Blog tasks: Representation of women in advertising
Advertising: The representation of women in advertising
Start by watching her Ted Talk…
The representation of women in advertising is a vital area of study. We need to be able to discuss how representations have changed and apply these ideas to both unseen advertisements and our CSPs.
The notes from the lesson are below.
Jean Kilbourne: Killing us softly
Activist and cultural theorist Jean Kilbourne has been studying the image of women in advertising for over 40 years. Her series ‘Killing us softly’ highlighted the negative representation of women in advertising.
She went on to make further documentaries studying this issue and whether it was changing over time.
Liesbet van Zoonen: Feminist Media Studies
Liesbet van Zoonen was one of the first theorists to explicitly link gender, feminism and media studies. Writing since the 1990s, van Zoonen is a key figure in third wave feminism alongside theorists such as Butler and McRobbie.
Looking specifically at the representation of women in advertisements in the 1970s and 80s, van Zoonen questioned how much things had really changed. For example, women in adverts may be shown to have jobs but their appearance was usually still the vital element.
Liesbet van Zoonen: third wave feminist
Like McRobbie, van Zoonen was interested in the pleasures female audiences took from the women’s magazines that were heavily criticised by more radical 1970s-style feminists.
In a similarity with Butler, van Zoonen sees gender as negotiated and dependent on social and historical context. She wrote the meaning of gender is a “discursive struggle and negotiation, the outcome having far-reaching socio-cultural implications.” (van Zoonen, 1994)
Liesbet van Zoonen: constructing meanings
Van Zoonen also built on Stuart Hall’s reception theory with regards to how gender representations communicate their meanings to audiences. She suggested the media’s influence in constructing gender is dependent on:
•Whether the institution is commercial or public
•The platform (print/broadcast/digital)
•Genre (e.g. drama/news/advertisement)
•Target audience
•How significant the media text is to that audience
Create a new blogpost called 'Representation of women in advertising' and work through the following tasks.
Academic reading: A Critical Analysis of Progressive Depictions of Gender in Advertising
Read these extracts from an academic essay on gender in advertising by Reena Mistry. This was originally published in full in David Gauntlett's book 'Media, Gender and Identity'. Then, answer the following questions:
1) How does Mistry suggest advertising has changed since the mid-1990s?
Advertising has increasingly employed images in which the gender and sexual
orientation of the subject(s) are markedly (and purposefully) ambiguous.
2) What kinds of female stereotypes were found in advertising in the 1940s and 1950s?
Soon after 1945, women were made to feel guilty by warnings of the dangerous consequences to the home that had begun to circulate. Looking at women's magazines in the 1950s, Betty Friedan (1963) claims this led to the creation of the 'feminine mystique’: The highest good is keeping house and raising children’
3) How did the increasing influence of clothes and make-up change representations of women in advertising?
Major area of expansion in production/consumption - clothes and make-up - which led to women being increasingly portrayed as decorative (empty) objects.
4) Which theorist came up with the idea of the 'male gaze' and what does it refer to?
Laura Mulvey - 'Male Gaze/female gaze': Women see themselves through the eyes of men and are not sexualised by men. Audiences are force to view women from the point of view of a heterosexual male or a male is sexualised in fragrance adverts for a women demographic.
5) How did the representation of women change in the 1970s?
that women are depersonalised and objectified because they are
encouraged to 'use commodities to serve men; they use them on themselves to aid femininity; commodities replace them in their relation to men'
6) Why does van Zoonen suggest the 'new' representations of women in the 1970s and 1980s were only marginally different from the sexist representations of earlier years?
From the mid-1970s there was a proliferation of distinct images that became labelled as the ‘New Woman', and that were seen as representative of the 'changing reality of women's social position
and of the influence of the women's movement'
7) What does Barthel suggest regarding advertising and male power?
Barthel notes that 'today's young women can successfully storm the bastions of male power... without threatening their male counterparts'
8) What does Richard Dyer suggest about the 'femme fatale' representation of women in adverts such as Christian Dior make-up?
claims that such images are something of a misrepresentation of women's liberation: '[advertising] agencies trying to accommodate new [feminist] attitudes in their campaigns, often miss the point and equate "liberation" with a type of aggressive sexuality and a very unliberated coy sexiness'
Media Magazine: Beach Bodies v Real Women (MM54)
Now go to our Media Magazine archiveand read the feature on Protein World's controversial 'Beach Bodies' marketing campaign in 2015. Read the feature and answer the questions below in the same blogpost as the questions above.
1) What was the Protein World 'Beach Bodies' campaign?
The Protein World team were clearly courting the female market (19-30) into looking their best for the beach this summer. The advert – featuring a tanned, blonde female in a full-frontal pose
2) Why was it controversial?
invited readers to think about their figures, we did not consider the image of the model would shame women who had different body shapes into believing they needed to take a slimming supplement
to feel confident wearing swimwear in public.
3) What did the adverts suggest to audiences?
The advert was arguably aimed first and foremost at the male gaze (an interesting way to get the attention of both sexes) but the question – and the subsequent advertising message – was definitely designed for women.
4) How did some audiences react?
Some protesters responded visually by posing next to the advert in their bikinis, to offer a more realistic depiction of women’s bodies. When angry consumers contacted Protein World, complaining about the campaign, the company’s Twitter response urged them to ‘grow some balls’ – an interesting response for a campaign supposedly directed at women.
5) What was the Dove Real Beauty campaign?
Dove Campaign for Real Beauty – one of the most successful of the digital age. The campaign features real women with real bodies of all races and ages. Dove created an interactive Ad Makeover campaign that put women in charge of the advertisements, where they themselves would choose what they saw as beautiful, not the advertisers. The campaign’s mission is to create a world where beauty is a source of confidence and not anxiety.
6) How has social media changed the way audiences can interact with advertising campaigns?
7) How can we apply van Zoonen's feminist theory and Stuart Hall's reception theory to these case studies?
8) Through studying the social and historical context of women in advertising, do you think representations of women in advertising have changed in the last 60 years?
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