Feeling Bodies in Marketing: Aesthetics, Emotions and Gender

Gender is deeply embedded in marketing ideology, and it continues to be a topic of concern in the marketing academy. There has been little attention paid by marketers, however, to related studies in other fields on aesthetic labour and emotional labour in relation to gender issues, despite the commonalities and intersections between them. Taking the gender and marketing literature as a starting point, the article thus seeks to incorporate aesthetic labour and emotional labour into the gender and marketing discussion. The rationale for this is that these three literatures, when taken together, offer us a fresh opportunity to consider the on-going impact of gender on marketing. Above all, the article deliberately reintroduces a concerned, 'trailblazing' feminist element into discussions of gender in marketing in order to re-ignite this issue. It concludes by calling for greater critical awareness of gender as a dominant motif in our ideologies, discourses and practices in marketing, offering suggestions for empirical research into this important topic.