emily Wilding Davison as constructed in news media in the UK between 1913 and 2013. Their findings suggest a pattern of representation of the suffragetes as initially “demonised and caricatured, but also legitimised, lionised, and celebrated.”18 In particular they remark that “Davison’s image was rescued from that of a ‘brutal lunatic woman’ to that of a heroic, iconic martyr, who died for a worthy cause.” It is this process of recuperation and then lionisation of the suffragette identity which speaks to a wider discourse of “Suffragette spirit” which has come to dominate the British historical imagination19 and has arguably recuperated and domesticated the image of the suffragettes.20 This lionisation of the suffragette spirit allows for Sylvia Pankhurst, Millicent Fawcett and Emmeline Pankhurst to become symbols of female empowerment within Natwest’s contemporary advertising campaign, in a way which can be argued to over-simplify the complexity and diversity of the suffragette

168 

J. MARTIN

movement. I argue that with this recuperation of the suffragettes image and “spirit” comes commodification – in this case the celebration of suffragette martyrdom leads neatly to commercialisation and presents a branding opportunity for Natwest which coincides with the rising visibility and marketability of the suffragette movement across contemporary popular culture in the UK. This depoliticised recuperation of the suffragette spirit coincides with not only with the context of austerity in the UK, but also a moment of heightened visibility and popularity of feminisms throughout popular culture. Scholars have noted the convergence of feminist discourses with neoliberalism21 and the development of a postfeminist sensibility which can be identified across the cultural landscape, which often uses the rhetoric of feminism to repudiate feminist ideas, and instead celebrates notions of individualism, empowerment and choice.22 Building on Stuart Hall’s conception of the popular as a struggle for terrain, Sarah Banet-Weiser has noted the constellations of differing feminisms circulating and struggling within what she terms an economy of visibility in the current moment.23 It is within this economy of visibility that particular manifestations of popular feminist sentiment are mobilised, such as empowerment, choice, independence and confidence, all of which can be said to be cultivated in the iconography and particular remembering of the suffragettes. Ros Gill details the ongoing uneven visibilities of differing feminisms across popular culture in the contemporary moment,24 and this analysis of the use of suffragette footages across NatWest’s advertising will detail the particular form of nostalgic, depoliticised postfeminist sensibility which has flourished and gained heightened visibility despite of and even because of the backdrop of austerity in the UK. Building upon cultural studies and feminist media studies traditions, I have employed a Critical and Visual Discourse analysis25 across the campaign material associated with “We are what we do” and “Processions”. This intertextual analysis includes video adverts and campaign materials created for both campaigns by M&C Saatchi, as well as additional promotional material released by NatWest including posters, press releases and social media campaigns on both Twitter and Facebook. Critical Discourse Analysis allows for an interrogation of how power elites sustain their power both formally in institutional modes and informally through hegemonic struggle. This is particularly relevant for a bank such as NatWest which plays a key role in sustaining both forms of power. I am led by questions of how a feminist identity is discursively reinforced by NatWest, what role

9  “WE ARE WHAT WE DO”: POSTFEMINISM AND NOSTALGIA IN BANK… 

169

nostalgia plays in this discursive formation and what cultural and political work this nostalgic feminist identity may be doing.

“We Are What We Do” Launched as a campaign by M&C Saatchi in 2016, “We are what we do” saw NatWest release an advert firstly in cinemas and then on TV in the UK. The advert utilises a classical cinematic aesthetic, filmed in black and white, and interspersing historical archive footage with clips from more contemporary scenes. As the scenes change, the female voiceover lists particular adjectives that “we” are said to be enacting in the footage shown. These adjectives are mostly juxtaposed against the opposite characteristic or behaviour, examples include “we are thoughtful, we are thoughtless” and “we are kind, and we are cruel”. Scholars have remarked upon the conspicuous absence of NatWest branding until the very end of the advert,26 which, in combination with the cinematic release of their advert works to position it as a cultural object beyond the constraints (or ethical complications) of corporate advertising. This is reinforced by M&C Saatchi’s description of the “We are what we do” advertising campaign which they claim “asks viewers to hold the bank to account for its actions”. Here we can discern a discursive strategy which positions NatWest as taking responsibility (in fact “we are responsible” is repeated twice in the advert voiceover, with both positive and negative implications). Given the context of growing public anger at the “bankers bailout” explored earlier as well as the broader context of austerity culture, these discourses of responsibility and accountability espoused by NatWest can be seen as a recognition of the role of banks in generating the global financial crisis of 2007/8. In this sense, we can understand these discourses of responsibility as being mobilised in direct response to accusations of irresponsible lending and risk management which have been cited as having contributed to the financial crisis. This rhetoric serves a dual purpose: NatWest can be understood as discursively framing themselves as both a responsible lender, and also as taking responsibility for their actions, although crucially there is no detail as to what these actions were, the ways they have been mitigated or the injustices created through NatWest’s institutional behaviour. Mooney remarks upon the lack of changes to the regulation of financial institutions following the financial crisis despite the public outcry and suggests that “it is difficult to believe that these institutions have themselves taken up a mantle of responsibility in the interests of

170 

J. MARTIN

customers and consumers” (2018:120). Despite this, NatWest cultivate this notion of responsibility in a particularly gendered way. When the advert declares “we are responsible” the first time, the film cuts to a mother cradling a young child and carrying her into the home. There is a clear invocation of maternal responsibility here as we see the child physically carried by the mother into the domestic space. This can be understood to reinforce dominant discourses found across austerity culture which position parents, and specifically mothers, as responsible for mitigating the impact of austerity policy within their households. This maternal responsibility for protecting children from the harsh realities of austerity policy can be said to be part of what Gill and Orgad have described as a “turn to resilience”27 across austerity culture which is specifically classed and gendered – mothers are encouraged to demonstrate this resilience in order to protect their children despite the escalating inequalities associated with austerity which have been proven to disproportionately impact single mothers.28 This invocation of maternal responsibility in “We are what we do” can be said to complement NatWest’s endorsement of mumpreneurialism discussed earlier through reinforcing the notion that through individual resilience, entrepreneurialism and ingenuity, women can overcome the structural inequalities generated through austerity and crucially, can shield their children from these inequalities simply through the virtue of being responsible mothers. The inclusion of and celebration of the figure of the mother reinforces the celebrated visibility of women in “We are what we do”, which is reinforced by footage of the suffragettes, is also complemented by the female employee who appears in colour at the end of the advert, becoming the face of NatWest as the advert reveals its true purpose. In many ways, this celebration of women in various roles including mother, activist and NatWest employees can be understood as part of a wider cultivation of women and empowerment found across the femvertising landscape. This seemingly apolitical celebration of women as cultivated by NatWest exists just as popular feminism does, along a continuum, within which Banet-­ Weiser among others argues that spectacular, media friendly and corporate forms of feminism achieve visibility at the expense of feminisms which actively critique patriarchal structures and structural injustices.29 In this way, the celebratory visibility of the women in the “We are what we do” advert can be understood as an example of the hegemonic discourses of neoliberalism and individualism which have taken hold during austerity

9  “WE ARE WHAT WE DO”: POSTFEMINISM AND NOSTALGIA IN BANK… 

171

culture and which Banet-Weiser and Portwood-Stacer claim prize “equal visibility in the marketplace as the apotheosis of empowerment”.30

Sylvia Pankhurst This cultivation of a feminist brand identity is reinforced particularly through the black and white footage of Sylvia Pankhurst being arrested in 1913, which plays as the advert narration states “we are brave”. The footage comes from the British Film Institute archival material, which again reinforces the understanding of the advert as cinematic. The footage used in the advert is part of a wider one minute newsreel which the BFI suggests “captures the aftermath of a demonstration by the Women’s Social and Political Union in Trafalgar Square on the 27th of July 1913”,31 where Pankhurst was said to have encouraged a crowd to mobilise and violently harangue the prime minister. Sylvia Pankhurst can be said to be an unusual choice for NatWest to use to represent the suffragette movement. Unlike her arguably more famous mother Emmeline and sister Christabel, Sylvia Pankhurst can be understood as a “revolutionary leftist”32 and a figure within the Suffrage movement who fought injustices at the intersections of class and gender. At the time of the footage utilised by NatWest, Pankhurst spearheaded the East London Federation of the Suffragettes (ELFS) who “demanded far more than votes for women: it fought for day-care centres, better housing, the socialisation of housework, inexpensive but good public restaurants, decent medical care, free milk for children, unionization of women workers, and equal pay for equal work.”33 Often described as a communist or as an anti-capitalist suffragette, and a “defender of the poor, the oppressed and the marginalised”34 Pankhurst fought for suffrage for working-class women, becoming one of the more explicitly anti-capitalist members of the suffragette movement. In 1913, where NatWest’s footage is from, Pankhurst also became the prisoner who held the record for being most frequently subjected to torture via force-feeding.35 Pankhurst’s often violent anti-capitalist activism and advocacy for working-­class women appears at odds with a large financial institution such as NatWest, part of the RBS group who, previous to the financial crisis of 2007/8 were the largest bank in the world. The suffragette movement of course did contain more politically conservative members too, most notably perhaps in the Conservative and Unionist Women’s Franchise Union.36 So the suggestion here is not simply that Natwest are

172 

J. MARTIN

commodifying a working-class movement, in fact, it is clear that the suffragette movement was diverse and full of contestation, representing both working class and middle class women. Instead, I argue that the use of suffragette iconography in Natwest’s commercial campaign is in some ways a bland uptake of a feminist identity without any commitment to feminist politics. We can even understand Natwest’s use of the suffragette iconography in the same way as  Jilly Boyce-Kay and  Kaitlynn Mendes37 found Davison’s representation circulating: as a means to disarticulate contemporary feminism, and instill corporate friendly lean-in discourses38 which masquerades as progressive feminism without the structural changes implied by the latter. In this way, Natwest’s utilisation of the Suffragette iconography can be said to function in a similar way to their use of mupreneurialism: to allow them to present a feminist identity whilst evading the scrutiny this would entail. It can be suggested then, that Pankhurst’s image is being utilised in a particular way here which does some significant cultural work and requires further analysis.

“We Are Heroes”: Bravery and Nostalgia As we see Pankhurst being marched away by Policemen on either side, the narrator of the “We are what we do” advert reminds us “we are heroes”. This has been preceded with reminders of how we are both “brave” and “stupid” with footage of men in military outfits and then men fighting in a bar respectively. The use of the terms brave and heroic here, particularly when attached to footage of the arrest of a known communist, can be said to reinforce Jilly Boyce-Kay and Kaitlynn Mendes’ findings that contemporary mediations of the suffragettes image have been through a process of recuperation and then lionisation.39 This can also be understood as part of an effort from NatWest to align their brand with a progressive agenda, signalling a feminist identity without necessarily detailing explicit feminist politics. Francesca Sobande details ways in which some contemporary advertising campaigns serve to position particular brands as “woke” through what she identifies as “intersectional femvertising”, with brands aligning themselves with social justice movements at the intersections of race and gender.40 One key feature of this intersectional femvertising as identified by Sobande which draws on Black social justice movements is the focus on the notion of bravery, and the association of discourses of “wokeness” with courage.41 We can understand NatWest’s discourses of heroism when

9  “WE ARE WHAT WE DO”: POSTFEMINISM AND NOSTALGIA IN BANK… 

173

displaying Sylvia Pankhurst as a form of femvertising which borrows from intersectional social justice movements in order to position themselves as “woke” and feminist. As Sobande suggests however, “Current marketplace logics are influenced by activist issues and commercial ones, in conflicting ways that yield brand attempts to indicate a commitment to social justice via marketing that is inherently devoid of liberationist politics”.42 This lack of liberationist politics here is distinct in that NatWest provide a form of femvertising which draws on bravery to perform “wokeness” but also utilises nostalgia, in order to achieve this distance from contemporary politics. Nostalgia is coded throughout the advert and reinforced through the black and white aesthetic and the grainy, clearly dated archival footage utilised. In terms of the presentation of the suffragette however, I argue that nostalgia is invoked alongside a presentation of feminism to present a particular iteration of postfeminism which has emerged throughout austerity culture in the UK. The period of austerity into which the “We are what we do” advert was released can by characterised by a resurgence of nostalgic discourses. This is evident in the invocations of the post-war rationing period in UK understandings of austerity, which have been reinforced by the recirculation of discourses of the “blitz spirit”, a seemingly particularly British call to resilience, stoicism and a stiff upper-lip43 which has found new life across austerity culture.44 In the current period of austerity, this blitz spirit rhetoric can be utilised with ideological intentions, as seen in the Conservative government’s reiteration that “we’re all in this together”.45 David Cameron was elected in 2010 following a campaign in which he stressed the need for the country to enter “an age of austerity”,46 which marks the beginning of this discourse re-entering the public realm. This blitz spirit has transpired outside the realm of Westminster politics and throughout popular culture, one example of which is the huge surge in popularity of the “Keep Calm and Carry On” slogan, identified by many as an austerity trope which encapsulates the reappropriation of blitz spirit and wartime resilience.47 These nostalgic discourses have also become entwined with consumer culture. The utilisation of nostalgia by marketing teams during austerity is further confirmed by the marketing director of Marks & Spencer, Steve Sharp, who claims “nostalgia always becomes more important when times are tough”.48 It is important to note here that nostalgia in this context is not simply a yearning for the past, but a yearning for a particular, culturally constructed version of the past, which is not always historically accurate.

174 

J. MARTIN

It is this culturally constructed and nostalgic version of feminist history that we can see cultivated by NatWest in their short portrayal of Sylvia Pankhurst as a demonstration of a hero. The lack of violence or resistance as she is marched peacefully away by the police demonstrates a sanitised perception of Pankhurst’s battle against injustice, which we know to be marked by torture, violence and detainment at the hands of police. This nostalgic remembering of Pankhurst allows for her image to be depoliticised and re-made for consumption. This can be considered part of a wider phenomenon as identified by Francesca Sobande whereby feminist ideas become de-contextualised and then re-contextualised within consumer culture49 and here I suggest that re-contextualisation is achieved through discursive formations of nostalgia. I argue that this nostalgic re-making of Pankhurst’s legacy represents a particular form of femvertising, whereby notions of women’s emancipation are celebrated through representing historical demands which have already been met. We can understand the footage of Pankhurst and the notion of her heroism as relating to women achieving suffrage, which was granted to women over 30 who owned property or whose husbands owned property in 1918, and then for all women over 21  in 1928. It can therefore be argued that suffrage as a political issue becomes a comfortable, already resolved demand for brands such as NatWest to align themselves with through a framing of nostalgia, to demonstrate their “woke” credentials without having to grapple with the complexities of contemporary feminism. This resonates with research on portrayals of WWII in contemporary popular culture, which are often mobilised in the British context to signify a period of moral simplicity where the British were unambiguously on the “right side” without the complexity of the current moment.50 This yearning for a more simplistic definition of women’s emancipation can also be understood as a distinctly postfeminist form of femvertising; feminism is taken into account and seemingly celebrated,51 whilst simultaneously seen as resolved through suffrage, allowing for a NatWest to cultivate a feminist identity which is remade through articulations with both consumer culture and nostalgia. Though the conflation of women’s empowerment and consumption is certainly nothing new within postfeminist media culture,52 the introduction of nostalgia here represents an adaptation of the postfeminist sensibility which draws on the nostalgic discourses of austerity culture to retain its relevance. Whereas postfeminist texts of the late 1990’s and 2000s in the UK and USA were associated with an economic boom with many women having access to disposable income, the connection between the

9  “WE ARE WHAT WE DO”: POSTFEMINISM AND NOSTALGIA IN BANK… 

175

postfeminist sensibility and consumption might suggest that its hold on popular culture would be diminished during a time of economic recession, especially when significant numbers of women are subjected to increasing levels of poverty, stagnant wages and have less disposable income than ever. Instead, scholars have detailed the increased visibility of postfeminist discourses. Reflecting in 2017 on the postfeminist sensibility becoming normalised and somewhat ubiquitous throughout previous decade, Gill remarks on how the sensibility appears to have achieved cultural hegemony.53 I would suggest that one of the ways in which this hegemony is fought for and secured is through the adaptation of postfeminism to integrate nostalgic discourses of women’s emancipation as seen in the postfeminist femvertising in “We are what we do”.

