The Construction Of Meaning: A Cultural Study Of The Representation Of Women In American Magazine Advertising In 2002

This dissertation The Construction of Meaning is a three-faceted examination of the subject: American advertising, the meaning of women, and American culture, by the analysis of the magazine advertising in the year 2002. About thirty years after the Feminist movement and with the rising of Cultural Studies in the 1990s, the female images in American advertising are represented with plurality and sophistication, embodying complex power relationship in American society.This is an interdisciplinary study between Cultural Studies and Media Studies, based mainly on Michel Foucault's theory of power and knowledge and Stuart Hall's analysis of media representation. Other schools of thoughts such as feminism, neo-Marxism, postmodernism, postcolonialism are also drawn in combination with the theories of culture, in addition to the recent studies of popular culture: the theories of fashion, subculture, television, and the culture of consumption. Different languages/meanings constructed in advertising are measured in relation to race, gender and sexuality and identity. Three analyses are employed for more exact measurement of discourse: a content analysis, a qualitative analysis, and a semiotic analysis. Women in advertising are found out to be represented as white, heterosexual 'pretty' body with presumably sexual appeal. Female images other than this category are marginalized: they are characterized by fetishization, sexualization, fragmentation, objection, underrepresentation, trivialization, negation, commercialization, in addition to a racialized and gendered representation. Female representation in advertising is saturated with the power of domination by the social institutions which represent the white supremacist capitalist patriarchy of the United States, which attempt to maintain its social, cultural, economic and political power by fabricating and dominating the 'Other'. However, advertising is also a realm where multiple powers contest for existence. The voices of the oppressed and marginalized are also articulated in the representation of advertising. Not only are there changes in the representation of women, but there also appear new elements which represent resistance to the dominant discourse of women in advertising by the subcultureimages, lesbian images, transgender images as well as female images of multiple, ambivalent meanings, which are commercialized by capital in order to magnify the market. Moreover, female audience are able to construct multiple levels of meanings in the process of consumption. Therefore, the social discourse of women is destabilized by the multiple articulations of the resistance as well as women when consuming these images. Power domination encounters power destabilization in dialogic and dynamic relation. In addition, this characteristic of power politics in advertising illuminates the empowerment of women in consumer society as well as the resistance strategies to stereotypical representation of advertising. It is argued that more effective resistance is possible for women in everyday life and enlightening women through diverse representation and education is important for social transformation.When exploring the power relationship in constructing the meaning of women in advertising, a major objective is the study of the identity of women. While the identity of women as the white heterosexual body of sexual appeal is examined, it is argued that the identity of women represented in advertising is fragmented, not only because of the multiple identity of resistance politics but also due to the increasing power of the audience/consumers, who construct their own meanings/identity according to their needs, pleasure and social conditions in relation to race, gender, identity. Consumption becomes the crucial process for meaning construction, which offers the opportunity for the reconstruction of the meaning for individual woman in everyday life. Therefore, the female identity is more fluid than rigid.Finally, based on the study of the construction of the meaning of women in advertising and the contending power relationship in the process, American culture proves to be in a fragmented picture rather than as a homogenizing melting-pot.