Gendering Theory in Marketing and Consumer Research

Zeynep Arsel, Kirsi Eräranta, Johanna Moisander

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2018
• eBook ISBN: 9781315300733
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Business

Gendering Theory in Marketing and Consumer Research showcases state-of-the-art scholarship on gender in the field of marketing and consumer research. The book presents seven original contributions by a group of internationally renowned academics, who take up the task of theorising gender and gendering theory in new ways, accommodating recent intersectional, material-discursive, and practice-oriented theorisations. Connecting the study of marketing and consumer behaviour to different theoretical perspectives on gender, the contributors explore and critically examine the gendered nature and dimensions of contemporary marketplace activity. Through innovative conceptual development and insightful empirical analyses, the book offers important scholarly contributions to the literature on gender, marketing, and consumer research, and advances our understanding of gender as lived experience and socially regulated performance. It also frequently employ an intersectionalist perspective, theorising gender as only a part of one's subject position, which is constituted by mutually reinforcing categories. The book will be essential reading for students, scholars, and practitioners who are interested in the implications and contemporary manifestations of gender as a cultural category in the marketplace. This book was originally published as a special issue of the Journal of Marketing Management.

The abject single: exploring the gendered experience of singleness in Britain

Ai-Ling Lai, School of Management, University of Leicester, UK

Ming Lim, School of Management, University of Leicester, UK

Matthew Higgins, School of Management, University of Leicester, UK

Abstract This paper explores the gendered experience of singleness in Britain through a theoretical and empirical understanding of the abject. Drawing on the writings of Judith Butler, we argue that singleness is culturally pathologised as an abject ‘other’, a liminal state which renders the legitimation of the single subject unintelligible. Through 14 active interviews with British singles, we demonstrate how our participants negotiate their marginal status vis-à-vis the marketplace and the broader society that continue to uphold heterosexual partnership as a normative form of intimacy. Our data uncovers persistent and powerful gender stereotypes of how singles ought to organise their lives and conform both to social, as well as market-driven pressures. We therefore highlight research gaps in the experience of singleness and critique the heteronormative framework that remains dominant, yet concealed, in gender research.

Introduction

In this paper, we explore the gendered experience of singleness and how this is negotiated within a marketplace that continues to legitimise heterosexual relationship as a normative form of intimacy (Budgeon, 2008). To date, there is surprisingly little research exploring single consumers and their participation in the marketplace. Yet, census data and national surveys consistently highlight the growth of the single population (Euromonitor, 2012), with 51% of Britain’s population registered as unmarried in 2011 compared to 30% in 2001 (ONS, 2012). Meanwhile, Burnett (2007) calls for the need to realise the untapped potential of the singles market, suggesting that there has been an oversight by both academics and marketers to understand the consumption experience of singles (Wortzel, 1977). We argue that such an oversight mirrors broader marginalisation of singleness as a troubled cultural category (Reynolds & Wetherell, 2003), in which single individuals are stigmatised as the abject other since they do not conform to the dominant heterogender arrangements (Budgeon, 2008; Ingraham, 1996).

According to Rich (1980), and reinforced more recently by Appleby (2013) and Martin (2009), the experience of singleness is overshadowed by compulsory heteronormativity – an ideological framework that institutionalises heterosexuality as a ‘natural’ sexual preference. Rich argues that such a framework implicitly sustains patriarchal capitalism by persistently espousing marriage (Roseneil & Budgeon, 2004) and the nuclear family (Byrne, 2003) as ideals, thereby preserving ‘male fantasies about women, and male interest in controlling women, particularly in the realms of sexuality and motherhood’ (Rich, 1980, p. 634). More recently, consumer researchers are beginning to recognise the tacit operations of the heteronormative framework, which have informed much of gender research in marketing (Borgerson, Schroeder, Blomberg, & Thorssén, 2006; Bristor & Fischer, 1993; Catterall, Maclaran, & Stevens, 2005; Kates, 1999; Peñaloza, 1994). By prioritising the family/couple as a valuable unit of consumption (O’Malley & Prothero 2007), marketers have silenced those voices whose relational practices fall outside of the heteronormative framework (Wilkes, 1995).

