Seeing (post)feminism through visual style: The case of pro-woman advertising in China

A focus on representation has long been central to feminist media scholarship, generating a rich critical tradition that exposes both the perils and, more recently, the potentials of how women and girls are portrayed, or portray themselves, across media texts and platforms. Yet within this tradition, remarks about the “aesthetics,” “rhetorics,” or “tone” of visual media texts are frequent but seldom examined in detail, while the notion of style is often conflated with that of representation. This article foregrounds the importance of analysing visual style as a distinct dimension within feminist approaches to media culture. Combining a critical discussion of key scholarship on postfeminism with a social semiotic analysis of a Chinese “pro-woman” advertisement, it argues that studies of representation should be complemented, and thus also enriched, by attention to the non-figurative, stylistic strategies through which visual media texts acquire perceptual and sensorial qualities that exceed or even contradict their figurative content. Because postfeminist media culture is shaped by “structures of feeling” that promote distinctly gendered emotional states, attending to visual style deepens critiques of its affective and political implications, expanding feminist understandings of how gendered imagery both looks and feels.