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This paper aims to explore how and why ideas regarding “intersectional” approaches to feminism and Black activism are drawn on in marketing content related to the concept of being “woke” (invested in addressing social injustices). It considers which subject positions are represented as part of this and what they reveal about contemporary issues concerning advertising, gender, race and activism.

This study involves an interpretive and critical discursive analysis of so-called feminist advertising (“femvertising”) and marketing examples that make use of Black social justice activist ideas.

Findings illuminate how marketing simultaneously enables the visibility and erasure of “intersectional”, feminist and Black social justice activist issues, with the use of key racialised and gendered subject positions: White Saviour, Black Excellence, Strong Black Woman (and Mother) and “Woke” Change Agent.

This research signals how brands (mis)use issues concerning commercialised notions of feminism, equality and Black social justice activism as part of marketing that flattens and reframes liberationist politics while upholding the neoliberal idea that achievement and social change requires individual ambition and consumption rather than structural shifts and resistance.

This work can aid the development of advertising standards regulatory approaches which account for nuances of stereotypical representations and marketing’s connection to intersecting issues regarding racism and sexism.

This research outlines a conceptualisation of the branding of “woke” bravery, which expands our understanding of the interdependency of issues related to race, gender, feminism, activism and marketing. It highlights marketing responses to recent socio-political times, which are influenced by public discourse concerning movements, including Black Lives Matter and Me Too.

Grounded in experience of co-organizing a two-day photography-based workshop in Paris, this paper explores how photo-dialogues can facilitate anti-racist pedagogy and generative discussions about how race and racism function in marketplace contexts.

This paper draws on the authors' involvement in a cross-national and cross-disciplinary team of scholars who worked with local community stakeholders—including activists, artists and practitioners—to discuss, theorize and photo-document issues regarding race and racism in the Parisian marketplace.

This paper contributes to the literature on visual culture studies and critical race studies as it demonstrates the potentials of photography combined with dialogue to challenge the White supremacy over archiving and visuality in the context of urban spaces. This new methodology is an opportunity to reflect on archetypes of visuality that depart from the traditional Parisian flâneur to be consistent with and reinforce anti-racist stances.

Photography and visual methods often play peripheral roles in anti-racist education across various disciplines and research areas, including critical marketplace studies. This paper expands understanding of the potentials of using photographic methods as part of critical and anti-racist work related to racial and racist dynamics, including issues regarding power, White supremacy and public space. It outlines the use of photographic dialogues in a context (Paris, France) where discussion of race is regularly societally discouraged. Thus, this work shifts the focus away from decontextualized research that regards race as an object, to specifically foreground understandings of racialized experiences and how the photographic gaze produces and is produced by racialized viewers.

Purpose: This research explores parental management and use of media, as part of strategies to affirm children’s racial identities, as well as to assist such parenting efforts. It analyzes how parents construct Black children’s engagement with media, as being a counter-cultural coping mechanism, to temper the potential racial and diasporic discordance of their children’s identities.

Methodology/approach: There is analysis of in-depth interviews about the media marketplace experiences of Black women in Britain. The analytic approach is informed by studies of identity and visual consumption, as well as race in the marketplace, which emphasize how identity intersects with consumer culture.

Findings: Findings reveal that intra-racial, inter-racial, and inter-cultural relations influence how and why parents manage media that their Black children engage with, including when trying to reinforce their Black identities. Findings also indicate how online user-generated content enables parents to seek a sense of support as part of their inter-cultural and race-related parenting efforts.

Social implications: Findings at the root of this research point to the need for media producers and marketers to be sensitized to parental concerns about the development of their children’s Black identities.

Originality/value: This work foregrounds under-explored issues concerning parental race-work and processes of consumer biracialization in relation to media representation and spectatorship.

Jordan Peele’s critically acclaimed directorial debut Get Out (2017) highlights the issues regarding racism and Black identity that have seldom been the subject of horror film. More specifically, Get Out offers representations of Black masculinity that push against the stereotypical and reductive ways that Black men have often been depicted in horror cinema. The portrayal of Black men in Get Out takes shape in ways influenced by a range of relationships featured in the film. Amongst these is the dynamic between the leading character Chris (Daniel Kaluuya) and his white girlfriend Rose (Allison Williams), in addition to Chris’s interactions with Rose’s mother Missy (Catherine Keener), as well as his best friend Rod (Lil Rel Howery). As such, scrutiny of Get Out yields insight into the construction of Black masculinity in horror film, including how on-screen inter- and intra-racial relations are implicated in this. The writing that follows focuses on how Get Out offers complex and scarcely featured representations of Black masculinity, and boyhood, in horror. As part of such discussion, there is analysis of the entanglements of on-screen gender and racial politics, which contribute to the nuances of depictions of Black masculinity in Get Out.