Advertising and Consumer Citizenship

Gender, Images and Rights

Anne M. Cronin

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2005
• Print ISBN: 9780415223232
• eBook ISBN: 9781134595174
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

Using a variety of print advertisements, this exciting and provocative study explores how the consumer is created by advertisements in terms of:
* Sex
* Class
* Race.
It also explores the figure of the citizen and how this identity is produced by contemporary political discourses. Advertising and Consumer Citizenship will be essential reading for all those interested in the study of consumption, citizenship and gender.

1 The individual, the citizen and the consumer

Il y a nulle parité entre les deux sexes quant à 1a conséquence du sex. Le mâle n’est mâle qu’en certains instants, la femelle est femelle toute sa vie ou du moins toute sa jeunesse; tout rapelle sans cesse à son sexe.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau 1782¹

[There is no parity between the two sexes due to the nature of sexual difference. The male is only male at certain moments, the female is female all her life or at least all her youth; her sex is continually invoked.]²

In this chapter, I explore the links between the political culture of citizenship and the consumer culture of advertising. The chapter’s focus is an investigation of the category of ‘the individual’ which bridges two of my central concerns. Firstly, historically embedded discourses of ‘the individual’ are primary defining forces of the nature and the rights of both the citizen and the consumer. Secondly, feminists have engaged in a range of theoretical critiques which have demonstrated that the ostensibly neutral, universal category of the individual veils a sexed, racialised and classed particularism. In effect, the rights of the individual are based on a white, male, classed, heterosexual model which excludes subordinate groups. Exploring the structurally sexed, classed and racialised nature of the ostensibly neutral, universal ‘individual’ goes some way to explain the uneven and paradoxical way in which gender has been theorised in consumerism. Thus, focusing on the individual as a socio-political taxonomy enables me to explore how gender is a central, structuring principle of citizenship and consumerism. It also provides a way into thinking through the assumptions about ‘the subject’ of consumer culture. Many studies posit a preformed subject who engages with discourses of consumerism, ‘applying’ individual agency in acts of consumption. Examining the discursive construction of this subject allows a more nuanced analysis of agency, mediation and power.

My focus on discourse aims to explore social identities as ‘complexes of meaning, networks of interpretation’ (Fraser 1997: 152). Nancy Fraser usefully summarises what a theory of discourse can contribute to feminism,

First, it can help us understand how people’s social identities are fashioned and altered over time. Second, it can help us how, under conditions of inequality, social groups in the sense of collective agents are formed and unformed. Third, a conception of discourse can illuminate how the cultural hegemony of dominant groups in society is secured and contested. Fourth and finally, it can shed light on the prospects for emancipatory social change and political practice.

(Fraser 1997: 152)

I carry over these concerns with identity, agency and contested cultural legitimacy into the following sections and later chapters. In the first section of this chapter I examine feminist work on the exclusive nature of ‘the individual’ focusing on how women and other groups have an ambiguous relationship to this category. In certain respects women are included within the category, yet in others they are excluded from it. This borderline status also becomes a central concern of later sections, which examine women’s relation to citizenship rights in the West. However, this ambiguity is not arbitrary but rather functions as the force which holds together ‘the individual’ as a discursive category. In the following section, I propose that the concept of performativity can be employed to explore these contradictions. A performative understanding of identity and discourse does not assume a pre-formed, core subject who expresses individual agency through acts, as in the purchase, use and display of consumer goods or services. Performativity focuses on how categories of selfhood do not pre-exist discourse; through discourse they are continually created and recreated in ways which both produce and challenge forms of exclusion. I go on to link this political and discursive arena of ‘the individual’ to that of the cultural by exploring contemporary discourses of identity politics. These draw on notions of authenticity and individual potential and promote rights of ‘self-expression’ which are often played out on the terrain of culture. By exploring contemporary discourses of cultural difference, I argue that these politics of identity and difference function on the level of both the individual and the nation. In the final section I draw together the concerns of this chapter by exploring how the current intensified focus on the cultural as a terrain of political contestation has transformed the relation between discourses of citizenship and cultural belonging. Central to these new forms of cultural belonging and exclusion are transformations in sexed, racialised and classed identities.

The individual

It has often been claimed that historical shifts in the West have produced more fluid social structures, in which status is not fixed in rigid hierarchies determined by birth. The advent of the shift from ‘status to contract’ altered the terms of social stratification and increased mobility – for some (Pateman 1988). The erosion of narrowly defined access to social status highlighted the role of consumption in Western societies in displaying social distinction (Slater 1997). The individual display of status through consumption threatened established hierarchies in which each person’s place was preordained and immutable: any person could now display the indices of status through clothing or food consumption. The old order responded by introducing forms of symbolic consumption-regulation: only certain groups were entitled to wear particular clothes or eat particular animals. In time, modern structures of market exchange dismantled this system of symbolic regulation and established a contract-based system enabling greater individual social mobility (ibid.). As I examine in this chapter, contract has gained a renewed prominence in Britain with the 1991 Citizen’s Charter and the influence of Gidden’s (1998) The Third Way on the Blairite British government of the late 1990s.

