Femvertising and Postfeminist Discourse: Advertising to Break Menstrual Taboos in China

Abstract

This article investigates three commercials for Libresse sanitary napkins that aired in China in the transnational brand’s marketing to counter menstrual taboos. Employing feminist critical discourse analysis (CDA), we interpret Libresse’s efforts in China as exemplary of the appropriation of femvertising, or women’s empowerment advertising. Our findings indicate that Libresse’s commercials attempted to eschew explicit menstrual stereotypes and taboos, emphasizing instead individual desires and autonomy, with an implicit heterosexist message intended to involve men in the agenda. Libresse’s femvertising strategies in China have been influenced by social and cultural factors—primarily, industry self-regulation, menstrual taboos, and the development of feminism. The commercials create a postfeminist discourse that has generated contradictory gender discourses, both liberating and constraining women in an elaborate dance that should be understood in relation to postfeminism, advertising, and global capitalism.

Keywords:

• China
• femvertising
• menstrual taboos
• period poverty
• postfeminist discourse

Acknowledgment

The authors are thankful to the two anonymous reviewers for constructive comments and editor Claire Sisco King for invaluable feedback and editing.

Disclosure statement

The authors have no potential conflicts of interest to disclose.

Notes

1 It is of importance to note that not all people who identify as women menstruate, and not all people who menstruate identify as women (Bobel, 2010). “Menstruators” include not only cisgender women but also transmen, gender nonbinary individuals, and others (Chrisler et al., 2016; Bobel & Fahs, 2020; Frank, 2020; Rydström, 2020).

2 At the time of this writing, these commercials were available online at the following URLs: A1, https://v.qq.com/x/page/u0927m767t1.html; A2, https://v.qq.com/x/page/g0973a4y35e.html; A3, http://n.miaopai.com/media/CIJ2eN4M8GoWrt5236Y5uCxmQ9XAr9qB.

3 Influenced by Engels’s theory of women’s liberation, the Chinese Communist Party imposed gender equality as a state policy in the early 1950s by bringing women out of home and into social production for China’s socialist construction (Wang, 2005). The top-down policy has been criticized for “gender erasure” (Yang, 1999), in which gender “became an unmarked and neutralized category” (p. 41) and was encompassed by class politics. A significant exemplification was that women’s dress and personal style reached an extremely unisex form, diminishing women’s self-identity and liberation movements (Yang, 1999; see also Chen, 2016).

4 We interpreted Libresse’s advertising in Shenzhen subway as part of its mobile marketing efforts rather than as traditional mass-media marketing.