IMAGINE this: A truck barrels down the highway at high speed, narrowly avoiding several other vehicles. Oddly enough – beyond perhaps, well, irresponsible commuter’s behavior and risky driving – of far greater concern, however, is the sarcophagus of a strikingly bright-colored corporate livery which adorns the transport. It’s an image that individuals unacquainted to (for lack of better expression) liberal frameworks of perceiving society are likely to miss – more so in as conservative a community as this.
The advertisement features something most of us would unquestioningly consider ubiquitous: a middle-aged woman, blonde, operating a cooking pan purportedly of the latest technological advances: non-stick, minimal grease residue, easy-cleaning – really just the usual value-adds corporations love publicising.
And that’s what makes it all the more of a tremendous issue. The instantaneous average human response is a self-completing image that cements unknowns and knowledge gaps, independent of whether any relevant information is present or not, of the persona featured in the product pitch. Sure, here’s what we see: an ordinary person working a kitchen object, presumably preparing a meal. But what do we actually mean? The translation of this simple idea by our subconscious faculties is certainly more complex (and absurd?): female, house-wife, mother, good chef, obedient, family, caring to the kids, female. We’re probably quite familiar to these thoughts, and, to a large degree, the comparative end is similarly insidious – where the mass media portrays masculinity as a trope: an essentialist template of physical prowess, decisiveness bordering on blind obstinacy and infinite passion.
THOUGH, logically-speaking, this makes no sense at all. The basic rational and cognitive function of human minds grounds itself in making meaning from practical observations and trends. It is alarming, therefore, that the connotative capacity of this advertisement alone – no much different from any other of its kind – is sufficiently great to trigger the various aforementioned gender associations. This phenomenon is further compounded by its ubiquity. That parallel occurrences have became just so commonplace is already worrying to begin with, yet more so that people are reaching a stage of desensitisation to such prevalent perpetuations of gender stereotypes. The inclination now is not to challenge the impositions of social institutions, but normalise these artifices as the universal constant to disturbing consistency, upon which the greatest of premiums crown.
Marxism and feminism find convergence on the same common contention of human agency: do individual choices exist, and if so, how autonomous can they possibly be?
In The Critique of the Political Economy, German philosopher Karl Marx (1859) posits the following:
…The mode of production of material life conditions the general processes of social, political… It is not the consciousness of man that create their existence, but their social existence that determines their consciousness… (The Critique of the Political Economy, p. i-iii)
Here, the construction of identity – and therefore, by extension, our decisions – arguably predicates an uncontrollable “superstructure” of economic organization: the manner and metric by which material goods and services are distributed in society. Undoubtedly, any immediate connection between a Marxist outlook of the economy and feminism is likely tenuous and obscure. This is where I try my best to explain.
MY argument is that in the post-modern, laissez-faire free market, consumerism contributes significantly to entrenching the male-female gender binary. It does not carry the burden of having to be critical to neither Marxist thought, nor capitalism. The hypothesis begins from the (hopefully reasonable) assumption that advertisements, being the most direct and widely applied marketing tool of enterprises, strive to increase demand of a particular product. And in order to do so, advertisements compete to either build commonalities and shared interests with a target audience (say, having a line of perfume scents branded as ideal for the corporate environment), or creating generic themes which resonant strongly within the majority aggregate of consumers. It is hence unsettling that, in this process of commercial outreach, the line of best fit tends to be the line of segregation as well.
This is because advertisements, in attempting to pander to populist social conventions, lean towards portraying goods as complementary to specific genders, and unfortunately to the extent whereby femininity (or masculinity, for that matter) becomes defined by the very products it supports, and society willingly endorses such practices. Paradoxically and disturbingly, females do too, albeit, in most circumstances, not of their own consent. Why?
To answer this question prompts an understanding of “ideology” as a concept that is central to Marxist literary criticism. Louis Althusser (1970) describes ideology as “the imaginary relationship of individuals to their real conditions of existence” which shields authenticity behind a veneer of what is “socially-acceptable” or “correct”. In its original inception, ideology purposed to frame capitalism as an hidden evil – the silent enemy, and justify some communist epiphany of sorts. Placed against a modern context, however, it normalizes gender roles as what is supposedly a natural state of social tension between the sexes. Historical influences of ultra-conservative systems of patriarchy (which could be as subtle as male-only hunting parties, and more recently and perhaps controversially, the authority and power structures within a family unit) feeding into this existing narrative only clouds it with even more additional biases against women. This means that even female communities face overwhelming difficulties in escaping this system of belief, by sheer virtue of the fact that it has become the dominant social order.
CONSUMERISM in a capitalist economy places immense importance on the ability of a commercial venture to mass market goods and services in pursuit of economic success. At its genesis advertisements bring some congruency to product and gender. In this early stage, the two elements (recall: think a frying pan and a female user) complement each other to present a cohesive and cogent impression that potential buyers feel comfortable viewing and processing, but ultimately remain distinct – the emphasis continues to remain on the product. That’s no longer the case, because consumerism and marketing have reached a threshold whereby gender is almost entirely assimilated into the product; that the artificial edifice of what it means to be “female” is constructed by commercial expedition. As such, female identity has been built and objectified (or, in the preferred terminology of Marx, “reified”) by the associations of branding a product to correspond to social conventions.
THEN, what is the message being proliferated? In Food and Love, writer Katherine Parkin (2006) highlights an advertising culture which embraces a feminine ideology of “sustained involvement in housework”, “marriage, motherhood”, and “deference to male desires”. The incessant perpetuation of such gender stereotypes through advertisements and mass marketing establishes an equilibrium of power that is quite ironically imbalanced against females. Them being placed on the back foot results not in structural discrimination, but a delicate and stealthy infiltration of how we perceive the social environment surrounding ourselves – definitely in some contributing manner producing the glass ceiling in workplace situations, or influencing as foundational and cardinal aspects as behavioral tendencies. The function of ideology explicated in Marxist theory preserves this equilibrium, and any resistance is labeled disruptive and rebellious to what is self-righteously “normal”.
Sources
Althusser, L. (1970). Ideology and ideological state apparatuses. France: Retrieved from http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/althusser/1970/ideology.htm
Marx, K. (1859). A contribution to the critique of political economy. (p. i-ii). Moscow: Progress Publishers. Retrieved from http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1859/critique-pol-economy/preface.htm
Parkin, K. (2006). Food is love. (p. 66, 129, 139). Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Retrieved from http://books.google.com.sg/books?hl=en&lr=&id=0IodJ2vuQjYC&oi=fnd&pg=PA1&dq=advertisements and gender roles&ots=ce90U_xRyX&sig=nX3ymNPRF8csM7DPGfGCB8su02o
Through the Coloured Glass 