Living Up to the Ads: Gender Fictions of the 1920s (review) (original) (raw)
Related papers
2013
This dissertation examines representations of sexual-based girlhood trauma in American literature during the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Using critical theories in the fields of trauma, feminist, and rhetorical studies, it focuses on the evocative demands rhetorical structures place upon readers' interpretations and completions of plot, which effectively draw readers' attentions to the social conditions surrounding girlhood trauma. Thus, the literature of focus in this dissertation ultimately functions to expose, question, and undermine oppressive cultural constructs that facilitate the psychic and physical traumas of fictional characters. Equally important is that this study demonstrates the alignment between narrative strategies and sociological trauma theories, and, thus, demonstrates the value of literature in analyzing and understanding the social phenomenon of girlhood trauma. Specifically, Chapter Two examines how unstable irony functions to expose characters' (and readers') ignorant and active complicity in relation to gender-based violence in the short stories "Good Girl," "Parts," and "Proof of God" from Holly Goddard Jones's collection Girl Trouble. I argue that the use of irony in these interrelated stories is intended to show 1) how almost all members of a community are complicit participants in girlhood trauma, and 2) the dynamics by which girlhood trauma is linked to greater social trauma. Focusing on Joyce Carol Oates's "The Girl" and Sandra Cisneros's "One Holy Night," Chapter Three examines ambiguity as a rhetorical tool for exposing the damaging consequences of culturally accepted microaggressions on young girls' self-concepts. I argue that the ambiguity in these stories functions to reveal the girls' internalizations of microaggressions as a facilitating factor in their victimization. Chapter Four examines modes of rhetorical silence in Jamaica Kincaid's "Girl," Annie John, Lucy, and The Autobiography of My Mother. In this chapter, I analyze Kincaid's use of omission, voice, and fragmentation to show that these rhetorical moves convey the pain of trauma that cannot be spoken. I argue that Kincaid's use of these moves triggers readers' vicarious realizations of the protagonists' traumas.
In the pages of Ms.: sex role portrayals of women in advertising
Journal of Advertising, 1990
The stated advertising policy of Ms. magazine precludes the acceptance of advertisements for products that are "harmful" or advertisements that are insulting to women. This study employs manifest and latent content analysis to assess the extent to which Ms. advertising, over the first 15 full years of its publication has carried out this policy. The findings suggest that a substantial proportion of Ms. advertising promotes products generally considered "harmful." Also, while the portrayal of women as subordinate to men or as merely decorative has decreased over time, Ms. advertising has increasingly portrayed women as alluring sex objects. Possible reasons for the trends revealed here are discussed.
2015
This paper responds to specific questions raised in the author’s previous research on five American novels from the first half of the twentieth century which concern sexuality, abortion, and male-female relationships: Pearl Doles Bell’s Gloria Gray, Love Pirate (1914); Floyd Dell’s Janet March (1923); Vina Delmar’s Bad Girl (1928); Christopher Morley’s Kitty Foyle (1939); and Nancy Hale’s The Prodigal Women (1942). The paper concludes that interpretations of the characters’ religious, moral, and sexual lives from a standard feminist perspective are insufficient to account for the works’ larger didactic purposes. Moreover, the paper asserts that an application of the more comprehensive Judeo-Christian approach to sexuality and related topics would assist twenty-first century readers to appreciate the works.
International Journal of Language and Linguistics
In the era of globalisation, international brands increasingly launch advertising campaigns designed to work in different countries. In this context, the translator reveals him/herself as a key element in the adaptation of these advertisements to different audiences. Up to now translation literature has approached the linguistic aspects of advertising translation but has paid virtually no attention to the semiotic ones. By analysing one of these international campaigns, specifically the Oh, Lola! campaign starring Dakota Fanning and launched by Marc Jacobs in 2011, this paper demonstrates the urgent need for research into the semiotic aspects of advertising translation, since in this textual genre every single element conveys an intended meaning. Besides, it aims at denaturalising the narrative of the woman as a sexual predator that nowadays abounds in western printed advertising aimed at women. In this sense, it seeks to emphasise the power and danger of discourses and their key role in shaping social constructions.
The Trauma Paradigm and Commercial Fiction: The Case of Fifty Shades of Grey
The Politics of Traumatic Literature: Narrating Human Psyche and Memory. Edited by Önder Çakırtaş, Antolin C. Trinidad and Şahin Kızıltaş. (Cambridge Scholars Publishing) , 2018
In this essay I want to explore the way trauma fiction conventions are used in commercial fiction through the analysis of a literary phenomenon in terms of sales and media coverage: E. L. James’s 2012 erotic trilogy Fifty Shades of Grey, Fifty Shades Darker and Fifty Shades Freed. In 2015 a fourth book was published, Grey, but since it is a retelling of Fifty Shades of Grey from Christian Grey’s perspective I will mainly discuss the original trilogy. The books are mostly understood as erotic fiction which the press has labelled “mommy porn” for its mainstream success among female adult readers. The focus of this essay is not on the analysis of the cultural impact of the books, which has been widely explored in newspaper articles, magazines and academic studies, but on the role they play within contemporary trauma culture or the “trauma paradigm” that, according to Luckhurst, pervades our understanding of subjectivity and experience since trauma, extremity and survival have turned into privileged markers of identity (2008, 1-2). It is my contention that it is precisely the role that trauma plays in the story that may account for its mainstream success beyond the limited erotic market and that the trilogy’s use of trauma best exemplifies the possibilities it can offer in commercial fiction beyond the more literary trauma novel.