Gender and Sexual Embodiment

January 30, 2020 2:35 PM

- Gender (in) Marketing

○ Girl toys vs. boy toys
▪ Baby dolls vs. building, Lego cars
- The value of gender
○ Marketers use gender to explain market
▪ How to access these 'new' markets?
□ ID key features of target markets
□ Appeal to identify, value etc. of target market
▪ Gender-based research seen as necessary. Why?
□ Helps (male) markets understand/reach female consumers**
○ Early consumer research equates sex difference with gender
▪ Suggests women and men are fundamentally/essentially different
□ Bases this difference on biology (genitalia at birth)
▪ Assumes all women are essentially the same
□ Driven by the same (biological) motivations, needs, etc.
***markets shaped their products and advertising
▪ Early examples of consumer research
□ "don’t worry darkling, you didn’t burn the beer!"
□ "is there a man in your life?"
- Feminist critique (1960s onwards)
○ Challenge portrayals of women (and men!)
▪ Assumptions that:
□ All men think, act, and feel a particular (singular) way
□ Entirely different from the way women think, act, and feel
 Predictable, reliable, standardizable
○ Emphasis on social construction (and conditioning)
▪ Gender identity is not restricted to biology
▪ Gender ID as a range of 'masculine' and ' feminine' traits
○ Draws on sociology and anthropology to
▪ Understand how gender ID has been informed
▪ Challenge accepted identities from gender essentialism
▪ Distinguish gender identities from gender essentialism
□ Why might this (gender ID vs. essentialism) be important?
- Reframing Masculinity
○ Men recognized as consumers (no just producers)
○ Explore the 'new' (metrosexual) man through consumption
▪ Challenge traditional/restrictive forms of male/masculine ID
▪ Products and campaigns aimed at this new aesthetic
▪ Adopt/reinterpret traditionally "feminized" domains
□ e.g. consumption/shopping behaviour re: fashion & grooming)
***understand, gain access to - and grow- this audience
- Sexual embodiment and consumption
○ How do we 'embody' our identity?
▪ What are some of the practices or processes involved?
○ Learning to be more aware/deliberate with our actions
▪ Recognize how consumption informs/reflects our ID
▪ Appreciates embodied experience/identity as a source of knowledge (to test
validity of norms)
○ Social science sensibility and approach
▪ Not just about identifying 'what' (something is or does)
▪ It is about identifying into the social and cultural influences
▪ Who where how why what
○ Social science research into identity might ask:

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○ Social science research into identity might ask:
▪ Are stereotypes true/valid?
□ Or have we been conditioned to believe they are true?
□ How? To what effect?
▪ Have stereotypes and depictions of identity contributed to/perpetuated ill-
informed beliefs? And even injustice?
○ Sex and bodies are commodified differently on the basis of gender, sexuality,
class, ethnicity and age
▪ Sue Scott "sexual embodiment and consumption"
○ What does it mean to have sex and bodies "commodified'?

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