This volume, edited by Kim Golombisky, applies an intersectional lens to advertising, focusing on gender, race, ethnicity, sexuality, disability, age, class, and nationality. Intersectional feminist perspectives on advertising are rare in the advertising industry, even as it faces pressure to reform. This anthology focuses on advertising messaging to follow up the professional practices covered in Feminists, Feminisms, and Advertising, edited by Kim Golombisky and Peggy Kreshel. In this new collection, contributors write from a variety of perspectives, including Black, African, lesbian, transnational, poststructuralist, material, commodity, and environmental feminisms. The authors also discuss the reproductive justice framework, feminist disability studies, feminist ethnography, feminist discourse analysis, and feminist visual rhetoric. Together, these scholars introduce big ideas for feminist advertising studies. The first section, titled “Historicize This!,” includes work dealing with historicized analyses of advertising, ranging from more than a century of stereotypes about black women to early twentieth-century white women purchasing automobiles, all contextualized with women’s complex relations with technologies from cars to Twitter. The second section, “Advertising Body Politics,” groups work on topics related to body politics in advertising, including lesbians, disabled women, aging women, and Chinese “promotion girls.” The third section, “Media Reps,” revisits advertising representation in novel ways from operational definitions of race and advertising news about gay men to advertising twenty-first-century masculinities in Ghana and the United States. The last section, “Reproduction and Postfeminist Empowerment,” ends the book with a selection of case studies on the advertising industry’s cooptation and commodification of feminism, particularly in regressive postfeminist ideologies about women’s reproductive health and mothering.

By bringing together a group of scholars who align themselves to a feminist perspective, Golombisky is able to provide a diverse and in-depth representation of the pervasiveness advertising’s messages have on culture. The collection provides a wide range of perspectives, including Black, African, lesbian, transnational, poststructuralist, material, commodity, and environmental feminisms. . . . Going beyond just gender issues, the contributors in Feminist Perspectives on Advertisingnavigate and discuss contemporary concerns influenced by persistent historical representations in advertising, providing to their readers a lesson and an underwritten challenge to identify and transform the advertising industry’s frameworks that result in incorrect and untruthful representation in the media. The message is clear: change is needed, let’s get to work. * Communication Booknotes Quarterly *
What does advertising really mean, beyond its obvious symbols and words? Could we train people to see advertising as a force of culture? This marvelous collection serves as a decoding machine with an intersectionalist lens—race, gender, abilities, sexualities, age—targeting one of the most powerful institutional forces in our world. -- Jacqueline Lambiase, Texas Christian University
This volume is especially close to my heart because it unpacks advertising messages in new and exciting work. When I started out over 40 years ago, hardly anyone else was talking about these issues. To my delight, this book advances and updates the feminist mission of my life’s work in several ways. The most important update is the contributors’ careful attention to intersectional identities. This book also discusses twenty-first century advertising that waters down progressive feminist politics. Most gratifying, I am no longer alone, as this book, its contributors, and their genealogies of citations demonstrate. -- Jean Kilbourne, Author of Can't Buy My Love: How Advertising Changes the Way We Think and Feel
Feminist Perspectives on Advertising: What’s the Big Idea? brings welcomed complexity to the vexing issue of gendered portrayals in advertising. Editor Golombisky invites a powerful array of talented scholars to delve below the surface of inadequate female representation, to the nuances behind this deficit. Pioneering scholar Jean Kilbourne offers a compelling preface that provides exceptional historical context. From there, all of the contributors prod readers to contemplate the ‘big idea’ behind advertising’s depiction of women’s bodies in diverse, complex and thought-provoking ways. -- Meta G. Carstarphen, University of Oklahoma
This collection is an engaging critique of how industries around the globe exploit notions of gender in pursuit of profit. The authors expose the cultural and political agenda embedded in advertising copy and imagery. Yet, they also create a platform for rethinking what advertising can be—a tool of social change. This book provides a range of perspectives and great examples for talking with my students about cultural awareness and communication practice. -- Deena Kemp, University of Texas at Austin

Kim Golombisky is associate professor and graduate director in the Department of Women's and Gender Studies at the University of South Florida.