Gender after gender: fragmentation, intersectionality, and stereotyping

ABSTRACT

This special issue on gender, markets, and consumption follows another special issue on gender and identity that appeared in 2003 in CMC. Fifteen years later, gender still represents a spirited field of confrontation. Seven articles emerged from the reviewing process, and contribute to three main themes: (1) refined representations of gender, which are fine-tuned to contemporary market and societal changes; (2) transformative contributions sharpening understanding of what gender inequalities are and how to contrast them through consumption and markets; and, (3) critical perspectives on gender, which stimulate societal as well as subjective undoing of gender.

KEYWORDS:

• Gender
• gender fragmentation
• intersectionality
• performativity
• stereotyping

Why gender still matters

For me, being a ‘lady painter’ was never an issue … I don’t resent being a female painter. I don’t exploit it. I paint.

Helen Frankenthaler in John Gruen’s (1972) book The Party’s Over Now

The opening quote illuminates the tensions animating gender. Helen Frankenthaler (1928–2011) was an American abstract expressionist painter. Her art has never enjoyed full consensus, with detractors qualifying it as too “feminine.” On the website dedicated to her life and work, we still read that Frankenthaler’s production surprises for “a gentle, almost poetic harmony despite its powerful spontaneity” (http://www.helen-frankenthaler.com). In Western societies, these qualities are culturally associated with women and often turned down as flaws. Among others, art critic Harold Rosenberg – the leading theorist of action painting – accused her of having never grasped “the moral and metaphysical basis of action painting,” adding that “her compositions fail to develop resistances against which a creative act can take place.” (Belz 2009) At the same time, Helen Frankenthaler was not as active as a woman of her generation was supposed to be. In The New York Times’ obit (Glueck 2011), the journalist – a woman – concludes that she “never aligned herself with the feminist movement in art that began to surface in the 1970s.” This is just partially true, considering that in 1957 Frankenthaler gathered some other women active in the arts to discuss the organization of a female artists’ exhibition to contrast sexism in the art system (against male gallery owners, male art critics, male artists). The exhibition would have also constituted a direct response to Sidney Janis Gallery’s 1949 show, “Artists: Man and Wife,” where female artists were included just for their quality of renowned male painters’ wives (Pritchard 2016).

Frankenthaler’s case sharply illustrates gender tensions. The artist’s will of being a painter, with no additional qualification (woman, New Yorker, or Jewish), conflicts with men’s ostracism and women’s expectations of political commitment. Too woman for men, insufficiently woman for women. Whatever the perspective, a woman, in disrespect of her desire of being perceived as just a painter. Sadly enough, discrimination against women is not dismissible as a burden of our collective past. In 2018, gender remains a highly topical issue, as recent fights against women tax, sexual harassment (e.g. the famous U.S. #metoo movement or the French equivalent #balancetonporc – #denounceyourpig), and gender pay gap still testify.

Gender(ed) discrimination in society and markets does not only pertain to women. Feminist movements, which originated in the 1850s with the suffragettes and have now entered their forth wave (Maclaran 2015), are just the forerunners of a broader number of gender-related streams of research and political claims. We detect two main trajectories of transformation in gender studies and politics (for a recent overview, refer to Visconti, Maclaran, and Bettany 2018). First, the multiplication of the social groups whose gender identities have become a matter of confrontation and litigation. We refer to lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer consumers (the so-called LGBTQ+ population), whose market and social visibility has started raising since the 1970s, following the Stonewall riots occurred in Manhattan on 28 June 1969. Judith Butler (1990) and Steven Kates (2002, 2003, 2004) are some notable expressions of this trajectory. In limited cases, also men and masculinity have been problematized (Visconti, Maclaran, and Bettany 2018). Molander, Kleppe, and Östberg’s article in this issue is a good example of the kind. Second, gender work has also evolved by refining the notion of gender. This special issue has especially welcomed contributions meant to advance understanding about the fragmentation (Butler 1990; Gregersdötter and Hållén 2013) and intersectionality (Gopaldas and DeRoy 2015; Gopaldas and Siebert 2018) of gender. On gender fragmentation and liquidity, Connell’s work (1995), which explodes the concept of masculinity in a plurality of masculinities, and Blakley’s (2010) investigation of how social media jeopardize the notion of gender are good exemplifications of this tradition. Masculinities and femininities are thus plural and depend on cultures, places, situations, status, and more. On intersectionality, Crenshaw (1989) steered gender studies towards the intersection with other dimensions (age, class or culture) to contrast gender inequalities more effectively.

