| The dissertation explores the relationship between advertising, imperialism, and the construction of middle class female identity in the years surrounding the Spanish-American War. Advertisements depicting interaction with food---its procurement, preparation, presentation, and consumption---are analyzed according the categories of race, class, and gender. The interplay and tension between these categories form a coherent discourse on fantasy and power in advertising images: fantasies that speak of economic power, racial power, and power over others. The concepts explored in the dissertation not only apply to the history and development of advertising as a whole, but also to the construction of the gendered self in everyday life as reflected in popular magazines. When these ads are deeply read and placed in broader social and political context, they demonstrate one of the ways in which bourgeois domesticity and mass media were enlisted in the American imperial project of the late nineteenth century. |