This paper, therefore, seeks to reinstate the muted voices of singles (Hirschman, 1993) through a theoretical and empirically informed understanding of their engagement with marketing and the marketplace. We consider the socio-historical conditions that engender the ‘naturalisation’ of heterosexuality as an obligatory practice (Butler, 1993). In doing so, this paper advances the theorisation of gender from the vantage point of the abject single by understanding the extent to which their marginality (1) problematises heterosexual partnership as an ‘innate’ sexual practice and by considering (2) whether their abject position provides an emancipatory space that potentially challenges the legitimacy of the status quo. We argue that an understanding of the abject experience of singleness is important for marketing and consumption since it exposes how society and the marketplace are complicit in reproducing and concealing the heteronormative framework whereby ‘couplehood is implicitly privileged over singlehood’ (Kates, 1999, p. 33). While society in our view denotes sets of relations between actors, the marketplace structures those relations in ways that allow or disallow varying degrees of agency by those who live in and around it (Giddens, 1986). As Butler (1993) argues, it is through the abject that we can begin to rearticulate and reassert terms of cultural legitimacy that challenge heteronormative assumptions.

In the following sections, we discuss the theorisation of the abject through a critical review of the work of Julia Kristeva and Judith Butler. We demonstrate how the marketplace conceals the marginalisation of single consumers through the fabrication of a heterosexual imaginary which celebrates marriage and the nuclear family. Next, we discuss how stereotypes of singleness produce regulatory power that disciplines the abject single while simultaneously instantiating a sexual double standard that regulates the gendered experience of singleness. Through active interviewing (Holstein & Gubrium, 1995), our study provides a discursive space for single individuals to articulate and make sense of their intimate lives. To do this, we present and analyse the narratives of 14 participants as they negotiate their experience of singleness within a couple-oriented marketplace.

The abjection of singles: paternal law and compulsory heterosexuality

Butler (1993) argues that the exclusionary matrix that privileges the heterosexual subject depends on ‘the production of a domain of abject beings, those who are not yet subject’ (p. xiii) and thus ‘do not appear properly gendered’ (p. xvii). Heteronormativity reinforces a construction of singleness that is seemingly conjoined to moral questions over social dysfunction, loneliness and anomie (Tiryakian, 1981; Tonkiss, 2003). Those whose intimate lives do not conform to the heteronormative framework are subjected to economic, political and social sanctions, as exemplified by the fate of Eleanor Rigby, who is widely regarded as an iconic representation of a spinster made famous by the Beatles’ pop song of the same title, depicting a woman who died alone, childless and in poverty (Bolick, 2015). Indeed, single individuals are often construed as deviant (Holden, 2007; Rich, 1980; Sandfield & Percy, 2003), pathological (Reynolds & Wetherell, 2003) and promiscuous (Gordon, 1994). As Butler (1993) implies, the symbolic repercussion of assuming the abject position of singleness is that of terror since such a position is culturally unintelligible given the lack of symbolic resources that make possible the articulation of single experience. The abject single is therefore emblematic of a breakdown in meaning – thereby posing as a formidable threat that destabilises the institution of marriage (Cherlin, 2004).

In Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, Kristeva (1982) explains that the abject threatens the integrity of one’s clean and proper self (that of being opposed to I) and ‘disturbs identity, system, order’ (p. 4). The abject is therefore a site of horror because it beseeches and challenges the subject and possesses the potential to dissolve the boundaries that give the subject meaning and stability. In the moment of abjection, we are gripped by a sense of uncanniness (Kristeva, 1982) in which the familiarity of our spatial and temporal anchorage of being-at-home-in-the-world is disrupted (Tyler, 2009). Abjection is therefore experienced as a liminal state of ‘the in-between, the ambiguous, the composite’ (Kristeva, 1982, p. 4). The abject thus occupies the zone between being and non-being (Tyler, 2009) where it is neither a subject nor an object (Kristeva, 1982).

