(Wo)men on top? Postfeminist contradictions in young women’s sexual narratives

Abstract

Feminized sexual consumption has gained increasing legitimacy in the marketplace. Despite calls for critical, feminist perspectives, extant research in marketing continues to prioritize its emancipatory implications. In this article, we draw on the cultural theory of “postfeminism” to critically analyze the sexual narratives of young women. Tightly bound with neoliberal ethics, a postfeminist orientation encourages women—purported to have achieved equality thanks to past feminist activism—to work on, invest in, and manage their sexual lives. This discourse manifests in women’s sexual and intimate experiences in two key ways: first, through their attempts to establish authority and control in their relationships, an endeavor thwarted by neoliberal and patriarchal logics; and second, through an implicit submissive sexual positioning that privileges masculine meanings of sexual pleasure. These findings suggest an inherent contradiction between participants’ understanding of themselves as free, able, and equal, and the constraining, subjugating experiences shaping their relationships and (sexual) lives. Our key contribution to feminist critique and theorizing is to illustrate how postfeminist discourses operate to mask and deny oppressive patriarchal discourses, which paradoxically increases their strength under the guise of female emancipation and consumer choice.

“Is it all just lip service?”: on Instagram and the normalisation of the cosmetic servicescape

“…Our study explores the role of Instagram in the shifting of consumers' perspective toward cosmetic surgery. As well as being a key source of social commerce (Casaló et al, 2020), Instagram's visual media ethos (Gurrieri and Drenten, 2019) makes it the uncontested content curator on social media today, allowing users to display, narrate, and critique their subject positionings (Rome and Lambert, 2020). To explore the power of Instagram in shaping beauty ideals (and our sense of self), our study adopts a dual-qualitative data-collection approach namely netnography, as an ethnographic approach for understanding online consumption-related aspects and digitised social interactions (Kozinets, 2019) and in-depth interviews (Charmaz, 2014) with young female Instagram users who have undergone or hope to undergo cosmetic procedures.…”

“…Lasting on average 45 min, our semi-structured interviews were digitally recorded either face-to-face (pre-pandemic) or online (mid-pandemic), manually transcribed and thematically coded (Charmaz, 2014). Thanks to our iterative netnographic fieldwork, we became familiar with both the visual content and sense-making taking place on the social media platform, affording us shared meanings (Wallendorf and Brucks, 1993) with our research participants' intimate body-projects (Rome and Lambert, 2020). Our questions centred on influencers as trend-setters of (a form of) aesthetic consumption, the conspicuous display of their cosmetic transformations and the significance of "try-on technology" on consumers' self-concept.…”

“…Within our sample population, there was a balance between participants that had undergone cosmetic procedures as well as participants who had not. As our study centres on the "ongoingness" of our body-projects (Rome and Lambert, 2020) through cosmetic modification, it was important to hone in on the impact of influencers' aesthetic and emotional labour on those who had taken the cosmetic plunge, as well as those still on the verge. Addressing the process of these body-projects, more so than the end-result of cosmetic surgeries, is particularly pertinent to the services literature (Klaus and Tsiotsou, 2020).…”

“…And will virtual influencers emulate the human qualities of influencers so sought after by followers? As research on the impact of AI on consumers and the marketplace remains in its infancy, new theorising on our (female) body-projects (Rome and Lambert, 2020) will need to address the influential role of these post-human influencers (Brandiotti, 2013) and how they will impact the marketing of services.…”

Problematizing the Postfeminist Gaze: A Critical Exploration of Young Women’s Readings of Gendered Power Relations in Advertising

“…This is significant given the power of representational practices to naturalize and sustain inequalities (Borgerson and Schroeder 2002). Further, insofar as power is believed to operate through the construction of subjects, rather than via top-down imposition (Foucault 1977), postfeminism has hatched new technologies-of-self that women employ in their physical, psychic, and sexual lives to become knowable and normative subjects (Rome and Lambert 2020).…”