Abstract
As the largest retailer of lingerie in the US, Victoria’s Secret has become a brand for promoting ‘sexy’ hyper-femininity. The brand’s annual lingerie show has long been a cultural spectacle. Since 2016, increasing numbers and varieties of Chinese cultural symbols have been seen on lingerie models at VS annual fashion show and the company stands accused of cultural appropriation. In this chapter, the focus is on the femvertising of VS advertisements, showing how the commercialised form of sexuality, with its promotion of sexiness as a positive, confident, and self-assured attitude, has updated neoliberal governmentally from disciplining women’s bodies to regulating women’s psychological life. This chapter shows not only how a specific type of sexually empowered postfeminist femininity is constructed and appropriated by the brand, but also brings a critical race perspective to the marketing practices of VS as it travels from the US to China.
I will first delineate the sexualised representation of lingerie models by situating them in relation to the contradictory nature of postfeminist media culture - a ‘double entanglement’ of feminist and anti-feminist ideas. Can the representation of hyper-femininity be seen as ‘women’s success’ or as retro-sexism in the era of postfeminism? (Angela McRobbie, ‘Postfeminism and Popular Culture’, Feminist Media Studies 4, no.3 (2004): 255.) Second, the way that VS, in seeking to secure market share in China, shifted from using mainstream Chinese-looking models to newer hyper-white imagery is examined. The chapter explores this shift by examining the work of two models: Liu Wen and He Sui, demonstrating the dynamics of female beauty in contemporary China. Furthermore, VS seeks to claim a racially and culturally diverse brand identity, but in fact uses highly restricted ideas of Chineseness. The collision and fusion of traditional Chinese culture with a sexualised aesthetic raises questions about gendered, racialised, and transnationalised power relations.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Similar content being viewed by others
Notes
- 1.
Althea A. Fung, ‘The Untold Truth of Victoria’s Secret’, The List (April 18, 2017). Accessed October 16, 2020, https://www.thelist.com/38724/untold-truth-victorias-secret/
- 2.
Silver-Greenberg Jessica, Rosman Katherine, Maheshwari Sapna, and Stewart James, ‘“Angels” in Hell: The Culture of Misogyny Inside Victoria’s Secret’, New York Times. (February 1, 2020). Accessed October 16, 2020. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/01/business/victorias-secret-razek-harassment.html
- 3.
Nina Åkestam, Sara Rosengren, and Micael Dahlen, ‘Advertising “Like a Girl”: Towards a Better Understanding of ‘Femvertising’ and Its Effects’, Psychology and Marketing 34, no.8 (2017): 795–806.
Sara Champlin, Yvette Sterbenk, Kasey Windels, and Maddison Poteet, ‘How brand-cause fit shapes real world advertising messages: a qualitative exploration of “femvertising”’, International Journal of Advertising 38, no. 8 (2019): 1240–1263.
Yang Feng, Huan Chen, and Li He, ‘Consumer Responses to Femvertising: A Data-mining Case of Dove’s ‘Campaign for Real Beauty’ on YouTube’, Journal of Advertising 48 (2019): 292–301.
Rosalind Gill and Ana Sofia Elias, ‘“Awaken your incredible”: Love your body discourses and postfeminist contradictions’, International Journal of Media and Cultural Politics 10, no.2 (2014): 179–188.
Fei Qiao and Ye Wang, ‘The myths of beauty, age, and marriage: femvertising by masstige cosmetic brands in the Chinese market’, Social Semiotics (2019): 1–23.
- 4.
Rosalind Gill, “From sexual objectification to sexual subjectification,” Feminist Media Studies 3, no.1 (2003).
Brian McNair, Striptease Culture: Sex, Media and the Democratisation of Desire (London: Routledge, 2002).
Brian McNair, Porno? Chic! How pornography changed the world and made it a better place (London and New York: Routledge, 2013).
- 5.
Sarah Banet-Weiser, Empowered: Popular Feminism and Popular Misogyny (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2018): 21.
- 6.
No VS fashion shows have taken place since 2019, so there is no available data after 2018.
- 7.
The term ‘postfeminism’ was first used in Susan Bolotin’s article ‘Voices from the Post-feminist Generation’ in New York Times on 17th October 1982. Postfeminism was used to refer to a new kind of politics which was about feminism but repudiating the anger and resentment associated with feminism.
- 8.
Angela McRobbie, The Aftermath of Feminism (London: Sage, 2009).
Yvonne Tasker and Diane Negra (eds.) Interrogating Postfeminism: Gender and the Politics of Popular Culture (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007).