Yet is this social mobility equally available to all? With the aim of examining social inequalities, certain analysts have focused their attention on the category of ‘the individual’ which underpins contract. In dissecting this category, they have made visible how certain social groups are excluded from ‘being individuals’ and are therefore not accorded full social, political or cultural rights, such as rights of citizenship. In examining notions of equality and difference in citizenship, feminists have explored how the social contract forms a major structuring principle of contemporary Western societies. In a range of studies, feminists have revealed a fundamental contradiction at the heart of social relations: women and other subordinated groups are positioned by the social contract as both individuals and non-individuals, both inside and outside society. In what follows I outline the significance for women of this ambiguous status, in which they are said to both participate in civil relations, yet are negated as full individuals.

Carole Pateman’s (1988) work examines the concept of ‘contract’ as a ‘political story’ or ‘conjectural history’. The concept of contract was developed by political theorists, in particular Locke, as an attempt to construct a narrative about the legitimation of political right in civil society. Contract is a constructed fiction in so far as it represents only one way of explaining social relations; yet it is very real in the effects it produces when deployed in structuring society. Pateman argues that the political fiction of contract theory actively forms the basis of the contemporary ideal of free civil relations. This ideal is embodied in social institutions such as marriage, employment and citizenship, taking the form of contracts which are based ostensibly on free and equal exchange. However, alongside its generally unrecognised counterparts of the racialised ‘slave’ and the ‘sexual’ contracts, the original social contract is founded on exclusion rather than equality. Indeed, the original contract which forms the blueprint and legitimation for subsequent contractual relations only appears to be neutral, egalitarian and universal. In fact it is based on a white, male, classed, heterosexual, Western model of disembodied rationality. This excludes and disenfranchises women, racialised groups, children, ‘the insane’ and the disabled (Diprose 1994; Pateman 1988, 1989; Yeatman 1994). The model of society produced is one of a fraternal, rather than the earlier paternal, patriarchy of property ownership and dominion over ‘the household’. In contemporary fraternal patriarchy, men are guaranteed ordered sexual access to women as objects of exchange through the marriage contract (Pateman 1988). According to Pateman, this produces a model of structural heterosexuality founded on certain notions of the ‘complementarity’ of the sexes, and structures the classed subordination and exchange of women.

Other feminists have expressed reservations about Pateman’s work on contract. Nancy Fraser (1997) is broadly sympathetic to Pateman’s approach, but cautions against imagining contract as the only or the most powerful form of social relation. Fraser argues for a more nuanced critique which does not propose such a seamless fit between capitalist power and patriarchal power. Contemporary discourses of gender, sex, ‘race’ and others are more fragmented and highly contested than Pateman suggests (Fraser 1997). Indeed, in later chapters I explore the terms of this fragmentation and contestation of meanings in relation to advertising and the images it produces.

Fraser (1997) does, however, support Pateman’s analysis of ownership rights and ‘possessive individualism’ which reveals structural gender exclusions. Pateman (1988) argues that women and racialised groups are ‘structured out’ of the category of ‘the individual’ through the concept of ownership rights. ‘The individual’ is defined through his capacity to own property in his person (Pateman 1988). In effect, the individual is defined as owning himself as an item of property: he is a self-possessive individual. He is seen to have the capacity to stand outside himself, to separate ‘himself’ from ‘his body’, and then to have a proprietal relation to himself as bodily property (ibid.). For example, according to contract theory the labour power expended in work is detachable from the body of the individual. Therefore, what is said to be sold or exchanged in an employment contract is an individual’s capacity to perform labour, rather than the individual himself. The exchange of ‘the man himself’ would count as slavery and run counter to the principle of freedom expressed by contract theory (ibid.). Indeed, the constitution of the category of the individual is also based on the slave contract and the construction of ideas of the European ‘self’ and the ‘savage other’ developed through European colonial encounters and violent domination of indigenous populations of Africa, India and the Americas. As I discuss in more detail in later chapters, ‘the colonial other’ formed the necessary foil to the European notion of ‘the individual’ as rational, ‘civilised’, Christian and democratic. In effect, this construction of self and other justified the violent oppression of what came to be seen as sub-human ‘others’ (McClintock 1995; Parekh 1995; Pratt 1992).

