Entre politização e comodificação: a publicidade de beleza na nova onda feminista

Abstract

Within the concept of postfeminism as an analytical category, this paper seeks to discuss the recent approach of beauty advertising to feminism. It is based on the understanding that this approach is based on an attempt to politicize the advertising discourse, evidenced by the rise of femvertising as an advertising technique that affirms itself as capable of empowering women. It is noticed that this does not happen without contradictions. Feminism enters the advertising discourse, but it is not “pure”, it is not the theory discourse, it is a worked on discourse, remodeled to fulfill the primary objective of advertising: selling products. Given these assumptions, we seek to investigate how such an approach is constructed. To exemplify, we will analyze Natura's campaign #OcupeSeuCorpo (2017), in order to observe how the reconciliation and junction between female liberation and beauty standards is constructed in the same rhetoric. How is the counterbalance between feminist goals of emancipating beauty standards and the industry's need to sell products that reinforce them can be eradicated? Finally, it is concluded that the rise of a postfeminist culture and its strong relationship with neoliberalism is what enables such a phenomenon, in addition to the strengthening of a liberal feminism as socially accepted, creating new configurations between femvertising and commodity feminism.