Postfeminism Outside the West: Exploring Nike's Transnational Femvertising Campaigns and Audience Response in China

Over the past two decades, encoding female empowerment messages in advertising (also referred to as femvertising) has become prevalent in the West. Sportswear brand Nike has released transnational femvertising campaigns centring around women and girls engaging in sports activities, bringing Western-originated female athleticism to a non-Western context. Drawing on Gill’s theory of ‘postfeminist sensibility’ (2007a) and Dosekun’s approach of thinking postfeminism transnationally (2015), this thesis considers Nike’s femvertising campaigns as a postfeminist culture spreading across geographical borders. However, existing scholarship primarily either investigates postfeminist culture from a predominant Western context or conceptualises postfeminism as a Western-centred cultural phenomenon. There is a paucity of research looking into how postfeminism as a sensibility takes shape in a non-Western context, and how postfeminist culture is consumed, interpreted, and produced by non-Western audience. My empirical study explores the production, circulation, consumption, and reproduction of a discursive postfeminist culture surrounding female empowerment and sport through two of Nike’s transnational femvertising campaigns promoted on Chinese social media Sina Weibo: ‘Further Than Ever’ and ‘Boundless Girls’. Situating postfeminist culture in a globalised setting and a specific Chinese context, my research aims to de-centre postfeminism from the West and to expand methodological dimensions in the field of transnational postfeminism.

My research consists of two parts. In the first part, I conduct textual analysis to analyse how Nike encodes female empowerment messages in ‘Further Than Ever’ and ‘Boundless Girls’. Stern’s Three-Step Textual Analysis in advertising research (1996) (Identification, Construction, Deconstruction) serves as a methodological framework for the textual analysis. In the second part, I conduct a reflexive thematic analysis of online comments responding to the two campaigns to grasp a sense of how the Chinese audience interprets female empowerment messages. My research suggests that both the two Nike campaigns and the Chinese audience have constructed a postfeminist theme embodied by the new athletic femininity which distinctly contradicts normative Chinese cultural values and alienates traditional Chinese beauty ideals. However, the Nike ethos represented by the new athletic femininity also aligns with Chinese national ideology and political economy in contemporary China, which might explain the overwhelming endorsement of the two campaigns from the snapshot of the Chinese audience represented in the online comments. Moreover, since a strong consumerist sense is recreated in the comments, I propose the term consumer-based female empowerment to conceptualise the postfeminist sensibility produced by the seemingly young middle-class urban female audience, which mirrors a consumer-driven Chinese society imposed by the Party-State. I further contend that postfeminist sensibility is not simply a Western-centred cultural phenomenon disseminating from the West to the non-West due to globalisation; rather, it can also be shaped by local non-Western political economy. This thesis therefore contributes to the research field of transnational postfeminism as I present a new approach which connects the universalised postfeminist discourses derived from the West and the local cultural politics that potentially influence the emergence of postfeminist sensibility in a non-Western context.