Commodity feminism

This article concerns women's images in ads, their responses to those images, and advertisers methods of managing these responses. Feminist discourses have been rerouted in the mass media according to the logic of commodity relations. Rather than fight the legitimacy of feminist discourse, advertisers have attempted to channel key aspects of that discourse into semiotic markers that can be attached to commodity brandnames. In today's crowded corporate marketplace where it is imperative to differentiate brandnames from those of competitors, advertisers compete at translating women's discourses into stylized commodity signs. Though at first glance this may appear as evidence of a new era of democratic cultural pluralism, we argue that the many faces of feminism appearing in women's magazines are a single aspect of an internally contradictory hegemonic process—an ongoing dialectic between dominant and oppositional discourse.