Consumerism Promoted by Television Help Enforce Patriarchy - Article Example

Does consumerism promoted by television help enforce patriarchy? A simple sentence like, “television depicts normal life”, can be a heavily loaded statement if looked at from a gender perspective. In a market driven society, there is a constant debate whether the advertisements, promote gender inequality. What is normal for a man necessarily need not be the same for a woman. For, example, the depiction of a woman doing all the daily scores of a household on television will seem like normal life to a man but for a woman, the same can be a sight of sheer drudgery imposed by a patriarchal society. But there have also been arguments, viewing the role of television in a positive light in constructing a wider realm of gender equality. Hall (2003, p.90) has observed that ideologies merge into and hide inside the taken for granted ‘naturalness’ or ‘commonsense’ and through this, racism and patriarchy begin to appear as ‘natural’. Hall (2003, p.91) in order to prove his point, has drawn attention to certain television shows which advocate racial harmony at macro level but at micro level, is “impregnated with unconscious racism,” depicting certain racist positions as normal, as part of commonsense. The slave figures in Gone With the Wind are cited by Hall (2003, p.92) as a stereotyped yet assumed ‘natural’ symbol of racism. Similarly, the female characters in this text have also been inferred to be satisfying the gender biases of the given society, namely the “mammy/Madonna/child triptych” (Wallace-Sanders, 2003, p.128). The author, Wallace-Sanders (2003, p.128) generalizes that almost all female images seen on television fit into these three roles perfectly. But there have been opposing positions to this argument also. Reminding that all advertisements of Nike historically have been male narratives, Grow (2008) has named the evolution of women’s brands and corresponding advertisements focusing them as ante-narratives. Here, a gender discourse is earning space in a hitherto male textual discourse and this is only because of the spread of consumerism among women, aided by the purchasing capacity that they have earned which in turn was achieved by becoming part of the labor force. Nike’s masculine brand image was considered normal as long as there were only male consumers but when a female consumer came into the picture, what was ‘normal’ turned out to be a bit less ‘normal’ (Grow, 2008). The female consumer could not associate with the images of masculinity and so the advertisements had to be fine-tuned with a new revised notion of normalcy, argues Grow (2008). This viewpoint gives a positive edge to consumerism by depicting it as a pioneering social force in picking up the new value system evolved by gender discourses. Wood (2007, p.77-100) has studied certain ‘normal’ discourses in British television talk shows and proved that there are also instances when consumerism is critically negotiated by the evolution of a “mutually constructed text” in television talk shows having majority of female viewers (2007, p.99). But there have been opposing positions as well regarding television talk shows. Wood (2007, p.77) has observed that these positions ranged from notions such as “talk shows offer a feminist and therapeutic alternate public sphere” to that they are simply “commercial exploitation of voyeurism.” Shattuc (1997, p.112) has drawn attention to the healing powers of talk shows and said that feminism, like religion, is related to the process of “healing through narratives and community” through the medium of “faith.” She (Shattuc, 1997, p.136) also opines that talk shows “represent popular TV at its most feminist, nonetheless; they articulate the frustrations of women’s subordination in a man’s world.” In her study, Wood (2007, p.80) has warned about the common-sense assumptions and those usually followed by the tradition of conversation analysis, which assume a particular kind of speaker/hearer dynamics in a television talk show. She (Wood, 2007, p.84), has drawn attention to the minimal responses that were expressed by female audiences of a television talk show (while they watched it at their home) and has suggested that, as indicated by Coates (1993) in another study, such responses meant that they were asserting their participation and space inside the conversation. But whether such private responses would make any difference to the major discourse is a highly doubtable proposition. In Wood’s (2007, p.84) study, a talk show expert is seen advocating on television, the need to consult a dermatologist to cure the wrinkles and other skin beauty problems, and a female listener of this talk show is found remarking that one got to be rich to get rid of wrinkles. Using similar examples, Wood (2007, p.90) has argued that though women are conceived as “Mrs. Housewife Consumer”, they do not just swallow the text but produce a negotiated text. This negotiated text questions the ‘normal’ as depicted in the talk show and often arrives at the opposite position. But Wood (2007, p.90) has not concluded that this negotiation process always goes against the encoded message. In her own examples, many women