Advertising’s Hidden Conversations: Framing (and Selling) Gender, Race, Community and Nation

1. Advertising’s Hidden Conversations:Framing (and Selling) Gender, Race, Community and Nation

2. International Communication Association, 2005 Conference Thursday, May 27th, 2:15 - 3:30 p.m. New York, N.Y.

3. Todd Joseph Miles Holden Professor, Mediated Sociology Department of Multi-Cultural Societies Graduate School of International Cultural Studies Tohoku University Kawauchi, Aoba-ku Sendai, Japan

4. Gender Discourses in Japanese Ads • This presentation summarizes work that is forthcoming in: • A chapter: “Naturalizing Gender: Watered-down women and grounded men in Japanese TV Commercials” to be published in Women/Advertising/Representation (Hampton Press). • A book: Sold on Gender: Re/Presentations of Men and Women in Japanese Television Advertising

5. General Focus • How advertising in Japan “naturalizes” discourse about men and women –

6. General Focus • It does it by framing men and women differently – often in juxtaposed or oppositional ways • In terms of (1) culture and (2) society • Often via systematic, repeated, uniform references to: • Color • Nature • Built and institutional environments • Nation

7. An Opening Vignette A man and woman stand shoulder to shoulder on an elevator. He in the dark uniform of the Japanese salaryman; she in a cherry red suit. Clearly strangers, they stand closer to one another than is the social norm – even for overcrowded Japan.

8. An Opening Vignette He struggles to avoid looking her way. She, on the other hand, turns her eyes toward him. After raising a finger to her lips, pondering her next move…

9. An Opening Vignette Suddenly, she thrusts a hand between the lapels of her coat and, to the man’s shock, extracts a can of demitasse coffee.

10. An Opening Vignette After his eyes have rolled back into his head and he has fainted and fallen to the floor, she takes a swig of her drink, then replaces the can in her bra.

11. Concluding Discourse She pats her breast and the anchored script appears in English: “Small, but Special”. Leaving the elevator, the woman turns back toward the camera, jiggles the product, then strides away.

12. A Polysemic Ad? Viewed in isolation, this ad could be about any number of things: • Male-female interaction, • A commentary about anatomy, • A discussion of human worth, • A précis on public behavior. • There is even information about a product somewhere in there.

13. Gender at the Fore The situation is scripted to accentuate: • male/female difference • contrasting physical size • dress • demeanor • attitudes about body and sexuality

14. A Premise Were this but a one-off, there wouldn’t be much cause to regard the ad with anything other than amusement, titillation or disdain. However, it turns out that this ad bears similarity to a large number of commercials in contemporary Japan.

15. A Second Example: Cosmetics

16. The Scenario A woman enters a bar alone She’s wearing a clinging, shiny red dress A young man in a white shirt is behind the bar The woman sits alone at the bar, caressing the stem of her glass

17. The Scenario (continued) She raises her eyes suddenly to meet the man’s …and winks Shocked, the man drops the glass he’s holding As it shatters the woman’s lips part Entranced, the man reaches out to to touch the woman

18. The Scenario (continued) She meets his touch Then directs his fingers to her face

19. The Scenario (concluded) She regards herself in the mirror of her compact We see her embrace the man forcefully In a voice-over the man utters: "is it okay to touch your skin?"

20. Emotional-Physical State • The paradigmatic example of how the color-female sign is employed to connote emotive-physical state is the Anna-Aka-Rosso ad of a few years ago, I detailed in other published work

21. A Third Example:Anna・Aka・Rosso The model, Umeya Anna, stands in front of a car named “Rosso” “Rosso” means “red” in Italian Anna is painted red from head to toe

22. Example:Anna・Aka・Rosso Anna’s “display” causes a male by-stander’s blood to boil

23. Example:Anna・Aka・Rosso In turn, his steam lifts Anna’s dress… What the man sees turns his entire body red

24. Anna・Aka・Rosso…Concluded “Shh,” Anna gestures… “Our little secret.”

25. Naturalized Discourse A systematic assemblage and assessment of ads indisputably leads to these conclusions: • Discourse about gender courses through Japanese TV advertising; • This discourse posits that, by nature, men and women are distinct classes of people: • Behaviorally • Ideationally • Existentially • Ontologically

