Document Type
Article
Abstract
This article dissects the current state of discourse in environmental advertising aimed at women, exploring the language and imagery from a feminist perspective. Examining three green advertising campaigns pervasive in women's lifestyle media in recent years, I discover that the gendered origins of environmental discourse in American popular culture continue to impact efforts to sell environmentalism to women. I trace the evolution of definitions of environmentalism in American popular culture, and comment on the debate among feminist environmentalists and media critics over these definitions. I highlight common tropes surrounding environmentalism in green advertising, such as nature's presumed purity and its association with women's presumed purity; assumed connections between motherhood and able environmental stewardship; and apparent efforts to limit environmentalism to the domain of white women. I argue that the hegemony of such tropes, particularly in media aimed at women, is ultimately anti-feminist, limiting definitions of environmentalism in popular culture, essentializing women's roles, and narrowly defining who ought to care about the environment. In exposing these anti-feminist tropes, I seek to encourage a discussion among feminist scholars about how feminists can best respond to the pervasiveness of such definitions in the current media space.
Repository Citation
Okopny, Cara. "Nature's Keepers?: Constructing Women’s Environmentalism in Green Marketing." Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture vol. 15, no. 3, 2015, pp. 1–19. https://digitalcommons.odu.edu/reconstruction/vol15/iss3/7