At this point I would like to turn to the ambiguous social positioning of women according to the terms of contract theory. How is it that women both participate in and are excluded from society in multiple ways? Pateman (1988) argues that an examination of the terms of the marriage contract and other contracts, such as employment and citizenship, exposes a contradiction. In contract, women and other overlapping subordinated groups are posited simultaneously as ‘non-individuals’ and ‘individuals’. They hold the position of ‘non-individuals’ as they are considered to be naturally excluded from the rationality of the purportedly ‘disembodied’ (yet, in fact, male) model of ‘natural right’ which was necessary to participate in contract. For Pateman (1988), it is this tension in the discursive status of women and others which forms the constitutive force needed to hold together the political fiction of the category of ‘the individual’: women and others are required to participate in contract as individuals, yet at the same time they are discursively excluded from the category of ‘individual’. They participate as ‘individuals’ in the civil, public sphere through their enactment of employment, marriage and citizenship contracts. However, they do not hold the capacities of ‘self-possessiveness’ required for ‘free’ exchange in contract and the constitution of their status as ‘individuals’. In this paradoxical way they form the constitutive elements of the realm outside the civil, for ‘women are property, but also persons; women are held both to possess and to lack the capacities required for contract – and contract demands that their womanhood be both denied and affirmed’ (Pateman 1988: 60). As exemplified in the Rousseau quotation at the head of this chapter, women cannot but inhabit the category of ‘Woman’, and yet even this ambiguous and subordinated status is restricted to certain women at certain times of their lives.³ Rousseau indicates that this access is circumscribed by youth in what I take to be a reference to marriageability and reproductive status. In this sense, (classed) heterosexual marriage and reproduction form women’s only access to a limited form of ‘individual’ status through relations with men. Yet this limited status is one which simultaneously denies women a coherent, unified selfhood and restricts even this access to certain groups of women. Indeed, I would argue that it is this gendered ambiguous and denigrated status which is reflected in many studies of consumerism and advertising. Women are imagined to be active, consuming subjects, yet also cultural dupes and passive ciphers for consumerist ideology (Bowlby 1985, 1993; Felski 1995; Nava 1997; Radner 1995). How should we think about the category ‘woman’ when her only characteristics appear to be ambiguity and contradiction?

This ambiguity of the positioning of women and racialised groups in relation to the category of ‘the individual’ can be usefully considered in terms of Teresa de Lauretis’ (1989) approach to theory as process. She argues for a subject of feminist analysis whose definition should be in progress, so that the analytical category ‘woman’ used in research, and by extension ‘race’, should be a working construct which is ‘a way of conceptualising, of understanding, of accounting for certain processes, not women’ (de Lauretis 1989: 10). This approach enables de Lauretis to explore the contradictory, disjointed and mobile nature of the discursive production of sexual, racial and class difference. At the same time, this approach attempts to avoid the reification and naturalisation of certain formulations of ‘women’ and ‘race’. In the work of both Pateman and de Lauretis, ‘women’ can be seen as inhabiting a discursive position that is both impossible and yet necessary. De Lauretis points to,

the discrepancy, the tension, and the constant slippage between Woman as representation, as the object and the very condition of representation, and, on the other hand, women as historical beings, subjects of ‘real relations’, are motivated and sustained by a logical contradiction in our culture and an irreconcilable one: women are both inside and outside gender, at once within and without representation.

(de Lauretis 1989: 10)

In addition to women’s decentred positioning in relation to gender, women are positioned as neither individuals nor non-individuals, neither citizens nor non-citizens. In Pateman’s (1988) analysis, the categories of ‘women’ and subordinate others are both inside and outside civil society. They are the very groups necessary to constitute the social system of contractual relations: they form ‘the other’ for ‘the individual’ and enable him to come into existence. Yet they are outside the social system because they are denied the full status of individual themselves. Women are positioned within the discursive space of the individual in that they are required to perform the contractual relations such as marriage or citizenship that regulate society. In this capacity, women require the status of individual to participate. Yet they are simultaneously outside the discursive space of the individual through the logical contradiction that they cannot hold the status of individual required for participation.

Furthermore, this ambiguity of status should not be considered to be static. Pateman (1988) argues that these contractual relations must be constantly repeated in order to reproduce the social system. The rights of ‘the individual’, defined through contract as ownership of the self as resource of labour power and the free and equal exchange of that power and property, must be actively expressed and reiterated through continuous engagement in contracts (ibid.). This is not an act of free will which produces the self through an expression of agency. There must be a compulsory reiteration of the category ‘individual’ through the repetition of contracts if the (exclusive) status and rights of ‘the individual’ are to be maintained (ibid.). Pateman states that this requires at least two individuals to mutually recognise each other’s status as individuals for the contract to be enacted and validated. This exchange of recognition in turn reinforces the legitimacy of the system of contractual relations. Therefore, it is in this mutually informing process of exchange of recognition that an individual expresses, enacts and materialises his civil rights of freedom and possession.

Yet we have seen from de Lauretis’ (1989) approach that women and other subordinate groups are positioned ambiguously in discourses of the individual, thus complicating the processes of mutual recognition. Women are framed as both inside and outside the discursive space of the individual. In terms of temporality, they are positioned as having achieved individual status already and yet, contradictorily, they can never attain individual status. In the following section I address these contradictions of mutual recognition through theories of performativity which explore the paradoxes of time, identity and difference.

Performativity and the individual

Pateman’s (1988) analysis of contract opens up a wide field of questions for feminists by pointing to the structu...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Plates
• Series editors’ preface
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 The individual, the citizen and the consumer
• 2 Advertising knowledges
• 3 Advertising, texts and textual strategies
• 4 Branding vision
• 5 Female visions
• 6 Visual epistemologies and new consumer rights
• Concluding remarks
• Appendix
• Notes
• Bibliography