New Insights into Gendered Discursive Practices - Language, Gender and Identity Construction

It might be thought that anxiety-creating tactics are infrequent in the present world. However, their use both in unofficial commercial advertising and in official propaganda can still be witnessed today. Fear, or at least anxiety, plays a part in the selling of cosmetics, weight-reduction products, and fashion of all kinds, even for men – a less evident effect of gender construction created by branding.

Men are aware –now more than ever– that appearance can satisfy more than just vanity; it can convey an array of social messages, including status, class, profession, and sexual confidence. In much the same way that clothes and makeup allow a woman to transform herself, men have come to discover the silent language of appearance and the power it can wield in the workplace, with women, and even with each other. While still wary of appearing dandyish or effeminate, the evolving man realizes the “style” that can propel him into higher spheres, both professionally and personally (Pellegrin 2009: 1-2).

Many men may feel that they must adopt a particular form of masculinity in order to be “in control of” their identity as masculine beings or, as Beneke (1997: 39) has termed it, to prove their manhood.

On a governmental level, scare campaigns, such as the G.W. Bush administration’s use of fear, have convinced at least part of the American public of the need for homeland security measures, with the corresponding indiscriminant searching of private messages. These violations have been tolerated since 9/11, as Jan Philipp Albrecht, a German lawmaker and rapporteur on data protection in the European Parliament has recently stated: “It became normal not only to accept but to defend this kind of surveillance as a normal reaction to terrorism” (World.Time 2013).

Other more recent examples can be observed in the use of antiimmigration campaigns (some clearly racist, as in the expulsion of the Romanian Roma from France) by some political parties and diverse media in various European countries. Even before the summer of 2013, the English print media published provocative articles, such as “The true scale of European immigration”, in which it was claimed that there are 600,000 migrants in the UK without jobs and that the National Health Service has been left with an annual bill of £1.5 billion (Mendick and Duffin 2013). But when one reads the literature more carefully, one can see that there are clear differences between the acceptance of some immigrant women as compared to some immigrant men, mostly because the former will not be occupying jobs sought by UK residents (Dustmann, Fabbri, Preston, and Wadsworth 2003: 25), with the exception of West Indian women, who have attained high levels of education in the UK and can, therefore, occupy jobs that UK citizens might apply for.

Anti-immigration (i.e., racist) propaganda has also been spread by diverse political parties in Europe. In his election victory speech, Geert Wilders, leader of the Netherland Party for Freedom, declared that: “The Netherlands is waking up from a long leftist nightmare. A nightmare of crazy high taxes, crime, lousy care, headscarves and burkas, of pauperizing, of mass immigration and Islamization . . .” (Seidman 2009). Very notable in this quoted text is the mention of female dress as an obvious sign of the supposed “islamization” of Europe. All of these latter examples of “scare tactics” rely on existing human anxieties that might lead to a group’s or nation’s searching for a scapegoat, existing outside the nation, or within it.

Fundamental to success in convincing the public, in either official or unofficial advertising campaigns, is the selective use of the truth in order to solely support one’s point of view, i.e., not offering various points of view concerning an issue, a technique known as “framing”. This is the case, in some media, of the ideological discussion of the issue of private ownership vs public ownership, for example, those whose liberal political inclinations lead them to believe that only private enterprise can be efficient enough to come up with new inventions or applications and actually make them work for society. For instance, Prime Minister David Cameron, as well as Nick Clegg, coalition leader, frequently offers only examples of cases in which a public service entity has been or should be open to bidding by private companies, supposedly making these services more efficient, as reported in Stratton (2011) regarding Cameron’s ideological suppositions as to the efficiency of private enterprise. Liberal ideological sources cite mostly private company successes, a view that has been set forth in many publications and broadcasts through different media as if these views had been proven by a number of successful cases of private businesses. Yet more recent publications (Mazzucato 2013) indicate that these accounts reveal only half truths, as they almost never offer readers a balanced account of the advantages and disadvantages of private or public ownership. For instance, proponents of private ownership often suggest that state-owned enterprises cannot efficiently open up ground-breaking innovations for society, but this viewpoint does not take into account that many societal benefits have accrued from governmental agencies’ expansion of global satellite systems to cover such societal needs as GPS tracking and from internet communication systems, whose development originally came from the US Air Force systems, later transferred to the ARPA, the Advanced Research Projects Agency –all projects initially funded by the US government, not by private enterprise, which would not have had the funds for projects of such long-term development.

In commercial advertising, half-truths are rampant as in Johnson & Johnson’s advertising practices for their antipsychotic drug, Risperdal, promoting it for older adults, children and people with developmental disabilities. In a recent ruling of Federal Drug Administration of the U.S., Johnson & Johnson (Thomas 2013) was fined $2.2 billion for promoting unapproved uses (especially among the elderly in nursing homes), and of misrepresenting the safety and relative effectiveness of the drug. In this case, the FDA found that Johnson & Johnson had told its sales representatives to boost sales, by visiting child psychologists and mental health facilities that mainly focused on children, in order to promote the drug as a safe treatment for disorders such as attention deficit hyperactivity disorder and obsessive-compulsive disorder, when in reality, this drug was only effective as an antipsychotic aid, and was not meant for children or the elderly.

The final technique used in official propaganda or unofficial advertising is to imply that everyone agrees, thus focusing on people’s need to “fit in” (positive face needs). In official propaganda, this technique almost always takes the form of appealing to the citizen’s patriotism. In the Propaganda. Power and Persuasion exhibition, one of the video sites featured Tessa Jowell, Olympics Minister, speaking on the power of the 2012 Olympic Games to enhance Britain’s prestige. Nevertheless, in her very words, there is a presupposition which is not advantageous for Britain: “Britain has been seen in terms of her traditional heritage rather than the creative, iconoclastic nation that we are.” In this quote, it can be seen that Britain wishes to be considered among the innovative and modern economies, but the presupposition is that she has not been thus considered.

In unofficial, commercial, advertising, the “get on the bandwagon” tactic is quite convincing as well, targeted towards both men and women. The success of today’s marketing depends not only on celebrity endorsement of the product but rather on the creation of a store, shop or café which expresses a lifestyle as a way of contributing to the organization’s brand identity. A good example of this type of lifestyle marketing is the store as the presentation of a lifestyle, for example, in the American shops Crate & Barrel, which sell furniture, home decor, gifts, and house wares, mostly appealing to women as homemakers. They advertise themselves in the following fashion: “Crate & Barrel is making the world more at home… What an easy way to surprise a friend across the pond. Or bring your own corner of the world to life”. “Making the world more at home” implies that any consumer can find his/her “lifestyle” at Crate & Barrel, while “across the pond” refers to the Atlantic Ocean and evokes the thought that, in reality, the world is really very small and corresponding lifestyles can be found on both sides of the ocean. These statements accompany Crate & Barrel’s new campaign, which advertises the possibility of sending gifts from the U.S. to European countries.