Underline the key terms
“Representations are a fundamental tool to allow producers to successfully target audiences”. To what extent do you agree with this statement? Make reference to Woman and Adbusters to support your answer [30]
Knee jerk reaction
Representations are absolutely essential for both of the magazines to target their audiences, they do this in very different ways. Woman magazine is simple, sexist and stereotypical, while Adbusters is atypical, challenging and not for profit.
Plan
Patriarchal hegemony - the expectations reinforced on women by men in society
Stereotypes
Reception theory
Capitalism
Anticapitalist
Semiotics (codes)
Anchorage
David gauntlet - identity (pick and mix)
Activist
Complicated ideology
Van Zoonen (the male gaze)
Airbrushing
Extremist ideologies promoting an activist lifestyle
Gender performativity
Postcolonialism
Symbolic annihilation
Content
How does the Crème puff advert use representations to target its simple, mass audience ?
Woman magazine often resorts to using simple gender binaries to effectively target its mass audience. An excellent example of this can be found in the Crème Puff advert. The advert explicitly constructs the ideology that women must look hegemonically good in order to sexually attract men. The MES of the product itself is presented as a main image, which anchors the hegemonic attractiveness of the female model. A clear binary opposition is constructed between the model’s outfits. White has symbolic connotations of innocence while black has connotations of attractiveness and professionalism. This reinforces the ideology of traditional gender roles, and cultivates a very clear ideology and aspirational mode of address for the target middle aged female audience. This advert makes it absolutely explicit that to wear makeup is to attract heterosexual men, which reinforces patriarchal hegemony. These simple and sexist representations target the audience through an aspirational mode of address. Yet beyond simply targeting audiences, it can be argued that that woman magazine functions as a tool of female oppression, and helps to cultivate a patriarchal hegemony and construct a society where any kind of female revolution is suppressed.
How does the Louboutin advert spread in Adbusters use representations to target its activist audience?
While Woman magazine presents a simple and straightforward mode of address, adbusters takes the opposite approach, and uses deliberately confusing and upsetting imagery to provoke its activist target audience. An excellent example of this can be seen in the controversial Louboutin double page spread. The lexis ‘red soles are always in season’ constructs a polysemic mode of address. This makes intertextual reference to a high end brand of women’s shoes but it also simultaneously suggests that the person in the image has red, bloody soles from walking in crudely made shoes. This brutal mode of address is reinforced through the MES of dust and dirt, which has symbolic reference to poverty. The combination of media language functions as dark humour, as the likely central African setting forms a binary opposition with the crude water bottle shoes, making an important point about poverty. However, this deeply confusing and complex set of iconography is completely without anchorage. Many audiences will simply be confused, yet the preferred reading is to be inspired to challenge and ultimately to fight against capitalism. Yet by targeting a niche activist audience, Adbusters is preaching to the converted, and is unlikely to shift the ideology of anybody.