Neoliberalism, Consumer Culture and Feminism in the Global Beauty Market

Peiqing Gu

1006144405

MDSB05

University of Toronto Scarborough

 Neoliberalism, Consumer Culture and Feminism in the Global Beauty Market

This research intends to analyze the ideological practice of feminism with reference to

the challenges and changes encountered by women in the industrial practice of the globalized

beauty market. Regarding feminist activism and consumerism as a cultural factor that influences

the construction of media semiotics, the analysis of this paper will focus on the interplay between

the female appearance presented in the mainstream media contents and the market tendencies of

women's beauty products influenced by the contemporary globalization of the cultural media and

real economy networks. Media practices in advertising, product design and marketing/sales

strategy are the main critique objectives under the proposed research topic, which are going to be

discussed and illustrated through detailed case analysis within the scope of media studies and

globalization. The discussion is constituted upon two case studies, which includes the analysis

conducted by Jean Kilbourne through the project Killing Us Softly on the oppressive symbolism

found in American commodity advertising from 1970s-2010s, the market tendency of the beauty

industry indicated by the Netflix documentary Broken: Makeup Mayhem.

Assumptions

Neoliberalism

The basic theory of neoliberalism is based on the capital market and economic freedom,

and it is an important philosophy for Western countries to achieve economic recovery from the

depression in the 1930s in the middle and late twentieth century. In the contemporary

globalization process of the American hegemony, neoliberal philosophy tends to be understood

as an economic environment similar to the "American Dream", that is, the freedom of market

trade and the opposition to government interventions such as price control in the market.

Meanwhile, neoliberalism is a philosophy of alienation. It emphasizes the negative freedom of

people in the capital market, namely the freedom of people to purchase commodities. Such

liberty is imposed on consumers by the capitalist system, not inherent autonomy. Therefore, it is

reasonable to argue that the practice of neoliberal ideas has deepened class contradictions and

social inequalities.

Consumerism

Value in contemporary capitalist economies is validated by the exchange between

production and consumption. Exemplified by Marx's account of abstract labor, labor itself has

exchange value and can be bought and sold just like commodities. Value is not created by labour

alone. The value of labor can not be recognized by society unless it is exchanged. Consumerism

is built on such uniformity. In the context of capitalism, class struggle focuses on the

reproduction process, and the value expression of labor and capital cannot be separated from

consumption. In other words, consumption is also equivalent to a kind of value-creating labor.

(Ivanova, 2011)

Neoliberal Feminism

Neoliberalism emphasizes the relationship between labor value and capital class, thus

often ignoring the intersectionality between the factors that lead to oppression. Not only that, but

the neoliberalist account of consumption leads to a false sense of feminist practice. For example,

bourgeois women deny that women are oppressed in society and claim that everyone can achieve

their goals as long as they are willing to afford the input of capital and status. Neoliberal

Feminism is an account of false consciousness. It wrongly promotes the negative liberty, which

is the freedom from the obstacles leveraged by the social structure of the patriarchal culture, as a

quest that can be achieved through the practice of positive liberty, namely the autonomy to utilize

one's capital and power to achieve the access to more in a hierarchical society. Under the premise
of liberating women from subordination, the influence of neoliberalism ideology on the feminist

movement is embodied in the social consciousness that believes in the power of consumption,

which can be simply put as the idea that problems are solvable by inputs of capitals.

The Global Marketplace

The modern international relations and the exchange and development of international

culture are shrouded under the hegemonic practice with the United States as the dominance. As

far as the international beauty market is concerned, American brands not only occupy a

considerable market share, but also successfully lead the rise of the global beauty industry

through commercial expansion methods such as overseas shelves and remote manufacturing.

Under the influence of social media and e-commerce platforms, corresponding changes have

been made regarding the marketing strategy, advertising content and brand-user relationship of

the beauty industry along with the social consciousness practices of mainstream mass media.

After the establishment of the World Trade Organization in 1995, the disciplinary gaze imposed

on women has been increasingly transmitted through the practice of stereotypes and media

routines in the globalization of commercial advertisements and consumer culture. The social

structure and female aesthetic standards based on various discriminative forces such as racism

and sexism in developed countries in Europe and the United States have also been applied to the

transnational beauty market.