- 9.
Susan Faludi, Backlash: The Undeclared War Against Women (Vintage: London, 1992).
Tasker&Negra, Interrogating Postfeminism, 1.
- 10.
McRobbie, The Aftermath of Feminism, 12.
- 11.
Rosalind Gill, ‘Postfeminist Media Culture’, European Journal of Cultural Studies 10, no.2 (2007): 147–66.
Michelle M. Lazar. ‘Entitled to consume: postfeminist femininity and a culture of post-critique’, Discourse and Communication 3, no.4 (2009): 371–400.
McRobbie, The Aftermath of Feminism.
- 12.
Ednie Kaeh Garrison, ‘U.S. Feminism-Grrrl Style! Youth (Sub)Cultures and the Technologics of the Third Wave’, Feminist Studies 26, no.1 (Spring, 2000).
- 13.
Anderson, Modern Misogyny.
- 14.
Zaslow, Feminism, Inc, 3.
- 15.
Glenn Ficarra and John Requa, Crazy, Stupid, Love (US: Warner Bros. Picture, 2011), film.
- 16.
Gill, ‘Postfeminist Media Culture’, 147.
- 17.
Sarah Banet-Weiser, Rosalind Gill and Catherine Rottenberg, ‘Postfeminism, popular feminism and neoliberal feminism? Sarah Banet-Weiser, Rosalind Gill and Catherine Rottenberg in conversation’, Feminist Theory, 21, no.1 (2020): 5.
- 18.
Tasker&Negra, Interrogating Postfeminism, 3.
- 19.
Joel Gwynne, ‘Japan, postfeminism and the consumption of sexual(ised) schoolgirls in male-authored contemporary manga’, Feminist Theory 14, no.3 (2013): 325–343.
- 20.
Simidele Dosekun, ‘For Western Girls Only? Post-feminism as transnational culture’, Feminist Media Studies 15, no.6 (2015): 960, 972.
- 21.
State feminism was initially a Scandinavian creation used for explaining the cases of state socialism. See Helga M. Hernes, Welfare State and Woman Power: Essays in State Feminism (Oslo: Norwegian University Press, 1987). In this chapter, socialist state feminism refers to the ‘institutionalisation of feminism in state agencies’ which was promoted by socialist state’s gender policies. See Zheng Wang, Finding Women in the State (Oakland: University of California Press), 7.
- 22.
Jie Yang, ‘“Re-employment Stars”: Language, Gender and Neoliberal Re-structuring in China’, in Words and Material Girls: Language, Gender and Global Economies, ed. Bonnie, S. McElhinny (Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 2007), 72–103.
- 23.
‘Times have changed – men and women are equal’ is from Mao Zedong’s speech with the youth in the Ming Tombs Reservoir in June 1964. See Long Live the Victory of Mao Zedong Thought (Beijing: Nanjing Military Command, 1969), 243.
- 24.
Dai Jinhua argues that from a male perspective, the Maoist era was a de-sexualised era while from a female perspective, it was a masculinised process. See Dai Jinhua, Gendering China (Taipei: Erya Press Ltd., 2008), 78. I use ‘androgynous’ to describe ‘iron girls’ because ‘iron girls’ shared almost same figures as men on posters. Also, the notion of ‘androgynous’ offers more possibilities for decoding the ‘iron girl’ images.
- 25.
Mayfair Yang, ‘From gender erasure to gender difference: State feminism, consumer sexuality, and women’s public sphere in China’, in Space of Their Own: Women’s Public Sphere in Transnational China, ed. Mayfair Yang (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1999): 47.
- 26.
Lisa Rofel, Desiring China. Experiments in Neoliberalism, Sexuality, and Public Culture (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2007).
- 27.
Alicia Stevens and Scott Griffiths, ‘Body Positivity in Everyday Life’, Body Image 35 (2020): 181–191.
- 28.
Laura Mulvey, ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’, Screen 16, no.3 (1975), 17.
- 29.
Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (London: Allen Lane, 1977), 11.
- 30.
Ibid., 136.
- 31.
Candace West and Don H. Zimmerman, ‘Doing Gender’, Gender and Society 1, no.2 (June 1, 1987): 125–51.
- 32.
Robert Goldman, Reading Ads Socially (London: Routledge, 1992).
- 33.
Toni Ingram, ‘“I feel pretty”: Beauty as an affective-material process’, Feminist Theory 0, no.0 (2021), 2.
- 34.
Nancy J. Hirshman, ‘Choosing Betrayal’, Perspectives on Politics 8, no.1 (2010), 274.
