Publication date:

29 November 2018

Length of book:

396 pages

Publisher

Lexington Books

Dimensions:

231x165mm
7x9"

ISBN-13: 9781498528320

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.

By bringing together a group of scholars who align themselves to a feminist perspective, Golombisky is able to provide a diverse and in-depth representation of the pervasiveness advertising’s messages have on culture. The collection provides a wide range of perspectives, including Black, African, lesbian, transnational, poststructuralist, material, commodity, and environmental feminisms. . . . Going beyond just gender issues, the contributors in Feminist Perspectives on Advertisingnavigate and discuss contemporary concerns influenced by persistent historical representations in advertising, providing to their readers a lesson and an underwritten challenge to identify and transform the advertising industry’s frameworks that result in incorrect and untruthful representation in the media. The message is clear: change is needed, let’s get to work.