Overview
Arguing that advertising not only sells things, but also ideas about the world, media scholar Sut Jhally offers a blistering analysis of commercial culture's inability to let go of reactionary gender representations. Jhally's starting point is the breakthrough work of the late sociologist Erving Goffman, whose 1959 book The Presentation of the Self in Everyday Life prefigured the growing field of performance studies. Jhally applies Goffman's analysis of the body in print advertising to hundreds of print ads today, uncovering an astonishing pattern of regressive and destructive gender codes. By looking beyond advertising as a medium that simply sells products, and beyond analyses of gender that tend to focus on either biology or objectification, The Codes of Gender offers important insights into the social construction of masculinity and femininity, the relationship between gender and power, and the everyday performance of cultural norms.
Production
Media Education Foundation
Cast
More Like This
Olympia: Part One – Festival of the Nations
In Search of Tomorrow
Kate Bornstein Is a Queer & Pleasant Danger
Fanalysis
Gender Revolution: A Journey with Katie Couric
30 Years of Garbage: The Garbage Pail Kids Story
Greetings From Planet Smurf
Born to Be
Larger than Life: Reign of the Boybands
Alphas