The Power and Postcolonial Meanings of Lingerie for Urban Professional Indian Women Living In India

The purpose of this research is to investigate the power and postcolonial meanings of lingerie for urban Indian professional women (UIPW) living in India to better understand the consumer behaviour of lingerie consumption. This critical marketing studies thesis adds to the existing studies of lingerie to argue that little is understood about the social meanings behind the growth in lingerie in India. It analyses the ways in which lingerie is instrumental to how urban Indian women sartorially negotiate colonial and national tensions of sexual identity.

An interdisciplinary conceptual framework utilising Foucauldian power and an original application of Saidian orientalism are used to critique lingerie advertising practices in India and its implications for developing the discourse of cross-cultural consumer behaviour for postcolonial contexts. An interdisciplinary, interpretive, qualitative, mixed methods case study approach was undertaken in the urban Indian cities of Delhi and Bombay between the periods 2010 – 2014. The research design consisted of: a content analysis of lingerie advertising in the magazines Vogue India and Femina between the post-media-liberalisation years 2003 to 2014; visual and textual analysis of lingerie in three selective Indian films; 106 semistructured surveys conducted amongst UIPW in the urban cities of Delhi and Bombay; two focus groups in Bombay and Delhi and fifteen in-depth interviews. Data analysis included SPSS analysis and discourse analysis.

Findings reveal the contradictory ways in which female sartorial identity in India is caught up in competing postcolonial forces of control and resistance demarcated along the lines of cultural, social and economic capital, therefore differing from existing western studies of lingerie. Findings show current global marketing practices still operate within western marketing frameworks, perpetuating social inequalities and are failing to be congruent with multiple and alternative feminine identities. Findings empirically reinforce the importance of postcolonial theory for original socio-cultural consumer behaviour insight and the development of global marketing strategy.

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