CITATION AND COPYRIGHT INFORMATION:
Cite as: Shields, V. R. (1994). The constructing, maintaining, and negotiating of gender identities in the process of decoding gender advertisements. Doctoral dissertation, Ohio State University. Advisor, Brenda Dervin.
© Vickie Rutledge Shields (1994).
You may be able to order a full copy of this dissertation through the author, or through ProQuest Dissertation Express.

ADVISOR:
Brenda Dervin

ABSTRACT:
Advertising images pervade our everyday lives, bombarding us with snapshots of what we supposedly lack and what we need to fill the void. Images of the ideal female body are some of the most dominant advertising messages. Their pervasiveness has called forth popular and academic discourses foregrounding the crucial issue of how these images are implicated in the on-going construction, negotiation and maintenance of gender identities and social relationships between women and men. This issue concerns the impact of particular ads on audiences. Surprisingly, however, relevant research to date has involved analyses of advertising texts and few analyses of audience responses. Informed by Hall’s encoding/decoding frame, this research posits that audiences are neither completely free to make their own meanings nor completely constrained by the meanings inherent in ads.

Examination of the interplay between individual interpretive freedom (agency) and textual (structural) messages is necessary in order to understand the text/audience relationship. The purpose of this research was to provide an audience reception study of advertising decoding that illuminates the interpretive freedom/structural constraint question by focusing on gender as both structural constraint and as a personal resource for enablement and identity. With a sample of 14 women and 16 men, this study employed Sense-Making methodology in the form of structured, qualitative interviewing. The Sense-Making interview allowed respondents to talk in-depth about how they see advertising texts, how they see social structures, and how they see their lives as relating to and being impacted upon by both.

Male responses to gender advertising were generally framed in terms of compliance to dominant prescriptions of gender, personally and in society, in relation to: advertising content, the male gaze, and male-looking. Males rarely felt compelled to “accommodate” these images. This study found that the distinguishing feature of female responses to gender advertising was women’s on-going “negotiations” with, and “accommodations” of dominant images of ideal femininity in advertising content, the male gaze, and male-looking. For most women, movements from moments of compliance to moments of resistance with dominant images of ideal femininity are riddled with daily and continuous communicative “struggles.”

OTHER MATERIALS BY THIS AUTHOR ON THIS WEBSITE:
See: http://communication.sbs.ohio-state.edu/sense-making/AAauthors/authorlistshieldsv.html