Representational Harm: Advertising and the Gendered Drivers of Violence Against Women

2026 Fay Gale Lecture | 29 October 2026 | Adelaide University Decades of feminist advertising scholarship has found the same representational patterns: rigid gender roles and stereotypes, narrow beauty ideals and pervasive sexualisation, reproducing a monolithic gender order. Yet despite sustained criticism, campaigning by activists and even concessions from industry, we are routinely faced with the same representations. And as advertising becomes increasingly personalised, algorithmic and creator-made in an attention economy, these patterns have persisted, intensified and become harder to name. So, why has so little changed? This lecture argues that the answer lies in what becomes of objection itself. Associate Professor Lauren Gurrieri proposes representational harm as a way of understanding how advertising, as an institution, comes to constitute harmful gender norms and shift the threshold of what counts as acceptable – and how it does so out of the very objections raised against it. She makes the case for treating advertising as a setting for primary prevention, given its powerful cultural role in sustaining the underlying social conditions that drive violence against women. The Fay Gale Lecture is named in honour of the late Professor Gwendoline Fay Gale AO (1932–2008), the first female President of the Academy of the Social Sciences in Australia (1997–2000) and an eminent human geographer, well-known for her contributions to academia, the advancement of women within academia, Indigenous studies and juvenile justice. The lecture, inaugurated in 2010, is presented annually by a distinguished social scientist and is open to the public. The lecture is jointly hosted by the Academy of the Social Sciences in Australia and the Fay Gale Centre for Research on Gender.