Following decades of scholarly work and spirited politics, we are still confronting ourselves with two simple, yet fundamental, questions. Can we live beyond gender? Would it be desirable? In light of centuries of gender discriminations, we would be tempted to think that gender brings more troubles than benefits. Thus, overcoming gender – so to say, undoing it – could represent a tempting goal, even more so when research is deemed to be transformative (Davis and Pechmann 2013). Yet, new forms of feminisms have emerged, valorizing the care dimension of femininity as well as the feminine body: “Why, after having been only bodies, women should live today as if they had no body?” (Froidevaux-Metterie 2015, 13). Matich, Ashman, and Parson’s article in this issue takes on this conversation within the #freethenipple movement. Similarly, LGBTQ+ consumers still promote “pride events” (e.g. the Gay Pride or the Mardi Gras parades), where gendered representations are (re)produced and performed (Ammaturo 2016; Kates 2003), for both identity-related and political reasons. In other words, also social categories that have suffered, and still suffer, from gender inequalities seem reluctant to dismiss gender.

Advancing gender discourses within Consumption, Markets & Culture

Consumption, Markets & Culture has not only supported, but heralded consumer research on gender. As such, the journal has published a number of articles over time (to date, 274 gender-related results appear on the journal’s web site), from Winders’ 1997 article to Gopaldas and Siebert’s 2018 work. Retracing this conversation exceeds our aims. Here, we more modestly wish to confront the 2003 special issue dedicated to “Consumption, Gender, and Identity” and edited by Jonathan Schroeder – the second special issue in CMC’s history – with the current one.

Fifteen years later, some focal concerns have remained. Researchers are still engaged in deepening their understanding of intersectionality. In the original issue, two articles were already debating the interdependence between gender and ethnicity (Friend and Thompson 2003) and between gender and cultural identity as related to global consumer culture (Maxwell 2003). At this regard, we note two main changes: (1) in 2003, intersectional studies did not overtly address intersectionality, which has become an explicit tenet only afterwards (Gopaldas and DeRoy 2015); and, (2) today’s studies on gender are almost unimaginable outside an intersectional approach (i.e. intersectionality has become part of researchers’ mind frame). Other preoccupations that have remained include attention for gender(ed) representations in advertising (Stole 2003), gender performativity (Kates 2003), and gender-specific policies (Veeck, Flurry, and Jiang 2003).

A few, notable aspects have radically changed. First, consumer research on gender has moved from identity politics to politics, thus reflecting a shift from micro-level to meso-/macro-level analysis (cf. Steinfield et al. for an example in this issue). As a result, research has also become less descriptive of how gender combines with subject positions to acquire almost militant tones, in line with increasing interest for consumer research’s transformative effects (Davis and Pechmann 2013). Second, consumer research on gender has turned from the doing to the undoing of gender (Butler 1990). While a significant body of works still considers how gender is relentlessly made – in terms of finalities, forces, meanings, and outcomes – a significant amount of studies is also addressing the dismantling of gender. The two closing articles in this issue offer intriguing viewpoints on both the societal (cf. Molander et al.) and the subjective undoing of gender (cf. Seregina). Third, and quite inevitably, consumer research on gender has expanded from just physical to also digital environments. For example, feminism’s fourth wave (Maclaran 2015) is centered on the adaptation of feminist movements to the digital scene. In this issue, three articles frontally address digitalization in relation to gender. Takhar and Pemberton analyse how fertility web sites build multimodal narratives to deceive customers through distorted gender representations. Matich, Ashman, and Parsons provide a rich analysis of the cross-effects between online discourses and off-line (dis)empowerment of women in the context of female body’s social interpretation. Seregina follows the potentiality of the web to illuminate ludic gender performativity within a role-playing online community.

Concluding remarks and content organization

We draw three simple conclusions, which we connect to matching interpretations of gender studies. First, gender has not vanished over time. It has simply, and relentlessly, kept on changing – what we label the “gender after gender” dynamic. This may depend on the difficulties of getting rid of gender – think of dominant groups’ interest in defending their economic and social privileges (Lipsitz 2006) – and/or on the intention of maintaining it for a mix of affective, communal, historical, and political motives. This leads to expect from gender research the capacity of endlessly providing an updated representation of gender transformations.

Second, attempts to fix gender inequalities are never conclusive, nor are achievements gained for the last time. Think of recently granted civil partnerships for homosexual couples in Italy (2016) and the even more recent electoral declarations of some right-wing Italian parties promising their abrogation (2018). Elaborating on Goffman’s idea of “gender arrangement,” Macé (2015) points out that in Europe the transformation of employment, family, individualistic consumption and the attempts to lessen gender inequalities result in new forms of “after-patriarchy”. Gender research would then be more oriented to monitor social justice and deconstruct social and market discourses that can undermine gender parity (read, equal opportunities in economic and daily life).

