Selling Feminism: How Female Empowerment Campaigns Employ Postfeminist Discourses
Abstract
Femvertising messages are advertisements aimed at empowering women through pro-female messages, and they are celebrated by the industry. But recent critical research has found femvertisements that use postfeminist discourses, which both incorporate and repudiate feminist ideals, neutralizing feminism’s political force. Using qualitative (N = 26) and quantitative content analyses (N = 106), this study analyzed postfeminist articulations in award-winning femvertisements. Results showcase six commonly utilized discourses and elements of postfeminism: commodity feminism, individualization, self-surveillance, a new lens on the embrace of femininity, confidence cult(ure), and love your body. Two studies show how and how often disempowering discourses appear in female empowerment advertising.
Cite this
Kasey Windels, Sara Champlin, Summer Shelton, Yvette Sterbenk, Maddison Poteet (2019). Selling Feminism: How Female Empowerment Campaigns Employ Postfeminist Discourses. Journal of Advertising. https://doi.org/10.1080/00913367.2019.1681035
@article{kasey2019selling,
title = {Selling Feminism: How Female Empowerment Campaigns Employ Postfeminist Discourses},
author = {Windels, Kasey and Champlin, Sara and Shelton, Summer and Sterbenk, Yvette and Poteet, Maddison},
year = {2019},
journal = {Journal of Advertising},
doi = {10.1080/00913367.2019.1681035}
}Citations in this library
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