Celebrity Feminism: Nike Style Post-Fordism, Transcendence, and Consumer Power

1995 ◽  
Vol 12 (4) ◽  
pp. 347-369 ◽  
Author(s):  
Cheryl L. Cole ◽  
Amy Hribar
Keyword(s):  
Women Workers ◽  
Third World ◽  
Political Action ◽  
Women Consumers ◽  
Authentic Self ◽  
Advertising Strategies ◽  
Ways Of Thinking ◽  
Third World Women

We interrogate Nike’s implication in the developments of 1980s and 1990s popular feminisms by contextualizing and examining the advertising strategies deployed by Nike in its efforts to seduce women consumers. Although Nike is represented as progressive and pro-women, we demonstrate Nike’s alliance with normative forces dominating 1980s America. We suggest that Nike’s solicitation relies on the logic of addiction, which demonized those people most affected by post-Fordist dynamics. While Nike’s narrations of “empowerment” appeal to a deep, authentic self located at the crossroads of power and lifestyle, we suggest that these narratives offer ways of thinking/identities that impede political action. Finally, we consider the relations among Nike, celebrity feminism, and the complex and invisible dynamics that enable transnationals to exploit Third World women workers.

Development

2019 ◽  
pp. 89-121
Author(s):  
Eileen Boris
Keyword(s):  
Developing Countries ◽  
Women Workers ◽  
Third World ◽  
Family Responsibilities ◽  
Substantive Equality ◽  
Home Work ◽  
Independent States ◽  
Third World Women ◽  
Newly Independent States ◽  
State Socialist

This chapter turns to the construction of a category within a category, “women in developing countries,” whose difference from the Western norm defined the severity of woman’s oppression and made her into the other of the woman worker. In the early post-WWII years, the ILO juggled a commitment to equality with designation of Third World women as the most needy of distinct programs. It promoted handicraft despite the resemblance of such labor to exploitative industrial home work. When addressing Women Workers in a Changing World in 1964, the ILO separated the situation of women in developing countries, whose income generation could be integrated into home labor, from women in industrialized regions whose family responsibilities interfered with their labor force participation. At the 1975 UN World Conference on Women, the meaning of development, like that of equality, was up for grabs in the ideological contest between state socialist and newly independent states against the former colonial states and market economies. ILO opposition to the UN Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW) intertwined with its attempt to provide Third World women with substantive equality.

scholarly journals Relocating Colonial Women in Resistance: An Interpretation of Rabindranath Tagore’s Nastanirh and Chaturanga

2021 ◽  
Vol 13 (3) ◽  
Author(s):  
T. K. Krishnapriya ◽  
◽  
Padma Rani ◽  
Bashabi Fraser ◽  
◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Third World ◽  
New World ◽  
Social Dilemma ◽  
Feminist Scholarship ◽  
Bell Hooks ◽  
The West ◽  
The Social ◽  
Marginalized Women ◽  
Nineteenth And Twentieth Centuries ◽  
Third World Women

The Colonial Bengal of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries was a place of contradictions. For instance, despite certain evident advancements in the resolution of the women’s question, some of the emancipatory attempts of the period marked a rather dubious account of women’s liberation as patriarchal underpinnings hegemonized the efforts. Amid this complex backdrop, the colonial women’s position is further jeopardized by the western feminist scholarship that contrives colonial third world women as perennial victims and beneficiaries of emancipatory actions from the West. The paper attempts to relocate the colonial women and their resistance by negotiating the fissures in their construction. This study, informed by bell hooks’ (1990) postulations on margin and resistance, simultaneously seeks to form a bridge between the experiences of marginalized women beyond borders. Rabindranath Tagore’s Nastanirh (1901) and Chaturanga (1916) are chosen for close textual reading to examine the experiences of colonial women. The author’s women protagonists often embody the social dilemma of the period. Tagore’s Damini and Charu exist in the margin of resistance whilst Nanibala occupies the margin of deprivation. Significantly, Charu and Damini traverse the precarious “profound edges” of the margin to imagine a “new world” free of subjugation. Thus, the resistance offered by these women subverts the predominant conceptions of victimhood of colonial women, and it enables them to be posited as active agents.

scholarly journals Race, Gender and "Difference": Representations of "Third World Women" in International Development

2015 ◽  
Vol 2 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Christiana Abraham
Keyword(s):  
International Development ◽  
Third World ◽  
Developing World ◽  
Doctoral Study ◽  
Canadian International Development Agency ◽  
Women In Development ◽  
Third World Women ◽  
The Third World ◽  
Representations Of Women ◽  
Images Of Women

AbstractThis paper analyses images of international development through a study of the ways in which development representations produce and circulate “difference” with respect to women and the developing world. Through both overt and subtle narratives, representations of women as “different,” “distant” and “other” construct both the object and subject of development. The paper discusses the process by which racialization operates in development through gender as a signifying practice. Based on a doctoral study of communication materials of Women in Development (WID) images produced by the Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA), the paper analyses images of women of the developing world in communication materials attached to major campaigns during the Women in Development (WID) period. WID represents an important legacy of today’s prevalent images of women in development. The paper situates this legacy within the colonial roots of development and its representations, which include historical constructions of the "third world woman" that intricately reproduce a range of colonial images and practices. Images of "third world women" have become development’s most eminent symbol, yet many continue to communicate static and predictable views about the developing world.

Chaos in the Tribune

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jocelyn Olcott
Keyword(s):  
Third World ◽  
Betty Friedan ◽  
Third World Women

As the IWY events neared their conclusion, chaos erupted in the NGO tribune when participants learned that the group representing the United Women of the Tribune, led by Betty Friedan, had attempted to represent the tribune to the intergovernmental conference. The Mexican press attributed the campaign entirely to Friedan, describing the group she “commands” as composed primarily of US women who sought to subordinate the more political concerns that preoccupied Third World women to the “secondary issues” that interested US women. A planned lunchtime forum for the United Women turned into a fracas that generated one of IWY’s most widely circulated images: an AP photograph of two women fighting over a microphone.

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