Case Study: Killing Us Softly

Killing Us Softly is a documentary series filmed based on Jean Kilbourne’s study on

advertisements and disciplinary norms of femininity. Serving as one of the earliest scholarships

that leads to the contemporary media and gender studies, it presents a significant content analysis

of the disciplines imposed on women through the female body illustrated by media
advertisements from the late 1960s to the early 21st century. As Kilbiurne said, although the

feminist movement has gradually been recognized and accepted by all walks of life in society,

the gender oppression embodied by the objectification of women's bodies has not diminished but

increased in social changes of over 30 years. The idealistic female beauty has become

increasingly unrealistic with the advancement of media producing technology, such as photoshop

and video editing. Fabricated images of women, such as extremely slender limbs with big

breasts, no wrinkles even in middle age, perfectly proportioned facial features, etc. are

internalized as a self-monitored discipline among groups of women. As Kilbourne mentioned in

her analysis, the image of women mediated through advertising tends to be unrealizable for the

majority of females since the woman of absolute flawlessness is created by putting together the

body parts that belong to different women. It is difficult for the audience to incorporate such

consciousness into their perceptions, given the fact that the image seen is one configured female

whose every single body part is flawlessly constructed, instead of several women with

“imperfect” and average appearance.

The examples included in Kilbourne's analysis are primarily representations of European

and American popular culture. Targeting American advertising media as the primary condition,

Kilbourne's main criticism of idealistic female beauty lies in its deepening of sexist oppression.

The so-called idealistic female beauty is actually an encouraged and recognized account of

femininity, which is a self-contradictory concept internalized as a disciplined social norm. Such a

stereotypical and normative expectancy can be explained by Marilyn Frye's account of

oppression, which emphasizes the notion that women are being pressured by disciplinary power

from two opposing viewpoints under the dominating gaze in a patriarchal society. According to

Kilbourne, the women featured in American advertisements were supposed to display both
sexuality and innocence. In Frye's evaluation, not only is such contradiction almost impossible to

accomplish in practice, but women's sexual activity and sexual inactivity are both criticized,

punished, and punished by society's discipline of women.

Advertising Disciplinary Femininity

Argued by Sandra Bartky in Foucault, Femininity, and the Modernization of Patriarchal

Power, despite the recognition of sexual inequality, women still willingly submit themselves to

the patriarchal hierarchy of sexist oppression due to the internalized influence of the disciplinary

male gaze. Women are constrained by the structural hierarchy of oppressive forces, which means

they are not only facing judgement from the heterosexual gaze of men, but also criticisms from

the internal hierarchy developed within groups of women. Such circumstances are addressed as a

significant feature of oppression in Frye’s account in the essay Oppression, which claims that the

oppressed groups contribute to reinforce the oppression by competing within the subordinated

group. For instance, women are constantly subjected to the competition of their respective

gendered social identities. Whether voluntary or not, women will be regarded as participants in

the competition among mothers, wives, and women in the workplace. Moreover, women tend to

obtain satisfaction from winning in such contests, especially the rewards that fulfills their social

and esteem needs. Such competition is violent and is used only against female members of

society. Such violence has also been extended in the process of global network technology

modernization. Not only that, because of the interference of consumer culture and neoliberal

market dynamics, the means of gender oppression and feminist practices have produced false

consciousness and ideological illusions in the spread of mass social consciousness. It is worth

noting that in the modern globalized network, the practice of neoliberal market discipline can be

harmful. Not only because the social media network interaction under the hegemony of
neoliberalism is likely to bring congnitive distortion in the construction of social consciousness,

but the practice of free trade it promotes will also lead to practical public health hazards aimed at

women.

Case Study: The Makeup Mayhem

Business in the global beauty industry is rapidly rising. According to relevant data, the

global cosmetics market will reach US$262.21 billion in 2022, and will maintain a steady growth

trend until 2030. Among them, female end users accounted for more than 66%, and women's

investment in skin care, makeup, and hairdressing products continued to increase with the global

aging trend. The first episode of a Netflix-produced documentary series called Broken, Makeup

Mayhem, sheds light on the current practical environment of the global beauty market. Women's

consumption motivation in the beauty market is deeply guided by consumerism and the

structural oppression imposed on women, which are cultivated into the "panoptical male gaze" in

