Feminist Perspectives on Advertising : What's the Big Idea?

This volume, edited by Kim Golombisky, applies an intersectional lens to advertising, focusing on gender, race, ethnicity, sexuality, disability, age, class, and nationality. Intersectional feminist perspectives on advertising are rare in the advertising industry, even as it faces pressure to reform. This anthology focuses on advertising messaging to follow up the professional practices covered in Feminists, Feminisms, and Advertising, edited by Kim Golombisky and Peggy Kreshel. In this new collection, contributors write from a variety of perspectives, including Black, African, lesbian, transnational, poststructuralist, material, commodity, and environmental feminisms. The authors also discuss the reproductive justice framework, feminist disability studies, feminist ethnography, feminist discourse analysis, and feminist visual rhetoric. Together, these scholars introduce big ideas for feminist advertising studies. The first section, titled "Historicize This!," includes work dealing with historicized analyses of advertising, ranging from more than a century of stereotypes about black women to early twentieth-century white women purchasing automobiles, all contextualized with women's complex relations with technologies from cars to Twitter. The second section, "Advertising Body Politics," groups work on topics related to body politics in advertising, including lesbians, disabled women, aging women, and Chinese "promotion girls." The third section, "Media Reps," revisits advertising representation in novel ways from operational definitions of race and advertising news about gay men to advertising twenty-first-century masculinities in Ghana and the United States. The last section, "Reproduction and Postfeminist Empowerment," ends the book with a selection of case studies on the advertising industry's cooptation and commodification of feminism, particularly in regressive postfeminist ideologies about women's reproductive health and mothering. Dedication 6 Contents 8 Acknowledgments 10 Foreword • Jean Kilbourne 12 PART I: HISTORICIZE THIS! 16 1 An Introduction to Some Big Ideas for Critical Feminist Advertising Studies • Kim Golombisky 18 2 From Aunt Jemima to Beyoncé: Twitter, Consumer Agency, and the Transformation of the Black Female Image in Advertising • Patricia G. Davis 52 3 Black Women’s Hair Politics in Advertising • Natalie A. Mitchell and Angelica Morris 76 4 Driving Her to Distraction: Women, Modernity, and the Disciplinary Discourse of 1920s Automobile Advertising • Roseann M. Mandziuk 98 PART II: ADVERTISING BODY POLITICS 116 5 Lesbian Consumers and the Myth of an LGBT Consumer Market • Gillian W. Oakenfull 118 6 Women Who Experience Depression Interpret Advertising Representations of Women with Depression: A Feminist Disability Studies Perspective • Ella Houston 138 7 Middle-Aged Women, Antiaging Advertising, and an Accidental Politics of the Unmarked • Kim Golombisky 158 8 Corporeal Commodification: Chinese Women’s Bodies as Advertisements • Carol M. Liebler, Li Chen, and Anqi Peng 180 PART III: MEDIA REPS 204 9 Representations of Race/Ethnicity, Gender, Class, and Power in 1,084 Prime-time TV Commercials from 2005 • Janice Marie Collins 206 10 The Modern Man in Ghanaian Radio Adverts: A Reproduction of or a Challenge to Traditional Gender Practices? • Grace Diabah 232 11 Woman as Product Stand-In: Branding Straight Metrosexuality in Men’s Magazine Fashion Advertising • Jennifer Ford Stamps and Kim Golombisky 254 12 Beyond the Fringe? Market Desirability and Alternative Sexuality in Advertising News • Angela T. Ragusa 272 PART IV: REPRODUCTION AND POSTFEMINIST EMPOWERMENT 300 13 We’re Way “Beyond Birth Control”: Women’s Reproductive Health, Gendered Consumption, and Direct-to-Consumer Advertising • Whitney Peoples 302 14 “Thank You, Mom”: Mothers, Olympic Athletes, and Procter & Gamble’s Global Brand • Dunja Antunovic and Michelle Rodino-Colocino 324 15 The Limits of Women’s Environmentalism in Seventh Generation’s Digital Advertising • Cara Okopny 346 Index 370 About the Contributors 390