Menstruation in Marketing: Stigma, #femvertising, and Transmedia Messaging in Routledge Companion to Feminism and Marketing

This chapter’s inquiry into femvertising explores how #LikeAGirl, a gendered corporate social responsibility (GCSR) campaign, aligns with or undermines feminist goals of collective struggle against oppressive power relations in transmedia contexts. It does so by exploring the ways that gender stigmas are challenged and reproduced in brand-driven femvertising discourses for menstrual products, particularly through Millennial and Gen Z consumer discourses of menstruation using transmedia (i.e., hashtags, visual, text) content. We find that transmedia content - consumer images and replication of CSR hashtags - captures collective struggle related to stigma and the female body, uses humorous and/or transgressive posts as a form of collective de-stigmatization, and calls for collective action for menstrual justice. The chapter concludes by offering directions for further research on moral obligations to consumers in the intersecting theoretical domains of corporate social responsibility, the marketplace, vulnerability, and feminism.