Articulations of Desire and the Politics of Contradiction: Magazine Advertising, Television Fandom, and Female Gender Identity Dissonance.

Abstract

Articulations of Desire and the Politics of Contradiction recognizes that there is an intrinsic link between mediated representations of feminine contradiction and the manner in which women develop, organize, and manage personal identity. In order to explore media’s role in producing, reproducing, and policing identities – their boundaries, intersections, and ruptures – the theory of gender identity dissonance is proposed. Utilizing cognitive and social psychological literature pertaining to motivation, identity, and the self-concept, this theory expands upon Leon Festinger’s (1957) cognitive dissonance theory, by suggesting that anxiety occurs when individuals become consciously or unconsciously compelled to embrace contradictory gender identities. Turning to critical and cultural theory to examine the manner in which gender identity dissonance permeates media, an historical archive of advertisements drawn from Glamour, Cosmopolitan and Seventeen magazines beginning in 1970 was constructed. Three major dichotomies emerged: Madonna-Whore, Masculine-Feminine, and Singlehood-Couplehood. It is argued that the presence of identity-based tensions were associated with the sexual revolution and the emergence of feminism in the 1970s, and the rise of niche marketing and advent of poststructuralist/postmodern conceptions of self and society within popular discourse by the late 1990s. Industrial analysis of the advertising industry, in particular Hennessy Cognac’s “Appropriately Complex/Mix Accordingly,” Bacardi Rum’s “Bacardi by Night,” and De Beers’ “Right-Hand Ring” campaigns, found that corporations featuring gender identity dissonance-themed print magazine advertisements benefited economically. Results from focus groups conducted with female fans of the HBO series Sex and the City illuminate how identity dissonance associated with relationship status functions to support female fans’ belief in the text’s realism, enhancing their pleasure in the show. Gender identity dissonance theory rests on two assumptions. Firstly, that social discourses reinforce hegemonic power relations through implementation, reinforcement, and perpetuation of binary relationships (specifically, between identities). And, secondly, that there are corresponding psychological processes such as gender identity dissonance which create, reflect, emulate, and reinforce binary processing of information. While not all social relations and psychological experiences are rooted in binaries, certain binary-based processing and discourses exist, and how they work to both emphasize and elide the complexity that characterize women’s lives is important to explore.