- 35.
Banet-Weiser, ‘What is your flava?’, 208.
- 36.
Butler, Gender Trouble, viii.
- 37.
Tasker&Negra, Interrogating Postfeminism.
Sarah Projansky, Watching Rape (New York: New York University Press, 2001).
- 38.
Banet-Weiser, ‘What’s your flava?’.
Tricia Rose, The Hip Hop Wars (New York: Basic Books, 2008).
Kimberly Springer, ‘Divas, Evil Black Bitches, and Bitter Black Women’, in Interrogating Postfeminism, ed. Yvonne Tasker and Diane Negra (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007), 249–77.
- 39.
Ana Sofia Elias, Rosalind Gill and Christina Scharff, Aesthetic Labour: Rethinking Beauty Politics in Neoliberalism (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017).
- 40.
Gill, ‘Postfeminist Media Culture’.
Wolf, The Beauty Myth.
- 41.
David Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism (New York: Oxford University Press Inc., 2005).
- 42.
Hiroshi Wagatsuma, ‘The Social Perception of Skin Colour in Japan’, Daedalus 96, no.2 (1967): 407–443.
- 43.
Graefer, ‘White stars and orange celebrities’.
- 44.
The idea of ‘post-feminist masquerade’ is taken from Riviere’s essay ‘Womanliness as a Masquerade’ in 1929 which describes a notion of femininity as a masquerade. This idea has a psychoanalytic origin: as Riviere (1929: 35) argued, ‘women who wish for masculinity may put on a mask of womanliness to avert anxiety and the retribution feared from men’.
- 45.
McRobbie, The Aftermath of Feminism, 66, 41.
- 46.
Ibid., 66.
- 47.
Ibid., 65–66.
- 48.
Ibid., 41.
Vron Ware, Beyond the Pale: White Women, Racism and History (London: Verso, 1992).
Richard Dyer. White: Essays on Race and Culture (London: Routledge, 1997).
- 49.
Eva Chen, ‘Shanghai(ed) Babies: Geopolitics, Biopolitics and the Global Chick Lit’, Feminist Media Studies 12, no.2 (2012): 215.
- 50.
Mehita Iqani, Consumer Culture and the Media: Magazines in the Public Eye (UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 96.
- 51.
Ibid.
- 52.
Joan Rivière, ‘Womanliness as a Masquerade: 1929’, In Formation of Fantasy, ed. Victor Burgin, James Donald and Cora Kaplan (London: Methuen, 1986): 42.
- 53.
Yun Shao, Fabrice Desmarais and Kay Weaver, ‘Chinese advertising practitioners’ conceptualisation of gender representation’, International Journal of Advertising 33, no.2 (2014): 337.
- 54.
Colin Hoskins and Rolf Mirus, ‘Reasons for U.S. dominance of the international trade in television programmes’, Media, Culture & Society 10 no.4 (1988): 499–515.
- 55.
Arjun Appadurai, Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalisation (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), 30.
- 56.
Ibid., 33.
- 57.
Henry Giroux, Consuming social change: The United Colours of Benetton (London: Routledge, 1994): 189.
- 58.
Rosalind Gill and Akane Kanai, ‘Affirmative Advertising and the Mediated Feeling Rules of Neoliberalism’, in Neoliberalism and the Media, ed. Marian Meyers (New York: Routledge, 2019): 142.
- 59.
Banet-Weiser, ‘What’s Your Flava?’, 203.
- 60.
Ibid., 204.
- 61.
McRobbie, ‘Top Girls? Young women and the post-feminist sexual contract’.
- 62.
Springer, ‘Divas, Evil Black Bitches, and Bitter Black Women’, 205.
- 63.
Gill & Kanai, ‘Affirmative advertising and the mediated feeling rules of neoliberalism’.
- 64.
Iqani, Consumer Culture and the Media, 96.
- 65.
Gill & Elias, ‘Awaken your incredible’, 185.
- 66.
Appadurai, Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalisation.
- 67.
McRobbie, The Aftermath of Feminism.
- 68.
Silver-Greenberg, et al., ‘“Angels” in Hell’.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2022 The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Jia, X. (2022). Victoria’s Secret Goes to China: Femvertising and the Failed Promise of Empowerment. In: Gwynne, J. (eds) The Cultural Politics of Femvertising. Palgrave Studies in (Re)Presenting Gender. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-99154-8_2
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-99154-8_2
Published:
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-030-99153-1
Online ISBN: 978-3-030-99154-8
eBook Packages: Literature, Cultural and Media StudiesLiterature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)