Happy Women's Day?

Sammanfattning: Purpose: The purpose of the study is to, from a critical feminist perspective, illustrate and create understanding for how companies use feminism to broadcast commercial messages. Methodology: The study was conducted in the form of a case study. The analysis was made by doing a qualitative content analysis of images and text in order to illustrate the material’s underlying meaning. Theoretical perspectives: The study’s theoretical framework consists of postfeminism and consumer culture theory. Empirical foundation: The case of the study consists of 27 Instagram-posts that were published in connection with International Women’s Day 2019. The posts were published by 24 Swedish companies, both large and small, that market goods or services directly to the end customer. Conclusions: The posts show how feministic terms and symbols have been commercialized and standardized in our society. Therefore, it appears that feminism has been “co-opted” along financial priorities and turned into a trend rather than a political movement. Henceforth, the posts only present one type of woman: strong, independent and successful as well as traditionally beautiful and feminine, unopposed by patriarchal social systems and oppression of women. At last, there are signs of how the individual woman becomes both guilty of, and in charge of solving, the possible problems that gender inequality may involve.