Gender and Advertisements: Personhood

and Subjectivity
 in aGlobal Economy
G205 Week 14 – Maitrayee Chaudhuri
Vogue India What is the product?
Vogue India What is the product?
 Reading Quiz/Attendance
Write your name on a piece of paper. Write as much as you can
about this in the next ten minutes WITHOUT looking at
notes/article.

1. Who is the “New Indian?”

2. Explain how branding is related to the “New Indian.”
3. What is “the rhetoric of globalization?”
4. How is the “New Indian” gendered?

Pass your answers to me.

 Branding the Self
BRANDING signals the shift from selling products to selling
concepts, values, lifestyles and even ideologies.
To show a product is banal. To associate a product with a concept and show that
lifestyle=clever marketing.

 Advertising is likened to myth, which makes “culture into

nature” through common sense norms, such as gender
(Barthes, 375).
 “The language of advertisements is more about the consumer
than the object to be consumed.” (376)
Selling a product
Selling a
Lifestyle
 http://
www.youtube.co
m/watch?v=zIbzS
lBjmGs
 http://
www.youtube.co
m/watch?v=1bpO
tnAgze0&feature
=related
 http://
www.youtube.co
m/watch?v=dySP
dBxNkNs
 The New Indian
Universal Non Gender Specific
 “National Culture”  New Woman
 Displacement shifts to “not taking  New Man
sides” or “unbelonging” in new
internationalism (377)=legitimate  Heterosexual
public discourse  Upwardly mobile
o Not displacement or dispossession.
 Powerful
 Global and cosmopolitan
 Household as site of consumption
 Successful (meritocracy)
(like Peiss/Rooks?) 376  Representation of equal
 Ethnic, not Desi access to resources
Themes raised in Chaudhuri
 Global economy create ideological shift in India
 Norms are branded (375-6)
 The New Indian within a National Culture
o Progressive, consumerism, cosmopolitan (not dispossessed/displacement),
 All MEN are included in the idea of the masses but read through the
representation of women
 liberalization / liberalism
 Branding of the Self
 Middle Class status (castes)
 Ethnic not Desi (378)
 Consumer citizenship? (376)
 Gendering magazines/products/consumers
 Indian Masculinity
New/Old
New Old
 Choice….you can make the  Desi, “native slob”
choice to distance yourself from
being a “native slob.” (379)
 “Pot bellied”
 Sveldt, Sensual (379) and  Patriarch
Sensitive (382)
 Upwardly mobile, power and
success (380)
 Work outside home
 REALness (381)
 “Complete” if able to demonstrate
caring and sensitive patriarch
 Catwalk kings (379)

 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6ifFFUe-VxM
Masculine beauty is not associated with femininity
like it is in the United States.
 Choice….you can make the choice to distance yourself from
being a “native slob.” (379)
 Sensual (379) and Sensitive (382)
 Upwardly mobile (power and success)
 REALness (381)
Indian Femininity New/Old
New Old
 “Alone time”  Traditional
 Meditation  Male oriented
 Healing by self reflection  Family centered
 Purchase power “Shingar”  Impoverished
 Modern
 Middle class
 Traditional
 Male oriented
 Family centered
New Indian Woman is traditional, but “free”

 Shushmita Sen, 1st Indian Miss Universe

 She “tells him what she likes.”
 Space for the self & meditation for healing.”
(382).
 Essentialist - “The essence of a woman is
motherhood and teaches a man to love and
care.” (383)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VNY57jPitWk
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7PDqsS6VCek
(Miss Universe)
 DISCUSSION QUESTIONS:

1. Who is the “New Indian?”

2. Explain how branding is related to the “New Indian.”
3. What is “the rhetoric of globalization?”
4. How is the “New Indian” gendered?
5. How has subjectivity changed in India since the late 1990s, according to
Chaudhuri?
6. How has your understanding of “consumer citizenship” changed over the course
of the semester? What in particular does Chaudhuri contribute to the conversation
on consumerism that Peiss, for example, did not?
7. How does Chaudhuri’s article intersect with Kathy Peiss’s article about American
modernity and womanhood?
8. Lutz and Collins discussed the 1st versus 3rd World representations. How does this
article take on the idea of the 3rd world?
9. To what extent have issues such as multiculturalism been turned into brand names
for the sake of commercial profit? Examples?
10. If branding creates a one-way glossy irrefutable message, doesn’t this contradict
the basic tenet of multiculturalism?
 Final Blog Assignment
Compare and contrast corporate personhood in the film The Corporation/Bose and Lyons Critical Corporation Studies/
Klein’s No Logo with Chaudhuri’s “Gender and Advertisements: The Rhetoric of Globalisation.”

 How is personhood understood in the film/Bose/Klein versus in the Chauduri article?

 How specifically does normative gender figure into these constructions of subjectivity?

You do not have to write about the film AND Bose AND Klein, however, you must use at least one of the sources on
corporate personhood to address the blog.

Resources you may use (min. of 2 required):

 -The Corporation
 -Bose and Lyons – “Toward a Critical Corporate Studies,” by Purnima Bose and Laura E. Lyons in (ed.) Purnima Bose
and Laura E. Lyons, Cultural Critique and the Global Corporation. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2010.
 -Klein, Naomi. No Logo, London: HarperCollins
 - Chaudhuri, Maitrayee, “Gender and Advertisements: The Rhetoric of Globalisation,” by Maitrayee,  Women’s Studies
International Forum, Vol. 24, No. ¾ p 373-385, 2001.

