Doing and denying sexism: online responses to a New Zealand feminist campaign against sexist advertising

Abstract

In 2012 a New Zealand feminist group launched a campaign against a series of local beer advertisements they deemed “retro-sexist.” The campaign generated media coverage across a range of viewpoints, but drew a largely negative response from the online public. This article analyses a comprehensive corpus of 753 online comments responding to news of the campaign. We discuss the dominant discursive constructions of gender and of feminists, and the ways these were deployed to trivialise the campaign, demonise the feminist campaigners, and depoliticise the issues. The comments overall, ironically, simultaneously disavow and perform sexism in this online public space. This imbrication of the denial and doing of sexism creates a hostile reception for public feminist voices, potentially dampening the field of possibility for action against sexism within mediated culture.

Keywords:

• Sexism
• feminism
• online abuse
• postfeminism
• activism

Acknowledgements

We are grateful to Helen Madden for assistance with data analysis and feedback on an earlier version of the paper, Grace Single for assistance with data coding, Anna Gatland for help with data collection, Ginny Braun and Margie Wetherell for comments on elements of the data; and members of the School of Psychology’s Psychology and Social Issues group, and in particular Octavia Calder-Dawe, for helpful discussions around the data and analysis in progress.