Gender Advertisements in the Korean Context: Now Available Online!
Welcome Pusan National University students, and please see above for the PowerPoint presentation that accompanies my guest lecture next week. I look forward to meeting you!
As for regular readers, this will be a repeat of the lecture I gave at the Royal Asiatic Society in Seoul back in February. Unfortunately, it’s not open to the public, but because the accompanying file is much too big to send via email, and because I’ve had many requests from readers for something like it, then I’ve decided to kill two birds with one stone by posting it here for everyone to enjoy.
Also, not only is it a much improved and simpler version of the original(!), but now only a handful of the slides in it require my additional explanation to be understood. So hopefully you’ll enjoy seeing it even though you can’t attend the lecture itself.
Please feel free to ask me any questions about the contents and/or for links to posts where I discuss any of the issues raised in it in more depth, and – as always – I’d be extremely grateful for any feedback!
Update: I’ve just updated the file, mostly adding more examples and making the text less cluttered and easier to read. Unfortunately, 3 GIF images in it (at slides 10, 86, and 108) still don’t work in this format, but that’s a very minor problem!
Update 2: For an explanation of the “Gundam” (model robot) advertisements at the beginning of the presentation that still lack any accompanying text, please see here.
Update 3: The file above has been changed to it’s most recent version, to be delivered at Sejong University on June 18.
Gender Advertisements in the Korean Context: Public Lecture, Tuesday March 8th 7:30pm, Royal Asiatic Society, Seoul
(Sources: SeoulBeats & personal scan)
See here for the details. Alas, with just 1 hour available then there’ll be little opportunity to do more than summarize what I’ve already written in my “Gender Advertisements in the Korean Context” posts unfortunately (see the right sidebar), but hopefully my very visual presentation will be a much more fun introduction to the topic then reading those tens of thousands of words would be. And it’ll be great to finally meet Seoul-based readers, and to hear your own opinions face to face.
What’s more, it’ll also be my birthday next Tuesday. So you have to come!
Vintage Gender Socialization?
What was the first thing that went through your mind when you saw the above advertisement?
Me? Why Nazi-occupied Colorado of course.
No, really. Specifically, the end of the following segment from Chapter 6 of Philip K. Dick’s classic alternative-history book, The Man in the High Castle (1962):
…Her shift at the judo parlor did not begin until noon; this was her free time, today. Seating herself on a stool at the counter she put down her shopping bags and began to go over the different magazines.
The new Life, she saw, had a big article called: TELEVISION IN EUROPE: GLIMPSE OF TOMORROW. Turning to it, interested, she saw a picture of a German family watching television in their living room. Already, the article said, there was four hours of image broadcast during the day from Berlin. Someday there would be television stations in all the major European cities. And, by 1970, one would be built in New York.
The article showed Reich electronic engineers at the New York site, helping the local personnel with their problems. It was easy to tell which were the Germans. They had that healthy, clean, energetic, assured look. The Americans, on the other hand — they just looked like people. They could have been anybody.
One of the German technicians could be seen pointing off somewhere, and the Americans were trying to make out what he was pointing at. I guess their eyesight is better than ours, she decided. Better diet over the last twenty years. As we’ve been told; they can see things no one else can. Vitamin A, perhaps? (source, right)
Of course, regardless of hierarchy and relationship, people do need to point things out in the distance to each other sometimes. But in advertisements featuring both sexes in Phil K. Dick’s time however, somehow it always seemed to be the men that were pointing things out to then women, as noted by sociologist Erving Goffman in Gender Advertisements in 1979:
On the positive side though, the second thing the advertisement reminded me of was a social studies textbook that I read in my final year of high school (back in 1993), which noted how rife such imagery was in earlier editions of a science textbook that I also happened to be using. But which had long since been removed, and indeed subsequent studies based on Goffman’s work – Belknap, P., & Leonard, W. M. (1991), “A conceptual replication and extension of Erving Goffman’s study of gender advertisements,” Sex Roles, 25(3/4), 103-118 for instance – confirmed that examples in advertisements were (by then) also so rare that it was not even worth looking for them. And much more recent studies of Korean advertisements (listed here) have come to much the same conclusions of them too.
But still, they do occur occasionally. Anybody remember this commercial I analyzed last September for instance, of which even just the visuals alone convey the message that only men are serious and thoughtful enough to be put in charge of your finances?
To which now can be added the ad I saw on the subway this morning, which feels like it’s at least 30 years out of date. Or is that just me?
p.s. Yes, I’m aware that, technically speaking, Colorado isn’t occupied by Nazis in the book, but is rather in a buffer zone between the Japanese “Pacific States of America” and the Nazi “United States of America.” Alas, that wouldn’t have had quite the same impact as an opening line however!
2 comments