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Abstract
ABSTRACT Influenced by Confucian culture, China’s traditional gender ethics associates women’s chastity with morality and its loss with immorality. However, the global transmission of postfeminist sensibility—which is closely tied to consumerism and women’s self-empowerment, has stimulated the marketing of various taboo products, such as sex toys, related to women’s sexuality in China. This study investigates the (de)construction of taboos in the marketing discourse of female sex toys on the largest Chinese online shopping platform, Taobao. I consider how the marketing discourse negotiates the tension between (post)feminist ideologies and the historically taboo nature of sex toys via various rhetorical strategies. Data was collected from the promotional text for OSUGA, a woman consumer-oriented sex toy brand whose vibrators were best-sellers on Taobao in 2020. Adopting feminist critical discourse analysis (FCDA), I identified six rhetorical strategies deployed by the marketer, including emphasizing embarrassment-free design, demystifying women’s orgasms, framing sex toys as playful products, stressing a non-penetrative feature, differentiating the product from traditional sex toys, and highlighting women’s agency. I illustrate how feminism and associated counterhegemonic notions are strategically commercialized within a consumerist pseudo-feminist discourse, and how the focal discourse appears to flout, but does not actively resist, taboos associated with women’s sexuality.
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