Feeling empowered: Pro-woman promotional communication in Mainland China

This thesis presents a case study of pro-woman promotional communication in Mainland China, and seeks to answer the overarching question about the feelings and experiences of womanhood that ads centring on women’s empowerment communicate to female consumers who are putatively already empowered. Specifically, this case concerns what the feelings and experiences of women’s empowerment are and how they are communicated in pro-woman ads. It takes social semiotic and multi-sited ethnographic approaches to pro-woman promotional communication and interrogates its semiosis, intended meanings, and industry knowledge-practice through an intersectional feminist lens. To do so, it drew on multimodal critical discourse analysis of ads, complemented with ethnographic data. These data comprised interviews with marketing professionals, including those who were directly involved in production of pro-woman ads, participant observation at industry events, and tracking of related trade press and news coverage. By triangulation of textual and social details in the case of pro-woman promotional communication situated within the advertising industry, findings suggest that empowered womanhoods communicated are at once playful and assertive, uncomfortable and restrained, and contented and sentimental. Women’s empowerment is framed as self-empowerment, to be experienced in assertive consumption, economically resilient production, and contenting caregiving and harmony-making for the self and others, all without disrupting the status quo. And these ads largely revolve around young urban middle-class Han cisgender women. Overall, this thesis argues that pro-woman ads make empowerment seem tangible and within one’s experience and physical reach in the everyday. With such ‘palpable’ alibi, pro-woman ads thus help to ‘disprove’ their glaring contradictions in contrast to the systemic disparities, open violence against women, and slow feminist progress on the ground.