Gendered Bodies: representations of femininity and masculinity in advertising practices

This chapter shows the differences between a common, taken-for-granted understanding of gendered representations in advertising, and a cultural perspective, which takes the culturally and socially constructed nature of gender into consideration. The chapter demonstrates that marketing managers may take one of four approaches in relation to their advertising strategies. These the authors define as traditional/complacent, traditional/subversive, cultural/complacent or cultural/subversive. These various positions are illustrated with examples from contemporary advertising campaigns. By sensitizing managers to wider macro issues, it is argued that more informed choices can be made about whether to sustain the status quo of conventional gendered representations (the complacent strategy) or whether to challenge these traditional representations and thereby offer something new instead (the subversive strategy).