• DOI:10.1086/528849
• Corpus ID: 146611955

Feminist Consumerism and Fat Activists: A Comparative Study of Grassroots Activism and the Dove Real Beauty Campaign

@article{Johnston2008FeministCA,
  title={Feminist Consumerism and Fat Activists: A Comparative Study of Grassroots Activism and the Dove Real Beauty Campaign},
  author={Jos{\'e}e Johnston and Judith Taylor},
  journal={Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society},
  year={2008},
  volume={33},
  pages={941 - 966}
}

• J. Johnston, Judith Taylor
• Published 1 June 2008
• Sociology
• Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society

C orporations have a long history of incorporating emancipatory ideals into marketing campaigns, often with limited transformative outcomes (Frank 1997; Heath and Potter 2004). Virginia Slims, for instance, promotes an image of feminist independence in the “You’ve come a long way, baby” marketing campaign, and yet it sells women a highly addictive, cancer-causing product. While “feminist tobacco” contains obvious contradictions, today’s transnational corporations employ a panoply of socially responsible wares ranging from fair-trade coffee to biodegradable yoga mats and organic frozen dinners (Johnston 2001). Because in some instances such corporate strategies appear both well intentioned and well received, we move beyond cynical dismissal to empirically investigate and analyze corporate discourse to identify its transformative possibilities and contradictions. In this article, we question whether transformative visions are exclusively linked with grassroots models for social change—models at the heart of feminist consciousness-raising. Our primary goal is to compare the discursive contributions of Dove’s “Campaign for Real Beauty”—a corporate project that claims to oppose restrictive feminine beauty standards and promote a more democratic vision of beauty—with those made by a Toronto-based grassroots fat-activist organization that also targets feminine beauty ideals: Pretty, Porky, and Pissed Off (PPPO). We use a comparative approach to evaluate how each case challenges feminine beauty ideology while also considering the scale