Director of Operations Meets Gangster from the Mother-hood: Consumer Culture and the Marketing of Maternal Identities (original) (raw)
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The Representation of Motherhood in Television Advertisements
2nd International Conference on Social Sciences, 2013
Television is one of the most popular sources of entertainment in the modern world. This observation is applicable to Sri Lanka where 80% of households have televisions. Advertising plays a crucial role in the modern world, since they form the life source of television and other forms of mass communication. The representation of motherhood in television advertisements forms the focus area of this paper with the belief that the advertising"s image of motherhood could influence the collective consciousness of society in terms of defining motherhood and exerting undue pressure on women. Given the gap in research during the recent past, this study attempts to draw a statistical profile of primetime advertising in Sri Lanka and analyze the representation of motherhood in advertisements from a quantitative and qualitative perspective. Advertisements from top advertisers of the country have been chosen for further analysis after monitoring three television channels during August, 2012. Statistical evaluations reveal that in television, advertisements occupy 17%-25% of primetime. A feminist analysis of the content and ideological subtexts of advertisements reveals that they rely on stereotypical portrayals and define womanhood and motherhood in rigid and limited terms. In Sri Lanka, the bulk of advertisements (71%) portray women as mothers and wives. Viewers are bombarded with images of beautiful wives and mothers who enthusiastically fulfill their responsibilities within the domestic sphere. Such stereotypical representations not only reflect sexist understandings about women and men but also reinforce unjust gender ideologies which are already part of the collective consciousness of society. The conclusion of this study is that most advertisements relegate women to traditional gender roles within which women are second-class citizens whose value is relative to their domestic performance and ability to procreate and nurture. Springing from a pool of collective knowledge that is highly sexist, the advertising"s image of motherhood contributes to form limited definitions of and strenuous demands on women, trapping them inside rigid concepts of normalcy.
Motherhood, Marketization, and Consumer Vulnerability
This article explores consumer vulnerability and the role of public policy by focusing on new mothers. Developing the consumer vulnerability model of Baker, Gentry, and Rittenburg, the authors consider how medical contexts, political and legal factors, economic resources, societal prescriptions, media representations, and the presence or absence of appropriate policy all contribute to the social construction of motherhood ideologies. These ideologies are adopted and amplified in the marketplace and used to encourage consumption as a means of coping with this particular role transition during a time of physical and psychological changes in mothers-to-be. This article illustrates that the extended market logic dominating contemporary mothering environments both contributes to and has the potential to exacerbate new mothers' vulnerability, raising important challenges for public policy, both in the immediate and in the longer term. The authors assess public policy implications and conclude that the market does not always provide the best answers to uncertainties people may experience and that macromarketers and public policy makers have a particular responsibility to identify alternative solutions.
Journal of Consumer Culture
The caring mother is one of the most recurring images of femininity in post-war advertising. We examine how mothers are depicted as knowing consumers in advertisements in Australian Women’s Weekly and the United Kingdom’s Good Housekeeping magazines between 1950 and 2010. Our data suggest that although visual representations of maternal consumer knowledge change over this period, assumptions about the responsibilities of mothers endure in the family-related advertisements in these women’s magazines. There is a shift over time, however, from a representation of mothers as passive recipients of advice provided by external experts to a more active representation of mothers as experts themselves within both domestic and private spheres. We trace historically how the trope of the knowing mother works as a visual discursive device that helps to reinforce not just patriarchal hegemony, but a particular form of maternal hegemony. The hegemony of motherhood presents a particularly desirable/...
Getting Past the Dream of a Bounded Life? An Analysis of Advertisements in Working Mother Magazine
INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF GENDER & WOMEN'S STUDIES, 2015
The dominant culture portrayal of work and family in the United States classifies women as either mothers or paid workers, and suggests that women cannot participate in both institutions successfully because both require full dedication and commitment to role responsibilities. Despite these ideals, however, most women engage in both paid work and motherhood. Today's working mother may therefore seek guidance from cultural texts while attempting to balance multiple roles. Product advertisements have long been studied as one such cultural text. In this study we examine advertisements in Working Mother magazine from 2011 to 2013. While we find thatWorking Mother Advertisements advocate for a boundary between paid work and motherhood, advertisements also hint that motherhood and paid work are intertwined roles. The notions that mothering and paid work are confined to separate spaces or can be bounded are false and readers of this magazine may clue into this subtle message. Getting past the notion of a boundary between paid work and motherhood is critical if our goal is to move cultural debates about paid work &motherhood forward in countries such as the United States.
