Xinran Wang

PhD Student in Media Studies

Reshaping Gender Norms around Women and Sport in China through ‘Femvertising’: a Study of Text and Audience on Nike’s Cases

Supervisors: Dr Anita Brady & Dr Emma Tennent

ABSTRACT

Over the past two decades, an increasing number of Western brands has begun to embed pro-female messages in advertising to “empower” women and girls. As the trend becomes popular, a new term “femvertising” has been coined to refer to advertising that embraces female empowerment content. While femvertising indicates features such as individualism and intersectionality from third-wave feminism, whether females are “empowered” from consumption behaviour remains debatable. Western sportswear brands, including Nike, have also brought such trend to the Chinese market to attract more female customers in recent years. However, a majority of former studies have only looked into femvertising under a predominant Western context rather than a globalised perspective. My research aims to find out how Nike tries to reshape the relationship of gender norms and sport through femvertising in contemporary Chinese society. I will conduct textual analysis on two of Nike’s cases in China (“Further Than Ever” and “Boundless Girls”) to examine how Nike encode (post)feminist discourse in sports advertising to challenge traditional gender stereotypes. Based on Stuart Hall’s encoding/decoding model, the response from the Chinese audience – both ‘online’ and ‘offline’ – will also be investigated to identify their attitudes and opinions towards Nike’s adoption of (post)feminism in sports advertising. I hope my research will contribute to expanding methodological dimensions in the field of feminist media studies as well as de-westernising feminist media theory by analysing femvertising in a non-Western society.

BIOGRAPHY

Xinran Wang holds a master’s degree with distinction in Communication, Media Practice and PR from Swansea University in the UK. Before embarking on her PhD research at Victoria University of Wellington, Xinran worked as a copy editor at a video news agency and an ESL teacher in China. Her research interest includes femvertising, female representation in Chinese media, as well as gender norms in sport.