CCS Supper Club ~ February 25, 2026 ~ Zhe Xiang

Zhe Xiang ~ Fudan University ~ Yale Fox International Fellow

Marketing a Public Secret: Managed Visibility and Moralized Anxiety in China’s Feminine Hygiene Market

Abstract：How do firms sell a product that must be publicly marketed but privately hidden? This article examines the commodification of menstruation in China through sanitary pad advertising and consumer reception. Drawing on a longitudinal analysis of brand campaigns alongside consumer narratives, I argue that market expansion in taboo domains often proceeds not by destigmatizing the practice, but by managed visibility: advertising makes the commodity publicly intelligible and purchasable while keeping the menstrual body socially unspeakable.

I show that managed visibility is accomplished through purification in two culturally distinct yet functionally equivalent styles. A hygienic-scientific style sanitizes menstruation via “clean” aesthetics, expert authority, and demonstrations, recoding it as a neutral matter of health risk and bodily management. An affective-innocent style achieves purification through softness, cuteness, and care, de-sexualizing the menstrual body by framing pads as gentle protection rather than contact with pollution. Across both styles, purification renders the product speakable without making the practice speakable.

These purified frames also enable a demand-making strategy of moralized anxiety. Advertising translates leakage from a technical inconvenience into a moral threat to feminine respectability, positioning product choice and use as tests of diligence, self-control, and social competence. This moralization polarizes audiences: some consumers intensify self-surveillance and increasingly meticulous body management, while others develop reflexive resistance and call to “normalize” menstruation. Under these conditions, guidance and credibility shift to shadow infrastructures--peer recommendations, online reviews, and intergenerational transmission--through which women exchange practical knowledge while preserving the privacy norm.

Theoretically, the article reframes advertising as classification politics: campaigns do not merely “communicate” product attributes but actively reorganize moral boundaries of what can appear in public. By conceptualizing managed visibility as a bridge between the visibility of the commodity and the invisibility of the practice, the study advances a cultural-economic account of how taboo goods become marketable without dismantling stigma. More broadly, it contributes to debates on the moral economy of marketing by showing how interactional constraints and moral classification jointly make--and contest--markets for “public secrets.”

Keywords: taboo goods; managed visibility; classification; moral economy; advertising; valuation; menstruation

Please note: Supper Club readings are available to current participants only. A link and password will be sent via email prior to the workshop. 

Please do not share the link or password as we promise confidentiality to our speakers. 

The Supper Club will meet this year at 210 Prospect Street, room 203 from 5 to 7 PM. A light supper will be served during the meeting