Reframing gender and feminist knowledge construction in marketing and consumer research: missing feminisms and the case of men and masculinities

Abstract

Gender has been theorised and studied in many ways and across different disciplines. Although a number of these theorisations have been recognised and adopted in marketing and consumer research, the significance of feminism in knowledge construction has largely remained what we would call ‘unfinished’. Based on a critical reframing of gender research in marketing and consumer research, in dialogue with feminist theory, this article offers theoretical and practical suggestions for how to reinvigorate these research efforts. The analysis highlights dominant theorisations of gender, relating to gender as variable, difference and role; as fundamental difference and structuring; and as cultural and identity constructions. This reframing emphasises various neglected or ‘missing feminisms’, including queer theory; critical race, intersectional and transnational feminisms; material-discursive feminism; and critical studies on men and masculinities. A more detailed discussion of the latter, as a relatively new, growing and politically contentious area, is further developed to highlight more specifically which feminist and gender theories are mainly in use in marketing and consumer research and which are little or not used. In the light of this, it is argued that marketing and related disciplines have thus far largely neglected several key contemporary gender and feminist theorisations, particularly those that centre on gender power relations. The potential impact of these theoretical frames on transdisciplinary studies in marketing and consumer research and research agenda(s) is discussed.

Keywords:

• gender
• feminism
• critical studies on men and masculinities
• marketing
• consumer research

Acknowledgements

The authors thank the special issue editors and anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments and suggestions in developing this article.

Notes

¹ These include approaches based on biological and psychological sexual difference; social psychological measures of masculinity/femininity scales; anthropological and sociological analysis of sex/gender roles; ethnomethodological and phenomenological investigations; more structural(ist) societal framings of gender along with associated structural contextualisations of plural gender practices; historical approaches to the category of gender; constructionist, discursive, deconstructive, textual and visual theoretical positionings; and material-discursive approaches, and its recent offshoots, such as ‘new materialist’ and ‘posthumanist’ approaches (see Hearn & Husu, 2011). In addition, there are major strands of theorising from global, transnational, postcolonial, intersectional, STS (science and technology studies), queer and crip theorising, as well as various attempts to combine or transcend these different approach.

² ‘1. Women demand equal access to the symbolic order. Liberal feminism. Equality. Women 2. Women reject the male symbolic order in the name of difference. Radical feminism. Femininity extolled. 3. (…) Women reject the dichotomy between masculine and feminine as metaphysical.’ (Moi, 1985, p. 12).

³ Comparison of these three traditions can also be made with the framework of the variety of feminisms across, first, functionalism and interpretivism, second, radical structuralism, and, third, radical humanism (Hearn & Parkin, 1983), based on Burrell and Morgan’s (1979) sociological paradigms (cf. Arndt, 1985).

⁴ Critical feminist biologists, such as Fausto-Sterling (2000), have developed sophisticated, grounded accounts of how biology does not conform to a two-sex female/male model but is much more variegated in many possible sexes.

⁵ The most important set of influences on CSMM has been propounded and developed by Connell and colleagues (Carrigan et al., 1985; Connell, 1995). This approach emphasises critique of sex role theory; use of a power-laden concept of masculinities located within patriarchy; men’s unequal relations to men, as well as men’s relations to women; and implications of gay scholarship and sexual hierarchies. More specifically, this has entailed distinctions between hegemonic, complicit, subordinated and marginalised (and sometimes other) masculinities; analysis of institutional/social, interpersonal and intrapsychic (psychodynamics) aspects of masculinities; and transformations and social change.

⁶ see also Mulvey (1975), Neale (1983), Cohan and Hark (2012).

⁷ For example, Aboim (2010); Clatterbaugh (1998); Cornwall and Lindisfarne (1994); Demetriou (2001); Hearn (1996, 2004, 2012b); Howson (2005); MacInnes (1998); McMahon (1993); Petersen (1998, 2003); Robinson (2003); Schippers (2007); Schwalbe (2014); Wetherell and Edley (1999); Whitehead (2002).

⁸ Apart from hegemonic masculinity, there have been explorations of ‘hegemonic heterosexual masculinity’ (Frank, 1987), ‘male hegemony’ (Cockburn, 1991), ‘the hegemonic male’ (Vale De Almeida, 1996), ‘hegemonic men’ (Dominelli & Gollins, 1997; Lorber, 2002), ‘hegemonic male sexuality’ (Mooney-Somers, 2005) and ‘the hegemony of men’ (Hearn, 2004). This involves re-examinations of the relevance of hegemony for CSMM from hegemonic masculinity to the hegemony of men, as far more taken-for-granted within gender hegemony (Aboim, 2010; Hearn, 2004; Howson, 2005). Specifically, the notion of men is far more hegemonic than masculinity. Masculinities may change but men’s individual and collective power may be little affected.

⁹ For example, in summarising feminist engagements with men and masculinities, Wiegman (2002) identified three dimensions: first, differences between women on how masculinity studies is constructed as positive or not for feminism, including rethinking sex-gender and the male bond; second, poststructuralist reconfiguring of the sex/gender relation, differences amongst men, and differences between masculinity and patriarchy; and third, female masculinity, and masculinity without men, through identification, not genetic corporeality.

¹⁰ Echoing Bettany et al.’s (2010) assertions on the disciplinary status of gender, feminist discussions that commenced during the early 1990s within the discipline have yet to advance sufficiently in relation to contemporary feminist transdisciplinary debates that focus on continued global, social and structural inequalities.

¹¹ This is very similar to what has happened with masculinities theory. Originally framed by Connell (1983) through a Gramscian approach to hegemony, the multiple uses by others since have often reduced masculinities to local practices and discourses, out of structural context and without attention to legitimacy in reproducing patriarchy (see Hearn, 2004, 2012b, pp. 594–595; Schwalbe, 2014). Masculinities can be discussed ad infinitum, but patriarchy is often taboo.

¹² To speak in marketing terms, feminism may be ‘incorrectly branded’ in terms of connecting with its political agenda, and thus without a clear ‘home’.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Jeff Hearn

Jeff Hearn is Professor of Management and Organization, Hanken School of Economics, Finland; Guest Faculty Research Professor in Humanities and Social Sciences, based in Gender Studies, Örebro University, Sweden; Professor of Sociology, University of Huddersfield, UK; and UK Academy Fellow in the Social Sciences. His latest books are Rethinking Transnational Men: Beyond, Between and Within Nations, co-edited with Marina Blagojević and Katherine Harrison (Routledge, 2013), and Men of the World: Genders, Globalizations, Transnational Times (Sage, 2015).

Wendy Hein

Wendy Hein is Lecturer in Marketing at Birkbeck, University of London. Her research focuses on gender, marketing and consumer research, particularly men and masculinities. Based on her ethnography of young men’s consumption practices in Scotland, she is also interested in innovative and ethnographic methodologies. She is the co-ordinator for the marketing discipline of the UN PRME gender equality working group, where current work focuses on integrating gender equality in marketing curricula and research. Her work has been presented at several North American ACR Conferences, ACR Gender, Marketing and Consumer Behaviour, Consumer Culture Theory and Interpretive Consumer Research conferences and has been published in Qualitative Marketing Research: An International Journal and the Journal of Marketing Management.

E [email protected]