Study Questions 4: Th Feb 13 (originally scheduled for Feb 18)

 

1. According to Kickham and Weller, how does Clinique "color code" gender into the packaging of its products?

2. How do Clinique ads aimed at selling to men differ from ads aimed at women? How does the written text differ? How does the visual text differ?

3. How do stereotypes about maleness conflict with the desire to sell the particular products made by Clinique, and how have they sought to use those stereotypes to their advantage?

4. How do questions of social class figure in the Clinique ad campaigns?

5. Go to the Clinique counter in the Bookie, and "read" it as a text. Are men's and women's products packaged differently or not? Are they still "color coded"? Is there any difference in the method of presentation? If things are different than those described in the article, what might account for those differences?

6. According to Jean Kilbourne, why are adolescent females especially targeted by, and especially vulnerable to, advertisers?

7. What are some of the main features of advertising aimed a girls and young women?

8. What do the images of girls and young women tend to look like?

9. What kinds of behaviors, activities, are shown? How do these represesntations of activity contrast with boys?

10. What kind of language is used to characterize girls and young women? What examples does Kilbourne give of "silencing" and how pervasive do you think this is?

11. What counter-trends, if any, do you see to the patterns Kilbourne describes? Have things improved given recent attention to eating disorders, teen suicide and other major problems Kilbourne and others have drawn public attention to?

12. According to Fejes, what has led to a greater amount of advertising being directed at gay and lesbian consumers?

13. What have been some of the problems in getting an accurate survey of gay and lesbian consumers?

14. How did advertising reshape the content of national (and later local) gay publications?

15. How have questions of gender shaped advertising to gays and lesbians?

16. How have questions of race and class been dealt with in gay/lesbian advertising?

17 How has advertising "constructed identities" for young gays and lesbians? Why has it been such a powerful force?

18. What has been positive, and what negative, about the inclusion of gays and lesbians into the world of advertising?

19. What is the "assimilationist strategy" in gay and lesbian activism, and what does Fejes see as its limitations?

20. What was "lesbian chic" and why did it not last as long as other gay and lesbian marketing strategies?

21. What can we learn in general from this article about a problem we might call "positive stereotyping?"