The structural oppression of women by markets: the continuum of sexual violence and the online pornography market

ABSTRACT

This paper assembles emerging scholarship attendant to the marginalisation of people by market structures of power and dominance. We conceptualise this as market violence and locate one group of people largely missing from this conversation: women. To theorise women’s structural subordination in the marketplace we introduce several key tenets of radical feminist theory. Then, applying the continuum of sexual violence, we conceive markets as structures of sexual violence. Through the online pornography market, we find the market system (in producing and distributing women as commodities) is perpetrating a complex range of (often difficult to define) forms of sexual violence. We then reveal the market’s pervasiveness as a form of sexual harassment. To finish, we offer the continuum as a broader conceptualisation for future market violence scholarship.

KEYWORDS:

• Market violence
• sexual violence
• pornography
• feminist theory
• power relations
• critical marketing

Disclosure statement

No conflicts of interest to disclose

Notes

1. This should not be taken to imply that men do not also experience sexual violence (especially at the hands of other men). In this case, we only focus on women as we are using a feminist analysis of men’s violence against women as the framework.

2. We use the term victim (and derivatives of) advisedly. For an analysis of why naming victimhood is important for understandings of structural oppression see Convery (2006).

3. The direct or indirect causal relationship between pornography and individual cases of violence against women is a point of some debate, even amongst radical feminists (Dworkin, 1981; Jeffreys, 2008; Thompson, 2001). However most radical feminists agree – pornography constitutes a form of sexual violence in itself (Kelly, 1991).

4. The lack of information on this market has been compounded by a scholarly tendency to view pornography as a text (Attwood, 2002).

5. Although it is not in the scope of this paper to do so, the continuum of incidence can be applied within specific forms of sexual violence: there is often a continuum of incidence within the continuum of experience (Kelly, 1987).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Australian Government Research Training Program Scholarship.

Notes on contributors

Laura McVey

Laura McVey is a doctoral student in Marketing at RMIT University, Melbourne, Australia. Her research examines the intersection of markets and violence against women, specifically through the context of the online pornography market.

Lauren Gurrieri

Lauren Gurrieri is a Senior Lecturer in Marketing at RMIT University, Melbourne, Australia. Her research examines gender, consumption and the marketplace, with a focus on gender‐based inequalities in consumer and digital cultures.

Meagan Tyler

Meagan Tyler is a Senior Lecturer in the School of Management and a research theme leader in the Centre for People, Organisation and Work (CPOW) at RMIT University, Melbourne, Australia. Her research interests are based around feminist theory and gender inequality in a range of contexts.