Processions NatWest’s femvertising which utilised the suffragette identity was further intensified through their lead sponsorship of the “Processions” campaign in 2018, described as a “mass participation artwork which celebrated one hundred years of votes for women”.54 Culminating in marches across London, Edinburgh Belfast and Cardiff on the 10th June 2018, the Processions campaign involved over 100,000 women “celebrating 100 years of suffrage”, despite the fact that all women were not afforded equal voting rights until 1928. NatWest’s contribution to Processions and their promotional material was once again created by M&C Saatchi under the “We are what we do” campaign, with many of the same creative team from the advert mentioned previously. In a short promotional video made by M&C Saatchi for NatWest to showcase their involvement in Processions, we are shown clips of women dressed in scarves handed out at the beginning of the route in traditional suffragette campaign colours of green, white and purple, wearing “votes for women” rosettes and marching through the streets with placards. This footage is interspersed with more of the BFI black and white archival footage which was used in “We are what we do”, invoking the nostalgic remembering of the suffragette spirit in a discourse of celebration. In NatWest’s signature brand shade of purple, we see font which reads “As lead sponsor of the event, we brought Emmeline Pankhurst and Millicent Fawcett back to life”. This bringing to life is realised when the promotional video produces a portrait photo of Emmeline Pankhurst which has been digitally animated, giving the impression that she is gazing across a

176 

J. MARTIN

room or crowd. There are two other digital mediations of Pankhurst and Fawcett respectively, animated to present them as clapping, waving and seemingly cheering on the crowds as they were played at various points along the route on the Processions marches in 2018. There are many complex ethical considerations to discuss when animating images of the deceased which lie beyond the scope of this paper, but are certainly amplified when those mediations are commodified by an institution such as NatWest. When reflecting on the digitally mediated intimacies created through animation of the deceased, Hales details the variable and fragmented nature of these characters as they form across different time periods and contexts and their narrative identity becomes compromised, “expanding into many versions to which shifting attachments can form”.55 It is this fragmentation which NatWest can be said to utilise in their reanimation of the suffragettes, creating a nostalgic, celebratory and victorious affective mood to encourage the women marching to connect with Pankhurst and Fawcett under a shared celebration of women’s political rights. Crucially, this connection is not only mediated specifically by NatWest, but is also branded by them in the promotional video which details their involvement in Processions and across other promotional material. The digital manipulation of Pankhurst and Fawcett’s images in these mediations allow NatWest to recontextualise their images and narratives within a campaign which is ostensibly feminist, promoting and celebrating women’s political citizenship, whilst conveniently obscuring the role of banks in institutionalising ongoing inequalities felt by women in the UK.  This is one example of the new opportunities for postfeminist femvertising afforded by developments in digital technologies such as re-­ animation, which allow for collective misrememberings or the recontextualization of historical movements in more brand-friendly, and this case nostalgic terms. The convergence of the NatWest brand identity with the suffragette spirit is further intensified through their brand colour “American Purple” resembling the shade of purple used by the suffragette movement in their campaign materials. NatWest capitalises on this convergence, going so far as to create promotional posters in NatWest purple with green flowers associated with the suffragette colour scheme. The posters read “I’m walking for suffrage around the world. Celebrating 100 years of votes for women” with the NatWest logo directly underneath (Fig. 9.1). This contributes to the association of NatWest not only with celebrations of historical gains for women, but as a brand which appears to be

9  “WE ARE WHAT WE DO”: POSTFEMINISM AND NOSTALGIA IN BANK… 

Fig. 9.1  NatWest Processions promotional poster

177

178 

J. MARTIN

championing empowerment, independence and emancipation for women in the contemporary moment. The interspersing footage of women on the Processions march in 2018 with the black and white archival footage of the suffragettes and the reanimated black and white footage of Pankhurst and Fawcett combines to form mutually reinforcing discourses of nostalgia and entrepreneurialism which can be said to have intensified throughout the current period of austerity in the UK. The celebration of suffrage combined with the particularly gendered form of entrepreneurialism that come with NatWest’s endorsement of the mumpreneur discussed previously serve to subtly obscure the challenges still faced by women at a time of escalating inequalities, many of which NatWest can be said to be implicated in reinforcing. In these discourses, the solution to the gendered implications of austerity appears to be achieved through cultivating individual entrepreneurialism, supported by a brand which uses suffragette imagery to position itself as feminist. One of the further implications of NatWest’s use of the suffragette imagery as a form of historical postfeminist femvertising is the work this nostalgic remembering does in terms of cultivating the brand’s reputation in the contemporary context. The interspersing of footage from the march with archival footage in Processions allows NatWest to utilise the suffragette spirit in order to align themselves with a contemporary activist movement, at least visually. The Processions video includes footage of women marching, carrying placards, waving flags and displaying badges with slogans associated with the suffragette movement such as “deeds not words”. The video suggests that the march “didn’t just celebrate achievements of the past…but also inspired the next generation to fight for equality”. This message of the ongoing commitment of NatWest to “fighting for equality” is reinforced through the hashtag #nofinishline which each marcher was encouraged to use online to continue the digital procession, which NatWest brand manager Emma Issac states was created in recognition that “we’ve come a long way, but there is still a lot of work to be done.”56 We can understand this as an example of NatWest using both the aesthetics, organising tactics and materials utilised by social justice movements, in order to signify their “woke” position. However, there is a distinct lack of discussion around what the “work that needs to be done” entails specifically, how women’s susceptibility to vulnerability is intensified at the intersection of their gender with their race and class identities, or of the crucial context of the economic, ideological and social context of austerity associated with the past decade. As Sobande has argued, it is crucial that we

9  “WE ARE WHAT WE DO”: POSTFEMINISM AND NOSTALGIA IN BANK… 

179

make brands accountable for woke-washing, utilising the aesthetics and language of social justice movements, “particularly when the brand’s actions do not indicate any sustained commitment to addressing such matters of injustice”.57

Conclusion In a contemporary moment which is marked by uneven feminist visibilities,58 it is crucial that we turn our attention to distinct forms of femvertising which have emerged and discern how they struggle for and achieve that visibility within popular culture. The utilisation of the suffragette imagery in NatWest’s advertising represents a specific form of nostalgic postfeminist femvertising which I argue is particular to austerity culture in the UK. This form of femvertising builds on the postfeminist discourses of corporate friendly, popular feminism which we might associate with the lean-in movement,59 which centres on individual resilience and confidence as crucial to women overcoming obstacles associated with gender inequality. These discourses are then entangled with nostalgic rememberings of the past, mobilised to inspire an affective mood of national pride, bravery and collectivism, which subtly obscures contemporary complexity and inequalities. These nostalgic celebrations of Britain’s history and supposed national character have been utilised by the Coalition and Conservative governments since coming to power in 2010 to justify harsh and unevenly felt austerity measures, under the guise that we are “all in this together”.60 This nostalgic national identity can be said to be capitalised on by NatWest in “We are what we do”, where the “we” that is described in contested behaviours crystallises in a specific identity forged through nostalgic articulations with British history. The introduction of the suffragettes in this context allows a bank like NatWest to utilise this nostalgia in order to align themselves with a vague notion of feminism, celebrating women’s citizenship and formal voting rights without having to engage in the complexity of contemporary gender inequality under austerity. It also allows NatWest to evade any scrutiny into their own male-dominated institutional practices, as well as the role the institution has played in economic insecurity for women across Britain. For an institution like NatWest to be able to lay claim to a feminist identity demonstrates not simply the elasticity of feminism in contemporary popular culture, but also the ability of postfeminist discourses to mutate and adapt to retain their dominance.

180 

J. MARTIN

The use of the suffragette’s in NatWest’s femvertising also coincides with a growing glorification and then commodification of the iconography of the suffragettes which has found new life across postfeminist media and consumer culture. The recuperation of the suffragettes image as heroic is achieved by NatWest through recontextualising the suffragette movement as fighting for an injustice which has been resolved (i.e women achieving suffrage). This allows for the bank to utilise footage as Sylvia Pankhurst being arrested as a nostalgic celebration, despite her anti-­ capitalist sentiments and calls for opposition to structural inequalities which still exist today, generated by uneven domestic labour responsibilities, prohibitively expensive childcare and unequal pay. Their involvement in Processions provided an opportunity for NatWest to intensify the alignment of their brand with feminist activism, here borrowing the aesthetics of a contemporary social justice movement although crucially in the absence of any substantial engagement with contemporary injustices. Here, nostalgic celebration once again insulates the brand from dealing in the complex inequalities associated with austerity, and instead, utilising digital media technology, allows them to position themselves as being applauded by the suffragettes. This can be understood as an example of the ways in which the postfeminist sensibility61 in which empowerment and consumption are entwined, is able to adapt to retain its visibility and secure its hegemonic hold on popular culture. This adaptation is achieved through brands like NatWest utilising nostalgia to reinforce notions of feminist empowerment and obscure their own complicity in generating inequalities, whilst presenting themselves as a responsible, accountable and “woke” brand.

Notes 1. Women’s Budget Group, ‘Austerity Hits Women Harder  – Womens Budget Group’, accessed 16 September 2019, https://wbg.org.uk/blog/ austerity-­hits-­women-­harder/ 2. Rosalind Gill, ‘Postfeminist Media Culture: Elements of a Sensibility’, European Journal of Cultural Studies 10, no. 2 (1 May 2007): 147–66, https://doi.org/10.1177/1367549407075898 3. David M.  Kotz, ‘The Financial and Economic Crisis of 2008: A Systemic Crisis of Neoliberal Capitalism’, Review of Radical Political Economics 41, no. 3 (1 September 2009): 305–17, https://doi. org/10.1177/0486613409335093

9  “WE ARE WHAT WE DO”: POSTFEMINISM AND NOSTALGIA IN BANK… 

181

4. Maria Karamessini, ‘Introduction  – Women’s Vulnerability to Recession and Austerity: A Different Crisis, a Different Context’, in Women and Austerity, ed. Maria Karamessini and Jill Rubery, 2013, https://doi.org/1 0.4324/9780203066294-­10 5. Graeme Wearden, ‘British Government Unveils £37bn Banking Bail-out Plan’, The Guardian, 13 October 2008, sec. Business, https://www.theguardian.com/business/2008/oct/13/marketturmoil-­creditcrunch 6. Paul Krugman, ‘Opinion | Gordon Does Good’, The New York Times, 12 October 2008, sec. Opinion, https://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/13/ opinion/13krugman.html 7. Benjamin Kentish, ‘Theresa May Declares “austerity Is over” after Eight Years of Cuts and Tax Increases’, The Independent, 11 December 2019, sec. News, https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/ theresa-­m ay-­a usterity-­e nd-­o ver-­s peech-­c onservative-­c onference-­t ory-­ labour-­a8566526.html 8. Phillip Inman, ‘Has the Age of Austerity Really Come to an End?’, The Guardian, 5 September 2019, sec. Business, https://www.theguardian.com/business/2019/sep/05/has-­t he-­a ge-­o f-­a usterity-­ really-­come-­to-­an-­end-­sajid-­javid 9. ‘Submission: Coronavirus and the Gendered Economic Impact’, Womens Budget Group (blog), 23 June 2020, https://wbg.org.uk/ analysis/consultation-­r esponses/submission-­c oronavirus-­a nd-­t he­gendered-­economic-­impact/ 10. Rebecca Bramall, The Cultural Politics of Austerity: Past and Present in Austere Times (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), http: //www.palgrave.com/page/detail/the-­cultural-­politics-­of-­austerity-­rebecca-­bramall /?isb=9780230360471 11. Kim Allen and Yvette Taylor, ‘Placed Parenting, Locating Unrest: Failed Femininities, Troubled Mothers and Rioting Subjects’, Studies in the Maternal 4, no. 2 (1 July 2012): 1–25, https://doi.org/10.16995/ sim. 39; Tracey Jensen, ‘Tough Love in Tough Times’, Studies in the Maternal 4, no. 2 (1 July 2012): 1–26, https://doi.org/10.16995/ sim.35; Bramall, The Cultural Politics of Austerity; Shani Orgad and Sara De Benedictis, ‘The “Stay-at-Home” Mother, Postfeminism and Neoliberalism: Content Analysis of UK News Coverage’, European Journal of Communication 30, no. 4 (1 August 2015): 418–36, https://doi. org/10.1177/0267323115586724; Kim Allen et  al., ‘Welfare Queens, Thrifty Housewives, and Do-It-All Mums’, Feminist Media Studies 15, no. 6 (2 November 2015): 907–25, https://doi.org/10.1080/1468077 7.2015.1062992; Jo Littler, Against Meritocracy, 1 edition (London; New York, NY: Routledge, 2017). 12. Allen et al., ‘Welfare Queens, Thrifty Housewives, and Do-It-All Mums’.

182 

J. MARTIN

13. India Sturgis, ‘Who’ll Be Our Mumpreneur of the Year?’, Mail Online, 15 April 2015, https://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-­3040629/ W h o l l -­M u m p r e n e u r-­y e a r-­m a j o r-­n e w -­t r e n d -­w o m e n -­j u g g l i n g -­ motherhood-­setting-­businesses-­like-­four-­looking-­inspiring-­stories.html 14. Littler, Against Meritocracy. 15. Diane Negra, What a Girl Wants?: Fantasizing the Reclamation of Self in Postfeminism (Routledge, 2009). 16. Orgad and De Benedictis, ‘The “Stay-at-Home” Mother, Postfeminism and Neoliberalism’. 17. Kat Gupta, Representation of the British Suffrage Movement (London Oxford New York New Delhi Sydney: Bloomsbury Academic, 2015); Jilly Boyce Kay and Kaitlynn Mendes, ‘Gender, Media and Protest’, Media History 26, no. 2 (2 April 2020): 137–52, https://doi.org/10.108 0/13688804.2018.1520631 18. Kay and Mendes, ‘Gender, Media and Protest’. 19. Laura E.  Nym Mayhall, ‘Creating the “Suffragette Spirit”: British Feminism and the Historical Imagination1’, Women’s History Review 4, no. 3 (1 September 1995): 319–44, https://doi.org/10.1080/ 09612029500200088 20. Red Chidgey, ‘“A Modest Reminder”: Performing Suffragette Memory in a British Feminist Webzine’, in Cultural Memories of Nonviolent Struggles: Powerful Times, ed. Anna Reading and Tamar Katriel, Palgrave Macmillan Memory Studies (London: Palgrave Macmillan UK, 2015), 52–70, https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137032720_3 21. Catherine Rottenberg, ‘The Rise of Neoliberal Feminism’, Cultural Studies 28, no. 3 (4 May 2014): 418–37, https://doi.org/10.1080/ 09502386.2013.857361 22. Angela McRobbie, ‘Post-feminism and Popular Culture’, Feminist Media Studies 4, no. 3 (1 November 2004): 255–64, https://doi.org/10.108 0/1468077042000309937; Gill, ‘Postfeminist Media Culture’. 23. Sarah Banet-Weiser, Empowered: Popular Feminism and Popular Misogyny (Durham: Duke University Press Books, 2018). 24. Rosalind Gill, ‘The Affective, Cultural and Psychic Life of Postfeminism: A Postfeminist Sensibility 10 Years On’, European Journal of Cultural Studies 20, no. 6 (1 December 2017): 606–26, https://doi.org/10.1177/ 1367549417733003 25. Teun A. van Dijk, ‘Principles of Critical Discourse Analysis’, Discourse & Society 4, no. 2 (1 April 1993): 249–83, https://doi.org/10.117 7/0957926593004002006; Gillian Rose, Visual Methodologies: An Introduction to Researching with Visual Materials, Fourth edition (London: SAGE Publications Ltd., 2016).

9  “WE ARE WHAT WE DO”: POSTFEMINISM AND NOSTALGIA IN BANK… 

183

26. Annabelle Mooney, The Language of Money: Proverbs and Practices (Routledge, 2018). 27. Rosalind Gill and Shani Orgad, ‘The Amazing Bounce-Backable Woman: Resilience and the Psychological Turn in Neoliberalism’, Sociological Research Online 23, no. 2 (1 June 2018): 477–95, https://doi. org/10.1177/1360780418769673 28. ‘Single Parent Families  – Trapped Within a Pernicious Intersection of Welfare Reform Policies’, Womens Budget Group (blog), 30 May 2019, https://wbg.org.uk/blog/single-­p arent-­f amilies-­t rapped-­w ithin-­a -­ pernicious-­intersection-­of-­welfare-­reform-­policies/ 29. Banet-Weiser, Empowered. 30. Sarah Banet-Weiser and Laura Portwood-Stacer, ‘The Traffic in Feminism: An Introduction to the Commentary and Criticism on Popular Feminism’, Feminist Media Studies 17, no. 5 (3 September 2017): 884–88, https:// doi.org/10.1080/14680777.2017.1350517 31. ‘Watch Trafalgar Square Riot’, BFI Player, accessed 24 February 2021, https://player.bfi.org.uk/free/film/watch-­trafalgar-­square-­riot-­1913-­ online 32. Sheila Rowbotham, ‘Preface’, in Sylvia Pankhurst: Sexual Politics And Political Activism (Routledge, 2013). 33. Barbara Winslow, Sylvia Pankhurst: Sexual Politics And Political Activism (Routledge, 2013). 34. Amanda Foreman, ‘Sylvia Pankhurst by Rachel Holmes, Review – Finally Having Her Moment’, sec. Culture, accessed 24 February 2021, https:// www.thetimes.co.uk/article/sylvia-­p ankhurst-­n atural-­b orn-­r ebel-­b y-­ rachel-­holmes-­book-­review-­d0mqclndc 35. Lucy Davies, ‘Sylvia Pankhurst by Rachel Holmes Review: The Rebel Sister Betrayed by Her Family’, The Telegraph, 27 September 2020, https:// www.telegraph.co.uk/books/what-­t o-­r ead/sylvia-­p ankhurst-­r achel-­ holmes-­review-­rebel-­sister-­betrayed/ 36. Lori Maguire, ‘The Conservative Party and Women’s Suffrage’, in Suffrage Outside Suffragism: Women’s Vote in Britain, 1880–1914, ed. Myriam Boussahba-Bravard (London: Palgrave Macmillan UK, 2007), 52–76, https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230801318_3 37. Kay and Mendes, ‘Gender, Media and Protest’. 38. Sheryl Sandberg, Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead, 1st edition (Virgin Digital, 2013). 39. Kay and Mendes, ‘Gender, Media and Protest’. 40. Sobande Francesca, ‘Woke-Washing: “Intersectional” Femvertising and Branding “Woke” Bravery’, European Journal of Marketing 54, no. 11 (1 January 2019): 2723–45, https://doi.org/10.1108/EJM-­02-­2019-­0134 41. Sobande Francesca. 42. Sobande Francesca.

