Speech 450

Gender Images

The category ritualization of subordination means that women are constantly being portrayed lying down on their sides or their backs, physically positioning them closer to the ground, instead of standing up tall and holding their bodies erect, like men often times do. By lowering themselves, this symbolizes being less in control of oneself.

Often times, models will be positioned to lie on beds, couches, floors or anything that can be lounged on, to show their sexual availability.

In Provocateur: Images of Women and Minorities in Advertising, a book written by Anthony Joseph Paul Cortese, he quotes Goffman saying “People in charge of their own lives typically stand upright, alert and ready to meet the world. In contrast, the bending of the body conveys unpreparedness, submissiveness and appeasement”.

1. Introduction.

Feminist approach
1. Content analysis reveals "symbolic annihilation"
  1. Exclusion of women
    
    Byte
  2. Condemnation of women
    
    Hitachi
  3. Trivialization of women
    
    Gary's Tux Shops
2. Assumption: these are harmful images, lead to sexist socialization
3. But effects must be studied, not assumed from models. Durkin (1985), p. 35:
  "... the content analyses tell us that much of television is reprehensible, and that it is likely to have a deleterious effect upon the young. In fact, two issues are conflated here, one ideological and the other psychological. Our assessment of thedesirability of sex stereotyping in TV is a matter of value judgement, and presumably varies as a function of an individual's general perspective on human affairs. Our assessment of the effects of sex stereotyping in TV is, however, an empirical judgement, which should ideally be based upon an understanding of how human beings acquire social roles, and upon evidence of how a mass medium might contribute to these processes. Since television first became available, critics from numerous perspectives have readily assumed that it has a bad influence upon children. This may or may not be the case, but for the moment it should be stressed that no amount of content analyses can establish the correctness of such a view. They tell us the 'bad news', but it remains to be seen what are the consequences of the messages they uncover."
4. It should be added that sex stereotyping is not a matter of intuition or self-evidence. Detection of sex stereotypes requires knowledge of gender codes--or of how gender messages are encoded in commercials and other media.
Relationship to model of communication process
1. Feminist approach concerns relationship of messages with the context of communication--how messagesreflect the real world (the mimetic character of feminist analysis) and how the real world should be changed to eliminate sexism (the instrumental character of feminist analysis).
2. Alternative approaches concern relationship of messages to audiences (effects analysis) and to theencoding process.
Preview
1. Examine three approaches to effects studies.
2. Examine two interesting encoding studies.

II. Body

Effects studies
1. Commercial examples
  1. Sex stereotyping and consumer attitudes
    - Utt (1984)
    - Pearce (1985)
    - Conclusions are not decisive. See Whipple and Courtney (1985), p. 5:
      "it is generally accepted, among both academics and commercial research practitioners, that the precise nature of the relationship between communication measures and subsequent action tendencies is, as yet, not fully understood. However, with respect to role portrayal issues, advertisers have argued that affective measures, particularly liking/disliking of the advertisements, are predictive of sales-effectiveness in the marketplace. The failure to relate preference to buying intention is nevertheless a serious flaw in many of these studies."
  2. Attractiveness studies
    - Downs and Harrison (1985) is a content analysis, showing that
      of 4,294 commercials aired in the Spring of 1982, about 10% say directly that beauty is good, important, valuable, and about 1/4 of the commercials contain some form of attractiveness message. Furthermore, female performers usually illustrate the attractiveness messages, and male voice-overs usually explain the message. Thus, attractiveness is linked to women, and it is men who establish the link! But this is not an "effects" study. Downs and Harrison conclude in part, "... careful scrutiny of theimpact of television's attractiveness messages on viewers is greatly warranted. Indeed, these messages may impact differently on children, adolescents, and adults, although an impact on all age groups is likely" (pp. 17-18).
    - Joseph (1982) reviews 34 attractiveness studies, concluding that
      attractive models (1) are liked more than unattractive models; (2) present messages that are evaluated more positively; (3) are not perceived as more expert, trustworthy, knowledgeable, etc., that is, as more credible; (4) do facilitate recognition of an ad but decisively not aid its recall; (5) may be effective in stimulating opinion change, though the evidence is inconsistent.
  3. Marketing strategies
    - Gay and Edwards (1985), "Chevy Woos Women"
    - Auchmutey (1985), "Marketing to Women"
    - Snyder and Serafin (1985), p. 80:
      "Joanne Albrecht Muir, manager-product research [director?] for American Motors Corp., said 'women are offended if they feel an advertisement is targeted toward them. It comes across condescending. But the biggest mistake is an ad that's sexist, with a woman draped over the hood. What works is shots of men and women enjoying themselves.'"
    - Holusha (1985) observes that
      women participate in 81% of all auto purchase decisions, and are the primary deciders in 39% of all sales, up from 33% in 1978 and 25% in 1973. He shows how advertising and marketing are being pitched to these women. But he includes this about the Ford Motor Company's Lincoln/Mercury division, which "is in the midst of what it terms a major study of how women shop for cars, and it plans to build a new marketing campaign based on that research.
      "'We think the thought process of women differs from men' when it comes to buying a car, said C. Williamson Day, a spokesman for the division."
2. [Television dramatizations and children: Durkin (1984, 1985)]
Encoding studies
1. Content analyses: Brown (1975), Russell (1981)
2. Encoding analysis: Berger (1973)
  Berger, p. 47: "One might simplify this by saying: men act and women appear. Men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at. This determines not only most relations between men and women but also the relation of women to themselves. The surveyor of woman in herself is male: the surveyed female. Thus she turns herself into an object--and most particularly an object of vision: a sight."
  1. Woman with mirror
    
