“Pushin’ It”

Formative scholarship on musical appropriation has tended to focus on how dominant groups borrow subaltern signifiers to elevate their hipness. However, in contemporary American advertising campaigns, marketers often deploy humorous devices that place stereotyped signifiers of distinctive groups in opposition to one another to magnify their perceived differences and create comedy for the spot. This chapter investigates this practice by examining a 2014 Geico insurance commercial that features the pioneering female hip-hop crew Salt-N-Pepa performing their 1988 hit “Push It.” The commercial aims for humor by re-envisioning the trio’s suggestive music video as a means for cheering suburbanites through mundane tasks. But the incongruence of old-school hip-hop sounds and imagery against those of the modern-day, white-washed lifestyles onscreen reveals a more obvious message: The urban, Black trio and their one-time hit song about female sexual empowerment do not belong there. Musicological inquiry is thus paired here with cultural studies of hip-hop, hipness, advertising, and humor to reveal the process by which signifiers of Salt-N-Pepa’s iconicity are placed in opposition to the pictured residents in ways that reaffirm hierarchies of race, gender, and class.

Disabled sexualities: A theoretical review of sociological approaches and a call to problematize the normative/non-normative dialectic

In the aftermath of the disability rights movement of the 1960s and 1970s, a number of disability activists and scholars began calling for increased attention to the sexual lives of people with disabilities. The result has been a wide range of research that has explored both the sexual marginalization and sexual empowerment of disabled people across diverse groups and social contexts. Indeed, while a number of reviews of research on disabled sexualities have already been written, they have either been too narrowly focused on niche topics, or provide such a broad overview of disabled sexuality that they do not adequately discuss the different theoretical perspectives guiding such research. In this paper, I offer more developed articulations of the theoretical perspectives underpinning scholarship on the sexualities of people with disabilities, and call for a “reproblematizing” of the complex dialectical relationship between “normative” and “non-normative” deployments of sexuality that go into acts of “queering” and sexual empowerment amongst disabled people.

‘Damn, Channing Tatum can move!’: Women’s accounts of men’s bodies and objectification in post-feminist times

This paper explores how women think about men’s bodies as objects of desire. It reports on one part of a larger qualitative study on men’s bodywork practices in contemporary Australia. Drawing on material from three focus groups with 24 Australian women of varying ages, sexual orientations and backgrounds, the paper considers how women experience, understand and reflect on their desire for men and men’s bodies. It also explores themes such as the connection women draw between what a man’s body looks like and what it can do, how attraction is experienced, the meaning making women engage in as they think about men and men’s bodies, and the broader politics of sexuality and objectification that inform their perceptions and ideas. These experiences are set against ideas in post-feminist thinking on women’s sexual desire and debates on their sexual empowerment. The paper argues that these women are grappling with tensions between their personal experiences of sexual objectification and a feminist ethics relating to their active and reflexive projects of sexuality.

A brave new world: embracing sexuality in advertising for apparel

PurposeIn light of the recent shift in the US culture, this paper investigates the effectiveness of female sexual empowerment as ad appeal in the apparel industry.Design/methodology/approachStudy 1 aimed to understand consumers' reactions to female sexual empowerment in ads in terms of their attitudes toward the ad, attitudes toward the brand and purchase intention. Study 2 investigated the role of gender in perceptions of female sexual empowerment in ads.FindingsThis research establishes that consumers display positive attitudes toward female sexual empowerment in the apparel advertisement. These attitudes positively influence attitudes toward the brand, which in turn improve purchase intention. These effects are stronger for women than men.Research limitations/implicationsThis research borrows from social power theory to reveal the impact of female sexual empowerment in ads in the apparel industry. Based on the theory of planned behavior, the findings also show that female sexual empowerment can have a positive impact on purchase intention through a serial mediation of attitude toward the ad and brand.Practical implicationsMarketers need to be aware of the impact of female sexual empowerment as ad appeal. Specifically, firms in the apparel industry could benefit from the positive effects of incorporating female sexual empowerment in their campaigns.Originality/valueThis research is the first to investigate the role of female sexual empowerment as ad appeal in improving consumers' responses to ads.

Lessons in Casual Sex: Narratives of Young Swedish Women

This study focuses on the narratives of four young Swedish women who were interviewed about their experiences of heterosexual casual sex. The analyses are based on a phenomenological approach and provide insight into a highly complex sexual practice, which the participants often portray as having lacked transparent communication, balance of power, and satisfying sex—three key dimensions of an everyday “sexual democracy.” However, the participants also claim to have dealt with these problematic issues, hence pointing to the socializing role that early sexual experiences have for young women. Thus, if the participants’ own perspectives of events are accepted, sexual empowerment might best be understood as individually colored, experience-based, developmental processes rather than as something that is brought about primarily through collective, formal sex education.

Unexpected Heroes of Feminist Cinema

This chapter challenges critics' readings of films as ‘sexist’, looking at two illustrative examples: Paul Verhoeven and Spike Lee. Paul Verhoeven's Basic Instinct (1992) was widely regarded as misogynistic and ‘lesbophobic’. Basic Instinct is a neo-noir film that scandalously refuses to conform to the patriarchal rule of ‘compensating moral values’. Moreover, its visual pleasures are deliberately constructed against the grain of male voyeuristic pleasures and offer women (especially lesbian women) a rare opportunity to dissect and ridicule male sexism, homophobia, and voyeuristic power. Verhoeven's Elle (2016) is a much more subtle and complex critique of how women's self-image is ‘mediated’ by patriarchal culture, and the film makes explicit or oblique references to tabloid journalism, the gaming industry, and religion in the construction of a total culture that presents women as ‘others’ not only to men but also to themselves. Meanwhile, Spike Lee has been a frequent target for the ‘sexist’ label. The chapter argues that this is unfair, given Lee's relatively frequent attempts to make films about female sexual empowerment (or the causes of female sexual disempowerment). The three examples of She's Gotta Have It (1986), She Hate Me (2004), and BlacKkKlansman (2018) suggest that Lee has in various ways attempted to represent females as empowered sexual agents, and to address social double standards erected by men to possess women through the possession of their bodies.