viewers of talk shows are found to endorse the positions of the speakers as well. Hence, it has to be assumed that “Mrs Housewife Consumer” does exist but within the patriarchal framework and they constitute a considerable proportion of the women in a given society. According to Wood (2007, p.100), there are lots of shifting positions in a viewing experience, and still she has talked of a “discursive potential for the viewer” (Wood, 2007, p.100). This discursive potential is what sabotages the loaded ‘normal life’ that surrounds a woman through television. But generally, almost all studies related to this topic have found a dictatorship of the ‘normal’ in almost all seller-consumer interactions (Wallace-Sanders, 2003; Kilbourne (1990). This point of view also states that, in extreme cases where the ‘normal’ might affect the selling potential of a product, the ‘exceptional’ is negotiated into the wider frame work of the ‘normal’ and never the vice versa. Coming back to Grow (2008) and the Nike case study, this process of negotiated status quo can be seen emerging. Grow (2008) has stressed upon the nature of the patriarchal society in which Nike’s feminine sub-brands were launched and has reminded such a society preferred femininity to athleticism. By endorsing the normal alone, that is femininity, Nike could expect social approval but could not sell their female sub brands. Grow (2008) has called what has emerged out of this conflict, a negotiated text. Grow (2008) also has cited an example for this in Anna Kournikova-ads, endorsing multiple products in which she displays “her highly sexualized femininity over her less competitive athletic abilities.” Such an advertisement finds its mass appeal in the conventionality of depiction of a female. A solely athletic depiction on the other hand must have interrupted this ‘normalcy’. Kilbourne (1990) has stated that apart from products, “images, …concepts of success and worth, love and sexuality (and) popularity”, ads also sell the normal patriarchal image of women. Kilbourne’s (1990) notion of normalcy can be correlated with the stereotypes which she has said, presents a “mostly white world in which people are rarely ugly, overweight, poor, struggling or disabled, either physically or mentally (unless you count the housewives who talk to little men in toilet bowls).” In this stereotype, there is no space for the real woman who is most probably depressed, complaining, revolting or painfully submissive. According to her (Kilbourne, 1990) analysis of advertisement texts, a normal woman is either a house wife or a sex object. She (Kilbourne, 1990) has described this housewife further as someone “pathologically obsessed by cleanliness, (who) debates the virtues of cleaning products with herself and (who) worries about "ring around the collar." Kilbourne (1990) has added a question here: “but no one ever asks why he doesnt wash his neck.” Such a question is against ‘normality’ and absurd for a society which accepts that notion of ‘normality’. On the other hand, for the sex object, reproaches Kilbourne (1990), “conventional beauty is …(the) only attribute.” Kilbourne (1990) has also revealed in her study that a woman feeling herself underweight or overweight (out of the psychological pressure from the texts depicting conventional beauty as the ideal model) has a great value for consumerism and advertising. Such manipulated feelings of inferiority are the base for the multi-billion dollar cosmetic industry (Kilbourne, 1990). And a woman often painfully finds out the reality that what is depicted as normal is costly and almost unachievable. Kilbourne (1990) also has criticized the superwoman image promoted by advertisements. A superwoman is one who “manages to do all the work at home and on the job” (Kilbourne, 1990) which also is not the reality. But the counter-arguments to this position have also some strong points to make. Criticizing the feminist critique of cosmetic industry, Feminist Review (1990, p.64) has pointed out that body painting has been a cultural attribute of human civilization since time immemorial. Citing the example of lesbian fashion trends, Feminist Review (1990, p.64) has observed that “lesbians flirt with the symbols of heterosexuality, constantly changing their meaning within the context of a lesbian subculture.” The wesite, www.genderads.com, has categorized television advertisements based on the way they depict female as difficult, stupid, and violent, as exotics, as dolls, as naggers, as better consumers and as nature. But there have been arguments that television channels like MTV, facilitate gender bending through cross dressing, and other style-related attributes of performers (Siapera, 2004, p.19). By creating gender ambiguity, the young performers of this channel creates a space for resistance against “hegemonic gender roles”, says, Siapera (2004, p.17). The complexities of human communication situations never cease to fascinate us, even as we may differ in our opinions about what social reality is. The conclusion that can be drawn is that television, like the society itself, is a complex mix of diametrically opposite processes and parallel sub-processes going on at the same time. Inferences could be drawn only based on specific contexts of time and space. Annotated Bibliography Gender Ads.com, n.d. 25 June 2010, http://www.genderads.com/Gender_Ads.com.html This website provides a panoramic collection of advertisements from all over the world and has categorized them into different topic heads based on the way they depict women and gender politics. Through this recording, the website provides enough solid proof to say that television advertisement has a gender bias. Grow, J.M., “The Gender of Branding: Early Nike Women’s Advertising a feminist antenarrative”, in Women’s Studies in Communication, 22 September 2008. 