Feminists, Feminisms, and Advertising

Women and advertising are both globally ubiquitous. Yet advertising remains one of the most unabashedly misogynist, heterosexist, and racist industries. This edited volume of original unpublished chapters is the first ever to offer explicitly feminist views on advertising. Feminists, Feminisms, and Advertising provides feminist analyses of the historical relationships between the advertising industry and the women’s movement in the United States. Contributors consider the ways that advertisers encode race, ethnicity, gender, and heteronormativity into advertising practices and messages exported around the world. They further explore the ways that intersectional audiences such as women of color, Latinas, and lesbian and gay audiences decode, reinterpret, resist, and subvert advertising. With this book, the editors and contributors address the present lack of feminist scholarship, research, knowledge, or curriculum in advertising, and begin a more honest dialogue about diversity and intersectional gender in the advertising academy as well as the advertising industry.

Golombisky and Kreshel provide an original and much-needed feminist exploration of the multiple ways women have engaged advertising, both as workers within the industry and as targeted consumers. The authors in this anthology tackle the historical and contemporary workplace culture in advertising’s creative departments, as well as how women audiences make sense of advertising’s messages—both areas that have long needed the kind of comprehensive and theoretically-informed approach this book provides. In doing so, they address a broad range of issues affecting women and the advertising industry, including ethics, intersectionality, commodity feminism, women of color as audiences, the sexism within the gendered silos that are the creative departments, and feminist education for advertising students. The book is a must-read for advertising students, instructors, and professionals—anyone in or thinking of entering the advertising industry—as well as anyone trying to make sense of the industry’s messages for or about women., This is a timely piece that makes novel theoretical connections at the intersection of advertising, gender, identity, and feminisms. What I really like about this book are the ways in which authors also offer specific practical recommendations for how to do better advertising. Taken together, the authors create a space for scholars and practitioners alike to play around with the gendered tensions that surface in the work of advertising and realize that the ‘click’ moment is now.

Kim Golombisky is associate professor and graduate director in the Department of Women’s and Gender Studies at the University of South Florida.Peggy J. Kreshel is associate professor of advertising at the Grady College of Journalism and Mass Communication and affiliate faculty member of the Institute for Women’s Studies at the University of Georgia.