Blog Due April 22, 2011 at 5 p.m.  in oncourse/assignments/blog 5/6 and two comments URL due in
oncourse/assignments/blog 5/6 by Sunday April 24, 2011 at noon.  (Must be 900 words, use at least two critical terms, and
must cite at least two readings from the course).
 Review
 
Peiss, Corporate Personhood, and Normative Subjectivity
 Definitions of multiculturalism/ cultural
pluralism

 A term describing a state of affairs:

o the coexistence of many cultures in a locality,
without any one culture dominating the region.
 A term describing a policy:
o To encourage all nationals to integrate into their society and take
an active part in its social, cultural, economic and political affairs
o To encourage racial and ethnic harmony and cross-cultural
understanding, and discourage ghettoization, hatred,
discrimination and violence.
Cultural pluralism, when small groups within a larger society maintain
their unique cultural identities
 Multiculturalism

 Relating to several cultural groups

 Co-existing
 Inclusive - allows the equivalence of those
several
 Respect for, and acceptance of, differences
 Breaks the binary pattern of superior/inferior
- invader/indigenous - imperial/provincial
 Issues raised in Peiss
 Norms
 All women are included in the idea of the masses (Question
the category of woman)
 Structure/infrastructure/structuralism
 Identity via “way of life” (consumerism)
 Respectability /femininity/uplift
 Masculinity and productivity
 Gendering spaces
 “Way of life”=representation of class standing (respectability),
associated with femininity and frivolity=Consumer citizenship
 Privileges of Corporate
Personhood
 Corporations are distinct legal entities which exist separate
from shareholders as shareholders have limited liability.
 Corporations can engage in civil litigation.
 Corporations can own property (called “islanding” in
transnational real estate interactions, Bose and Lyons).
 Corporations are immortal.

Is this an ultimate way to escape gender?

How have we understood personhood (subjectivity) thus far?
 NORMATIVE personhood
(subjectivity)
o Binary opposition
o Body as visible proof of difference (inherent/innate/essential)
o Sexed as male/female
o Sexed body experienced through adherence to gender norms.
o Gender is experientially different for males and females via their various embodiment of and
associations with masculinity and femininity.
o Sex, Gender are assumed to be dimorphic and mutually exclusive, invariant, fixed, and
constant across time and space.

o Heterosexuality or a sexual attraction to the “opposite sex,” is a condition of this norm.

Normative gender has been theorized as depending upon “compulsory heterosexuality”
(Adrienne Riche).

o Normative is problematic: does not account for the fluidity of gendered experiences, such
as corporate personhood or consumer citizenship. Nor does it account for change over
time or across space/place.
Multiculturalism in
Advertising
 
United States
Means: social ads / Public Service Ads (PSAs)

AD COUNCIL MISSION

Our mission is to identify a select number

of significant public issues and stimulate actions
on those issues through communications programs
that make a measurable difference in our societies.
Racial Cooperation
http://www.adcouncil.org/issues/antidiscrimination/
‘I am an American’ post 9/11 campaign
E Pluribus Unum, or Out of Many, One.
From the nation's original creed rises a message that has
never been more appropriate than now… that
diversity unites America, and that in the wake of this
national tragedy, now is the time to embrace and
celebrate that diversity instead of letting it divide us.
http://www.cre.gov.uk/

The unique faces of Britain poster campaign celebrates

and encourages recognition of ethnic diversity in this
country. It acknowledges modern Britain for what it is - a
fascinating multicultural, multi-racial, multi-faith nation
503 photographs
68 countries
2 million submissions

“The Family of Man

has been created in a
passionate spirit of
devoted love and faith
in man.
It was conceived as a
mirror of the essential
oneness of mankind
throughout the world.”
Edward Steichen, curator,
1955.
 I am an American

By showing people of many ages, races, and religions

saying the simple yet powerful line "I am an American,"
the advertising communicates the idea that our differences
equal the very foundation and spirit of this nation.

http://www.adcouncil.org/campaigns/I_am_an_American/
We all came over in different ships,
but we’re in the same boat now.

Our origins, skin colors or religions may be different

But our hearts are all in the same place.
Please show tolerance for your fellow Americans
AMERICANS STAND UNITED
Will hate bring it all back? Will it
bring back the innocence? The
sense of security? … Will hate
make us better than those who
hate us?…
Hate is our enemy, and when
we start to hate other Americans
we have lost everything. Hate has
taken enough from us already.
Don’t let it take you.
The Freedom Center's mission is to inspire people to speak
up in the face of injustice and for the spirit of freedom.
http://www.freedomcenter.org/
Benetton Campaign, spring-summer 1997
Benetton advertising
campaigns
Transnational
Branding of
Cosmopolitan
Womanhood
 
Vogue India (above), Cosmopolitan
And to satisfy our palate for the visual

Cosmopolitan, French Cosmopolitan, Russian

Edition, September 2000. Edition, May 2007.
the COSMOPOLITAN effect

Cosmopolitan, American Edition, Cosmopolitan, British Edition,

March 2007. August 2000.
 the COSMOPOLITAN effect

Cosmo en Espanol (Puerto Rico), Cosmo en Espanol (U.S.), April 2008

October 2007
the COSMOPOLITAN effect

Cosmo South Africa, May 2008 Cosmo South Africa, December 2007