Gendering the Commodity Audience in Social Media
Date
2014
Authors
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
Routledge
Abstract
Description
This chapter employs a feminist political economy approach to examine how the business practices of social media, especially advertising, work to construct users as gendered commodities. Generally speaking, the political economy tradition of studying communications and the media attends to the impact of economic structures such as media ownership, government policy, and advertising models on communication as a political and social instrument of power. A feminist political economy adds to this broad perspective an understanding of economic structures as fundamentally gendered. In seeing the politics of media owner- ship, government policymaking, and advertising practices as following not only class divisions but also the deep-seated gender divisions that organize social relations, feminist political economy highlights the central role that gender plays in arrangements of labor. Accordingly, the economic structures that underlie social media platforms show how these platforms are not just spaces in which gendered identities might be explored, but business models that create particular gendered identities in the interest of capital.
Keywords
gender, social media, advertising, commodification
Citation
Shepherd, T. (2014). Gendering the Commodity Audience in Social Media. In L. Steiner, L. McLaughlin, & C. Carter (eds.), The Routledge Companion to Media and Gender. New York: Routledge.