184 

J. MARTIN

43. Angus Calder, The Myth Of The Blitz, New Ed edition (London: Pimlico, 1992); D.  Kelsey, Media, Myth and Terrorism: A Discourse-Mythological Analysis of the ‘Blitz Spirit’ in British Newspaper Responses to the July 7th Bombings (Springer, 2015). 44. Jessica Martin, ‘Voices from the Kitchen Table  : (Post)Feminism and Domestic Cultures during Austerity’ (Ph.D., University of Leicester, 2020), https://doi.org/10.25392/leicester.data.11800281.v2; Jessica Martin, ‘Keep Crafting and Carry on: Nostalgia and Domestic Cultures in the Crisis’, European Journal of Cultural Studies 24, no. 1 (1 February 2021): 358–64, https://doi.org/10.1177/1367549420958718 45. David Cameron, ‘David Cameron’s Speech to the Tory Conference: In Full’, The Guardian, 6 October 2010, sec. Politics, https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2010/oct/06/david-­cameron-­speech-­tory-­conference 46. Deborah Summers and politics editor, ‘David Cameron Warns of “Age of Austerity”’, The Guardian, 26 April 2009, sec. Politics, https:// www.theguardian.com/politics/2009/apr/26/david-­c ameron­conservative-­economic-­policy1 47. Emma Hinton and Michael Redclift, ‘Austerity and Sufficiency: The Changing Politics of Sustainable Consumption.’, n.d., 22; Derek Edyvane, Civic Virtue and the Sovereignty of Evil (Routledge, 2013); Bramall, The Cultural Politics of Austerity; Kristina Diprose, ‘Resilience Is Futile’, Soundings 1, no. 58 (12 January 2015): 44–56, https://doi.org/info: doi/10.3898/136266215814379736; Owen Hatherley, The Ministry of Nostalgia: Consuming Austerity (London; New York: Verso Books, 2015). 48. Zoe Wood, ‘Queen of Florals Cath Kidston Bucks the Recession to Profit from Love of Nostalgia’, The Guardian, 9 August 2009, sec. Life and style, h t t p s : / / w w w. t h e g u a r d i a n . c o m / l i f e a n d s t y l e / 2 0 0 9 / a u g / 0 9 / cath-­kidston-­recession-­floral-­empire 49. Sobande Francesca, ‘Woke-Washing: “Intersectional” Femvertising and Branding “Woke” Bravery’. 50. Power and Crampton, Cinema and Popular Geo-Politics (Routledge, 2013); Martin, ‘Voices from the Kitchen Table’. 51. McRobbie, ‘Post-feminism and Popular Culture’. 52. Gill, ‘Postfeminist Media Culture’; Gill, ‘The Affective, Cultural and Psychic Life of Postfeminism’. 53. Gill, ‘The Affective, Cultural and Psychic Life of Postfeminism’. 54. ‘NatWest | Processions – Jordan and Danny’, accessed 28 February 2021, https://cargocollective.com/JorDancreative/NatWest-­Processions 55. Molly Hales, ‘Animating Relations: Digitally Mediated Intimacies between the Living and the Dead’, Cultural Anthropology 34, no. 2 (22 May 2019): 187–212, https://doi.org/10.14506/ca34.2.02

9  “WE ARE WHAT WE DO”: POSTFEMINISM AND NOSTALGIA IN BANK… 

185

56. Tamsin Kelly, ‘Why It Was Important For Me To Attend The Women’s March With My Daughter | HuffPost UK Life’, HuffPost UK, 11 January 2018, https://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/entry/why-­it-­was-­important-­ for-­me-­to-­attend-­the-­womens-­march-­with-­my-­daughter_uk_5b75800ce 4b02b415d761921 57. Sobande Francesca, ‘Woke-Washing: “Intersectional” Femvertising and Branding “Woke” Bravery’. 58. Gill, ‘The Affective, Cultural and Psychic Life of Postfeminism’; Banet-­ Weiser and Portwood-Stacer, ‘The Traffic in Feminism’; Banet-Weiser, Empowered. 59. Sandberg, Lean In. 60. Summers and editor, ‘David Cameron Warns of “Age of Austerity”’. 61. Gill, ‘Postfeminist Media Culture’.

Bibliography Allen, Kim, Heather Mendick, Laura Harvey, and Aisha Ahmad. ‘Welfare Queens, Thrifty Housewives, and Do-It-All Mums’. Feminist Media Studies 15, no. 6 (2 November 2015): 907–25. https://doi.org/10.1080/1468077 7.2015.1062992. Allen, Kim, and Yvette Taylor. ‘Placed Parenting, Locating Unrest: Failed Femininities, Troubled Mothers and Rioting Subjects’. Studies in the Maternal 4, no. 2 (1 July 2012): 1–25. https://doi.org/10.16995/sim.39. Banet-Weiser, Sarah. Empowered: Popular Feminism and Popular Misogyny. Durham: Duke University Press Books, 2018. Banet-Weiser, Sarah, and Laura Portwood-Stacer. ‘The Traffic in Feminism: An Introduction to the Commentary and Criticism on Popular Feminism’. Feminist Media Studies 17, no. 5 (3 September 2017): 884–88. https://doi. org/10.1080/14680777.2017.1350517. Bramall, Rebecca. The Cultural Politics of Austerity: Past and Present in Austere Times. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013. http://www.palgrave. com/page/detail/the-­c ultural-­p olitics-­o f-­a usterity-­r ebecca-­b ramall/? isb=9780230360471. Calder, Angus. The Myth Of The Blitz. New Ed edition. London: Pimlico, 1992. Cameron, David. ‘David Cameron’s Speech to the Tory Conference: In Full’. The Guardian, 6 October 2010, sec. Politics. https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2010/oct/06/david-­cameron-­speech-­tory-­conference. Chidgey, Red. ‘“A Modest Reminder”: Performing Suffragette Memory in a British Feminist Webzine’. In Cultural Memories of Nonviolent Struggles: Powerful Times, edited by Anna Reading and Tamar Katriel, 52–70. Palgrave Macmillan Memory Studies. London: Palgrave Macmillan UK, 2015. https:// doi.org/10.1057/9781137032720_3.

186 

J. MARTIN

Davies, Lucy. ‘Sylvia Pankhurst by Rachel Holmes Review: The Rebel Sister Betrayed by Her Family’. The Telegraph, 27 September 2020. https:// www.telegraph.co.uk/books/what-­t o-­r ead/sylvia-­p ankhurst-­r achel-­ holmes-­review-­rebel-­sister-­betrayed/. Dijk, Teun A. van. ‘Principles of Critical Discourse Analysis’. Discourse & Society 4, no. 2 (1 April 1993): 249–83. https://doi.org/10.117 7/0957926593004002006. Diprose, Kristina. ‘Resilience Is Futile’. Soundings 1, no. 58 (12 January 2015): 44–56. https://doi.org/info:doi/10.3898/136266215814379736. Edyvane, Derek. Civic Virtue and the Sovereignty of Evil. Routledge, 2013. Foreman, Amanda. ‘Sylvia Pankhurst by Rachel Holmes, Review — Finally Having Her Moment’, sec. culture. Accessed 24 February 2021. https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/sylvia-­pankhurst-­natural-­born-­r ebel-­by-­rachel-­holmes-­ book-­review-­d0mqclndc. Gill, Rosalind. ‘Postfeminist Media Culture: Elements of a Sensibility’. European Journal of Cultural Studies 10, no. 2 (1 May 2007): 147–66. https://doi. org/10.1177/1367549407075898. Gill, Rosalind. ‘The Affective, Cultural and Psychic Life of Postfeminism: A Postfeminist Sensibility 10  Years On’. European Journal of Cultural Studies 20, no. 6 (1 December 2017): 606–26. https://doi.org/10.1177/ 1367549417733003. Gill, Rosalind, and Shani Orgad. ‘The Amazing Bounce-Backable Woman: Resilience and the Psychological Turn in Neoliberalism’. Sociological Research Online 23, no. 2 (1 June 2018): 477–95. https://doi.org/10.1177/ 1360780418769673. Gupta, Kat. Representation of the British Suffrage Movement. London Oxford New York New Delhi Sydney: Bloomsbury Academic, 2015. Hales, Molly. ‘Animating Relations: Digitally Mediated Intimacies between the Living and the Dead’. Cultural Anthropology 34, no. 2 (22 May 2019): 187–212. https://doi.org/10.14506/ca34.2.02. Hatherley, Owen. The Ministry of Nostalgia: Consuming Austerity. London; New York: Verso Books, 2015. Hinton, Emma, and Michael Redclift. ‘Austerity and Sufficiency: The Changing Politics of Sustainable Consumption.’ n.d., 22. Inman, Phillip. ‘Has the Age of Austerity Really Come to an End?’ The Guardian, 5 September 2019, sec. Business. https://www.theguardian.com/business/2019/sep/05/has-­t he-­a ge-­o f-­a usterity-­r eally-­c ome­to-­an-­end-­sajid-­javid. Jensen, Tracey. ‘Tough Love in Tough Times’. Studies in the Maternal 4, no. 2 (1 July 2012): 1–26. https://doi.org/10.16995/sim.35. Karamessini, Maria. ‘Introduction  – Women’s Vulnerability to Recession and Austerity: A Different Crisis, a Different Context’. In Women and Austerity,

9  “WE ARE WHAT WE DO”: POSTFEMINISM AND NOSTALGIA IN BANK… 

187

edited by Maria Karamessini and Jill Rubery, 2013. https://doi.org/10.432 4/9780203066294-­10. Kay, Jilly Boyce, and Kaitlynn Mendes. ‘Gender, Media and Protest’. Media History 26, no. 2 (2 April 2020): 137–52. https://doi.org/10.1080/1368880 4.2018.1520631. Kelly, Tamsin. ‘Why It Was Important For Me To Attend The Women’s March With My Daughter | HuffPost UK Life’. HuffPost UK, 11 January 2018. https://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/entry/why-­it-­was-­important-­for-­me-­to-­ attend-­t he-­w omens-­m ar ch-­w ith-­m y-­d aughter_uk_5b75800ce4b0 2b415d761921. Kelsey, D. Media, Myth and Terrorism: A Discourse-Mythological Analysis of the ‘Blitz Spirit’ in British Newspaper Responses to the July 7th Bombings. Springer, 2015. Kentish, Benjamin. ‘Theresa May Declares “austerity Is over” after Eight Years of Cuts and Tax Increases’. The Independent, 11 December 2019, sec. News. https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/theresa-­may-­austerity-­ end-­over-­speech-­conservative-­conference-­tory-­labour-­a8566526.html. Kotz, David M. ‘The Financial and Economic Crisis of 2008: A Systemic Crisis of Neoliberal Capitalism’. Review of Radical Political Economics 41, no. 3 (1 September 2009): 305–17. https://doi.org/10.1177/0486613409335093. Krugman, Paul. ‘Opinion | Gordon Does Good’. The New York Times, 12 October 2008, sec. Opinion. https://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/13/ opinion/13krugman.html. Littler, Jo. Against Meritocracy. 1 edition. London; New York, NY: Routledge, 2017. Maguire, Lori. ‘The Conservative Party and Women’s Suffrage’. In Suffrage Outside Suffragism: Women’s Vote in Britain, 1880–1914, edited by Myriam Boussahba-Bravard, 52–76. London: Palgrave Macmillan UK, 2007. https:// doi.org/10.1057/9780230801318_3. Martin, Jessica. ‘Keep Crafting and Carry on: Nostalgia and Domestic Cultures in the Crisis’. European Journal of Cultural Studies 24, no. 1 (2021): 358–64. https://doi.org/10.1177/1367549420958718. Martin, Jessica. ‘Voices from the Kitchen Table : (Post)Feminism and Domestic Cultures during Austerity’. Ph.D., University of Leicester, 2020. https://doi. org/10.25392/leicester.data.11800281.v2. Mayhall, Laura E. Nym. ‘Creating the “Suffragette Spirit”: British Feminism and the Historical Imagination1’. Women’s History Review 4, no. 3 (1 September 1995): 319–44. https://doi.org/10.1080/09612029500200088. McRobbie, Angela. ‘Post-feminism and Popular Culture’. Feminist Media Studies 4, no. 3 (1 November 2004): 255–64. https://doi.org/10.108 0/1468077042000309937.

188 

J. MARTIN

Mooney, Annabelle. The Language of Money: Proverbs and Practices. Routledge, 2018. Negra, Diane. What a Girl Wants?: Fantasizing the Reclamation of Self in Postfeminism. Routledge, 2009. ‘NatWest | Processions – Jordan and Danny’. Accessed 28 February 2021. https:// cargocollective.com/JorDancreative/NatWest-­Processions. Orgad, Shani, and Sara De Benedictis. ‘The “Stay-at-Home” Mother, Postfeminism and Neoliberalism: Content Analysis of UK News Coverage’. European Journal of Communication 30, no. 4 (1 August 2015): 418–36. https://doi. org/10.1177/0267323115586724. Power and Crampton. Cinema and Popular Geo-Politics. Routledge, 2013. Rose, Gillian. Visual Methodologies: An Introduction to Researching with Visual Materials. Fourth edition. London: SAGE Publications Ltd., 2016. Rottenberg, Catherine. ‘The Rise of Neoliberal Feminism’. Cultural Studies 28, no. 3 (4 May 2014): 418–37. https://doi.org/10.1080/0950238 6.2013.857361. Rowbotham, Sheila. ‘Preface’. In Sylvia Pankhurst: Sexual Politics And Political Activism. Routledge, 2013. Sandberg, Sheryl. Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead. 1st edition. Virgin Digital, 2013. Womens Budget Group. ‘Single Parent Families  – Trapped Within a Pernicious Intersection of Welfare Reform Policies’, 30 May 2019. https://wbg.org. uk/blog/single-­parent-­families-­trapped-­within-­a-­pernicious-­intersection-­of-­ welfare-­reform-­policies/. Sobande Francesca. ‘Woke-Washing: “Intersectional” Femvertising and Branding “Woke” Bravery’. European Journal of Marketing 54, no. 11 (1 January 2019): 2723–45. https://doi.org/10.1108/EJM-­02-­2019-­0134. Sturgis, India. ‘Who’ll Be Our Mumpreneur of the Year?’ Mail Online, 15 April 2015. https://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-­3040629/Wholl-­ Mumpreneur-­year-­major-­new-­trend-­women-­juggling-­motherhood-­setting-­ businesses-­like-­four-­looking-­inspiring-­stories.html. Womens Budget Group. ‘Submission: Coronavirus and the Gendered Economic Impact’, 23 June 2020. https://wbg.org.uk/analysis/consultation-­responses/ submission-­coronavirus-­and-­the-­gendered-­economic-­impact/. Summers, Deborah, and politics editor. ‘David Cameron Warns of “Age of Austerity”’. The Guardian, 26 April 2009, sec. Politics. https://www. theguardian.com/politics/2009/apr/26/david-­c ameron-­c onservative-­ economic-­policy1. BFI Player. ‘Watch Trafalgar Square Riot’. Accessed 24 February 2021. https:// player.bfi.org.uk/free/film/watch-­trafalgar-­square-­riot-­1913-­online.