National Women's Studies Association Journal, 2006
In the current political climate, it is sometimes challenging to think back to the heyday of second-wave feminism, probably around 1970, when women in many facets of our society were applying critical concepts when thinking about their position inside and outside the family. It is challeng- ing because it's so far from the current reality, in which "feminism" has such a bad name. How was this shift accomplished? While Susan Douglas and Meredith Michaels do not give us the complete answer (perhaps no one can), they well illustrate that a shift in our popular vision of feminism has occurred, discuss in detail the extent of this shift and its impact on the lives of Americans and their families, and go on to offer a skillful explanation of the political forces that led to this situation. A huge part of our fervent and growing embrace of so-called "tra- ditional" family values is what Douglas and Michaels call the "new momism." Momism is the ethic that has impossibly raised the levels of time and expertise needed to meet the rapidly rising minimum level of "good enough" mothering. Women today have incorporated a version of expert mothering into the scale by which they're evaluated, and by which they evaluate themselves-a scale so harsh that most internalize perma- nent feelings of failure both on the work front as well as the mom front. That women are aware that these stakes are impossible is evidenced by the popularity of TV shows, films, and books either dramatizing or laugh- ing at the incompatible ideals today's moms are supposed to embrace. Put another way, why do American women continue to evaluate themselves along the impossible double axis of "good enough" (meaning excellent, high-quality, all-encompassing) mothering paired with successful career- ism/working? Put yet another way, why do I feel I should be at home playing with my six-year-old even as I sit here writing this long overdue review? The answer to this question is a "complexifying" mix of political and economic interests using women's susceptibility, vulnerability and guilt, and true concern about their children's welfare and future in the interests of a power structure that evinces precious little of the same concern. The Mommy Myth poses the question in no uncertain terms: "The question is why one reactionary, normative ideology, so out of sync with millions of women's lives, seems to be getting the upper hand" (24). It goes on to do a masterful job of illustrating the existence of this ideology in multiple facets of postmodern life-the toy industry, television news, magazine This content downloaded from 128.143.1.179 on Thu, 15 Aug 2019 17:46:44 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 236 ANDREA PRESS coverage dragging celebrities into the momist debates, and almost every- where else. The reasons explaining why momist ideology predominates vary from sphere to sphere, composing an ideological whole that is troubling to say the least. The Mommy Myth also illustrates that there is widespread evidence of sentiments critical of the new momism. Even if Hollywood film embraces the most reactionary ideas about motherhood, TV entertainment shows in particular give us plenty of wise-cracking, back-talking, less-than- perfect mommies, once we look beyond the June Cleavers of early televi- sion. These images coexist alongside a power structure and concomitant set of government corporate policies, which bolster the opposing, reac- tionary images, and make life uncomfortable, difficult, and sometimes dangerous for American moms and their kids. When I quiz my bright, intelligent undergraduate women students on their family plans, why does every last woman disavow feminism and state her intention to be a stay- at-home mom, at least for the years her kids need her. As one who's come full circle through the feminist movement, having grown up determined not to replicate my mother's housewife status, I now listen to my bright, well-read daughter question my work hours (other moms play with their kids!) and lecture me on the evils of abortion, which, she informed me last week, kills innocent babies (and she's only ten!). Most bizarrely of all, last week I went to view the remake of the feminist film Step/ord Wives and discovered that in the 2004 version, it is a woman's idea to turn Stepford's wives into robots, and why? Because feminism, in the incredible words of a wife in the film, has already "caused us to turn ourselves into automa- tons": once again, feminism is the cause of all our problems, a message in this case inserted even into one of the most feminist stories ever adapted by Hollywood. When do WE get a Michael Moore? The Mommy Myth helps us document the scary trek from feminism to a post-feminist netherworld that makes the false assumption that femi- nism's goals have all been achieved, questioned, and surpassed. For that, American women, and all our moms, are deeply indebted to this book. Andrea Press, who teaches media and women's studies at the Univer- sity of Illinois at Urbana/Champaign, has published widely in the area of feminist media studies. Her latest book, with Bruce Williams, is What's Important about Media Studies? She is currently working on an ethnographic study of teenagers, social class, and new media. This content downloaded from 128.143.1.179 on Thu, 15 Aug 2019 17:46:44 UTC
Hero shots: involved fathers conquering new discursive territory in consumer culture
Consumption Markets & Culture
In this paper, we explore how visual expressions of culture offer new discursive territory within which consumer cultural ideals can be negotiated on a global scale. Through a critical visual analysis of the revelatory case Swedish Dads, we find hero shots depicting involved fathers where children's needs and the hermetic confines of the home take center stage, as opposed to the traditional fatherhood ideals portrayed in western contemporary advertising, media, and popular culture. We demonstrate how the Swedish state's gender ideology was encoded into a communicative event in the form of hero shots and subsequently dispersed by visual consumers as well as political and commercial stakeholders pushing this particular agenda and/or capitalizing on its tendencies. This in such a way that the event conquered new discursive territory fostering new types of consumer cultural negotiations on fatherhood ideals also in other cultural settings.
Ideologies of Motherhood in Contemporary Israeli TV Commercials
Communication, Culture & Critique, 2016
This article is the first to scrutinize representations of motherhood and mothering practices in contemporary Israeli TV commercials in an attempt to shed light on the ideological constructs that these representations reflect and promote. I employ critical discourse analysis to identify the major recurring features in commercials that represent mothers and mothering. These features indicate advertising's ability to mobilize the patriarchal ideology of motherhood while using different thematic motifs, and such a mobilization of ideology occurs in the case of both antiessentialist and essentialist messages on motherhood. These different messages complete and complement each other, while in the end they enable advertising to exploit cultural norms and expectations in the service of the marketing and promotion of commodities.