Gender Issues in Car Advertisements: How are 'Masculinity' and 'Femininity' Represented in Car Advertisements? What do Car Advertisements Reveal about the ways in which 'Masculinity' and 'Femininity' are Shaped within the Spaces of Everyday Life?

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Felicity Allen

English 289 Research Assignment

Gender Issues in Car Advertisements: How are ‘Masculinity’ and ‘Femininity’ Represented in Car Advertisements? What do Car Advertisements Reveal about the ways in which ‘Masculinity’ and ‘Femininity’ are Shaped within the Spaces of Everyday Life?

We are a culture with an abundance of advertisements. Indeed, according to James Twitchell, in Western culture the average adult comes into contact with over 3,000 advertisements per day. Composing a large portion of the advertisements we see, are car advertisements.

It is widely acknowledged that for years advertisements have used certain gender representations to target specific audiences (potential buyers). Body images portrayed by the media (including car advertisements) through the use of imagery, the display of life-styles, and the reinforcement of values, are communicators of culturally defined concepts such as success, worth, love, sexuality, popularity, and normalcy. Of particular concern over the past two decades has been the excessive use of sexual stereotypes, especially those of women. Stereotypes are oversimplified conventional character, often gender, representations. Indeed, the Oxford English Dictionary  defines “stereotype” as “a conventional, oversimplified conception, opinion, or image.”                                          

Throughout this essay I shall analyse the gender representations that underpin the discourse of car advertising in Australia. In particular, I shall focus on the use of male and female bodies as organizing metaphors which produce a gendered framework for advertising different types of cars. I shall consider who the advertisements are targeted at (whether they are targeted at a particular gender) and what such advertisements reveal about the ways in which ‘masculinity’ and ‘femininity’ are shaped within the spaces of everyday life, taking into consideration the affects and influences they have on society. Since there are so many different car advertisements, I shall focus on those found in the West Australian newspaper, the Sunday Times newspaper and on television, as these media are assumed gender neutral.

According to A. E. Courtney and T. W. Whipple in their 1983 edition of Sex Stereotyping in Advertising, “Advertisements are full of stereotypes”. I shall begin my study by looking at stereotyping in car advertisements and challenging this claim. My study, like Erving Goffman’s Gender Advertisements, is devoted to what Goffman describes as a "pictorial pattern analysis"of the presentation of gender in advertisements. The use of collections of photographs has the considerable advantage of allowing subtle features of gender displays to be exhibited, not merely described. I shall investigate the effect produced by the interaction between text as caption and artfully sequenced arrays of photographs in the car advertisements. I shall also challenge Goffman’s proposition that advertisements exploit women’s sexuality to sell a product.

A first example gender stereotyping is that of the female sex object. The Renault Mégane advertisement, portrays a highly sexualized representation of femininity, featuring a young model wearing a very short, tight-fitting dress that expresses her sexuality. The caption “Get the figure you’ve always dreamed of” is a clever play on words, referring to both the shapely model and the shapely car. It is clearly aimed at women, suggesting to them that by buying the car they’ll “get the figure they’ve always dreamed of” as they’ll drive and be inside such a sleek, attractive car. This also implies that by driving such a car, they’ll obtain a highly desirable image and reputation, like the model who is assumed to drive that car. The advertisement conveys the advantages to women of buying the Renault Mégane by communicating the culturally desirable concepts of sexuality, beauty and popularity. The advertisement for the Citroen Xsara also portrays women as sex objects who are primarily concerned with their image. It features supermodel Claudia Schiffer seductively undressing, ending up naked, and displays the caption, “The only thing to be seen in this summer.”

The successful and financially secure male stereotype is portrayed in the BMW M3 advertisement, which features a good-looking young male executive, dressed in a suit, driving the car at what appears to be a high speed. He conveys the culturally defined concepts of success, worth and wealth. This advertisement concentrates on the technical, mechanical advantages, as opposed to those of the individual’s image. Technology is conventionally a masculine concept, and this, along with the fact that the advertisement features a man, suggests that it is aimed at men. A second example of this stereotype is found in the Porshe 911 advertisement, which again features a man and concentrates on the technology and mechanics of the car.

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The female stereotype of the housewife and mother is represented in a number of car advertisements, including  that for the Toyota Tarago. This advertisement shows a stressed mother frantically trying to get her children out the house and into the car. Once she is driving, she looks very happy and relaxed, seemingly unaware of her children squabbling in the back. It is evidently targeted at mothers, a point which is highlighted by the fact that the advertisement emphasizes the safety, convenience and practicality of the vehicle – factors we see as women’s concerns – rather than “speed, performance and handling,” ...

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