9  “WE ARE WHAT WE DO”: POSTFEMINISM AND NOSTALGIA IN BANK… 

189

Wearden, Graeme. ‘British Government Unveils £37bn Banking Bail-out Plan’. The Guardian, 13 October 2008, sec. Business. https://www.theguardian. com/business/2008/oct/13/marketturmoil-­creditcrunch. Winslow, Barbara. Sylvia Pankhurst: Sexual Politics And Political Activism. Routledge, 2013. Women’s Budget Group. ‘Austerity Hits Women Harder  – Womens Budget Group’. Accessed 16 September 2019. https://wbg.org.uk/blog/ austerity-­hits-­women-­harder/. Wood, Zoe. ‘Queen of Florals Cath Kidston Bucks the Recession to Profit from Love of Nostalgia’. The Guardian, 9 August 2009, sec. Life and style. https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2009/aug/09/cath-­kidston­recession-­floral-­empire

PART III

South America

CHAPTER 10

The Femvertising of Beauty: Rhinoplasty of the Negroid Nose in Brazil Carole Myers

Femvertising purports to merge the feminist ideology of empowerment and agency with a commercial agenda of brand image and sales, yet it is fundamentally influenced by cultural politics which reflect wider hierarchies of power that circulate within society, such as class and race. In turn, femvertising can lead to a tangled mix of empowerment and exclusion among women according to the semiotic meanings embedded in the way it constructs and communicates aspiration and desire. While research carried out by Victoria E. Drake shows how women feel empowered through advertising campaigns such as Dove’s Real Beauty,1 Kathrynn Pounders argues that femvertising often fails to promote images that empower women.2 In this chapter, I focus on the reasons for and the consequences of this failure by focussing on the issue of beauty in Brazil. I use rhinoplasty as a practice within the growth industry of plastic surgery as a case study through the presence or absence of the femvertising of beauty. I do

C. Myers (*) University of Manchester, Manchester, UK e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 J. Gwynne (ed.), The Cultural Politics of Femvertising, Palgrave Studies in (Re)Presenting Gender, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-99154-8_10

193

194 

C. MYERS

this to interrogate the connection between the wider neoliberal framework that embraces cultural politics and women’s lives in a postfeminist context.3 Longstanding Brazilian beauty hegemony is exemplified in the way the plastic surgery magazine Plástica e Beleza (Plastic Surgery and Beauty) has constructed and disseminated ideas of beauty. There is a gap between this type of beauty femvertising and a group of consumers that is desirous and demanding of rhinoplasty. This distance is exemplified by an understanding of the class and racial politics of beauty in Brazil and the conversations and posts that take place in the Facebook group Rinoplastia Nariz Negroide (rhinoplasty of the negroid nose) during 2017–2019.4 This new audience has been overlooked in the marketing and provision of this procedure despite having absorbed a number of messages that circulate within society through the media, including the hegemonic ideal of Brazilian beauty and its intrinsic imperative to adhere to that ideal, and the femvertising message of empowerment employed by traditional advertising strategies. Ideal beauty is communicated to black women in a way that simultaneously alienates and empowers them by reducing their self-esteem and suggesting self-improvement, yet does not reach out to them as consumers to fulfil their needs. Brazil is the largest consumer of plastic surgery worldwide, and the first two decades of the twentieth century saw global growth in the area of cosmetic surgery.5 As part of this general trend in cosmetic surgery, rhinoplasty consumption also increased. In 2015, the total number of surgical cosmetic procedures performed reached 730,000 operations worldwide, an increase of thirty per cent over five years, of which 50,000 were in the United States (3.5% of all surgical procedures), and 65,000 in Brazil (5.4% of all procedures).6 This surge in demand for rhinoplasty coincided with a socioeconomic shift in Brazil, namely the emergence of a new middle class during the early 2000s, which led to increased disposable income and a desires to consume previously inaccessible goods and services. Due to the mixed racial profile of the Brazilian population in the lower echelons of society, this change saw many black people reach middle class status. As a result, a new market for rhinoplasty emerged, with a new wave of consumers who brought with them demand for hegemonic beauty but had a different phenotype to the white women who typically had consumed rhinoplasty before. Their arrival disrupted a market that had never previously had to cater to their needs.

10  THE FEMVERTISING OF BEAUTY: RHINOPLASTY OF THE NEGROID NOSE… 

195

Beauty and Class Beauty projects involving surgery in Brazil were, for a long time, only accessible to elite white women due to their elevated economic means, a reflection of the high level of racial stratification that saw a concentration of white people at the top of society and black people at the bottom. These social class distinctions remained relatively unchanged until the early 2000s and race and class appeared to be interchangeable. However, these lines of demarcation of class through race had the potential to become blurred when higher disposable incomes across the lowest socio-­ economic groups in Brazil saw many non-white Brazilians enter the ranks of the middle class, which had previously been overwhelmingly white. Klein et al have labelled the new middle class as the ‘previously poor’ to demonstrate the journey they have made from poverty, thereby underlining the link between race and class by highlighting that, relative to the traditional middle class who were predominantly white, the majority of the ascendant middle class were non-white.7 This promise of social mobility offered hope and opportunities to the previously poor who had been excluded and disenfranchised. The notion of a new middle class in Brazil was proclaimed by economist Marcelo Neri in 2008.8 This new middle class was categorised as either classe C or a nova classe media Neri,9 and the emergence of this phenomenon has been seen as indicating an improvement in the country’s social conditions.10 The most frequently used Brazilian classification was created by the Fundação Getúlio Vargas (FGV) based on five socioeconomic designations from A to E. Groups A, B and C all grew in terms of their numbers between 2001–2008: ‘Class C was the fastest-growing group, rising from 38.07 per cent of the population in 2001 (approximately 66 million people) to 49.22 per cent in 2008, thereby becoming the dominant class at 100 million Brazilians. More than 30 million people ascended and the number of people in classes D and E decreased.’11 This new-found economic prosperity led to an increased focus on the emerging middle class on the part of politicians, financiers and marketers.12 In relation to marketing, a second system of formal classification was adopted to classify socioeconomic status, the ‘Critério Brasil’ developed by the Brazilian Association of Research Companies (ABEP). It looks at three key criteria: possession of eight types of durable goods; level of education of the head of the household; and employment of domestic help. Its objective is to create a standardised system of consumer profiling to

196 

C. MYERS

help companies gain insight into the different strata of Brazilian society and thus formulate effective and highly targeted marketing strategies according to this data.13 Nonetheless, the lived experience of social mobility was not one that was void of exclusion. Despite this system, black middle class women appeared to have been overlooked. For example, research into stereotyping showed that 92% of black women wanted to see people like them better represented in the media and advertising.14 There was a ready made market of new black female middle class consumers, which appeared to be waiting to be sold to and eager to consume forms of body work, such as plastic surgery, as a means of empowerment to achieve hegemonic beauty ideals.

Hegemonic Beauty Beauty operates as capital within a hegemonic system that embraces both symbolic and lived elements. Symbolically, beauty ideals reflect gender, class and racial hierarchies which are deeply embedded in society. At a lived level, beauty is enacted through consumption and practice. However, acquisition of beauty serves as a form of capital and therefore a means of empowerment, both in the goal of beauty itself and what beauty provides access to in terms of social, economic and cultural capital. Brazilian ideals of beauty are rooted in the country’s unequal history which has privileged whiteness and prejudiced blackness despite the country’s diverse population. This history precludes a more egalitarian ideal that would be inclusive of the whole population. While standards of beauty vary according to particular body parts, the hegemonically beautiful nose is one which is restrictively connected to a Caucasian phenotype, which is often described as straight, small, narrow or turned up. This type of nose is often contrasted with the negroid nose which is described by plastic surgeons as wide, flat and with thick skin. To further the understanding of hegemonic beauty, and to identify why women relentlessly pursue rhinoplasty surgery, Maria, a black feminist activist, explained to me how she believed beauty operated in Brazil: Here in Brazil we have this situation that many blacks with light skin who straighten their hair or who modify their nose, they become white people because there is colourism… But the closer you are to being white, the more you are socially accepted. (interview excerpt with Maria, conducted March 2018).15

10  THE FEMVERTISING OF BEAUTY: RHINOPLASTY OF THE NEGROID NOSE… 

197

The notion of ideal female beauty as white, which is engrained in society and commonly understood; has been constructed over centuries but accelerated during the twentieth century through mass consumption and advertising. This concept of ideal beauty in Brazil is racially complex and it is important to briefly discuss its historical context. A contradictory mix of racial harmony and racism evolved from early colonial times, throughout the three hundred years of slavery and passed into post-abolition and modern Brazil. This paradoxical combination of seeming harmonious race relations and deeply embedded racist behaviour and attitudes characterise Brazilian society, forming a racial hegemony. A feature of this racial hegemony is the myth that Brazil is a racial democracy, which circulates in the country despite persistent racial inequality. This myth, in turn, has led many people to believe that racism does not exist in Brazil and that any inequalities relate to class, not race, thus racial inequalities are not identified for their racial content but are attributed to class.16 Despite economic shifts including the advent of a new Brazilian black middle class and legislative attempts to reduce inequalities through poverty reduction programmes and affirmative action policies, these changes took place against an uneven background of social inequalities.17 Despite high levels of economic growth in Brazil during the twentieth century, black women remained at the bottom of economic hierarchies according to Peggy Lovell’s study on long term trends in wage disparity in Sao Paulo using census data. Lovell argued that wage disparities persisted even though black women’s rights and job opportunities improved during the period 1960–2000.18 These inequalities extend into the cultural domain while black beauty is marginalised and forced into a subculture with designated spaces such as beauty contests and fashion shows; indeed, the Facebook group, Rinoplastia Nariz Negroide could be added to this list. Like other subcultures such as music or art, the creation of such a dedicated space satisfies needs that are unmet in the mainstream, as if they are niche interests. However, in relation to beauty in Brazil, black beauty is pushed into this space because it does not fit with the dominant culture, thereby reinforcing its peripheral status. This marginalisation perpetuates black beauty being undervalued and ignored, including in femvertising spaces.19

198 

C. MYERS

Plástica e Beleza: ‘The Magazine That Will Change You!’ Plástica e Beleza was a bi-monthly magazine covering fitness, health and plastic surgery that ran from 1998–2019. In 2015 Plástica e Beleza had a print circulation of approximately 30,000 per bi-monthly edition and was nationally distributed with a predominantly female target readership in classes A, B, C.20 The magazine was entirely dependent on advertising revenue to sustain it; its business model was to distribute Plástica e Beleza free of charge to hair and beauty salons, ensuring advertisers that they would reach their target reader. In a typical 100-page edition, there were around 55 advertisements relating to plastic surgery.21 It offers an insight into the use of hegemonic ideas of beauty and how femvertising can offer empowerment yet simultaneously be exclusive. Despite overarching messages of empowerment within femvertising discourse, there are implicit boundaries to this empowerment connected to race, reinforced by stereotypes in such femvertising, as exemplified by Maria Perez and Mirén Gutiérrez.22 Its advertisements and features embraced Brazilian hegemonic beauty ideals connected to femininity, age, colour and size and, among its mechanisms for stimulating desire, the magazine used beauty stereotypes and celebrity, while excluding those who did not fit with this ideal beauty yet offering empowering messages and commercial solutions to what were communicated as beauty ‘problems’. Many of these problems that required women to spend money to correct are constructed within the narrow scope of the Brazilian beauty ideal. Plástica e Beleza exemplifies tactics used by women’s magazines to promote ideals of hegemonic beauty communicated via messages of empowerment and through beauty projects.23 However, added to these messages was the idea of changing one’s body through plastic surgery as a means of empowerment, thereby achieving one’s own beauty goals. The magazine’s strapline, ‘A revista que vai mudar você,’ translated from Portuguese means ‘the magazine that will change you’. The magazine very directly underpinned its goal of encouraging women to modify their bodies, using the language of empowerment, namely that the Plástica e Beleza itself was a tool for readers to use to change and improve themselves. This is exemplified by a regular feature in the magazine, ‘Look like a star’.24 A reader had a makeover to make her look like a well-known celebrity. The makeover showed how a reader could change herself for the better. The means of empowerment to achieve the improvement communicated in this

10  THE FEMVERTISING OF BEAUTY: RHINOPLASTY OF THE NEGROID NOSE… 

199

article was through consumption and body work. The format for this feature showed ‘before and after’ makeover photographs of the reader alongside an image of the celebrity. There were also three featured products with photographs, descriptions and prices, showing the reader how to ‘get the look’ (Fig. 10.1). A six page feature on another celebrity, Luiza Valdetaro (see Fig. 10.2), conveyed messages of superior beauty and inaccessibility to the audience was reinforced in the article, which then stated, ‘she has the cute face of a young girl, a contagious sweetness and a body the envy or any mortal.’25 The message of superior beauty was then balanced with prowess in other areas including as a wife, mother, and her career as an actor.26 A comment from Luiza, in large text, under her arm so the eye was drawn to her body, remarks ‘I haven’t had any invasive surgery so far but in the future, who knows…?’27 Creating feelings of low self-esteem using images connected to hegemonic notions of beauty through celebrity is a common tactic in magazine advertising and while such pieces appear to look like editorial, they are sponsored advertisements, i.e. paid for by advertisers whose products are being promoted in the editorial piece. Henderson-King and Henderson-King, developed an ‘Acceptance of Cosmetic Surgery Scale in 2005’.28 They conducted a study among 1288 adults29 in the United States to understand attitudes towards cosmetic surgery by analysing numerous criteria. The results of this research revealed that participants who had lower general self/body appreciation were more likely to have a high acceptance of cosmetic surgery.30 Viren Swami’s study in Brazil of negative satisfaction about physical appearance was linked to the acceptance of plastic surgery and one of the criteria was reading about beauty in the media as causing negative self-image.31 His study, conducted in 2010, applied the Acceptance of Cosmetic Surgery Scale to Brazilian adults, studying 311 participants.32 The advertising and journalistic methods employed by Plástica e Beleza offered a very limited representation of beauty. For example, I counted the number of images appearing in each of the six issues (134–139) of the magazine published in 2014 and found that there was negligible representation of blackness; two out of 591 images, 0.33 per cent of images used in the magazine, are of black women. These images were featured in two advertisements promoting straightening for black hair, in other words advertising a way to adhere to a universal beauty in eradicating a natural feature of blackness, curly hair. Its content promoted standards of beauty, which excluded blackness (Table 10.1).

200 

C. MYERS

Fig. 10.1  Look like a star article. Plástica e Beleza (issue 134, 2013)

10  THE FEMVERTISING OF BEAUTY: RHINOPLASTY OF THE NEGROID NOSE… 

201

Fig. 10.2  Double-page spread from cover story featuring Luiza Valdetaro. (Plástica e Beleza, issue 136, 2013)

Table 10.1  Frequency of racialised images in Plástica e Beleza (2014) Category

Issue 134

Issue 135

Issue 136

Issue 137

Issue 138

Issue 139

Total

White Black

82 0

102 0

93 1

103 0

116 1

95 0

591 2

Missing Persons: Black Women Unseen in Mainstream Brazilian Media The racial exclusion exemplified in Plástica e Beleza is typical of Brazilian beauty media. This is validated by D’Adesky’s research published in 2004, which showed that only four per cent of models in the advertising featured in the women’s magazine Cosmopolitan in Brazil were non-white.33 Over fifty per cent of the country’s population is non-white, however, across the mainstream media, beauty has typically been represented using visual images of white women with Caucasian features, rendering black women virtually invisible.34

202 

C. MYERS

Images of female beauty in the Brazilian media are presented in a way which is consistent with a universal notion of female beauty, namely a woman who is young, feminine, slim and white with unblemished skin, symmetrical features and long hair.35 Luciana Messias Shinoda et  al.’s [year] study of female representation in Brazilian print advertising reveals how non-white women are also missing there.36 This phenomenon stretches beyond magazines to billboards in shopping malls, point of sale material in shops, direct marketing and television advertising. There is a publication Raça,37 a black culture magazine, which is widely available to a black audience and its first edition in 1996 sold 270,000 copies.38 The magazine covers a wide agenda of topics including beauty, while its main goal is to validate blackness. For example, in edition 186, published in January 2014, there was a five-page feature on the beauty contestant, Priscila Cidreira who, in 2013, won Miss Bahia, and achieved third place in Miss Brazil. The headline for this article was “The beauty of Bahia: Get to know the beauty queen who won fans over the whole country with her stunning black beauty.”39 The story celebrated black beauty while at the same time highlighted the controversial underrepresentation of black women in the Miss Bahia beauty contest (less than 10 per cent of the contestants)40 in a state with a 76.2 per cent black population.41 While black beauty is validated within designated niches – such as Raça magazine, black fashion shows42 and hair salons promoting hairstyles specifically for black women – representations of blackness as beautiful have been almost non-existent in mainstream marketing. There is no such positive validation of the non-white nose. The impact of the underrepresentation and stereotyping of black women in the media is problematic; by excluding and making invisible a large proportion of the population, this lack of representation has multiple effects including creating stereotypes,43 perpetuating ideas of white superiority, marginalising black women, and has negative effects on their self-esteem.44 Consequently, by using messages of female empowerment, beauty media’s racial exclusion exacerbates feelings of alienation, yet still creates desire. Therefore, as an example of femvertising, it shows the limitation of such an approach.