Bartky's description of disciplinary power. Women are constantly pressured by criticism of their

appearance in social interactions. As such pressure is internalized into discipline that regulates

oneself, investment in the beauty industry has become a form of compulsory consumption for

most women in society. At the same time, having a specific popular beauty product is also

endowed with symbolic significance. Since the strategy of scarcity marketing is broadly adopted

by an increasing number of beauty product suppliers, the consumption of beauty products

becomes a conspicuous consumption among women. As the girl in the documentary said in an

interview facing the camera, owning a hit product in today's society is a status point. "It says

something about you. It says you can afford it; and you take your look seriously; and you are

using what everybody else does.” Such a motivation demonstrates the practical reality illustrated

by Bartky, that is, the form of disciplinary power is unique to modern times; it mainly integrates
power into the structure of the self by transforming people's thinking. The internalized

oppressive power placed on women regarding their looks and their status in the struggle of the

class is embodied by ownership and application of beauty products, as to realize the automatic

power enforcement of patriarchal culture.

Falsely Transmitted Feminism

The media practice of the beauty industry includes feminist expression, which encourages

women to break through conventional stereotypes and express their individuality with more

diverse colors. However, influenced by the consumerist society, this idea of ​feminism tends to be

misunderstood and misapplied. For example, according to the self-report of Marlena Stell, a

makeup influencer interviewed in the documentary, beauty makeup is not only a field for her to

display her artistic creation, but also a way to help her get rid of the inferiority complex of

society’s criticism of women’s bodies. Stell feels that people's first impression of her has shifted

from her body shape to her exquisite eye makeup, yet such transformation only changes the form

of oppression instead of solving the problem of violence which are permitted on women under

structural gender discrimination. In the case of Stell, if she ever felt inferior because her figure

did not meet the ideal female beauty standards, she would also feel distressed because her eye

makeup did not meet the ideal effect. The media content representatives of the beauty industry

may have expanded the norms of femininity and the ideal form of female beauty, but they have

not liberated women from the cage of male gaze. Instead, it creates an ideological illusion, driven

by consumer culture, that buying and using beauty products can contribute to ending gender

oppression.

The Global Marketplace of Counterfeit Goods

 As shown in this documentary, due to scarcity marketing, high consumer attention and

other reasons, popular products in the beauty market are often in short supply. Today, when the

international e-commerce network is highly popular, those consumers who have not bought the

desired product will choose to buy products sold by amateurs through online trading platforms.

Due to the profit model of such e-commerce platforms, it is impossible to implement strict

review systems or regulatory measures, coupled with the influx of overseas goods in a free trade

market environment, such a situation gives unscrupulous merchants loose conditions to sell

counterfeit makeup goods. Counterfeit makeup has no sanitation license, the raw materials and

production environment are unknown, and most of their outputs are full of germs and harmful

substances. These products are shipped to countries around the world where consumers

unknowingly buy them, leading to disease. Since the main consumers of the beauty industry are

women, women will correspondingly become the main victims in the trade of counterfeit

makeup.

Discussion

In today's social activities, cosmetics have become a must-have for almost all women in

the world. As women's education levels and participation in public affairs, business and political

fields have increased, beauty products have become a way for women to demonstrate their

qualifications in the workplace. It is not only a representation of creativity and feminine beauty,

but also an integral part of professionalism. At first glance, there seems to be an inextricable link

between the growth of the beauty market and the achievements of the feminist movement.

However, the consumption incentive encouraged by the feminist movement is not the motivation

to end sexist oppression. Instead, it reflects the deepening exploitation of women in

contemporary class society. With the popularity of social media networks in global mass culture,
the power to guide cultural hegemony is gradually expanding among civilian users, and content

creators and media influencers are also recognized as professional types. Female social media

users often only choose to show their decent and delicate side. A selfie shows the product of

repeated shooting hundreds of times with superimposed filters and beauty effects. The process of

generating this content is almost never published on the web, and since then, the ideological

illusion of the performed authenticity is fabricated and added to the consciousness of social

media users. In other words, social media contents tend to present people with the idealized way

of life, namely how one's life “should be.” With the trend of social network globalization, the

advertising audience and consumer customer base of popular beauty products have expanded to

the whole world. At the same time, social movements have also expanded their influence to the

world through social media platforms. Judging from the above two cases, the reason why the

degree of global oppression of women has not decreased but increased in the global network

society is inseparable from the ideological practice of neoliberalism feminism in the process of

globalization. Therefore, it can be concluded that the process of internationalization under

neoliberalism has a hindering effect on the dissemination of feminist ideas. Such a relationship is

necessary to be considered for the global practice of feminist activism in the future.
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