A Corporation in Feminist Clothing? Young Women Discuss the Dove ‘Real Beauty’ Campaign

Abstract

The Dove campaign for ‘real beauty’ has been exceptionally successful, generating public attention and increased sales. This article uses focus group analysis to investigate how young, feminist-identified women understand the campaign, and how they respond when a corporation encourages them to exercise their politics through consumption. We ask whether the campaign is seen as compatible with their vision of feminism, and whether corporations are potential vehicles for feminist change. To conceptualize critical consciousness, we suggest that classical critical theory, particularly Herbert Marcuse, can be fruitfully connected with contemporary critical and feminist theories of capitalist cooptation. Participants varied in their critiques, but relished the opportunity for deliberation, and displayed a clear capacity to disentangle ‘opposites’ like feminism and corporate profiteering. Most women saw the campaign as ‘better than nothing’ and supported some notion of ethical consumption – a kind of pragmatism that suggests the difficulty of imagining alternatives to consumer capitalism.