23 June 2010, http://www.accessmylibrary.com/article-1G1-189653396/gender-branding- early-nike.html This is an essay on gender influencing the branding process and its narrative text. The specific case of Nike company and its product advertising is scrutinized and it is clearly depicted how the branding style had changed when women became a potential group of customers. This article is useful in my study as it shows how negotiated spaces are created by advertising. Also this case study shows the nature and the gender politics of that negotiating process. But what makes this study very helpful in my study is that the gendering of advertising is depicted not from the traditional feminist point of view but from a different angle, namely, a non-judgemental and impartial angle. Hall, S. “The White of Their Eyes: Racist Ideologies and the Media”, in Gender, Race and Class in Media: A Text Reader, (Eds.) Gail Dines and Jean McMohan Humez, SAGE, 2003. This book analyses different genre of media with a perspective of gender, class and race politics. It questions the notions of commonsense and normalcy which very often are inevitably linked to gender, class and racial dominance. The book says that the dominant ideology is forced upon the suppressed groups in the name of common sense and normalcy. Particularly, the chapter written by Stuart Hall gives lot of evidence for me to correlate between the racial issues and gender issues in a common frame of superiority and inferiority. Kilbourne, J. “Beauty….and the Beast of Advertising”, in Media and Values, Issue #49 Winter, 1990. 22 June 2010, http://www.medialit.org/reading_room/article40.html This article is about how women are depicted in advertising in conventional patriarchal roles. It is argued that women are forced by the advertising industry to fit into the beauty concepts of men, and the cosmetic industry thrives on this false-image of women. This article helps me to present the predominant intellectual discourse on depiction of women in advertising. Siapera, Eugenia, At the interface: continuity and transformation in culture and politics, Rodopi, 2004. Eugenia Siapera has in this book, tried to convey the changes in meaning-making processes in the context of gender. How the stereotyped images of gender is sabotage by gender binding acts of performers on television channels like MTV has been elaborately discussed in this book. I find this book useful in that it approaches the issue from a different angle. Consumerism promoted by television is viewed in a new light here. Though the pop culture has been criticized for promoting consumerism by many, here, another discoursive function of it is revealed. Shattuc, Jane, The Talking Cure: TV Talkshows and Women, London: Routledge, 1997. In this book, the author has argued that the TV talk shows have a healing function to perform on the female participants. The author has equated feminism with religion and opined that both anchored on faith, to an extent. So the community healing methods of a talk show is seen as a modern correlation of the community healing process of religion. By putting forward this argument, this book provided me with a strong counter-argument to those who say that television propagates only oppression of women through its cultural discourses. Wallace-Sanders, Kimberly, Mammy: A Century of Race, Gender, and Southern Memory, Michigan: University of Michigan Press, 2008. This book analyses the roles attributed to women by the society and their relation to race and gender. The role of television in stabilizing these roles is also discussed in many places in this text. I have picked up some of the examples cited by the author in this book (to show that women’s identity is compressed into a few pre-created stereotypes) for my essay. Wood, H. “The Mediated Conversational Floor: An Interactive Approach to Audience Reception Analysis”, in Media Culture Society, 2007; 29; 75, SAGE, This book argues that the space created by media is always a negotiated space and that women also get a limited role in this process which some of them make use of to redefine gender equations. Many real life situations of television communication have been taken as case studies in this book and brilliant and thorough analyses follow. As audience reception has been the main focus of this study, the role of gender and the role of pre-conceived patriarchal notions embedded inside the minds of audience is discussed here. The reading of television media text as a democratic process is what has made me believe this study to be different and relevant to my research. Read More