The study of ideology has long interested sociologists and consumer researchers alike.
Much consumption research has approached ideology from various macro, meso, and
micro levels of analysis. However, many studies fail to address the dialogical interplay
among these three levels of analysis when examining how ideology manifests in, and
interacts with, consumer identity projects. Many consumption-based studies examining
ideology provide descriptive and normative accounts, affording practices of consumption
emancipatory potential. In response, this research adopts a critical marketing perspective
in order to draw out the macro and political implications of meso cultural production
systems and micro consumption experiences and identity projects. Focusing on the
contemporary American feminist movement, and on discourses around sex and sexuality,
it explores how hegemonic (patriarchal) and counterhegemonic (feminist) ideologies are
communicated in the marketplace, through the media, to understand their role in regard
to consumers’ lived experiences and interactions with advertisements.
Working within the consumer culture theory tradition, this thesis employed a variant of
phenomenological interviewing that explored female emerging adults’ sexual narratives
and their interpretations of sexualized ads. By generating data on a specific type of
experience, inferences were drawn about how young women experience and relate to the
contemporary feminist movement. In total, 14 American women, aged 20 to 31, were
interviewed twice and also created media collages of what they considered ‘sexy’.
Implementing a multi-step hermeneutic analysis, the data were analyzed through an
iterative process, moving back and forth between the idiographic cases and theory.
Through multiple iterations, micro, meso, and macro level inferences were made.
This study suggests that young women foster diverse and temporary identifications with
feminism in the pursuit of two, often overlapping, goals: ontological security and status.
This results in a micro process of ‘ideological shifting’, which has depoliticizing effects,
insofar as (anti-) feminist brands and identities were readily appropriated and discarded
depending on specific contexts and situations. Thus, contrary to much work in the
consumer culture theory tradition, which presents consumption as having transgressive
and liberating effects, this study finds that while the young women had the power to
dialogically interact with marketized (meso level) ideologies that constitute the
marketplace, they failed to intercept the macro level processes of marketization and
commodification and consequently did not challenge the hegemonic (patriarchal)
ideology at large.
In adopting a critical perspective, this study offers valuable insight into the relationship
between ideology and consumer behavior. Ideology is shown to be disseminated via
hegemonic processes of commodification and marketization. Because these processes
occur at a macro level, counterhegemonic ideologies are hegemonized and subsequently
depoliticized before even reaching the consumer on a micro level. By examining ideology
across all three levels, this study finds that consumer agency is largely relegated to the
realm of the marketplace, where consumers’ dialogical interactions and consumption
practices do not challenge the macro ideologies or oppression at large, but merely alter
their marketplace expressions