Consumption and women's rights - Conference report (original) (raw)

Consumption: What Women Want (Kosovo Case)

2020

Women worldwide are demanding greater role in society, economy and politics. Gender stereotypes are decisive in multifunctional women role. Women are consumers or deciding person in decision making in purchasing activities for wider categories of products and services; meantime, constantly asking for businesses to keep them closer and give them opportunities through offering appropriate products and services women having spare more time for themselves. Through this paper work, we will analyze position of Kosovo women in regarding to education, employment and their families, their persisting efforts getting empowered in Kosovo economy and society. Primary research is focused in questioning of 150 women during 2014, which belonging to different social classes, incomes, cities, and occupations. Our objective is relied on better understanding of what those women want from their life, even from products and services they consume. Results from survey will be used as guide for business and...

Gender in a Global Market Society

2011

We linked hands in solidarity. We refused to vindicate those responsible for this tragedy. Some people spoke of settling of scores…others talked of war…But why did it have to be our market? What had our street done? Did our market really have anything to do with that terrible tragedy which transformed children into assassins? How could they have borne a grudge against our market? Nobody understood why this market had become the target of such violence, such wanton acts of vandalism and the scene of all those horrors. Nobody! Ghislaine Sathoud, Le marche de l’espoir, 2005 The classical liberal ideology does not seem to draw any significant distinctions between men and women when they engage in commercial transactions that sanction the unevenness of the product without really factoring in the social status of the trading partners. It apparently does not consider that the individual, homo oeconomicus, whose conduct, viewed from the standpoint of the minimum ‘human’ referent, maximizes ...

Routledge Companion to Marketing and Feminism

Routledge Companion to Marketing and Feminism, 2022

This comprehensive and authoritative sourcebook offers academics, researchers and students an introduction to and overview of current scholarship at the intersection of marketing and feminism. In the last five years there has been a resurrection of feminist voices in marketing and consumer research. This mirrors a wider public interest in feminism-particularly in the media as well as the academy-with younger women discovering that patriarchal structures and strictures still limit women's development and life opportunities. The "F" word is back on the agenda-made high profile by campaigns such as #metoo and #timeisup. There is a noticeably renewed interest in feminist scholarship, especially amongst younger scholars and significantly insightful interdisciplinary critiques of this new brand of feminism, including the identification of a neoliberal feminism that urges professional women to achieve a work/family balance on the back of other women's exploitation. Consolidating existing scholarship while exploring emerging theories and ideas which will generate further feminist research, this volume will be of interest to researchers, academics and students in marketing and consumption studies, especially those studying or researching the complex interrelationship of feminism and marketing.

Consuming Gender: Identity Construction under Global Capitalism

Assuming Gender, 2017

This special issue of Assuming Gender seeks to examine and problematise the relationship between consumer culture and gender—but what does it mean to be a ‘consumer’ of gender, or a gendered consumer? More than ever before, we define ourselves through the things we buy, and the ways in which we buy them. This theoretically gives us a certain degree of agency, transforming the act of buying (or refusing to buy) into a political or ideological statement. As many scholars have argued in recent years, however, the use of considering the ‘individual consumer’ an autonomous political entity is limited. Consumer identity is intersectional and highly complex, and must be regarded as a nexus of competing and often contradictory influences.

Consuming Consumption, review of Gender Commodity

Consuming Consumption, 2024

We are consumed by our consumption. Consumption is ubiquitous: buying t-shirts, reading novels, burning coal, drinking sugar with our coffee, visiting exhibitions are all deeply political acts with uncertain political corollaries. What we are doing when we consume-how we can approach, understand, and categorize different kinds of consumption and different kinds of commoditiesremains deeply contested. The scales of these implications, as other recently published works have made clear, can be as vast as the history of imperialism or as narrow as the regional brand identity of a single beer. 1 Appraising these acts, developing both a praxis and a disciplinary mode that can be appropriately responsive to their historical and social freight, is the challenge explored by these four 2023 works: Robin Truth Goodman's Gender Commodity:

The Institutionalized Inequality of the Global Markets: A Socialist Eco-Feminist Analysis

Introductory note: This paper is an earlier version--now including a number of updates and revisions-- of what became a chapter in my 2010 book "Contemporary Feminist Theory and Activism: Six Global Issues," Broadview. It's my view that these themes are more urgently in need of address than ever, and I will explore them in a slightly different context in my new book, "A Manifesto for an Eco-Feminist Post-Humanism," (Lexington, forthcoming 2016). Abstract: While Alison Jaggar’s contribution to the feminist analysis of heteropatriarchal capitalism offers key insight into the history and mechanisms of the oppressive economic conditions faced daily by millions of women, it may not be as well suited to the issues confronting contemporary theorists and activists. I think this is so for at least four reasons: First, while corporate exploitation, the export of Western standards of consumer culture, and the continuing exhaustion of environmental resources are hardly new to the 21st century, each in its own way has been transformed by the globalizing of labor in tandem with the advances of technology or, as Donna Haraway puts it, technoscience. Analyses of the relationship between capitalism and patriarchy must, then, include these factors particularly as they bear on the rapidly changing conditions of developing world women, and as the economic gap between Western and developing nations grows ever wider. Second, however perceptive, few writers in Jaggar’s 1980’s were in a position to foresee the consequences of the globalized market, and hence of the virtually exponential growth of the Westernizing culture industry into the 21st century. More than merely an instrument for the export of Western values, and revolutionized by the Internet, the culture industry appropriates the value associated with creative or praxis labor and transforms it into the desire to imitate the popular, well heeled, sexy, and powerful. Given the commodifying of sexuality and reproduction already deeply rooted in Western culture, it’s not surprising that the impact of the culture industry on women and girls is both disproportionately exploitive, and—contrary to the Internet’s liberating potential—that it may actually reinforce patriarchal institutions including the traditional family, prostitution, pornography, and masculinist (male-centered) religion. Third, although there’s little doubt that Western values permeate the culture industry, it would be naïve to suggest that these are the only values whose influence is felt at this scale. As the recent resurgence of religiously motivated terrorism amply illustrates, other systems of value—even systems purportedly anti-capitalist—have had significant impact on the ways in which Westerners understand their increasingly fragile cultural hegemony. Terrorism, moreover, may be “merely” the most extreme example of the possible effects of alternate and competing systems of value. As Chandra Mohanty argues in Feminism Without Borders, a number of other factors have begun to play crucial roles within the global exchange not only of currency and labor, but also of power realized in other (though enduringly patriarchal and racist) ways.

Selling women the green dream: the paradox of feminism and sustainability in fashion marketing

Journal of Political Ecology, 2020

This article explores the paradox of corporations using social and environmental justice concerns to market products that are themselves made in conditions of environmental and social injustice, most often in the Global South. The effects of the fashion industry on people is two-pronged: 1) the unsafe and exploitative conditions under which many garment workers operate, and 2) the severe and harmful water and air pollution caused by fashion industry factories. There are thus contradictions inherent in the manner in which corporations, through their marketing, seek to foster feminism and environmentalism, whilst sourcing their garments from factories that operate in problematic ways. Using case studies of advertising campaigns from three Swedish companies, H&M, Monki and Gina Tricot, we conducted a discourse analysis to understand the messages to consumers as well as the image of the company that is portrayed. Through our political ecology analysis, we suggest that the promotion of f...