bell hooks’ “Eating the Other” as a Critical Advertising Framework

This chapter proposes the late bell hooks’ essay “Eating the Other: Desire and Resistance” (2012) as an exemplar for understanding the contradictions in representation in multicultural, postcolonial, and globalized advertising. Her argument and framework for analysis highlight the mix of seemingly affirmative portrayals—but ultimately with essentialist and stigmatizing undertones—of Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC) representation and postcolonial portrayals of other cultures, including those in the Global South, produced by advertising in the West. The chapter will explicate hooks’ argument and its explanatory power and discuss its relevance for critical advertising studies and ways to use the essay for critical and postcolonial advertising studies, including a review of how previous research has employed the perspective to understand representation in advertising. It will then apply her framework to two case studies: a 2013 print campaign for Turkish Airlines that offered images of different cultures, and a 2021 digital video and in-store commercial by the Canadian branch of the French beauty product brand Sephora that attempted to integrate—or perhaps appropriate—National Indigenous History Month.