ABSTRACT
Advertisements sell more than products; they sell, among other things, values, ways of life, and conceptions of self and the Other.1 Media theorists have long argued that advertisements serve to sell mass audiences such ideologies as capitalist consumerism, imperialism, racism, and patriarchy.2 In addition, advertisements sell particular visions of the imagined community, by celebrating certain values, highlighting certain ways of life, and featuring casts with socially preferred characteristics. In the United States, for instance, advertisements create a universe in which nearly everyone is young, good-looking, able-bodied, heterosexual, and white.3 Advertisements seek to persuade through their aestheticized articulation of social ideals and values. They provide the viewer with “reality as it should be-life and lives worth emulating” (Schudson 1984, 220); and in so doing, they provide models for identity formation, at the level of both the individual and the nation. Thus advertisements serve as a rich source of discourses of national identity.