Rhinoplasty of the Negroid Nose Within the cosmetic surgery field, the terms “nariz caucasiano” (caucasian nose) and “nariz negroide” (negroid nose) are commonly used terms in Brazil. The term nariz negroide comes from the medical profession and is commonly used on social media forums by both rhinoplasty surgeons

10  THE FEMVERTISING OF BEAUTY: RHINOPLASTY OF THE NEGROID NOSE… 

203

advertising their services and women seeking rhinoplasty surgery. The term refers to a nose which is common among people with African ancestry. As Brazil is highly miscegenated, this nose is not strictly a characteristic of black women. However, on social media groups and among the women I interviewed, this type of nose is seen as undesirable and needs to be changed. The terms nariz negroide and nariz caucasiano are found in Brazilian medical textbooks that derive from Europe and the United States that discuss different ‘ethnic’ rhinoplasty surgery techniques. In the US, this type of nose is described as either ‘African American’ according to plastic surgery websites. Different types of noses, broadly slotting into racially shaped categories, require different surgical techniques. These terms are then used by surgeons to describe the type of nose a patient has in order to formulate a plan for the surgery. Examples of standard textbooks for rhinoplasty surgery include “Mastering Rhinoplasty”45 and “Ethnic Rhinoplasty”.46 These texts explain modern rhinoplasty techniques that were developed in the United States during the early to mid-twentieth century to cater for consumers who were predominantly white Europeans.47 Between 2017 and 2019, I researched rhinoplasty of the negroid nose using social media. The Facebook group Rinoplastia Nariz Negroide was a source of material as well as a route to obtaining interviews with women who were having surgery and also rhinoplasty surgeons. Digital media has become the main marketing channel for plastic surgery since around 2016. In relation to rhinoplasty, in 2016 there were three Facebook groups on the topic, and plastic surgeons had websites and Facebook pages where they posted information. Facebook and Instagram became the main social media platforms used and gradually many plastic surgeons moved to these methods of creating their own groups and offering advice to people posting images and questions. Among several social media groups dedicated to rhinoplasty in Brazil, the Facebook group ‘Rinoplastia Nariz Negroide’ is a space where women with a shared interest in having rhinoplasty can meet. This group’s focus on the negroid nose brings women with this type of nose together to discuss their desires, concerns and to share their experiences, unique to the phenomenon of their type of nose. Analysis of images and conversations within this group show how they have appropriated femvertising messages about beauty that circulate across Brazilian media and see rhinoplasty as a means of achieving their beauty goals that are in line with ideal standards of beauty. The group provides a source of validation in the shared desire to have rhinoplasty and support to realise this desire.

204 

C. MYERS

Although the group members have the negroid nose in common, there are rarely any comments relating to race, black ancestry or skin colour as the link between this type of nose and their heritage is not seen as relevant, due to the way discourse has evolved in Brazil to exclude discussion on race, despite the prevalence of persistent racial inequality, including in the way beauty is perceived. However, medical terminology for the nose within the medical practice of rhinoplasty is differentiated along racial lines, with the terms ‘nariz caucasiano’ (caucasian nose) and ‘nariz negroide’ (negroid nose) being the most commonly used phrases in Brazil. While the term negroid nose originates from the medical profession, it is commonly used on social media forums by both rhinoplasty surgeons advertising their services and women seeking rhinoplasty surgery. As the Brazilian population is highly miscegenated, the negroid nose is not strictly a characteristic of black women, nevertheless it is seen as a racial marker of black ancestry. Furthermore, this type of nose is seen as undesirable, a cause of low self esteem and something that needs to be changed. For example, two examples of posts within the Facebook group “I would very much like your help. My nose is horrible, huge. Self esteem is right at the bottom. I think my nose is really, extremely negroid, y’know. Do you think rhinoplasty will solve my problem?”48 and “My dream is to have a nose job. My nose is negroid. There must be a way. Which surgeon do you guys recommend?”49 This second post included four photographs of the woman to show her nose at various angles. It is very common to see such posts that suggest the negroid nose is a problem that has to be fixed and responses validating the problem, by offering support. This post received 25 comments, mostly recommending surgeons who she could approach, validating her belief that she needed to change her nose. One person commented, “A smaller nose will suit your face and make it more harmonious”.50 This response was also accompanied by a photoshopped image of one of the photographs posted, showing how her nose could look after surgery. This last post on the Facebook group conveys not just the desperation felt by this member because of her nose, but the sense of shared experience that the group provides, letting the commentator be aware that she was not alone in her dream and quest for rhinoplasty. She went on to thank the group for their support. The group seemed to provide her with hope and inspiration, possibly when she was not spoken to by any other medium. Before and after images are very common in this Facebook group, as exemplified by the statement,

10  THE FEMVERTISING OF BEAUTY: RHINOPLASTY OF THE NEGROID NOSE… 

205

Anyone with the same nose as me that has had rhinoplasty, put up ‘before and after’ photos with comments. My self-esteem is so low because of my nose, I never take a photo from this angle (photo is a frontal view). When I smile, it (my nose) opens and the end drops down. My dream is to have rhinoplasty, this group is my inspiration, we all have the same problem.51

This person is looking for the motivation to make the decision to have rhinoplasty. Implicit in the decision to fix a nose that is believed to be a problem is the sense of empowerment to fix it and what fixing it will achieve. This message of empowerment is fundamental to femvertising and is adopted by the Facebook group. Its group page header has an image of a Barbie doll with brown skin, blonde hair and sunglasses (see Fig. 10.3) while text underneath, translated from Portuguese, states, ‘If I

Fig. 10.3  Cover of Raça magazine edition 186 (Alcântara, Fernanda. “A Bela Da Bahia.” Raça, ed. 186. 2014, 36–41)

206 

C. MYERS

have got myself a new cute little nose, it’s because I deserve it’. This message is one that focuses on the potential satisfaction derived from having rhinoplasty, connected to femvertising messages of empowerment.52 Member comments reflect this both in their desire to have surgery, and indeed in the outcomes. For example, “Your self-esteem increased by how many % after surgery?? Mine increased 100%. Today I consider myself extremely happy with myself, I look in the mirror and I like what I see, but before it was just a sadness, I hated pictures and I still had to put up with several jokes…”53 Embedded in this statement is the low self esteem and negative experiences that drive many women to aspire to rhinoplasty. This experience comes from the sense of lack due to the way their characteristics are excluded from dominant standards of beauty. However, this lack is countered by not just the possibility of overcoming it but that it is one’s right and responsibility to undergo rhinoplasty (Fig. 10.4).Underpinning the belief that beauty is both a responsibility and a right is the sense that it is necessary.54 This seems to essentialise the existing, pre-operative nose as

Fig. 10.4  Header image from Facebook group “Rinoplastia Nariz Negroide” (https://www.facebook.com/groups/1274432482580750/permalink/32296 10923729553) (currently offline)

10  THE FEMVERTISING OF BEAUTY: RHINOPLASTY OF THE NEGROID NOSE… 

207

erroneous and requiring correction, which is seen in many of the Facebook group’s posts as an incontrovertible and obvious truth. Several times during my research interviews with black or mixed race women who I had found through the Facebook group and who already had or wanted to have rhinoplasty surgery in Brazil, I heard the phrases ‘ela precisa’ or ‘eu precisei,’ meaning ‘she needs it’ or ‘I needed it’. One interview took place at a café in a busy shopping centre on a Saturday morning in the north of Rio de Janeiro with Lina, a woman who had had rhinoplasty a few months prior. She worked as a medical representative for a pharmaceutical company and was the only dark-skinned woman in her team. Lina was mixed race and her nose (prior to surgery) was broad and flat (i.e. a negroid nose). She was very pleased with the results as she felt that she had needed surgery and her nose was, according to her, now ‘normal’ as it was narrow, small and straight. As we were saying goodbye after the interview, Lina’s friend walked past the cafe. Lina introduced her friend, making a point of saying (with concern for her friend) “Maria também queria fazer rino, ela precisa” (“Ana also wants to have a nose job… she needs it!”). Ana was dark-skinned with a broad, flat nose. When I asked why she thought she needed it, Lina just replied “ela precisa, não?” (“she needs it, right?”), as if it were obvious from looking at Maria that her nose was not in line with normative or commonly understood idea of beauty and therefore no further explanation was required. Despite the promise of empowerment through femvertising across the Brazilian media, women in this Facebook group did not find it easy to access rhinoplasty. Being overlooked as a consumer was Camila’s motivation for setting up this group. According to her, when she was looking for advice in 2015, she found that there was little information available that was relevant to her as a woman seeking rhinoplasty of the negroid nose. She had wanted to change her nose for some time and told me that she had always found it ugly and wanted to be prettier. When she left university and got a job as a training co-ordinator with a company in São Paulo, she was looking to fulfil her dream of having rhinoplasty but struggled to find a surgeon who was prepared to operate on her at a price she could afford. She eventually found a surgeon following many months of searching. After Camila had undergone rhinoplasty, she wanted to share her own experiences and provide a forum for other people looking to have surgery; her ambition for the group was limited and she had expected the group to reach a couple of hundred members and was staggered that so many women (over 95% group participants are women) joined the group.

208 

C. MYERS

Within eighteen months of its creation, the group had reached 22,000 members. The main questions people asked on the Facebook group page were usually accompanied by a photo of the person’s face, showing their nose from the front and in profile. The most common questions were ‘Do you think I have a negroid nose?’, ‘Do you think I should have rhinoplasty surgery?’, ‘Where can I get rhinoplasty surgery in the town I live?’, ‘Do you recommend Dr X?’, ‘How much will I have to pay for surgery?’, ‘Can I get rhinoplasty surgery for 5,000 Reais?’, ‘I would love to have surgery with Dr X but I know he charges (for example) 20,000 Reais, have a look at my nose and let me know who do you think could operate on it with a similar outcome to Dr X but for (for example) 5,000 Reais?’. These questions indicate the high level of demand for a service that did not appear to be easily accessible. Indeed, it was not uncommon for women in the group to have to visit several surgeons before they would find one who would operate on them. One member posted, Good morning guys, my nose is considered negroid and it’s been four months since I’ve been looking for a good professional, I’ve been through five appointments, two of them very famous in the media, but yesterday was my last appointment because I found an angel, a professional who specialises in the face… I just came to report my happiness because I have scheduled my surgery, thanks to all of you for exchanging experiences….55

This sentiment was also backed up by plastic surgeons I interviewed who had felt that women sometimes had unrealistic expectations of surgery.To explore the reasons as to why there might be difficulties in finding a plastic surgeon, there are a number of points that can be made. Firstly, the type of nose women consistently wanted, a hegemonic nose, is very different from the negroid nose. For example, it was very common for women to discuss celebrity, which as seen earlier is a common vehicle for representing and promoting beauty in femvertising. For example, “Do you have a famous person as inspiration in terms of beauty for you? Mine is Amber Heard. I absolutely love her nose but her whole face is harmonious.”56 Amber Heard is an American actor whose facial characteristics conform to Caucasian standards. Another example of the use of celebrity also ties in with the hegemonic nose, alluding to the idea that this is the only type of nose that anyone could possibly desire: “Do you prefer a straighter or

10  THE FEMVERTISING OF BEAUTY: RHINOPLASTY OF THE NEGROID NOSE… 

209

curved/pointed nose? If you have [a] picture of the famous nose you use as inspiration, post in the comments.”57 Another possible explanation is how, in everyday life, hierarchies of power operate unequally along racial lines. As such, inequality is reinforced and reproduced by beauty practices. One Facebook post offered advice to the other members, remarking ‘Não tem medo de fugir suas raizes” (don’t be scared to escape your roots). In contrast, a plastic surgeon I interviewed said to me, “as pessoas querem mudar raça pela rinoplastia” (people want to change race through rhinoplasty), and he went on to explain that he will not do this; he will only make a face harmonious based on proportions indicated by the golden ratio.58 These two contrasting viewpoints show how the notion of race comes into play in the consumption of rhinoplasty and how ideas are polarised as to what is acceptable, according to a person’s perspective. For example, a white plastic surgeon with high levels of cultural capital may view rhinoplasty that interferes with the harmony of a person’s appearance to be a bad choice. Conversely, a black woman who sees that the acquisition of a nose that is in line with dominant standards of beauty may view this as a route to increasing her cultural capital. However, plastic surgeons act as the gatekeepers to surgery, in other words, they determine access to, and the potential outcome of, any surgery. Alexander Edmonds’ observation of a rhinoplasty surgery records a remark from a surgeon, who stated regarding a patient he was about to operate on, “It’s a very negroid nose, it’s her type”. A second doctor observed “her nose is very ugly. There’s not much we can do; not even Pitanguy59 could make that a pretty nose. It’s not going to be a well-defined nose. But we can do something, and it bothers her a lot so I think there’s an indication.”60 During research I carried out in 2017 and 2018, many surgeons I met did not like to perform surgery on the negroid nose. Among the surgeons I interviewed, only two of the twelve regularly operated on it. For example, one surgeon described it as being like an ‘edredom’ (eiderdown), thick and difficult to create structure from, while the nariz caucasiano was a ‘lençol de seda’ (silk sheet), easily malleable and fine. The difficulty of this operation was often cited as the reason for a surgeon’s unwillingness to perform it on a woman with a negroid nose. However, this reluctance runs deeper and reflects the influence of the racialised class structure of society of which hegemonic beauty is a part. These racial hierarchies meant that rhinoplasty techniques were developed by white privileged people for the wealthiest in society, i.e. those with the least negroid nose, which might help to explain why advertising is not directed at women with a negroid nose.

210 

C. MYERS

Conclusion In sum, my research highlights a phenomenon which demonstrates how a person with a negroid nose is likely to find it more difficult than a person with a caucasian one to get the nose she wants through surgery and therefore access social mobility or other benefits of beauty capital through consumption can be limited by this racialised marker of a negroid nose. Within the system of beauty, there is an absence of any positive validations of the negroid nose in the media or within public discourse in Brazil. This creates a difficult situation from which there is no ready escape. There is a vicious circle whereby ideal beauty is not possessed, is highly desired, believed to be attainable through consumption, but is actually out of reach and ultimately not attainable to those furthest away from the ideal. The lack of promotion of rhinoplasty surgery services to women with a negroid nose may well be due to a lack of inclination on the part of surgeons to perform this type of rhinoplasty. The reach of femvertising is driven therefore, not just by a market of keen consumers, but a will from the provider of the service to take on the market. Paradoxically, the market has been created based on hopes and desires that suppliers are not confident that they can meet. A discussion of a Facebook group relating to rhinoplasty of the negroid nose raises questions around the cultural and racial context within which the market is situated. The commercial imperative of the beauty media as well as the motivations of plastic surgeons connect to overarching hegemonic ideas which at best seem to disregard black women through the appropriation and reproduction of racial hierarchies. This shows a conundrum with regard to femvertising in that, there is a powerful impact of femvertising campaigns on women to believe that they are empowered, yet femvertising itself is a marketing tactic that is subordinate to a deeper, broader framework of cultural politics that determines whether women are worth marketing to or not, according to the stereotypes they project. Unlike with hair, where there is a global movement to recognise and affirm black people, there is, to date, no resistance to the hegemonic notion of a beautiful nose. It is, therefore, evident that black Brazilian women, unfortunately, remain marginalised by beauty ideals, hence it is unsurprising that they have had to create their own social media spaces to share information in pursuit of elusive beauty ideals, thereby reproducing the ideal that excludes them.

