(Dis)empowered women? A critical feminist interrogation of the creative practice of femvertising.

Femvertising is advertising that employs pro-female talent, messages, and imagery to empower women and girls. This new type of advertising has been both celebrated for challenging traditional representations of women and at the same time repudiated for failing to empower its audience in any meaningful way. Recent critical research has found that femvertisements use postfeminist discourses, which both incorporate and repudiate feminist ideals, neutralising feminism’s political force (Windels et al., 2020). To date, research has tended to focus on analysing the femvertisements themselves or consumers perceptions of them (Becker-Herby, 2016; Kordrostami & Laczniak, 2022; Taylor et al., 2016). While this has provided some revealing insights into the appearance of these advertisements and, indeed, the ways that they make meaning to audiences, they overlook the role played by key stakeholders - advertising practitioners. This study utilises in-depth semi-structured interviews to explore the degree to which advertising practitioners recognise and understand the complex messages that are sometimes embedded in femvertising.