Marketing and the missing feminisms: Decolonial feminism, and the Arab Spring

Abstract

The marketing literature is rich in gender and feminist conceptualizations useful to unpack the understandings of market phenomena that involve social justice, power relations, and equality issues. In our field, these phenomena have been mainly investigated from a Western feminist theoretical perspective building on Western consumer cultures. Most research tackling women and gender issues in the “Global South” is located within the social marketing paradigm. This prism often overlooks the wealth of local feminist scholarship and lacks a socio-historic and cultural perspective or a deep grasp of the ‘context of context’. Gender and feminist research anchored in the sociocultural marketing paradigm also tends to overlook social realities outside the Western world and/or superposes Western theories over social facts that require more depth through building on local knowledge. Consumer culture theorists and gender scholars appeal for a better grasp of this ‘invisible half’ and for more intersectional perspectives.