10  THE FEMVERTISING OF BEAUTY: RHINOPLASTY OF THE NEGROID NOSE… 

211

Notes 1. Victoria E. Drake, “The Impact of Female Empowerment in Advertising (Femvertising),” Journal of Research in Marketing 7, no. 3 (August 2017). 2. Kathrynn Pounders, “Are Portrayals of Female Beauty in Advertising Finally Changing?,” Journal of Advertising Research 58, no. 2 (June 2018). 3. Rosalind Gill and Christina Scharff, New femininities: Postfeminism, neoliberalism and subjectivity (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 7. 4. I undertook a research study on rhinoplasty surgery in Brazil during 2017–2019, involving a study of social media as well as interviews with women who wanted to have/had had rhinoplasty and rhinoplasty surgeons. 5. “Plastic Surgery Market in Brazil,” The Brazil Business, 2014, accessed 13 October 2020, http://thebrazilbusiness.com/article/plastic-­surgery­market-­in-­brazil 6. ISAPS, I. S. o. A. P. S. (2017). “ISAPS International Survey on Aesthetic/ Cosmetic Procedures Performed in 2017.” Retrieved 12 January 2021, from https://www.isaps.org/wp-­content/uploads/2018/10/ISAPS_ 2017_International_Study_Cosmetic_Procedures.pdf 7. C. H. Klein et al., “Naming Brazil’s previously poor: ‘New middle class’ as an economic, political, and experiential category.” Economic Anthropology 5, no. 1 (May 2018): 83–95. 8. Marcelo Neri, “A Nova Classe Média,” Revista Conjuntura Econômica 62, no. 9 (2008): 48–51. 9. Neri, “A Nova Classe Média.” 10. ‘A nova classe media’ accounts for over 100 million people, an increase from 50 million since the turn of the twenty-first century. See Marcelo Cortes Neri, “Poverty Reduction and Well-Being: Lula’s Real,” in Brazil under the Workers’ Party (New York: Springer, 2014); Marcio Pochmann, Nova Classe Média?: O Trabalho Na Base Da Pirâmide Social Brasileira (Boitempo Editorial, 2012). 11. Centro de Politicas Sociais Instituto Brasileiro de Economia Fundação Getulio Vargas, “Consumidores, Produtores E a Nova Classe Media: Miseria, Desigualdade E Determinantes Das Classes,” http://www.cps. fgv.br/cps/fc/. Accessed 24 September 2020. 12. Ana Raquel Coelho Rocha et al., “Classifying and Classified: An Interpretive Study of the Consumption of Cruises by the ‘New’ Brazilian Middle Class,” International Business Review 25, no. 3 (2016): 624–632. 13. Wagner A.  Kamakura and Jose A.  Mazzon, “Socioeconomic Status and Consumption in an Emerging Economy,” International Journal of Research in Marketing 30, no. 1 (2013): 4–18. 14. https://www.unstereotypealliance.org/en/resources/research/ beyond-­gender%2D%2D-­the-­invisible-­stereotypes

212 

C. MYERS

15. Translated from the Portuguese: “Aqui no Brasil a gente tem essa dinâmica de que muitos negros de pele clara quando eles alisam o cabelo ou quando eles modificam o nariz eles passam por pessoas brancas porque existe o colorismo. Mas quanto mais próximo do branco você tá mais você é aceito socialmente”. Unless otherwise noted all translations are by the author. 16. Antonio Sérgio Alfredo Guimarães, Racismo e Anti-racismo no Brasil (2nd ed., São Paulo: Editora 34, 2005). 17. H. C. a. d. V. S. Nelson, “Racial and Political Inequality in Brazil,” in Racial Politics in Contemporary Brazil, ed. Michael George Hanchard (Durham, NC and London, Duke University Press, 1999), 163. 18. Peggy Lovell, “Women and Racial Inequality at Work in Brazil,” in Racial Politics in Contemporary Brazil, ed. Michael George Hanchard (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2005), 138–153. 19. L. M., Shinoda et al. (2021). “Beyond gender stereotypes: The missing women in print advertising.” International Journal of Advertising 40(4): 629–656. 20. “Plastica e Beleza,” United Magazines, (http://www.Plásticaebeleza.com. br/midiakit/#&panel1-­2). Accessed 30 August 2014. (http://www. Plásticaebeleza.com.br/midiakit/#&panel1-­2) 21. According to research carried out by the author in editions 134, 135, 136, 137, 138 and 139. 22. Maria Pilar Pérez, and Miren Gutiérrez (2017). “Femvertising: female empowering strategies in recent spanish commercials.” Investigaciones feministas 8(2): 337–351. 23. Jaritza Ortega and Janina Stara, “Lather, Rinse, Repeat–The Stereotyping of Women in Magazine Grooming Advertisements,” (2018). https://lup. lub.lu.se/student-­papers/search/publication/8945213 24. Translation from Portuguese: “Visual de estrela”. 25. Translation from Portuguese: “Ela tem um rostinho de menina, uma simpatia contagiante e um corpo de fazer inveja a qualquer mortal”. Plástica e Beleza, no. 136, 30. 26. Translation from Portuguese: “Luiza Valdatero, com apenas 28 anos, já como atriz, mas também como mãe, esposa e beldade”. Plástica e Beleza, no. 136, 30. 27. Translation from Portuguese: “Hoje, eu não faria nenhuma intervenção cirúrgica, mas no futuro, quem sabe?” Plástica e Beleza, no. 136, 31. 28. Donna Henderson-King and Eaaron Henderson-King, “Acceptance of Cosmetic Surgery: Scale Development and Validation,” Body Image 2, no. 2 (June 2005): 137–149. 29. The study interviewed men and women; the findings here are based on the data derived from women only.

10  THE FEMVERTISING OF BEAUTY: RHINOPLASTY OF THE NEGROID NOSE… 

213

30. Viren Swami et  al., “The Acceptance of Cosmetic Surgery Scale: Initial Examination of Its Factor Structure and Correlates among Brazilian Adults,” Body Image 8, no. 2 (2011): 179–185 (181). 31. Swami, “Acceptance of Cosmetic Surgery Scale”. 32. Swami, “Acceptance of Cosmetic Surgery Scale”. 33. Jacques D’Adesky, Pluralismo étnico e multiculturalismo: racismos e anti-­ racismos no Brasil. Afro-Asia (1997) 34. Liv Sovik, “We are family: Whiteness in the brazilian media,” Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies 13, no. 3 (2004), 315–325. 35. Sovik, “We are family,” 315–325. 36. Shinoda et  al. “Beyond gender stereotypes: the missing women in print advertising,”. 37. https://revistaraca.com.br/ 38. https://revistaraca.com.br/sobre/ 39. https://revistaraca.com.br/sobre/36. Translation from Portuguese: “Conheça a Miss que conquistou fãs em todo o país com a sua beleza negra estonteante”. 40. Bahia is a region in North-eastern Brazil. It has a population of 15,126,371. The average monthly income is R$601.04 Reais compared to an average of R$668.00, according to the 2010 census. IBGE, “Census,” http://www. ibge.gov.br/estadosat/perfil.php?sigla=ba. http://www.ibge.gov.br/ estadosat/perfil.php?sigla=ba) Last accessed 24 September 2020. 41. According to the IBGE 2010 census, this figure includes both people who classify themselves as ‘pardo’ (brown) as well as ‘preto’ (black). Ibid. 42. Peter Wade, Race and sex in Latin America (London: Pluto Press 2009), 188. 43. Karen Middleton, et al. (2020). “Female role portrayals in Brazilian advertising: are outdated cultural stereotypes preventing change?” International Journal of Advertising 39(5): 679–698. 44. Kia Lily Caldwell, K. L. (2003). ““Look at Her Hair”: The Body Politics of Black Womanhood in Brazil.” Transforming Anthropology 11(2): 18–29. 45. Rollin K.  Daniel, Mastering Rhinoplasty: A Comprehensive Atlas of Surgurical Techniques with Integrated Video Clips (Berlin: Springer, 2010). 46. Steven M.  Hoefflin, Ethnic Rhinoplasty (Berlin: Springer Science & Business Media, 2012). 47. Macgregor, “Social and Cultural Components,” 125–135. 48. Translated from the Portuguese: “Gente, acredito que meu nariz é super hiper negroide kkk. Será que a Rino resolve meu problema?”. Facebook post in Rinoplastia Nariz Negroide, 28 August 2017. 49. Translated from the Portuguese: “Gostaria muito da ajuda de vocês. Meu nariz e horrivel, enorme. Auto estima la em baixo. Meu sonho e fazer rino. Meu nariz e negroide. Sera que tem jeito. Vcs indicam qual cirurgião?”. Facebook post in Rinoplastia Nariz Negroide, 27 May 2017.

214 

C. MYERS

50. Translated from the Portuguese: “Realmente, um narizinho menor vai combinar mais com seu rosto e deixa-lo mais harmonioso!”. Facebook post in Rinoplastia Nariz Negroide, 27 May 2017. 51. Translated from the Portuguese: “Alguém com o nariz igual o meu que tenha feito rino? Deixe foto de antes e depois nos comentários! Minha auto estima é tão baixa por causa do meu nariz, eu nunca tiro fot desse ângulo só de lado. Quando eu vou sorrir ele abre e cai a ponta. Meu sonho é fazer rino, esse grupo eu tenho como inspiração, todos nós temos o mesmo problema”. Facebook post in Rinoplastia Nariz Negroide, 11 September 2018. 52. Sarah Banet-Weiser, (2018). Empowered: Popular feminism and popular misogyny, Duke University Press. 53. Translated from the Portuguese: “A auto estima de vcs aumentou quantos % depois da rino?? A minha aumentou 100%. Hoje me considero extremamente feliz comigo mesma, olho no espelho e gosto do que vejo, mas antes era uma tristeza só, odiava fotos e ainda tinha que aturar várias piadinhas”. Facebook post in Rinoplastia Nariz Negroide, 22 December 2017. 54. R. Gill and C. Scharff, New femininities: Postfeminism, neoliberalism and subjectivity (Berlin: Springer, 2013), 7. 55. Translated from the Portuguese: “Bom dia turminha,meu narizinho é considerado negroide, e ja fazem 4 meses que estava a procura de um bom proficional,já passei por 5 consultas,sendo dois deles muito famosos na mídia,mais ontem foi a minha ultima consulta pois achei um anjo,um proficional especializado em face..., vim apenas relatar a minha felicidade prq ja marquei minha cirurgia,obrigado a tds vcs pelas trocas de experiências....”. Facebook post in Rinoplastia Nariz Negroide, 24 February 2019. 56. Translated from the Portuguese: “Vocês têm alguma famosa que seja inspiração no quesito beleza pra vocês? A minha é a Amber Heard, sou absolutamente apaixonada pelo nariz dela mas o rosto inteiro é harmônico”. Facebook post in Rinoplastia Nariz Negroide, 4 May 2017. 57. Translated from the Portuguese: “Voces preferem nariz (dorso) mais reto ou curvadinho/com ponta? Se tiver fotos do nariz de famosa que usam de inspirações, postem nos comentarios”. Facebook post in Rinoplastia Nariz Negroide, 31 May 2018. 58. E.  P. Prokopakis et  al. (2013), “The golden ratio in facial symmetry”, Rhinology 51(1): 18–21. 59. Ivo Pitanguy was a leading Brazilian plastic surgeon. Surajit Bhattacharya, “Dr. Ivo Pitanguy: Strived for a ‘Human Right to Beauty,’” Indian Journal of Plastic Surgery: Official Publication of the Association of Plastic Surgeons of India 49, no. 3 (2016): 300. 60. Alexander Edmonds, Pretty Modern: Beauty, Sex, and Plastic Surgery in Brazil (Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 2010), 144.

CHAPTER 11

Femvertising and Commodity Feminism: The Brazilian Context Soraya Barreto Januário

Issues related to women in advertising, although recurrent in academic debate,1 are far from exhausted. Although studies have interrogated the gendered representations of women in the media and the process of constructing these objectified and hypersexualized images through a myriad of different lenses, there remain epistemological gaps in this rich field of study. One possible approach in the study of such gendered representations is to analyse the construction of signs related to femaleness in advertising, particularly through the lens of consumer culture. Although the consequences of this process in the relations of contemporary society in which we exist have already been realized in some areas such as beauty and the exposure of the female body in the media,2 consumer culture is fluid and multifaceted, despite feminist messages and themes in “advertising pieces indicative of a ‘Feminist Spring’ that would raise women, once again, to the status of political subject” and consumer agent.3

S. B. Januário (*) Federal University of Pernambuco, Recife, Brazil e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 J. Gwynne (ed.), The Cultural Politics of Femvertising, Palgrave Studies in (Re)Presenting Gender, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-99154-8_11

215

216 

S. B. JANUÁRIO

Néstor G. Canclíni argues that when we choose consumer goods and take ownership of them, we end up defining what we consider publicly important and valuable to us and others.4 These processes and behaviors are one of the genuine ways to both integrate and distinguish ourselves in society. It is pertinent to remember that citizenship is not only constructed on the basis of rights recognized by state apparatuses, but also through the social and cultural practices that give people a sense of belonging and social distinction.5 Advertising monitors changes in various social spheres, especially regarding products and discourses aimed at women—take for example, the popularization of feminist agendas as female representation in the media and women’s empowerment gain visibility amidst. The gender (de) construction process is constantly changing, and the concepts of masculinity and femininity are being re-signified,6 allowing room for some instances of advertising and marketing to break with hegemonic views of representation and behavior. With the increase in women’s purchasing power and consumption, advertising has “discovered” and shaped new ways and perspectives to communicate and sell various consumer products to a differentiated female audience, particularly one touting a neoliberal, postfeminist sensibility. As a result, a new market trend has emerged that aims to meet the new demands of mostly middle-class women consumers who are using their purchasing power and disposable incomes to attain upward mobility and the accumulation of material and erotic capital. In Brazil, 2015 and 2016 were considered the years of female empowerment and the so-called “feminist spring”.7 The phenomenon was characterized by the increasing utilization of female empowerment in advertising, and questions were raised about the legitimacy and ethical concerns of brands with regard to gender equality and the backdrop of the premises of commodified feminism and feminist ideology that they defend in their campaigns. The term that has been commonly used to define this new scenario in advertising is femvertising—a portmanteau of the terms “feminine”/feminism—and “advertising.”. This expression gained traction in 2014 and was popularized by SheKnows Media, a lifestyle platform for women—in particular, middle-class working mothers, following analysis in Adweek8 of the same year. SheKnows Media defines femvertising as advertising that contains “stereotype-busting, pro-female messages and images” whose target audience is primarily comprised of women and girls.9 The panel’s final notes indicated that companies are directing their efforts and

11  FEMVERTISING AND COMMODITY FEMINISM: THE BRAZILIAN CONTEXT 

217

investments at differentiated approaches as a way of approaching a female audience, seeking for the audience to identify and construct themselves in the products and advertisements produced. According to SheKnows Media, this strategy is based on the idea that advertising can empower women, as much as it sells products. Femvertising is a growing trend in Marketing and has been used by major brands such as Avon, Dove, Always, and Pantene, among others, who attempt to employ feminist messages and ideologies in their advertising strategies. On the other hand, within the scope of gender studies, there are views that are skeptical towards this marketing strategy,10 interpreting these attempts as the mere commodification of feminism by brands to widen profit margins.11 As previously stated, one of the main concerns at the heart of corporate feminist activism is that the empty use of the movement’s beliefs and values by brands aims ultimately at financial return. Thus, it is suggested not only that such use of feminism may harm the movement, but also that the female empowerment transmitted in this way is meaningless and superficial. However, we intend to establish, on the other hand, tension in light of the results of these long-term discourses, whereby advertising could also contribute to positives in this debate. Backed by a literature review of commodity feminism, a term coined by Goldman, Heath and Smith,12 we intend to reflect on advertising’s use of feminist discourses.

Femvertising and Commodity Feminism: Encounters and Departures It is possible to affirm that the phenomenon of femvertising is associated with a mercantilist or market logic, which aims to encourage the consumption of goods potentially associated with feminist ideals. This phenomenon is facilitated through a consumer culture present in contemporary society that encourages the rampant consumption of consumer goods and services in order to reproduce the neoliberal and mercantile values that are necessary for the continued success of consumerism. We understand consumer culture as the dynamic relationships that take place between the actions of consumers, the market, and the cultural meanings derived from such exchanges in society.13 In consumer culture, social, and material resources are mediated by the market whose consumers are active agents in a system that links products to symbologies.

218 

S. B. JANUÁRIO

Don Slater argues that consumer culture was conceived in the mid-­ eighteenth century as an expression of social differentiation in so-called progressive cultures in service of the ideals of modernity.14 The processes associated with consumer culture in contemporary times dialogue with this debate just as these reflections do with the work of Lipovetsky and Serroy,15 who maintain that we live in a “trans-aesthetic era” of “artist capitalism.” This assertion presented by the authors argues that we are included in a structure and a culture of consumption that appeals to aesthetics, beauty, emotions, and social values to fuel further consumption, whether by identifying with the product, or with ideals, causes, and values that these products become a stand-in for. The authors further argue that the more these aesthetic signs are present in the different spheres of everyday life—such as through the media—the more the reality of the world and the myriad of different socio-political causes and cultural values can be fragmented and compartmentalized through marketed products. In a search for satisfaction via unbridled, ephemeral, and superficial consumption, this commodification of values also permeates the debate around feminisms as well, in the notion of a feminism packaged and ready for consumption through products from supposedly diverse markets. It is undeniable that the guidelines and values of feminisms have reached more women and have been part of a constant media agenda. If, on the one hand, we perceive the perverse logic behind the neoliberal system, which takes the substance out of important political debates, as is the case with feminist agendas, transforming them into a commodity associated with this trans-aesthetic capitalism We cannot neglect to consider the possible positives of such femvertising when we understand that the media does have potential as pedagogy16 and as an educational device that “has some meaning to account for these relations between culture, subject, and society”.17 As such, we intend to interrogate and map the polyvalent readings and consequences of femvertising efforts in this chapter, with specific emphasis on the Brazilian media landscape. In fact, there are many positive contributions to the feminist agenda that femvertising brings, such as new forms of female representation and the rupture of women’s stereotypes, as well as the popularization of feminist discourses and agendas. But we have to consider the feminist debate associated with consumption as something much deeper than the ideas presented under the label of femvertising. The concept alone, in our view, does not account for the presentation of a perspective with its sights set on changing the broader social scenario. Indeed, we acknowledge that it is

11  FEMVERTISING AND COMMODITY FEMINISM: THE BRAZILIAN CONTEXT 

219

shallow to say that femvertising contemplates a new scenario for women in commercial media representations. It should be noted that we, in fact, have already been enthusiastic about the strategy in question.18 In this way, it is pertinent to reinforce that advertising corresponds to a certain externality in market logic, the business philosophy behind the management of a brand is more profound and diverse and must be considered to establish that an advertising campaign or work truly proposes to promote a discourse of change and emancipation. Becker-Herby19 considered five pillars to verify whether the advertising strategy at-hand can be considered ‘femvertising’: (1) Utilization of diverse female talent: women and girls are more likely to identify themselves with advertisements that feature “real” women and girls rather than just supermodels. (2) Messaging that is inherently pro-female: powerful, inspiring, and predominantly inclusive messages. Usually, advertising makes use of a discourse that almost always starts from the perspective that women are imperfect, and the product in question is the key to correct such imperfections. In femvertising, the message must reinforce that a woman “can be whatever she wants” and as “she wants”. (3) Pushing gender-norm boundaries/stereotypes; challenging perceptions of what a woman/girl “should” be: exclude stereotypes associated with the female gender, such as the housewife who only takes care of her husband and children, or the woman with a sculpted body that is the object of male desire. (4) Downplaying of sexuality; sexuality that does not cater to the male gaze: the body must be used consistently in relation to the product or service without associating it with the question of male desire (for example, the semi-nude female body in a lingerie campaign). The question then is whether to expose a woman’s body in a relevant and appropriate way to a societal gaze. (5) Portraying women in an authentic manner: this relates to all aspects of brand communication with regards to as regards not only the advertisement showing real women, but also supporting feminism as a whole. Mary Douglas and Baron Isherwood argue that a sociological rationality drives consumption.20 The authors understand consumption as a fundamental cultural activity in social organization. Thus, contemporary cultural value systems have changed in such a way that traditional identity markers no longer afford space to consumption as a central marker in the understanding of personality and individuality. In this way, the logic of production and consumption would be based on the atomization of the market—that is, on the reduction of the presence of the State and on the overvaluation of the individual as responsible for her own success.

