دفاع از مارکرهای مردسالاری: مقاومت مصرف کننده در برابر برند جنسیتی

I study the Porsche Cayenne SUV launch to ethnographically analyze how men consuming a gendered brand respond to perceived brand gender contamination. The consumers' communal gender work in a Porsche brand community is analyzed to uncover brand gender contamination's effects on the identity projects of consumers, the brand as an identity marker, and the prevailing gender order in the group. Through the promulgation of gender stereotypes, Porsche owners stratify themselves along gender lines and create an ingroup that is sharply defined by masculinity and an outgroup that is defined by femininity. The construction of social barriers limits access to Porsche's meanings to those who achieve masculine ideals and causes the SUV owners to resort to hyper-masculine behaviors to combat exclusion. The consumers' gender work reverses the firm's efforts to gender-bend the brand, reinstates Porsche as a masculine marker, and reifies particular definitions of masculinity in the community.

“It's a boy!” claims Volkswagen in the 2012 relaunch of its Beetle. The Beetle's more aggressive design was devised to bring men into the female-skewed customer base. Harley-Davidson once claimed that it made “big toys for big boys”; today, the company is trying to attract women. Marketers are gender-bending their brands, taking products that had been targeted to one sex and targeting them to the other. In the postmodern era, both men and women have engaged in gender-bending consumption, co-opting the consumption practices and products of the opposite sex to play with definitions of gender and support new ideologies. Consumer researchers argue that we are in a post-gender period in which the stark lines that have historically divided men's and women's consumption are blurring (Firat, 1994 and Patterson and Elliott, 2002). Have we finally reached a time when gender does not matter in consumption? Can brands transcend their gendered roots and become neither masculine nor feminine, but an androgynous mixture of both?