ABSTRACT
The previous chapter challenged the idea that the viewers straightforwardly ‘express’ their agency in interpreting advertising images. Some views posit that the subject uses the advertisement’s meanings as raw materials – or signposts directing their material acts of consuming goods – to construct ‘messages’ which are designed to communicate ideas about their identity to others. I argued instead that the subject is produced performatively in acts of vision. This disrupts a conventional notion of agency residing in the subject, awaiting expression through the interpretation and appropriation of signifiers in advertising. I examined the implications of the contemporary fluidity and dereferentiality of signifiers – their detachment from their original signifieds opens the field of signification to rearticulation. For Virilio (1994), this dereferentiality manifests itself in an untethering of the image from a material ‘support surface’ (print or celluloid). Instead, it engages a self-consciously temporal connection to the viewer in order to generate meaning. These moments of contact and interpretation, I argued, are branded by advertising in an attempt to articulate consumerist identities through specific commercial products. Framed by advertising, these interpretative manoeuvres reconsolidate the status and rights of the (white, male, heterosexual, middle-class) ‘individual’. Simultaneously, they reiterate the uneasy positionings of ‘others’ between and across the borders of discourses of presence, visibility and ‘individuality’. In effect, these positionings marginalise such groups in conceptual ‘elsewhere(s)’ and ‘elsewhen(s)’ and operate to ‘re-centre’ the exclusive category of ‘the individual’. Yet the theoretical approaches used to examine the shifting discourses of ‘the individual’ cannot be directly mapped onto an exploration of the elsewhere(s)/ elsewhen(s). This requires an approach to temporality and the ‘betweenness’ of moments which attends to the disjunctures in these spaces/times. In this chapter I examine the forms of self-temporality available to female viewers of advertisements in magazines. Through an analysis of narratives of self, distance, contact, tactility and performance, I explore the textual address in advertising targeted at women and consider what forms of marginalised agency may be available to them. I examine this in the context of advertising in women’s magazines and draw on studies of gender and popular culture
(e.g. Nava 1992). I explore how women’s magazines may offer possibilities for resistant viewing strategies of advertisements, and I consider what forms of subjectivity this resistance may offer. In this approach, I develop ways of thinking about the discourses of individuality which many advertising campaigns draw on. I argue that campaigns’ focus on individuality and rhetorics of choice coexist with women’s exclusion from the political category of ‘the individual’ which I addressed in previous chapters. This makes for an uneasy relation between expectations and the reality of free (consumer) choice.
