"It's girls being girls!": Young women reading gender in advertising

Abstract

This thesis is a study of how young people read gender (and to a lesser extent, ‘race’) in advertising. It focuses particularly on young women, exploring how they respond to the mediated images of women in advertising, and the discursive strategies they use as they negotiate meanings from these images that resonate with their understandings of what it means to be a woman in New Zealand today. The thesis compares male and female readings of the same ads in order to consider the role that gender plays in the interpretation of advertising. The study is based on discussions with senior students from eleven New Zealand secondary schools. Where possible a focus group interview model of gathering data was used, and groups were invited to discuss their views about and interpretations of advertising in relation to gender (and in some cases ‘race’). In some schools there were discussions with whole classes of students. Both magazine ads and television commercials were explored. In total, 27 focus groups and 12 class discussions were conducted. This data was supplemented by some fieldwork with young people in Singapore (for comparative purposes), and interviews with advertising agency personnel in both countries. My methodology draws on, but modifies, grounded theory, where the researcher moves into a “research situation” without a set hypothesis in mind and proceeds to find what the key issues are and what theory may account for this situation. The thesis is firmly situated in the considerable body of academic literature about the representation of women in the media, and in advertising in particular. After four decades of research and theorising, the meanings and implications of such portrayals continue to be contested. The advent of postfeminism has contributed to this debate, and the thesis therefore takes into account feminist literature on the changing notions of feminism and femininity (femininity has proved to be a particularly relevant concept for my research). As an audience study it draws on theories of the active audience, as well as ethnographic research with young women which explores their readings of media texts or their relationship to feminism. This thesis arrives at the conclusion that much of the existing literature on feminism and postfeminism, while helpful, does not always fit the ways many of the young women in my survey see their position in the world or their relationship with advertising. This research identifies the importance of specific local and historical factors. The readings that these young women produce need to be understood as emerging from a particular historical period, when many of the aims of second wave feminism seem to be have been achieved but are not yet fully embedded in the wider society or in the consciousness of many of the young people who took part in my research. The findings demonstrate some similarities with similar research done in other countries, but also some significant differences which suggest that the experience of growing up female in New Zealand is in some ways different to that in other Western countries. Similarly, the readings of‘race’ relate to a particular historical moment in New Zealand’s history.