    Goya, Drawing B.26
    
    Titian, Venus with a Mirror (ca. 1553)
  2. Woman as displayed for viewing
    
    Titian, Venus of Urbino (1538)
    
    Goya, The Naked Maja
    
    Ingres, Odalisque with Slave (1842)
  3. Woman as watching herself being observed
    
    Veronese, Venus at Her Toilette (early 1580s)
    
    Goya, Drawing B.25
    
    Ingres, Reclining Odalisque (1814)
  4. Woman as appearing, man as doing
    
    Holbein, The Ambassadors (1532)
3. Commercials (Goffman [1976])
  1. Explanation:
    These are not intrinsically gender traits, but ways of coding social scenes. One can see how power and function are coded, for example, and men and women are related to power and function--but the codes, or signs, are not gender-bound, and so role reversals are possible.
  2. Categories of analysis
    - Relative Size
      Goffman, p. 28: "One way in which social weight--power, authority, rank, office, renown--is echoed expressively in social situations is through relative size, especially height.... [O]n the very few occasions when women are pictured taller than men, the men seem almost always to be not only subordinated in social class status, but also thoroughly costumed as craft-bound servitors who--it might appear--can be safely treated totally in the circumscribed terms of their modest trade...."
      Shogun
      
      Lippmann, "environment!"
    - The Feminine Touch
      Goffman, p. 29: "Women, more than men, are pictured using their fingers and hands to trace the outlines of an object or to cradle it or to caress its surface ..., or to effect a 'just barely touching' of the kind that might be significant between two electrically charged bodies. This ritualistic touching is to be distinguished from the utilitarian kind that grasps, manipulates, or holds...."
      - feminine
        
        Coca-Cola
        
        Camel
        
        Shaeffer Pens
      - masculine
        
        Bond Clothes
        
        Jack Daniels
      - contrasting "real-life" photographs
        
        Paula Stern
        
        James Burke
      - [Other categories:
        face touch
        self-touch
    - Function Ranking [closest to "feminist" content analysis]
      Goffman, p. 32: "In our society when a man and a woman collaborate face-to-face in an undertaking, the man--it would seem--is likely to perform the executive role, providing only that one can be fashioned. This arrangement seems widely represented in advertisements, in part, no doubt, to facilitate interpretability at a glance."
      - male as executive
        
        Schlitz
        
        Harris Viewwriter
      - [even in infancy, males are superior in potentio]
        
        Squibb
      - [family roles]
        
        Isuzu
      - [Other categories:
        males as instructors,
        males as incompetent in female's domain]
    - The Family
      
      Goffman, pp. 37-39: "The nuclear family as a basic unit of social organization is well adapted to the requirements of pictorial representation.... [D]evices are employed to exhibit the presumed special bond between the girl and the mother and the boy and the father.... Often the father (or in his absence, a son) stands a little outside the physical circle of the other members of the family, as if to express a relationship whose protectiveness is linked with, perhaps even requires, distance...."
      - father/son, mother/daughter identification
        
        Subaru
        
        Post's Bran Flakes
      - male as aloof, protective
        
        U-Haul
    - Ritualization of Subordination
      Goffman, p. 40: "A classic stereotype of deference is that of lowering oneself physically in some form or other of prostration. Correspondingly, holding the body erect and the head high is stereotypically a mark of unashamedness, superiority, and disdain. Advertisers draw on (and endorse) the claimed universality of the theme...."
      - women recumbent
        
        Black Velvet
        
        Clow Aero-o-Flo
        
        Tropical Blend
        
        Calvin Klein
      - kneebend
        
        Hilo Hattie
        
        Jindo Furs
        
        (Goffman, p. 45: "Whatever else, the knee bend can be read as a foregoing of full effort to be prepared and on the ready in the current social situation, for the position adds a moment to any effort to fight or flee. Once again one finds a posture that seems to presuppose the goodwill of anyone in the surround who could offer harm. Observe ... that a sex-typed subject is not so much involved as a format for constructing a picture. One female in a picture may perform the gesture and another serve as the support that allows the performance. So a two-role formula is at issue, not necessarily two sexes.")
      - canting posture
        
        Benson & Hedges
        
        Ivanov, "First of May"
        
        (Goffman, p. 46: "The resulting configurations can be read as an acceptance of subordination, an expression of ingratiation, submissiveness, and appeasement.")
      - arm lock
        
        Grand Marnier liqueur
      - [hands free for action]
        
        Merit
      - [other categories:
           lowering self
           smiles
           puckish attire
           unserious dressing
           mock assaults
           arm around shoulder
           holding hands
           etc.]
    - Licensed Withdrawal
      Goffman, p. 57: "Women more than men, it seems, are pictured engaged in involvements which remove them psychologically from the social situation at large, leaving them unoriented in it and to it, and presumably, therefore, dependent on the protectiveness and goodwill of others who are (or might come to be) present."
      - finger to mouth
        
        eye shadow
      - averting gaze
        
        Merit
      - [other categories:
           covering face or mouth
           females more expansively euphoric
           gaze from behind a barrier
           snuggling
           nuzzling
           etc.]
  3. Overall encoding strategy
    - contrast between strength and grace
      
      Zéfal
    - contrast between doing and appearing
      
      Slocum
      
      Cateye Ergociser
      
      TurboTrainer