Between Co-optation and Resistance: From 'Femvertising' to 'Profem Advertising'

'Femvertising' has gained relevance in the last few years as a strategy of persuasive communication that tries to eliminate gender stereotypes while promoting the empowerment of female consumers. However, the essentially commercial quality of advertising raises doubts about its actual aims. Although 'femvertising' is supposed to tend towards social change, there is always some suspicion about its instrumentalization of feminism for commercial purposes. This paper tries to fill a gap within the specialized bibliography on 'femvertising'. In order to do so, it revises its origins, it explores its main theoretical keys from the point of view of feminist philosophy and, finally, it elaborates a method to analyze or design a type of 'advertising that generates feminism', which we have dubbed 'profem advertising', taking an approach that seems to be more useful for gender-based interests than the more problematic definition of 'feminist advertising'.