Drawing on the psychoanalytic writings of Jacques Lacan, Kristeva (1982) contends that subjectivity can only emerge through the process of abjecting, which involves a radical exclusion of what is deemed ‘other’ to the self – the most potent abjection being that of maternal abjection. In reference to Lacan’s theory of the mirror stage¹ (1977), Kristeva explains that individuation is predicated on the (infant) subject recognising its individuality as being discontinuous from the womb of the ‘mother’. In other words, the subject is born of a violent abjection of the maternal body and thus establishing a border that separates the ‘I’ from the ‘other’, the ‘individual’ from the ‘social’ body. The maternal body is thus a monstrous body (Creed, 1993) whose devouring potential threatens to engulf the self and erase the distinction between the ‘I’ and ‘other’ (Tyler, 2009). So as to maintain social order, the abject and in particular the maternal body must be domesticated through culture via the regulating authorities of religion, politics, morality and language (Cosivo, 2004).

As such, culture is founded on the repression of the maternal drives – a state which Kristeva designates to the pre-discursive realm known as the semiotic,² whilst culture is subsumed within the realm of the symbolic³ (Butler, 1990). This is a realm where the ‘speaking subject’ becomes acculturated into a signifying system made up of social conventions, codes of conduct, rules and regulations (Cosivo, 2004). As Lacan (1977) argues, the symbolic is structured by the Law of the Father and constitutes the universal principle that organises culture (Butler, 1990). Kristeva calls for the revival of the semiotic to subvert the Paternal Law.

This privileging of the maternal semiotic, however, is disputed by Butler (1990) as futile and essentialist. She argues that Kristeva has created a self-defeating strategy since the semiotic – given its pre-discursive nature – cannot be culturally sustained as a political practice. Instead, Butler (1990) contends that subversion can only be mobilised from within culture by exposing the mechanisms of its construction.

Through a Foucauldian reading, Butler (1990) argues that the psychoanalytic narrative of the maternal body as pre-discursive is, in itself, ‘a product of a historically specific organisation of sexuality’ (p. 125). Such a narrative reifies motherhood as an innate maternal instinct and is thus rendered compulsory for women. Developing a position with which we concur, Butler (1990) implies that the abjection of singleness reflects the fantasy of a fearful heterosexist culture against the failure to sever the apron string of maternal dependency (Kristeva, 1982).

Furthermore, Butler (1990) argues that the naturalisation of motherhood necessitates the cultivation of reproductive desires which are institutionalised through heterosexual union and kinship. In other words, the regulatory norm of compulsory heterosexuality requires the propagation of bodies into discrete sexes with ‘natural’ heterosexual dispositions (Butler, 1988). Underpinning this is the cultural imposition of exogamic heterosexuality, which mandates that sexual desires be directed towards the opposite sex, thus culminating in obligatory heterosexual marriage, a desire for procreation and the compulsion to establish a family (Rubin, 1975). Singleness (alongside homosexuality) is deemed a violation of this exogamic arrangement.

Not only is heterosexuality presented as an ‘innate’ sexual preference, it also masks a deeper stratum of meaning – i.e. a society where couples – and couples only – enact socially acceptable norms and practices. According to Butler (1993), the legitimation of the heterosexual subject is predicated on the regulation of phantasmatic identification, a process of identifying with a heterosexual position by ‘fantasising the possibility of approximating that symbolic site’ (p. 61). In this way, heterosexual affiliation becomes legitimised as an unquestionable way of being – for whom one’s ‘humanness’ as a gendered subject is rendered culturally intelligible and imaginable. At the same time, heteronormativity operates as a tacit exclusionary system by foreclosing the possibility of identifying with the abject single – i.e. a position that is unthinkable and difficult to imagine (Butler, 1988). This process of identification is cultivated through what Ingraham (1996) calls the heterosexual imaginary. We will now discuss the complicity of marketing and consumer culture in maintaining this imaginary.