Third, for those believing that gender is obsolete and harmful, ad hoc fights to expand gender minorities’ civic and market rights would never be conclusive, since those fights maintain gender (differences) at their very center. Hence, they paradoxically nurture the enemy. Since 2011, some schools in Sweden have started experimenting the foundations of a gender-neutral society. In these schools, boys and girls share the same spaces (e.g. the same toilets), expressive opportunities (games and activities are not gendered), and are left free to form their own (gender) identity (schoolteachers call them by name or by using the genderless pronoun “hen”) (Hebblethwaite 2011). On a more systematic level, the weakening of gender discrimination could come through gender fragmentation and intersectionality. Both would help make gender less controllable, predictable, and normative. Thanks to intersectionality, identity positions and social representations would not depend on a single dimension (gender), but on the intersection of more dimensions. An interdependent appraisal of these dimensions would also limit the risk of attributing disproportionate importance to a single dimension (Gopaldas and DeRoy 2015). Thanks to fragmentation, each of these dimensions would not bring univocal meanings, but a variety of alternative meanings (Butler 1990). Fragmentation and intersectionality are thus different though similarly spirited forces, driving gender towards its attenuation and, even, disintegration. Quoting Stuart Hall, if we cannot undermine the foundational importance of representations – according to him, the key moment in the circuit of culture – by multiplying representations of the same object (here, gender), we radically reduce the negative effects deriving from those representations (e.g. discrimination, stereotyping, and stigma). From this perspective, gender studies would aim at both expanding gender discourses and exploring ways to overcome them.

These concluding remarks lead us to identify three orders of consumer research on gender: (1) representational, driven by the will of constantly updating gender representations embedded in societal and market changes; (2) transformative, driven by the will of maintaining gender achievements and contrasting gender injustice; and, (3) critical, driven by the will of undoing gender and exploring the potential of a gender-neutral market and world. While none of the articles included in the special issue is reducible to a single order of consumer research on gender, we propose the following content organization, which we ground on our appraisal of each article’s core contribution. Readers as well as authors may see different possible matches.

Representing gender transformations

Elaborating upon Barbara Stern’s notion of “rhetrickery,” a dishonest use of rhetoric, Takhar and Pemberton extend it to the digital context of fertility web sites. Through a visual and textual analysis of online discourses and their rhetorical construction, which companies operating in the assisted reproductive technologies industry put in place, they reveal how marketing uses gender instrumentally. By leveraging upon discourses of consumer empowerment, which result from ideals of liberated men and women in the tech era, these companies rather perpetuate oppressive discourses mystified within their multimodal assaults. In doing so, they document how progressive gender representations can be reverted to conservative gender practices.

By addressing the online conversations and digital campaigns that the #freethenipple movement has promoted, Matich, Ashman, and Parsons provide an intriguing illustration of how contemporary feminists (i.e. fourth wave feminists) are reframing discussion about the female body. While #freethenipple helps re-signify the female body in sharp opposition to patriarchal associations (mothering and sexual fetish), it unintentionally concurs to reproduce patriarchal uses of the female body due to its commodification. From this perspective, the authors conclude that the digital environment may not facilitate changes in the real world, when it comes to gender.

Contrasting gender inequalities and stereotypes

Zanette and Brito provide a nuanced discussion about the strategies that plus-size consumers undertake to accommodate bodily norms they experience in markets (i.e. the fashion system) and at a societal level. While former works emphasize resistance strategies and privilege the perspective of empowered agents (e.g. fatshionistas and fashion bloggers), this article accounts for a form of “complicit resistance,” where compliance to norms (subjectification, in Foucauldian terms) combines with attenuated forms of reaction to institutional pressures (Foucault’s idea of biopower). In doing so, gender inequalities are attenuated though not overcome.

Contributing to both acculturation and matricentric feminism theory, Rojas Gaviria, Cardoso, Scaraboto, and De Araujo Gil provide a vibrant account of the role schools play as an often-hostile acculturation agent for immigrant mothers in Chile. Good schools are key to optimize children’s chances of accessing the “good life.” Leveraging upon this power, said schools normalize prescriptive mothering rituals – what the authors label “mama profesión colegio” (“professional school mom”) – which these women (and mothers) can only partially contrast. In line with Zanette and Brito, they also document states of attenuated consumer resistance. In their empirical context, however, gender inequalities emerge from the trade-off between personal empowerment as women and children’s well-being.

Steinfield and colleagues locate gender inequalities at the intersection between the meso-/macro-level of institutions framing social marketing actions to support contraception in Uganda and the micro-level gender relations hindering the effectiveness of social marketing actions. Through a quasi-ethnographic fieldwork, they unveil how patriarchy, which men exerts over women, and control over knowledge, which mothers exert over daughters, reproduce power asymmetries between sexes and across generations. Their work points to a representation of the agency/structure discourse that is less radical, and more conversational.

