To what extent does cultural context influence how magazines create meaning? Make reference to the set editions of Woman and Adbusters
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| This bathtub is over £5000 at retail. Adbusters present an anticapitalist ideology that challenges such excessive consumerism. But they do so in a deliberately confusing, atypical manner, that lacks any form of anchorage or even context. This makes Adbusters a highly subversive and challenging magazine! |
Cultural context refers to the context that exists at the time a media product is made. In this essay, I shall argue that both magazines I have studied completely reflect the cultural context of the time in which they were made, through their own specific uses of media language. In order to argue this, I shall be comparing Woman, a woman's lifestyle magazine first published in the 1930's that was selling millions of copies in the 1960's, and is wholly sexist, stereotypical and straightforward, and Adbusters , an unconventional magazine that addresses niche political issues and completely lacks any form of anchorage or any paid for advertising.
One excellent and striking way that Woman magazine reflects the social and cultural context of 1964 is through it's paid for advertising. Roughly 1/3 of a magazine's revenue comes form advertising, and since woman magazine reaches such a vast audience, advertisers will pay a premium. The Breeze soap advert presents a heavily sexualised representation of a young, hegemonically attractive woman. This is reinforced through the MES of the model's slim figure and her lack of clothing. Her nudity is emphasised through her performance, with her legs playfully propped up, and her breasts partially covered by her arms. The suggestive placement of the MES of soap constructs a highly sexualised symbolic code, constructing an ideology that be be feminine, one must be clean and also hegemonically sexually attractive. This further anchored through the use of lexis "because you are a woman", which further enhances the ideological perspective that not only are the target audience clearly women, but they must listen to and accept a particularly demanding mode of address. The advert takes an explicit and sexualised mode of address in order to manipulate its easily influenced and less educated target audience. This ideological representation is clearly present to uphold patriarchal hegemony, and therefore can be seen as both highly damaging and sexist. This reinforces the attitudes towards women during the 1960s.
However, Adbusters takes a completely different approach to the representation of women. In the Zucchetti double page spread, a striking similar image of a nude woman in the bath is used. However, remarkably, the nude woman in Adbusters is not even slightly sexualised. This is a surprisingly atypical representation of a woman.
- MES of bland, dull, desaturated colours
- MES of wrinkly hands suggests abundance of water
- MES of tattoos may have associations with poverty and a criminal lifestyle
- A highly polysemic representation of women, which can be interpreted in many different ways
- bell hooks - feminism is for everyone: a challenging representation of a non sexualised woman
- A deliberate statemen and an attempt to challenge the sexualised representation of women
Another way in which the cultural context influences meaning in adbusters is through it's complete lack of anchorage...