Selling smiles, covering periods: The commodification of menstruation in Orkid's femvertising campaign featuring Turkish national volleyball player Eda Erdem

This article examines how the Orkid Platinum advertisement featuring Turkish volleyball player Eda Erdem reconfigures feminist empowerment within the performative context of sport and the logics of neoliberal capitalism. Drawing on a socialist feminist perspective, the study conceptualizes femvertising as a discursive arena in which feminist values are commodified while the embodied realities of menstruation are obscured. Using Multimodal Critical Discourse Analysis (MCDA), the research analyzes the campaign's visual, verbal, and bodily elements—including imagery, gesture, color, and sound—to explore how menstruation is represented through narratives of athletic resilience, confidence, and happiness. The analysis indicates that menstrual pads can be read as functioning symbolically as a “cover” of happiness that screens bodily discomfort beneath a sanitized image of female strength. Through science-coded imagery, menstruation is biomedicalized and reframed as a performative test of resilience, which appears to align the model of ideal womanhood the campaign projects with a secular, middle-class register of modern femininity in Türkiye. By promoting a smile-centered empowerment discourse, the campaign reproduces the logic of commodity feminism, transforming bodily autonomy into a marketable affective performance. The article argues that this campaign translates menstruation into a narrative of neoliberal resilience in which material inequalities are left out of frame through commodified happiness. By bridging socialist feminist critique with multimodal discourse analysis, the study contributes to feminist media scholarship and shows how a single, richly multimodal femvertising campaign negotiates global neoliberal narratives of empowerment while depoliticizing the material conditions of women's bodies in the Turkish context.