220 

S. B. JANUÁRIO

It is in this context that advertising invests its strategies, through discourses and advertising pieces that cover the products and services of values and attitudes related to the subject. We understand advertising as a communicational process that influences a social practice, which shapes the behaviors and lifestyles of individuals in contemporary times and also operates as a pedagogical agent.21 This reflection dialogues with the proposal of trans-aesthetic capitalism22 whereby, as explained, aestheticization functions as a survival strategy. This process of beautification that feminisms have undergone in a more mainstream and popularizing proposal seems to have become a useful tool for action and analysis, as well as to critique a reality in which companies and brands are the creators of demand and commodity narratives that drive culture. At a time when consumption is especially characterized by ephemeral narratives and proposals, there emerges the planned obsolescence of consumer goods and the spectacularization of economic, political, and social relations. Robert Goldman, Deborah Heath and Sharon Smith presents the term commodity feminism in their article Commodity Feminism (1991). Despite being presented in the early 1990s, the term has not been debated in the context of gender and media studies in Brazil. The authors argues that feminism was “adopted” by the Advertising industry, which turned it into a commodity in response to growing feminist criticism, during the 1980s, by the media and the industry itself. In contrast to this statement, Mirian Catterall, Pauline Maclaran, and Lorna Stevens claim that markets, as well as advertising, have always been close to all waves of the feminist movement.23 It is important to say that the waves were designated and separated in historical periods dated by the movement of women who have organized themselves, throughout history, in different and diverse ways at equally different times. Catterall, Maclaran, and Stevens argue that in the first wave of the movement, marketing was seen as a positive force in helping to disseminate ideas and campaigns related to suffrage, for example, with activists holding meetings at large department stores at the time. Second-wave feminism, on the other hand, was strongly influenced by anti-marketing and market discourses, under the influence of texts of importance to the movement, such as Betty Friedan’s Feminine Mystique, among others. Hamlin and Peters affirm that this meeting between feminisms and advertising “[was] more contentious between the 1960s and 1980s, a period that characterizes the second wave of the movement”.24 The authors claim that third-wave feminism on the other hand unveiled the idea of plural feminisms, in addition to its increasingly complex

11  FEMVERTISING AND COMMODITY FEMINISM: THE BRAZILIAN CONTEXT 

221

interrelations with different systems of oppression, such as race / ethnicity, gender, and class. The authors further conceive that the feminist revolution of second-wave feminism was co-opted by the market and “under the guide of postmodern marketing in the 1990s, discovered many new market opportunities by respond to the celebration of difference that the cultural turn brought”.25 Goldman reflects that advertising and marketing strategies apparently related to certain feminist ideas and causes were born as an attempt to incorporate the cultural power of feminism and feminist ideas into advertising, while simultaneously domesticating the critique of the feminist movement itself to the market’.26 According to the author, commodified feminism and its attempts at marketing were attempts to appease women’s discontent with images of thin, young, and hypersexualized women. By using the feminist agenda as a social value that can be bought together with a product that simulates female independence, feminism’s social goals are transformed into “lifestyles” for consumers that can supposedly be attained through the consumption of such products. In this sense, Goldman sees it as a “false feminism” packaged to please consumers and adapt to the market. As such it is a palatable feminism that is easy to assimilate, but critically and politically lacking. It is noteworthy that the narratives analyzed by Goldman at the time (i.e. the 1980s) are somewhat dated compared to the reality we find today regarding female representation in advertising, but the debate around the use of feminisms, in our view, is preserved. Moreover, misogynistic representations of hypersexualized women still endure today, despite the intervening years between the zenith of second-wave feminism and today’s contemporary age. Angela McRobbie argues that this media narrative reproduces more “tolerable” forms of representations with an emancipatory and progressive content, which are undertaken, in general, by feminisms perpetrated especially for youth.27 The author corroborates Goldman when she states that ideas linked to female empowerment have been offered to women “as a kind of substitute for feminist politics and transformation”.28 As such, it is pertinent to address the concept of commodity feminism in any interrogation of femvertising. Commodity feminism can be further unpacked through the concept of ‘commodity fetishism’ as coined by Karl Marx in Capital, published in 1867. Marx conceives of commodity fetishism as the characteristic that the products have, within the capitalist system, of hiding the social relations of exploitation of labor, establishing itself, therefore, throughout all society.29 At the heart of these social relations, profit is made by those who own the means of production, in this case, the brands

222 

S. B. JANUÁRIO

and advertisers associated with advertising. For Marx, fetishism is a social relationship between people mediated by products, things, and objects. As a consequence to this process, consumers begin to view value as inherent in the product as the ideologies it has become a stand-in for, instead of the value begotten from the labor that has gone into the production of the product. Linked to this concept is the feminist movement’s, among other critical theories, strong criticism of capitalism and its logic of production especially in what concerns the unequal distribution of labor power. As such, this commodity fetishism of feminism makes it easy for the market to ascribe symbolic value to products sold at (sometimes exorbitant) profit, even though they are typically produced under exploitative conditions in both the developed and developing world. It is possible to perceive this logic in the reorganizations and performances of the brands in which the signs are mobilized to establish contemporary narratives that remove the product from its practical usage, to link the value of these goods to symbolic processes that homogenize people and society (such as the marketing of makeup through empowering language, yet disregarding that such advertising still pushes the implicit agenda that women are not attractive enough as they are and their appearances need to be modified in order to achieve attractiveness). Yet a case can be made that by promoting the breaking of the historical cycle of the representation of women embraced by misogyny, the process of using feminist values appears as a late but necessary reinterpretation of the circulating discourses of advertising and marketing, observing that the old gender performances will not work with the new generation of women.30 With the effervescence of new communication technologies and the intense use of the internet and its tools, feminisms have gained an ally in the information process with cyberactivism,31 which allows activists (and femvertisers) a platform to rewrite the old discourses around female representation. The driving force behind these new prerogatives in advertising strategies is embraced by the discourse of empowerment. Empowerment processes are linked to the conception and socialization of power relations in participatory systems in different areas of social, cultural, and political action.32 The word has been widely used in different fields of knowledge and gained social notoriety in the aegis of feminism, LGBTQ people, and equity. It has also been debated in the academic sphere and has gained great visibility in media planning and brand activism strategies, where consumers are invited to defend values and principles together with a brand,

11  FEMVERTISING AND COMMODITY FEMINISM: THE BRAZILIAN CONTEXT 

223

adding value to the brand’s DNA and thus transforming the brand into an ally of the disenfranchised,33 though it can be argued that this is a controversial stance given that most companies are primarily motivated by profit. Female empowerment has been debated as a process of liberating women from the chains, invisibilities, and silencing promoted by gender oppression and patriarchal subjugation.34 It is pertinent to emphasize that it seems evident that the narratives of commodity feminism transmitted through linguistic and imaginary vehicles, built to account for a new marketing strategy, are exclusive and incipient in what we understand by a visibility of more intersectional feminisms,35 with a theoretical methodological proposal that sheds light on the debate around the social relations of power and the contexts in which the social and power inequalities between genders take place, as well as, the socially situated asymmetries built throughout history and a multiplicity of disciplines. The promotion of a conscious and diverse use in the utilization of advertising or by the market within feminist agendas is certainly complex, it is necessary to pay attention to some issues that go beyond advertising and observe all the logic of the market, from production to placement. With hybrid formats of market strategies and transmediatic tools,36 observing only advertising, in our view, limits a broader analysis of the phenomenon. In effect, we will prefer to use the term commodity feminism as a perception and theoretical line to follow. Thus, we ask what are the feminist narratives that appear in Brazilian advertising when they adopt the perspective listed by commodity feminism? The Media Observatory: Gender, Democracy, and Human Rights— OBMIDIA / UFPE,37 has been monitoring daily, since 2014, advertising in the Brazilian market. From 2015 to 2020, 123 advertisements were cataloged with the premises and themes most frequently employed by commodity feminism. These advertisements were broadcast on national televisions and on the pages of the social media, digital platforms, and YouTube channels of the brands in question. Convenience sampling was used to collect advertisements broadcast nationally that debated the theme linked to the idea of female empowerment, associated with the premises of commodity feminism. The method used was content analysis38 to identify thematic patterns. The collected material was subjected to fluctuating reading, the stage at which first impressions are made. Then, the units of analysis with qualitative and quantitative emphasis were selected. Seven (7) predominant thematic categories were found: (1) Beauty; (2) Women’s

224 

S. B. JANUÁRIO

financial independence; (3) Freedom; (4) Equal rights; (5) Disrupting social paradigms; (6) Repositioning; (7) Women’s visibility. The first category contends with questioning the idea of beauty and briefly summarizing the most evident beginning of this perspective in Brazil. The Dove brand became a pioneer in femvertising when it launched the 2005 “Campaign for Real Beauty”,39 with messaging that promoted a more human and equal discourse in advertising and the representation of women in advertising. It began to question the idea of an authoritarianism regarding beauty or a so-called beauty dictatorship that pressured women into adopting a one-size-fits-all standard of beauty.40 Despite challenging the excessive standardization of dominant body types and the impossibility of perfect beauty, the campaign still had a strong tendency towards Eurocentric beauty standards — that is, privileging white women as the majority of those represented, arguably due to prevailing beauty standards in Brazil. But it must be noted that the campaign arguably starts the debate around other possible beauties, dubbed “real beauty” in the advert, calling on women to view themselves more compassionately and thus promoting the notion of greater self-acceptance.41 In 2015, the “Like a Girl” campaign of feminine hygiene brand Always,42 greatly impacted the debates in the advertising medium. The pioneering spirit of international brands such as Dove and Always arguably encouraged other brands to follow in the same path, as is in the case of Brazil. The first Brazilian brands to consolidate their presence in this discourse are linked to products and services in the cosmetics and beauty sector— brands with strong market performance among women consumers. In this context, the second category found in our analysis of femvertising in Brazil is that of financial independence. In 2015, the Brazilian brand Avon released a campaign entitled “Independence is Destiny: Avon takes you on that journey,” in which it declared itself a supporter and promoter of the financial independence of women. The campaign featured the hashtag #Belezaquefazsentido or #BeautyThatMakesSense,43 with a strong sensitivity to issues of female entrepreneurship44 and primarily targeting middle class women and those in the margins of society in order to promote female empowerment through its collaborators / resellers. This was done with the intention of fomenting the debate around the relevance of financial independence in the informal market. Since Brazil is a country marked by profound inequalities in which women represent the main portion of the population tied to the informal and precarious labor market. In order to resonate with the targeted consumer base who need to participate in

11  FEMVERTISING AND COMMODITY FEMINISM: THE BRAZILIAN CONTEXT 

225

informal labour or would like to supplement their incomes, these brands have carved a niche in the market. In addition to being consumers, these women also promote the brand and become collaborators / sellers of their products, in a proposal that reinforces the aestheticisation of ideals such as independence and empowerment that permeates discourses on womanhood in the contemporary age. It is worth mentioning that the company has also been carrying out some tangible action such as training workshops and campaigns that suggest a real concern with the social perspective and the financial impact on the lives of these women. Indeed, when we observe the so-called informal sector, we understand it as “a set of forms of organization of production that occupy an interstitial place in the economy, which operate ‘together’ with properly capitalist forms, but are not part of them.”45 Brazil and the world were already in a process of work scarcity, whether in the loss of labor rights, or in the so-­ called “uberization” of work which consists of a work-on-demand format, with precarious working conditions, exploitation of labor by large conglomerates, which concentrate the market together with digital platforms and electronic commerce.46 When we look at the world of informal work, it is pertinent to reflect that, according to UN Women, 54% of women in Latin America make their living from this sector. In effect, they are more subject to the economic impacts of the coronavirus pandemic. IBGE notes that 41.3% of the population derives their income from informal work. From the perspective of gender, informal work rises slightly from the general average and represents 42% of female employment, while male work represents 20%. Another important point to note is that 47.8% of the female informal workforce are black women. The third category concerns what we call freedom or the representation of women based on the idea of freedom ​​ and power of choice. An example of this category is the campaign of the Brazilian cosmetics brand Quem disse Berenice: “É pra mim” (Who says, Berenice: “It’s for me”) (2015). The motto of the campaign is that “women’s lives are marked by too many not’s” with the debate around the opportunities and spaces denied to women, (e.g., this space / opportunity is not for women). The campaign challenges old patterns of female behavior and proposes that women should not accept the socially-imposed limits. Several characters in the video cross out the negatives in phrases like “Makeup is not for me;” “Red lipstick is not for me;” “Buying condoms is not for me;” and “Paying the bills is not for me.” The diversity of women represented, demonstrates

226 

S. B. JANUÁRIO

the brand’s concern with inclusive representation, and the consumer is invited to reflect on women’s empowerment, struggles, and achievements. Another campaign of the same brand is entitled “[You] can!”. The repetitive use of the statement “[You] can!” throughout the advertisement denotes a sense of empowerment and choice and the brand reaffirms the idea that to be free is to deal with a diversity of desires, knowledge, bodies, etc.47 With the question “Who says you can’t choose what is best for you?”, the discourse presents the idea that women can be who they want, thus potentially breaking down socially structured paradigms of hegemonic beauty and behavior. The fourth category relates to the search for equal rights and social equity. It deals with the equality of spaces, views, and opportunities. The advertisement entitled “Overturning labels: Equality in politics” by the Superior Electoral Court of Brazil (2016) is representative of this campaign, aimed at the inclusion, participation, and decision-making power of women in Brazilian politics. In addition, the advertisements sought to demystify the idea that women should not inhabit spaces typically associated with the masculine, such as football or engineering’. One of the pieces presents the act of flying an airplane / flying a stove, in reference to the woman having always been relegated to the domestic environment and thus rupturing this fallacy by turning the stereotype on its head. The campaign runs on the ideals of ​​equality, but it also fits into the following category in our analysis on the rupture of institutionalized social paradigms. In 2020 Continental, the Electrolux group’s appliance brand, used International Women’s Equality Day, celebrated on August 26, to launch its advertising campaign.48 The campaign featured videos and digital and physical posters that were scattered in the city of São Paulo, Brazil that utilized phrases like: “I wish all women: freedom, equal opportunities and spaces that allow you to be you”; “ To be a woman is to be free to decide what you are” and the “best scorer of the national team is a northeastern woman” (alluding to Brazilian national soccer team player Marta, from the northeast of Brazil, who is the seven-time winner of the “Golden Ball”—an award that recognises the best soccer player in the word each year.) This fifth category concerning the rupture of institutionalized social paradigms found in our analysis also concerns itself with breaking stereotypes that chain women to the domestic sphere. Take, for example, the theme of marriage associated with the principles of commodity feminism and the representation of women independent of the social imposition of

