Reading Questions Gender, Media & Politics 3/26 - 4/2
Bring typed answers to class on Friday, 4/2. The easiest way to complete this assignment is to copy the questions, paste them into a word processing program, and then type in the missing words.
In "Madison
Avenue versus the Feminine Mystique," Steve Craig argues, "The Feminine
Mystique spoke to (and for) a new
kind of oppressed group–not a poor, exploited minority, but rather the
_________________________ who are the major purchasers of many of the products
advertised so heavily in American media. As these women began to take the
movement seriously, advertisers realized they had a crucial economic interest
in responding to their concerns." (Fill in blank.)
According to Steve Craig in "Madison Avenue versus the Feminine Mystique," in 1971, the National Organization for Women called for boycotts against four products that were promoted via advertisements that seemed to degrade women. Name these four products:
According to Steve Craig in "Madison Avenue versus the Feminine Mystique," "One content analysis of over 2,000 network television commercials aired in 1990 indicated that although TV commercials often portray women in the ways encouraged by the women’s movement, these portrayals tend to be aired mostly _______________, when women who work outside the home are in the audience. Daytime commercials still tend to portray women _______________, and weekend sports ads still frequently exploit images of women as ______________ (Craig, 1992). (Fill in blanks.)
In "Torches of Freedom": Themes of Women's Liberation in American Cigarette Advertising," Steve Craig points out that the advertising used to introduce Virginia Slims cigarettes centered on three primary themes: " (1) ______________________, (2) ____________________, and (3) _____________________________. (Fill in blanks.)
In "Don't Hate Me Because I'm Beautiful: A Commercial In Context," Gerald Grow argues:
By using idealized images that have no connection with the product, commercials may be promoting, not the joining of the viewer and the ideal, but just such a separation. Through certain strategies in commercials, we are led to desire various states of mind, yet we are misled in the means for achieving them. By depicting highly-valued states of being, yet offering no avenue to those states except consumer products, commercials make us the cognitive equivalent of sinners: cut off from the ideals we aspire to and mocked by the mediators that promise to take us to that heaven implied by television images. In showing us what to aspire to, but providing us means that will surely fail, advertising ___________________________. (Fill in blank.)
In "Gender Advertisements in Magazines Aimed at African
Americans: A Comparison to their Occurrence in Magazines Aimed at Caucasians,
" Tara L. McLaughlin and Nicole Goulet begin by summarizing some of
Erving Goffman's research on gender in advertising. According to
McLaughlin and Goulet, Goffman's frame analysis of commercial messages led him
to classify visual images under six different headings or rubrics: "(1)
____________, observed when one person in the frame is displayed as being larger
or taller than another person (2) ___________, in which a person is portrayed
using their fingers or hand to gently caress or cradle an object (3)
______________, in which one person is portrayed as playing a managerial role in
relation to another person (4) ______________, in which a person is portrayed in a
submissive posture relative to others in the frame or to the viewer, (5)
_____________ in which a person is portrayed as being psychologically removed
from his or her surroundings and (6) __________, which includes ads portraying
family relationships. "