Overcoming gender

Molander, Kleppe, and Östberg draw from the Swedish context to provide empirical evidence of how parenting roles and representations are becoming more gender-neutral in the country. They connect the policy level, which already grants equal parenting rights to men and women, with that of visual culture. To do so, they refer to a largely acclaimed photographic project, the Swedish Dads book, through which the Swedish photographer Johan Bävman first documented and then made public representations of home parenting engaging men. Their contribution is threefold. First, they provide evidence about how gender neutrality requires interconnected actions (policy, arts, marketing) to succeed. Second, they show how gender-neutrality can become a marketing driver to promote a country (or a brand). Third, they prove how gender-neutral parental roles can conquer other cultural territories, thus activating a self-feeding process.

Grounded on the performance methodology of crossplay in LARP (live action role-playing), Seregina’s article offers an elegantly woven argument about the undoing of gender at the subjective level. The author deploys a Butlerian performative perspective on gender, yet from a reversed angle. Instead of looking at how people perform their gender, she focuses on how people perform their opposite gender in online gaming. In doing so, she unveils the subjective strategies to foster self-reflexivity about one’s gender, which ultimately makes a person more capable of critically thinking about his/her gender – in this sense, to become more gender-free. She also locates considerations about the undoing of gender beyond classic categories of gender injustices, politics, and power, to rather explore it within a ludic context.

Reviewers for this special issue

Søren Askegaard, University of Southern Denmark, Denmark

Emma Banister, The University of Manchester, UK

Stéphane Borraz, IAE Paris, Sorbonne Business School, France

Marylouise Caldwell, The University of Sydney Business School, Australia

Benedetta Cappellini, Royal Holloway, University of London, UK

Andreas Chatzidakis, Royal Holloway, University of London, UK

Franck Cochoy, University of Toulouse, France

Bernard Cova, KEDGE Business School, France

Anglea Cruz, Monash University, Australia

Andrea Davies, University of Leicester, UK

Hélène de Burgh-Woodman, The University of Notre Dame, Australia

Jimmy Draper, University of Michigan, USA

Güliz Ger, Bikent University, Turkey

Rika Houston, California State University, USA

Elif Izberk-Bilgin, University of Michigan-Dearborn, USA

Annamma Joy, University of British Columbia, Canada

Ingeborg Astrid Kleppe, NHH – Norwegian School of Economics, Norway

Marius Luedicke, Cass Business School, UK

Pauline Maclaran, Royal Holloway, University of London, UK

Diane Martin, RMIT University, Australia

Ilona Mikkonen, Aalto University, Finland

Yuko Minowa, LIU Brooklyn, USA

Risto Moisio, California State University Long Beach, USA

Jacob Östberg, Stockholm University, Sweden

Nacima Ourahmoune, KEDGE Business School, France

Marie-Agnès Parmentier, HEC Montréal, Canada

Liz Parson, University of Liverpool, UK

Lisa Peñaloza, KEDGE Business School, France

Anissa Pomies, emlyon business school, France

Fatima Regany, Université Lille 2, France

Diego Rinallo, KEDGE Business School, France

Daiane Scaraboto, Pontifical Catholic University of Chile, Chile

Leslie Scattolin, ESCP Europe, France

Katherine Sredl, Loyola University Chicago, USA

Laurel A. Steinfield, Bentley University, USA

Lorna Stevens, University of Bath, UK

Jennifer Takhar, Université Paris-Sorbonne (Paris IV), France

Linda Tuncay Zayer, Loyola University Chicago, USA

Acknowledgements

The guest editors wish to express their appreciation to Jonathan Schroeder and Dannie Kjeldgaard for their support and guidance all along the preparation of the special issue. They also express their gratitude to ESCP Europe for having hosted the 13th Gender, Marketing, and Consumer Research Conference in 2016, from which the special issue originates. They also warmly thank Leslie Scattolin and Michele Corengia for their valuable help in the preparation of the issue. Finally, they are thankful to all authors and reviewers for their impressive commitment.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

Elisabeth Tissier-Desbordes is Emeritus Professor of Marketing at ESCP Europe, Paris. She has also been Editor of Décision Marketing, a leading marketing journal in France. Her research lays in the domain of gender – in terms of conceptualization, representation in advertisements, and measurement – and in the field of family decision-making and consumption.

Luca M. Visconti is Professor of Marketing at USI, Lugano (Switzerland), and Affiliate Professor at ESCP Europe, Paris (France). He directs USI’s Master of Science in Marketing and Transformative Economy, in line with his research interests revolving around market vulnerability (ethnicity, gender, poverty) and TCR. He is also passionate about (luxury) branding and brand storytelling.