Reproducing “rhetrickery” in online fertility marketing: harnessing the “rhetoric of the possible”

ABSTRACT

This article addresses the gap in research on visual and narrative persuasion in online fertility marketing contexts and reveals their reliance on rhetorical ruses embedded in the language of “choice” and “empowerment”. We assess four websites targeting women and men who have experienced infertility and expose their “digirhetrickery”, or use of deceptive rhetoric in digital space which exploits gendered stereotypes of the female body in ways that ultimately mislead their target markets about assisted reproductive technologies (ARTs) and the “liberatory” potential they offer. We advance digital rhetoric as an analytical method to the field of consumer research in order to engage in a reflexive analysis that reveals these underhand ideological operations. As “authorial voices” and narrative agents in digital advertising discourse are more cunningly subterranean, this study shows how the instrumentalization of “consumer empowerment” has become increasingly hyperbolic with particularly problematic consequences for infertile women consumers.

KEYWORDS:

• Fertility marketing
• testimonials
• digital rhetoric
• gender
• assisted reproductive technologies
• discourse analysis

Notes on contributors

Jennifer Takhar is Associate Professor of Marketing and Communication at the ISG Business School in Paris and a research associate at Paris-Sorbonne (Celsa). Her most recent work looks at gamete commodification and the marketing and advertising of assisted reproductive technologies (ARTs) in digital space. Her research is attentive to the rhetorical and literary strategies used to persuade consumers.

Kelly Pemberton is Associate Professor of Religion and Women’s Studies at The George Washington University in Washington, D.C., and advisor to the M.A. Program in Hinduism and Islam in the department of religion. She received an M.A. in international studies and comparative religion from the University of Washington, Seattle, and a Ph.D. in religion from Columbia University. Her most recent work focuses on gender activism in Asia and the Middle East as well as Islamic medicine and modes of consumption.