Commodification of Feminism Through Advertisement and Consumption Culture: Analysis of Commercials With the Theme of March 8th International Women’s Day

Commercial films, which legalize the consumption culture and its ideology, do not only provide women with a number of ideal identities. Also, as the commercials for the International Women’s Day March 8th illustrate, feminism and feminist values are reduced to a tool of capitalist consumption culture. For this reason, in this paper, four commercial films broadcasted on TV channels in Turkey were analyzed via the “semiotic model” developed by French linguist Roland Barthes. It was detected that, in accordance with today’s capitalist values, feminist gains in the commercials have been interlaced with the indicators of the consumption culture and commodified. In addition, it was observed that the identity of woman, by being reidentified in accordance with neoliberal capitalist order through a number of myths, is positioned as the subject of the consumption culture.