The heterosexual imaginary in marketing and consumer research

Ingraham (1996) argues that the heterosexual imaginary is produced to veil the socio-historical conditions that construct heterosexuality as a ‘natural’ practice, thereby foreclosing the possibility of (critically) exposing heterosexuality as an organising institution. It is our contention that academic research in marketing and consumer research has contributed to the circulation of the heterosexual imaginary. This is evident in the burgeoning body of work exploring (consumption) experiences of contemporary married women (Thompson, Locander, & Pollio, 1990), fathers (Bettany, Kerrane, & Hogg, 2014; Coskuner-Balli & Thompson, 2012; Eräranta & Moisander, 2011), working parents (Thompson, 1996), single parents (Harrison, Gentry, & Commuri, 2012) and mothers (Carrigan & Szmigin, 2004, 2006; Houston, 2004; The Voice Group, 2010; Thomsen & Sørensen 2006). Heterosexuality is often celebrated through gift-giving rituals (Ingraham, 1996; Sherry, 1983) that valorise familial and romantic exchange of love (Belk & Coon, 1993), dating experiences (Belk & Coon, 1990), Valentine’s Day (Otnes, Ruth, & Constance, 1994), Thanksgiving (Wallendorf & Arnould, 1991) and Christmas (Fischer & Arnold, 1990).

Indeed, cultural rituals such as weddings (Otnes & Pleck, 2003), engagement (Fram & Baron, 2004) and baby showers (Fischer & Gainer, 1993) are tacit forms of heterosexual celebration, marking the normative rite of passage from singleness to marriage and parenthood. Similarly, theories of family life cycle in consumer research (e.g. Murphy & Staples, 1979; Wells & Gubar, 1966) typically espouse the developmental model (Wilkes, 1995), which construe singleness as a temporary/preparatory phase prior to marriage (Holden, 2007). As Byrne (2003) observes, marriage and parenthood are considered important milestones of adulthood in Western culture. Hence, individuals who successfully attain such milestones are legitimised as moral citizens (Gordon, 1994) – who are productive, family-centred and more importantly appropriately (hetero)gendered. Meanwhile, individuals who remain single are deemed failed subjects since they have not traversed the normative rite of passage as culturally expected (Sandfield & Percy, 2003).

Advertisers play a significant role in constructing the cultural imagery of the ‘good life’ (Catterall et al., 2005), which depicts sexual attraction between heterosexual couples (Schroeder & Borgerson, 1998) and reinforces the idealised image of the nuclear family (Borgerson et al., 2006; Kates, 1999). Leach (1968) coined the term ‘the cereal packet family’ to describe prominent media representations of a happy family – which is typically made up of a father (breadwinner), mother (usually a homemaker) and at least one child. These imageries engender the cultivation of desires, which as discussed above is implicitly orientated towards promoting the agenda of exogamic heterosexuality (Rubin, 1975).

In recent years, marketing practitioners and academics have started to embrace the plurality of family arrangements (Kerrane, Bettany, & Hogg, 2014), with examination of cohabitation, single parenthood, non-heterosexual partnerships and the stepfamily (Roseneil & Budgeon, 2004; Stacey, 1998). The incorporation of these variants through the idea of a postmodern family (Houston, 2004) is however admitted as approximates of the phantasmatic ideal of the traditional family (Butler, 1993). For example, in their analysis of the gay family ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Citation Information
• Notes on Contributors
• Introduction: theorising gender and gendering theory in marketingand consumer research
• 1. The abject single: exploring the gendered experience of singleness in Britain
• 2. Gendered reading of the body in the bed
• 3. Fashionably voluptuous: normative femininity and resistant performative tactics in fatshion blogs
• 4. Reframing gender and feminist knowledge construction in marketing and consumer research: missing feminisms and the case of men and masculinities
• 5. Masculinising domesticity: an investigation of men’s domestic foodwork
• 6. Marketing the female politician: an exploration of gender and appearance
• 7. Consuming stress: exploring hidden dimensions of consumption-related strain at the intersection of gender and poverty
• 8. Towards more marketing research on gender inequality
• 9. Critical visual analysis of gender: reactions and reflections
• 10. Feminism’s fourth wave: a research agenda formarketing and consumer research
• 11. Judith Butler on performativity and precarity: exploratorythoughts on gender and violence in India
• Index