Читать книгу Sociology of the Arts - Victoria D. Alexander - Страница 30

Goffman (1987 [1976]) took a very different approach to learn about gender relationships. He examined advertisements to learn about contemporary society in his well‐known study, Gender Advertisements. He argues that, in order to make their meaning clear, advertisements point to familiar rituals from everyday life. Rituals include formalized behavior called “displays,” which are useful because they “provide evidence of the actor’s alignment in a gathering, the position he seems prepared to take up in what is about to happen in the social situation” (p. 1, emphasis original). Displays, then, reveal the structural relationships—the alignments—among people. The depictions in advertising are schematic representations of displays; they are “hyper‐ritualized.” Goffman argues that advertisements are an excellent source from which to learn about structural relationships in everyday life, precisely because they present, unambiguously, these hyper‐rituals.

Goffman looked at thousands of print advertisements to show the structural relationship between men and women. He showed that women are structurally subordinate to men, and we can see this through a variety of displays common in advertisements. For instance, subordination is shown through “relative size” (p. 28), especially the height of the participants. Taller participants carry more authority. In the advertisements Goffman examined, men are routinely shown with their heads higher than those of women. While it is true that men are, on average, taller than women, Goffman suggests that this physical difference alone does not account for the way men are shown in advertisements. Rather, advertisements are constructed to make a particular meaning, and it would be possible for advertisers to portray women as taller than men. Moreover, it is actually the height of the head rather than actual height which conveys the authority. So in one picture that Goffman shows us, there are three men, one standing and two seated. The context, and the heights of the heads, show that the men work in an office and the standing man is the boss. It would be easy for advertisers to use images of sitting men and standing women, but it is telling that they almost never do so. Indeed, Goffman finds some exceptions to the “men are taller” rule, but in each of these, there is something else going on which explains the woman’s height. In one case, the woman is dressed in upper‐class clothing and she stands next to a shorter man dressed as a chef. It is clear that, as his patron, she has more status than he does. In another case, the woman is tall; she is also stout and dressed as an opera singer complete with a pike and horned helmet! She’s powerful, but also ridiculous; the exception that proves the rule.

Goffman describes a number of other displays that similarly reflect the unequal nature of gender relations in society. He posits that a “classic stereotype of deference is that of lowering oneself physically in some form or another of prostration. Correspondingly, holding the body erect and the head high is stereotypically a mark of unashamedness, superiority and disdain. Advertisers draw on (and endorse) the claimed universality of the theme” (p. 40). He goes on to show that “children and women are pictured on floors and beds more often than are men” (p. 41), and that women are posed with a “bashful knee bend” (p. 45) or with a “cant” (bend) of the head or body that “can be read as an acceptance of subordination, an expression of ingratiation, submissiveness and appeasement” (p. 46). Another display is “Function Ranking” in which men “perform the executive role” in face‐to‐face interactions between men and women (p. 32).

Goffman’s influential study was based on advertisements printed in the 1960s and 70s. More recent studies have found that many, but not all, of Goffman’s findings still hold in contemporary advertising. Cortese (1999), for instance, finds that the relative height of men and women often follow the pattern Goffman described, but heights are also reversed, with women portrayed higher, such that the finding on relative size no longer applies (pp. 27–28). Gender reversals are also found in function ranking, with women taking the lead, but Cortese finds that “traditional function ranking remains a big draw for marketers” (p. 33). Similarly, Kang (1997) found that relative size and function ranking had declined in advertisements, but that stereotyped portrayals of women have increased.