11  FEMVERTISING AND COMMODITY FEMINISM: THE BRAZILIAN CONTEXT 

227

traditional marriage and romantic life. A good example is the Renault advertising campaign 201: “Família Sandero” or “Sandero Family.” The campaign’s is divided into four stages that portray the love life of the main character, inside a car. In the video, after meeting four potential candidates, represented in the story by four cars, the last one proposes marriage to her. The protagonist then states that she actually wants a car just for herself and drives off alone. By refuting the idea of ​​success associated with one’s love life, such as the notion that happiness is only found next to a romantic couple, and that those who buy and understand cars are men, the campaign attempts to break down symbolic structures. Another narrative in this fifth category dialogues with the conquest of public spaces and activities culturally linked to the male universe. The Buscofen (2018) campaign “My pain matters”,49 which uses a discursive line and catchphrase associated with indemnity and social movements, addressing the issue of female menstrual cramps. Speaking frankly about the theme and the prejudices associated with women’s intimate health issues, the campaign comments on the lack of professional opportunities extended to women, as well as the prejudices and beliefs linked to female menstruation. In doing so, such campaigns bring up narratives about female sexuality and promoted debates about a rupture with pre-­ established beliefs that are harmful to women. Over time, other sectors of the economy have also chosen to dialogue with feminist agendas in Brazil, one of the most evident examples being beer advertisements, which previously employed the hypersexualization and objectification of female bodies to sell their products to a predominantly male audience. It is arguable that the figure of the woman-object associated with Brazilian women, whether in the national or international scene, has contributed greatly to the abusive portrayal of women in Brazil. The sixth category found in our analysis corresponds to this repositioning of dated and misogynistic representations, in which brands try to fix discourses and narratives based on sexist practices using premises of commodity feminism.. Skol, a brand of Brazilian beer that gained notoriety in the national scene for its misogynist discourse and advertisements, recognized its failures in its communicative history in relation to their presentation of women and carried out a campaign to redesign the most questioned and criticized of its campaigns.50 Through the “Reposter” project, which invited six illustrators to reconstruct campaigns and advertisements from the brand’s sexist past which contained hypersexualized female bodies used to promote beer. The idea was for the artists to reinterpret the

228 

S. B. JANUÁRIO

advertisements as they would like to be represented, which corresponds to the premises listed by Becker-Herby (see above). Finally, the sixth category deals with making previously invisible and neglected groups of women visible. It is linked to the discourses and narratives of issues that remain largely undiscussed, for example those affecting trans women and women with physical disability. This category deals with the abjection, the repulsion and prejudice that these women’s bodies suffer in society and in the mainstream.51 Certain campaigns have challenged these attitudes. For example, the Brazilian brand Lola Cosmetics carried out the “Oh, Maria” campaign,52 with university student Maria Clara Araújo, a trans woman and activist on the issue who is considered the first trans woman to be featured in an advertisement in Brazil.53 The proposal was to encourage changes in the way trans women are viewed and represented in the media. According to the brand’s director, Dione Vasconcellos, Lola has always sought to embrace the plurality and diversity of women in its product lines and communications, and the brand has sought to position itself with the theme of these women in its advertisements, aiming at plurality, breaking stereotypes, and obviously pursuing alternative consumer audiences. It is important to highlight that the most evident campaigns in the use of feminist guidelines in their advertising strategies are brands positioned with the female consumer audience. In quantitative terms, the present research showed us that among the adverts collected, 66% of the campaigns were for cosmetics and beauty brands; 25% were for products linked to domestic tasks such as detergents, disinfectants, etc., which still reinforces and legitimates beliefs regarding women and domesticity or their association with the private / domestic sphere in the popular imagination.54 Only 2% referred to brands with narratives culturally focused on the male audience, such as drinks and sports. However, it is pertinent to point out that the advertisements listed fit the premises established by Becker-­ Herby. Moreover, only the Lola Cosmetics campaign presents women in the entire production chain of the campaign ahead of the aesthetic and narrative decisions of advertising as compared to the rest of the adverts which focused primarily on women as consumers of goods. In the case of Skol, the changes in their advertising outlook could possibly be attributed to the change in the company’s marketing department, with a woman taking charge of the department who is arguably more concerned with helping the company project an image of inclusivity. There have been significant advances and the use of feminisms by the market seems to awaken new

11  FEMVERTISING AND COMMODITY FEMINISM: THE BRAZILIAN CONTEXT 

229

advertising and marketing practices and alternative discourses about women in society. Indeed, it is imperative that this new discursive practice extend to more general and broad sectors of Brazilian society.

Final Considerations In the contemporary scenario in which communication, feminisms, and new technologies, not to mention processes of resignification, emerge with great effervescence, it is possible to identify important changes in the types of relationships between social actors, consumption, and the processes of media representation. The academy has guaranteed feminism a space to question oppression in the most varied fields of knowledge, one of which is communication. The stereotypes and the naturalization of the objectification of women, previously indisputable, are now largely denounced and questioned. If, on the one hand, we find the skepticism and distrust of these uses and strategies, we also find enthusiasts and currents that exalt the ambivalence and complexity of the issue. We believe that this would be the starting point for thinking about the exit of a superficial, shallow, and dangerous use of female empowerment, and opting for the use of advertising strategies around feminism in a conscious way that can really promote changes in the representations women see of themselves not only in the media but also in leadership spaces. Although there is a positivist view that “we have the power to denounce and question” such sexist practices, it is necessary to think about the privilege of women who can do so. After all, access to certain tools and discourses necessary for such changes may not be available to all women. There are questions of class, social and racial asymmetries, and privilege that still need to be considered in this debate, and issues of intersectionality need to be considered in depth beyond the notion that strategies should focus only on the external superficiality of advertising and marketing of brands. Finally, we are hopeful that a new way of using advertising and marketing in favor of the expansion of the feminisms debate and for the creative destruction of the dominant logic55 that aims to reconstruct a new perspective in the way of thinking about advertising and marketing strategies covered by guidelines of social importance. It has become clear in the content analysis here that feminist agendas are most evident in the discourses surrounding the ideas of entrepreneurship and independence through advertisers’ attempts to provoke debates

230 

S. B. JANUÁRIO

and challenges in sectors where women and feminism did not have access. Doing so has unveiled a very rich multiplicity of approaches and intersections of feminisms as diverse as women themselves. Freedom and equality are pillars of the original agendas of the movement, and that still makes sense in today’s contemporary age. Yet, the subject of the use of feminisms by the market and the impacts of this combination are still up for debate. There are many nuances to foster a conscious use of social causes by consumer culture in Brazil. This is a debate that needs more in-depth reflections and analysis of objects and the historical background for a reliable and realistic foundation.

Notes 1. Iara Beleli, ‘Corpo e identidade na propaganda’, in Revista Estudos Feministas, 15:1(2007), p. 195. 2. Raquel Moreno, A beleza impossível: mulher, mídia e consumo (São Paulo: Editora Ágora, 2008), p. 27. 3. Soraya Barreto Januário and Ana Veloso, ‘O entrelace entre Gênero e Comunicação: uma discussão contemporânea’, in A transversalidade de gênero na produção do conhecimento e nas políticas públicas, ed. by Alfrâncio Dias, Elza Santos and Maria Helena Cruz (Aracaju: Ed. IFS, 2017), p. 175. 4. Néstor G.  Canclíni. Consumidores e cidadãos: conflitos multiculturais da globalização (Rio de Janeiro: Editora UFRJ, 1995), p. 167. 5. Pierre Bourdieu, A distinção (Porto Alegre: Zouk, 2007). 6. Soraya Barreto Januário, Masculinidades em (re)construção: gênero, corpo e publicidade (Covilhã: Coleção: Livros LabCom, 2016), p. 23. 7. Barreto Januário and Veloso, 2017, p. 175. 8. Adweek is a weekly publication on commerce, business and advertising in the United States of America, and organized a panel discussion dedicated to the topic of femvertising, Samantha Skey moderated this panel. 9. SHE Media, ‘About the #Femvertising awards.’ Femvertising Awards, 2020, https://www.femvertisingawards.com/ 10. Angela McRobbie, ‘Pós-feminismo e cultura popular.’ Feminist media studies 4:3 (2004), p. 255–264. 11. Robert Goldman, Deborah, Heath and Sharon Smith. Commodity feminism. In: Critical Studies in Mass Communication, 8:3(1991), p. 333. 12. Robert Goldman, Reading Ads Socially. London: Routledge, 1992, p.131. 13. Eric J Arnould and Craig J Thompson. ‘Consumer Culture Theory: Twenty Years of Research’, Journal of Consumer Research, 31(2005), p. 873. 14. Don Slater, Cultura do Consumo e Modernidade (São Paulo: Nobel, 2002) p. 81.

11  FEMVERTISING AND COMMODITY FEMINISM: THE BRAZILIAN CONTEXT 

231

15. Gilles Lipovtsky and Jean Serroy, A estetização do mundo: viver na era do capitalismo artista, (São Paulo: Editora Companhia das Letras, 2015), p. 10. 16. Guacira L.  Louro, ‘Gênero e sexualidade: pedagogias contemporâneas’, Pro-Posições 19:1 2008, p. 19. 17. Rose M. B. Fisher, ‘O dispositivo pedagógico da mídia: modos de educar na (e pela) TV’, Educação & Pesquisa 28:1(2002), p. 159. 18. Soraya Barreto Januário and Marcela Chacel, ‘Femvertising: uma tendência publicitária?’ in Publicidade e gênero: representações e práticas ed. by Milena F. Oliveira-Cruz (Santa Maria: FACOS UFSM, 2018), p. 165. 19. Elisa, Becker- Herby, The Rise of Femvertising, Master’s thesis, School of Journalism and Mass Communication, University of Minnesota, 2016, p.  18–19 https://conservancy.umn.edu/bitstream/handle/11299/ 181494/BeckerHerby_%20Final%20Capstone_2016.pdf?sequence=1 20. Mary Douglas and Byron Isherwood, O mundo dos bens: para uma antropologia do consumo (Rio de Janeiro: Editora UFRJ, 2006). 21. Louro, 2008. 22. Lipovetsky and Serroy, 2015, p. 11. 23. Mirian Catterall, Pauline MaClaran and Lorna Stevens, ‘Marketing and Feminisms: An Evolving Relationship’ in Marketing And Feminism: Current Issues And Research. ed. by Mirian Catterall, Pauline MaClaran and Lorna Stevens (New York, Routledge, 2000) p. 1–15. 24. Cynthia Hamlin and Gabriel Peters, ‘Consumindo como uma garota: subjetivação e empoderamento na publicidade voltada para mulheres’, Lua Nova: Revista de Cultura e Política, 103:1 (2018), p. 169. 25. Catterall, Maclaran and Stevens, 2015, p. 6. 26. Robert Goldman. Reading Ads Socially (London: Routledge, 1992). 27. Angela McRobbie. The Aftermath Of Feminism: Gender, Culture, And Social Change, (London: Sage, 2009?), p. 1. 28. Hamlin and Peters, 2018, p. 182. 29. Karl Marx. O Capital, (São Paulo: Centauro Editora, 2005), p. 70. 30. Judith Butler, Problemas de gênero: feminismo e subversão da identidade, (Rio de Janeiro: Civilização Brasileira, 2003), p. 194. 31. Fábio Maline and Henrique Antoun, A internet e a rua: ciberativismo e mobilização nas redes sociais, (Porto Alegre: Sulina, 2013), p. 33. 32. Lorraine M. Gutiérrez and Edith A. Lewis, Empowering Women of Color, (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999), p. 150. 33. Mukjerjee and Banet-Weiser, 2012, 13. 34. Gutiérrez and Lewis, 1999. 35. Kimberlé W Crenshaw, On intersectionality: Essential writing, (New York: The New Press, 2017), p. 5.

232 

S. B. JANUÁRIO

36. Marcela C. da C.  Chacel, ‘Audiência transmídia: uma proposta de conceituação a partir das telenovelas da Rede Globo’ Master’s thesis, PPGCOM, University Federal of Pernambuco, 2016, p. 40. 37. The observatory monitors, catalogs, and analyzes the national news and advertising media from the perspective of gender and feminism studies applied to critical media reading methodology (Kellner and Share, 2008). http://www.obmidia.org/ 38. Laurence Bardin, Análise de conteúdo (São Paulo: Edições 70, 1979), p. 12. 39. Dove, Real Beauty Campain, retrieved in: https://www.dove.com/br/ historias-­Dove/campanhas/real-­beauty-­sketches.html 40. Naomi, Wolf, O mito da beleza: como as imagens de beleza são usadas contra as mulheres, (Rio de Janeiro: Rocco, 2009). 41. Nita M. Mckinley, Resistindo à insatisfação corporal: Mulheres gordas que endossam a aceitação da gordura, Imagem corporal, 1:2 (2004), p 213–219. 42. Youtube, Always—Like a girl, last modification 08th july 2015, https:// www.youtube.com/watch/XjJQBjWYDTs 43. Youtube, Avon-Beleza que faz sentido, last modification, 12th January 2015, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U8%2D%2DmzOPVxo 44. Eva G. Jonathan and Taissa M.R da Silva, ‘Empreendedorismo feminino: tecendo a trama de demandas conflitantes’, Psicologia & Sociedade, 19:1(2007), p. 77–84. 45. Leslie D.  Beloque, ‘A cor do trabalho informal’, Phd. thesis. Pontifícia Universidade Católica de São Paulo,2007, p. 28. 46. David S. Franco and Deise L. S. Ferraz. Uberização do trabalho e acumulação capitalista. Cadernos EBAPE. BR, 1:7 (2019), p. 846. 47. João A. Carrascoza, A evolução do texto publicitário: a associação de palavras como elemento de sedução na publicidade (São Paulo: Futura, 1999), p. 39. 48. Continental atualiza. https://www.continentalbrasil.com.br/atualiza 30th of August 2020. 49. Youtube. Busconfen. Last modification 6th of March 2018 https://www. youtube.com/watch?v=v7Gme0EhEDg 50. Bárbara Sacchitiello, “Skol assume passado machista e ressalta a importância de evoluir”. Meio e Mensagem. March/9, 5th of November 2017, Retrieved in https://www.meioemensagem.com.br/home/comunicacao/2017/03/09/skol-­a ssume-­p assado-­m achista-­e -­r essalta-­a -­ importancia-­de-­evoluir.html 51. Butler, 2003, p. 190. 52. Youtube. Lola Cosmetics, last modification 6th of February. https://www. youtube.com/lolacosmetics/videos/311987286192408

11  FEMVERTISING AND COMMODITY FEMINISM: THE BRAZILIAN CONTEXT 

233

53. Carta Capital, ‘Maria Clara Araújo, a primeira garota-propaganda trans do Brasil’. Carta Capital, Retrieved in: https://www.cartacapital.com.br/ sociedade/maria-­c lara-­a raujo-­a -­p rimeira-­g ar ota-­p r opaganda-­ trans-­do-­brasil-­1913/ 54. Susan Okin. Gênero, o público e o privado. Revista Estudos Feministas, 16:2, 2008, p. 306–310. 55. David Harvey. O enigma do capital: e as crises do capitalismo (São Paulo: Boitempo, 2011), p. 147.

Index

NUMBERS AND SYMBOLS #BlackLivesMatter, 118 #MeToo, 18 A Adidas, 82 Advertising Museum of China, 76 All-China Women’s Federation, 65 Amore Pacific, 45 B Body positivity, 22 Brazilian Context, 215–230 Breast cancer advertising, 116 C Chick flicks, 63 China, 21 Chinese feminism, 65 Chinese femvertising, 79 Chineseness, 19

Chinese socialism, 25 Chinese Women’s Daily, 76 Chung, Kyung-Wha, 44 Commercialised sexiness, 33 Commodification of feminism, 217 Commodity feminis, 75 Communist Party of China (CPC), 76 Compulsory sexiness, 110 Confucian cultural values, 78 Consumer culture, 215 Contemporary society, 215 Content analysis, 223 Corporate, 217 Covid 19 pandemic, 165 Cultural appropriation, 18 D Dove, 39, 119 E Emmeline Pankhurst, 167 Estée Lauder, 124

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 J. Gwynne (ed.), The Cultural Politics of Femvertising, Palgrave Studies in (Re)Presenting Gender, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-99154-8

235

236 

INDEX

F Facebook, 168 Fashion shows, 99 Female empowerment in advertising, 216 Femininity, 17 Feminist activism, 217 Feminist discourses, 217 Feminist ideology, 216 Femvertising, 216 Fenty, 110 Fourth wave feminism, 117 G Gendered representations of women in the media, 215 Gill, Rosalind, 20 Girl power, 20 Globalisation, 78 H Heterosexual femininity, 100 Hypersexualized, 215 I Inclusiveness, 24 Individualism, 24 Intersectionality, 24 K Kardashian, Kim, 108 K-drama, 49 Kilbourne, Jean, 117 K-pop, 49 Kyung-a Song, 44 L Lee, Jeong-eun, 44

M Market logic, 217 Marks & Spencer, 173 McRobbie, Angela, 100 Middle-class, 216 Modernity, 218 Mumpreneurial, 164 N Natwest, 163 Neoliberal, 18, 216 New femininities, 109 Nike, 82 O Objectification, 18 P Peking Opera, 27 People’s Daily, 80 Pinkwashing, 116 Plástica e Beleza, 194 Plastic surgery, 194 Postfeminist, 20, 216 Purchasing power, 216 R Retro-sexism, 32 Rihanna, 102 S Sex-positive, 23 Sexualisation, 18 Sexuality, 20 SheKnows Media, 42 Sina Weibo, 57 Single mothers, 170 SK-II, 89

 INDEX 

So Yoon Hwang, 44 Social equity, 226 Socialist state feminism, 64 State feminism, 76 Sulwhasoo, 44 Sylvia Pankhurst, 167 T Todorov, Tzvetan, 81 Twitter, 168

V Victoria’s Secret, 17 W WeChat, 77 Whiteness, 24–27 Y Yasmin, 57

237