Alyssa Wallingford
October 31, 2022
English 206
Professor Catherine Frank
Can Identities Be Fully Realized By Advertisers?
When you think about advertising, many people have heard of “secret” or subliminal messaging being present in our commercials and products advertised to consumers every day. This includes the idea of including certain references and words that only a certain group would understand and appreciate. This brings us to the writing of Danae Clark titled Commodity Lesbianism, which is about how the media has used symbols and messaging in their advertising to give a nod to the LGBTQ+ community, without necessarily having the larger population notice it. Her writing speaks to a larger idea of how different people perceive the same thing differently, depending on their own experiences and identities, also speaking to the idea of intersectionality. The main issue of this writing is acknowledging that everyone has multiple sides to them and simply focusing on one aspect of someone is not fully encompassing how people experience things. It also speaks to the larger issue of modern society’s assumptions about things that people experience, and how those assumptions can affect people without even realizing it, and challenging these assumptions is something that should be encouraged (Parker 217).
Clark analyzes ads and how they are subtly giving messages to the LGBTQ+ community without people who are not a part of this community ever noticing them doing such. This quiet acknowledgement but apparent lack of recognition for many people in modern society lends itself to the ideas that Parker lays out in his discussion of queer studies/theory. Based on who is viewing the ads, they place different meanings on the same thing, or choose whether or not to attribute meaning to an ad choice at all. An example of this being a fashion layout from Mirabella, entitled “Spectator”. In this example, Clark discusses how the style choices of the women in this shoot is easily recognizable to lesbians as a more “butch” style, if not simply masculine in appearance. This choice appeals to some lesbians’ desire to fight against traditionally feminine style choices, and as a result, appeals more to them and encourage them to buy. But if you were not aware of this kind of style association beforehand, you wouldn’t notice the difference (Clark 490).
Specifically in the case of lesbian advertising, Clark argues that “a lesbian subject’s recognition of the butch-femme binarism, as it has been historically styled by lesbian communities, is an essential component of a reading practice that distances, subverts, and plays with both heterosexist representations and images of sexual indeterminacy”(Clark 491). By this group challenging the assumptions made by heteronormative behavior, they are creating their own space in which they possess insider knowledge and power based in the idea that they are all aware of a certain message being shown or assumed in an advertisement. But this idea brings up another important question especially in the modern heteronormative sense, but also in the case of LGBTQ+ advertising. Why do people make so many assumptions about the media they are consuming, and why is it those assumptions in particular? Clark also argues that advertisers bringing in assumptions based on a shared gay or lesbian identity is oversimplifying and reducing the larger community to simple assumptions (Clark 493). There is so much focus on what category everyone belongs to, when in reality, each category realistically only fits a part of any one person, and in Parker’s idea of queer theory, gender is possibly in part performative. This is based on the idea that people choose to act a certain way based on the category they “fit in”, when the reality is, there is a spectrum that exists and each individual is somewhere on it, and there aren’t realistically boxes that people fit into neatly and completely. Specifically in a post-structuralist view, forming these identities of these communities is leading to essentialist definitions of what identity is.
In conclusion, Clark visits the idea of the effect different perspectives can have on different people viewing the same thing. But it also raises the question of whether or not we need to claim a specific identity and fit into a performative norm based on our “category”, or if that in itself is just a performance and is ultimately reductive of each individual experiencing the world around them. In the example of advertising, people creating these ads have been able to give signals to people in this case, the LGBTQ+ community, acknowledgement without being completely obvious as to their goals in doing this. But this idea of categorization can be misleading, and ultimately, not really encompass the entirety of who a person is, and not fully acknowledging that identities intersect.
Works Cited
Clark, Danae. Commodity Lesbianism Danae Clark. Duke University Press, 1995. https://eng206-f22.uneportfolio.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/4242/2022/10/Clark_Commodity-Lesbianism.pdf
Parker, Robert Dale. How to Interpret Literature: Critical Theory for Literary and Cultural Studies. 4th ed., New York, Oxford University Press, 2019, pp. 191–228.
