Teaching
Consumer Culture and Promotional Media
Promotional media—from commercials to billboards to social media ads—are ubiquitous in contemporary culture. While these media may seem innocuous, they often reflect larger social beliefs and norms about race, gender, and sexuality. In this course, students will learn to read, critique, and analyze promotional media in order to understand how they shape (and are shaped by) consumer culture and capitalism.
The course begins by introducing students to theoretical frameworks and concepts (e.g., commodity and consumption, celebrity culture and fandom, representations of race and gender, etc.) and analytical methods (e.g., semiotic, discourse, and rhetorical analysis) which they will use to critique and analyze advertisements and other promotional media. Students will then apply these concepts and methods to select case studies that represent cultural industries such as fashion, marketing, and social media.
In groups, students will develop a mock advertising campaign that addresses a topic of their choosing in a satirical way. Students will have to work together to create a "product" and build materials to promote it, which may include ad mock-ups, ideas for commercials, and even branding and logos, depending on their skills. They will present a pitch to class to explain their idea and how it relates to course concepts.
UNIT I: THE MAKING OF CONSUMER CULTURE
Week 1: Language and Ideology
Williamson, “A Currency of Signs”
Barthes, “Written Clothing”
Keith & Lundberg, “Argument and Persuasion”
Wernick, “Advertising and Ideology: An Interpretive Framework”
Week 2: Commodity and Consumption
Goldman, “Advertising and the Production of Commodity-Signs”
Nicole, “How Consumerism Ruins Our Planet and Finances”
Marx, “The Commodity”
Veblen, “Conspicuous Consumption”
“Our Consumer Society”
Week 3: Celebrity and Fandom
Holmes & Redmond, “Understanding Celebrity Culture”
Coscarelli, “How Pop Music Fandom Became Sports, Politics, Religion and All-Out War”
Dyer, “Stars as Images”
Hills, “Fan Cultures Between Consumerism and ‘Resistance’”
Week 4: Race, Gender, and Representation
Goffman, “Gender Commercials”
hooks, “Eating the Other: Desire and Resistance”
Davis: “Representation Matters: An Illustrated History of Race and Ethnicity in Advertising”
Brown, “Marlboro Men: Outsider Masculinities and Commercial Modelling in Postwar America”
Week 5: Space and Place
Lange, “Why We Go to the Mall”
Nygaard, “How Retail Stores Manipulate You”
Gruen, “The Big Breakthrough”
Miller, “Selling Consumption”
Benjamin, “Arcades, Magasins de Nouveautés, Sales Clerks”
“How the First Department Store Transformed Society”
UNIT II: CULTURAL INDUSTRIES AND PROMOTIONAL MEDIA
Week 6: Women’s Magazines and Ideal Femininity
Walker, “Women’s Magazines and Women’s Roles”
Welter, “The Cult of True Womanhood: 1820–1860”
McCracken, “Covert Advertisements”
The September Issue (2009)
Selection of women’s magazines
Week 7: Modelling and the Body on Display
Mears, “Discipline of the Catwalk: Gender, Power and Uncertainty in Fashion Modelling”
More Perfect Union, “Models Tell All: Exploitation and Abuse in the Fashion Industry”
Entwistle, “From Catwalk to Catalog: Male Fashion Models, Masculinity, and Identity”
Wissinger, “The Job: Nice Work if You Can Get It”
Week 8: Commodity Activism, Commodity Feminism
Banet-Weiser & Mukherjee, “Commodity Activism in Neoliberal Times”
Treisman, “Is Barbie a Feminist Icon? It’s Complicated”
Murray, “Branding ‘Real’ Social Change in Dove’s Campaign for Real Beauty”
Goldman et al., “Commodity Feminism”
Selected ad campaigns
Week 9: Marketing Diversity and Inclusion
Sender, “The Business and Politics of Gay Marketing”
Sephora’s 2023 DE&I Progress Report
Ahmed, “The Language of Diversity”
Shankar, “The Pitch”
Selected ad campaigns
Week 10: Branding the Self
Serazio, “The Rise of Influencers: Corporatizing the Human”
Banet-Weiser, “Branding the Post-Feminist Self: The Labor of Femininity”
Duffy, “Branding the Authentic Self: The Commercial Appeal of ‘Being Real’”
Glossier’s #GetReadyWithMe playlist