26. Women, By Nature Women are: • Sexual • Passionate • Unpredictable • Aggressors • Associated with the natural world

27. Men, By Nature Men are: • Objects of Female Attention • Business-like • Associated with Built and organizational worlds

28. Even More… • In a “natural succession” of iconography… it may even be that, over time, women have first served as symbol for nation, then as surrogate -- fixing a place that has then been “naturally” supplanted, of late, by product. • This is a less empirically stable, claim, but one I will make before closing

29. Gender Comes in Colors One element underscoring difference is a visual trope: the recurrent association of particular colors with women and men.

30. Gender Comes in Colors For women it is the red.

31. Gender Comes in Colors For men the color is black

32. Past Research In earlier published work I have explored the use of color as a tool for depictingnation,emotion, andgenderin different nations. • It is true that the genderedred-femaleassociation can be found elsewhere • For instance, America • However, in Japan it is much more extensive

33. Past Research Thus, for instance, corporate logos are often used to simulate Japanese flags – an association of color with nation

34. From Nation, Gender? And if one views enough of these logos, it almost comes to appear as if commercials frame women in a way that references flag. This “female-national reference” association is enough to naturally wonder: “is semiotic substitution at work?”

35. From Nation, Gender? Here, for instance a game of musical chairs is presented as a ritual dance around a ring bearing significations of nation-hood. (This is a car ad, by the way…)

36. From Nation, Gender? The national signification lies not only in the ring, but the coloration of the clothing…the red numerals on white. Of interest is that all the women are non-Japanese

37. From Nation, Gender? In fact, time and again, women in red are centered, just as the sun is centered on the Japanese national flag….

38. Through Gender, Nation? This idea of centering women with red – either inverting the colors as Japanese logos occasionally do, or by placing reddened body parts against a field of white – works to simulate nation.

39. Sexism: Seeing Red This association is to sexuality, sexual suggestion, passion

40. Sexism: Seeing Red And to women’s physical characteristics

41. Sexism: Seeing Red As in this ad in which a salarman is molested (to his great delight) by a group of bathing-suited women. -- with the central suit in each frame pink/red

42. The Meaning of Red • A recent article (Barton and Hill 2005) has suggested that red is disproportionately the winning color in Olympic events between competitors of equal strength; • So, too, in Euro 2004 did teams wearing red jerseys score more than when wearing their white uniforms; • It is suggested that this mirrors the animal kingdom, where red is the color of dominance, if not sexual display…

43. Naturalizing… or Socializing Gender? • This may suggest that color is being associated with human and social characteristics – in short “natural” elements in psychology or physiology. • And if not natural, then certainly socialized via repetition in media messages

44. Next Steps • Beyond color, there are other ways that gender is “naturalized”, as the following ad makes clear… • A woman (in red) is spied running along a deserted beach

45. Panting, she stops to douse her head under a spigot…. Other Extra-social, Supra-societal References

46. Quaffing the product (a beer), she sits, battered by the wind, giggling in a giddy, almost post-coital ecstasy. Her arms open she presents herself as unrestrained, free, natural Other Extra-social, Supra-societal References

47. Next Steps • This ad helps move us toward consideration of how men and women become divided (and distinguished) by their associations with specific environments or “worlds”

48. Split Worlds, By Gender • Traditionally this has been in terms of men as active and outdoors, while women are sedentary and inside the home (for instance)… • A long line of advertising research in the United States supports this view. And it can be found in Japanese ads, as well.

49. A Side-by-side campaign depicting men and women: (Will Beer) Men operate outdoors Women work indoors

50. Split Worlds, By Gender • Such ads can be found in Japan • certainly men are active… and • women are more often shown as homemakers (than men)… • However, a different kind of “milieu” split also obtains in Japan