| This dissertation research explores identification and its complex relationships with knowledge, desire, and belonging as they manifest within Nike's sport and leisure marketing directed to female consumers. The research is grounded within feminist, poststructural, and sociological theory and specifically relies upon discourse analysis, psychoanalysis of culture, and the deconstruction of community. First, it is argued that given the frequency of exposure to advertising, it is imperative that scholars, students, and consumers of sport acknowledge advertisements as rich and significant texts that can and need to be explored for their representational politics. Each paper thereafter is an exploration of a theme of identification through a reading of Nike advertising to female consumers. Through discourse analysis identification is explored in relation to how knowledge and power produce particular subject positions by which people come to read themselves. Psychoanalysis of culture is used to investigate how social beings, through the production and functioning of desire, fantasy, and misrecognition, come to identify with various subject positions. A deconstruction of the concept of community is used to explore the role of difference and belonging in relation to identification. The dissertation concludes with the articulation of these sometimes contradictory themes of identification. Rather than reading identification through purely discursive, or psychic, or communitarian accounts, it is proposed that reading them through various points of articulation is both necessary and productive. |
