Presentation Schedule
Negotiating Feminist Visibility: Cultural Authenticity, Platform Backlash, and Nike’s Femvertising in South Korea and Japan (111092)
Session: On Demand
Room: Virtual Video Presentation
Presentation Type:Virtual Presentation
This study offers a comparative analysis of Nike Korea and Nike Japan YouTube campaigns to examine how multinational femvertising is received across East Asian digital publics. While scholarship on femvertising often emphasizes empowerment and consumer identification, less attention has been paid to how platformed audiences in relatively collectivist, high-context, high-uncertainty-avoidance societies regulate the acceptable boundaries of feminist visibility, bodily legitimacy, and gendered self-presentation. The study draws on Hofstede's cultural dimensions, Hall's intercultural communication theory, and postfeminist sensibility theory to explore expectations around communicative harmony, authenticity, and femininity emerging within specific cultural and platformed contexts. The study employs comparative multimodal discourse analysis and critical thematic analysis of videos released by Nike Korea and Nike Japan between 2019 and 2026. It analyzes a corpus of over 6,100 YouTube comments, focusing on community-based gatekeeping and affective responses. Hofstede's and Hall's frameworks are operationalized through audience expressions. The analysis examines social conformity, discomfort with overt ideological confrontation, and resistance to norm disruption. It evaluates the videos’ physical representations, authenticity, self-managed transformation, and commercialized empowerment through a postfeminist sensibility. The findings indicate that Nike Japan's empowerment campaigns are positively received when framed as individualized, culturally moderated, and authentic performances, embodied by a plus-sized athletic comedian and a theatrical girl group. Conversely, Nike Korea's confrontational gender messaging and disruption of normative femininity generate intensified backlash amid growing gender tensions and anti-feminist discourse online. The research contributes to transnational advertising scholarship by theorizing how global brands negotiate feminist visibility within differing platformed cultural contexts and audience responses.
Authors:
Dannica Eirren Batoon, King’s College London, United Kingdom
About the Presenter(s)
Dannica Batoon is currently a Marketing MSc student at King’s College London, United Kingdom.
Connect on Linkedin
https://www.linkedin.com/in/dannicaeirrenbatoon/
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