Up close and personal:feminist pedagogy in the classroom

This commentary reflects on 20+ years as marketing academics committed to a feminist, critical approach to the marketing curriculum.Feminist pedagogy focuses on critiquing the wider, macro-structural realities that impact on gender inequality. A key aim is to empower students to consider how society might be differently structured. We also advocate a multiple perspectives approach, whereby there are no absolutes but rather contexts, thus nudging students to move beyond a micro-managerial mindset, and problematising many of the assumptions embedded in marketing. This includes understanding that identity positions shape social worlds and consumption patterns. Finally we identify three tools for implementing a feminist pedagogy: subjective personal introspection (SPI), collaborative and action learning and a low-hierarchy learning environment

When Same-Sex Couples Say 'I do':Display Work and the (Re)Production of the Wedding Rite

Weddings are collective rituals that enable couples to show their solemn commitment to an invited audience. In this sense, weddings can thus be viewed as important forms of ‘display work’. While there are clear commonalities between rituals and display work, particularly in terms of their emphasis on spectacle, demonstration and audience, little attention has been given to how display work can inform and indeed transform wedding rituals. We use display work as a lens for exploring how same-sex couples construct and enact their wedding. In particular we show how heteronormative, gendered traditions that underpin the wedding rite are negotiated. Our findings demonstrate the interplay between display work and normative ritual elements. We identify four tactics of ‘reflexive display’: strategic compliance; playful appropriation; annexation; and conspicuous absence. Together, these show how the wedding rite is done, undone or redone, to reflect each couple’s unique relationship and perspective on same-sex union.</p

An embodied approach to consumer experiences:the Hollister brandscape

This paper uses embodied theory to analyse consumer experience in a retail brandscape, Hollister Co. By taking a holistic, embodied experience approach, our study reveals how consumers interact with such retail environments in corporeal, instinctive, sensual ways.The primary source of data were 97 subjective personal introspective accounts undertaken with the target age group for the store. These were supplemented with in-depth interviews with consumers, managers, and employees of Hollister.We offer a conceptualization of consumers’ embodied experience, which we term The Immersive Somascape Experience. This identifies four key touch points that evoke the Hollister store experience - each of which reveal how the body is affected by particular relational and material specificities. The authors propose an emergent theoretical framework - The Immersive Somascape Experience – that provides a holistic way to analyse how the body leads in emplacing the consumer within a retail brandscape. It depicts four embodied elements: Sense Activation, Corporeal Relationality, Brand Materialities and (Dis)Orientation. Together these may culminate in Consumer Emplacement. Future consideration of embodied experiences across different retail contexts may further develop these insights.The study reveals the perils and pitfalls of adopting a sensory marketing perspective. It also offers insights into how the body leads in retail brandscapes, addressing a lack in such approaches in the current retailing literature, and suggesting that embodied, experiential aspects of branding are increasingly pertinent in retailing in light of the continued growth of on-line shopping.Overall, the study shows how an embodied experience approach challenges the dominance of mind and representation over body and materiality, suggesting that an "intelligible embodiment” approach offers unique insights into consumers’ embodied experiences in retail environments