1. Gender Advertisements

2. Sut Jhally, “Image-Based Culture”
The modern world is dominated by consumer culture.
Consumer culture relies on a system of images to define ”the good life."
The marketplace is the central institutional structure of society and is ideologically shaped by advertisements. (248)

3. "Advertising absorbs and fuses a variety of symbolic practices and discourses, it appropriates and distills from an unbounded range of cultural references. In so doing, goods are knitted into the fabric of social life and cultural significance" (248)

4. Happiness comes to be understood in terms of commodities and the image system。(248)
Jhally writes that today's world is saturated by advertising images, such that "Happiness comes to be understood in terms of commodities and the image system" (248).  Do you agree or disagree with this insight?  How do "commodities and the image system" influence notions of happiness differently depending on one's gender identity or position?
Do you agree or disagree with this insight?  How do "commodities and the image system" influence notions of happiness differently depending on one's gender identity or position?

5. The modern world is understood primarily through images
Speed and rapidity of images require undivided attention and dissuade from critical thought. (250)

6. Semiotic Analysis of Ads
Semiotics: interprets messages in terms of their signs and patterns of symbolism
Sign: a word, sound, or visual image.
consists of two components--the signifier (the sound, image, or word) and the signified, which is the concept the signifier represents, or the meaning. (Saussure)
relation between the signifier and the signified is arbitrary and conventional (Berger)
signs can mean anything we agree that they mean, and they can mean different things to different people.
Sandra Moriarty, 'Visual Semiotics and the Production of Meaning in Advertising' (1995)
Cosmopolitan, Dec. 2010

7. Meanings of signs are iconic, symbolic and indexical
Iconic: sign looks like what it represents
Symbolic: meaning is determined by convention – it is based upon agreement and learned through experience
Indexical: meaning is connotative; sign is a clue that links or connects things in nature. Smoke, for example, is a sign of fire; icicles mean cold.
Most signs operate on several levels--iconic as well as symbolic and/or indexical
Sandra Moriarty, 'Visual Semiotics and the Production of Meaning in Advertising' (1995)

8. Erving Goffman, Gender Advertisements (1979)
Relative Size
Feminine Touch
Function Ranking
Ritualization of Subordination
Licensed Withdrawal
Primacy of images, not words – how to decode?
Relative Size. Social weight (e.g., power, authority, rank, office, renown) is echoed expressively in social situations is through relative size, especially height.
Feminine Touch. Women, more than men, are pictured using their fingers and hands to trace the outlines of an object or to cradle it or to caress its surface or to effect a "just barely touching." This ritualistic touching is to be distinguished from the utilitarian kind that grasps, manipulates, or holds.
Function Ranking. When a man and a woman collaborate in an undertaking, the man is likely to perform the executive role. This hierarchy of functions is pictured either within an occupational frame or outside of occupational specializations.
Ritualization of Subordination. A classic stereotype of deference is that of lowering oneself physically in some form or other of prostration. Correspondingly, holding the body erect and the head high is stereotypically a mark of unashamedness, superiority, and disdain. The configurations of canting postures can be read as an acceptance of subordination, an expression of ingratiation, submissiveness, and appeasement.
Licensed Withdrawal. Women more than men are pictured engaged in involvements which remove them psychologically from the social situation at large, leaving them unoriented in it and to it, and dependent on the protectiveness of others who are present. Turning one's gaze away from another's can be seen as having the consequence of withdrawing from the current thrust of communication (p. 62). The individual also can withdraw his/her gaze from the scene at large, and be psychologically "away" from the scene. Maintaining a telephone conversation is another sign of licensed withdrawal.
In your view, are all of these conventions still operative in advertisements today?  Which do you see as particularly prevalent (or absent) in present-day advertising imagery?

9. Group Activity
Please bring to class on Tuesday one print copy of an advertisement that reflects gender relations and/or norms.  We will discuss these in relation to the Jhally and Goffman readings.  
You might also share a mass mediated text (TV show, film, literary genre, radio program, etc.) of which YOU are an avid consumer.
How do you think your decoding of the text compares to the messages encoded by its producer(s)?  
Do you consider yourself part of a fan community, and if so, how important is that membership to your identity?  
Is your consumption of the text in question empowering to you, and if so, how?

10. Relative size

15. Ritualization of subordination

18. Feminine touch

21. Function Ranking

26. Licensed Withdrawal

28. Dismemberment

29. Commodification

30. Kilbourne, "The More You Subtract, the More You Add: Cutting Girls Down to Size"
As Erving Goffman pointed out in Gender Advertisements, we learn a great deal about the disparate power of males and females simply through the body language and poses of advertising. (265)