Seeking Subjectivity Beyond the Objectification Of
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UNIVERSITY OF HAWAI'I LIBRARY MY BODYI MY PLAYGROUND: SEEKING SUBJECTIVITY BEYOND THE OBJECTIFICATION OF ADVERTISING A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED TO THE GRADUATE DIVISION OF THE UNIVERSITY OF HAWAI'I IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY IN AMERICAN STUDIES DECEMBER 2002 By Kamuela A. Young Dissertation Conunittee: David Stannard, Chairperson Kathy Ferguson Michael J. Shapiro William Chapman Floyd Matson ©2002 Kamuela A. Young INTRODUCTION: 3 for the reader 4 (rom the writer 7 to the Book 11 CHAPTER 1 20 AMERICAN IDEOLOGy 20 the theory 22 CHAPTER 2 42 CHANGING AMERICA 43 the ad man 60 CHAPTER 3 74 CONSUMPTION -- A WAY OF LIFE 75 the groundwork 84 the new collective knowledge 87 created market dependence 90 CHAPTER 4 105 ADVERTISING: TIlE SIREN OF CONSUMPTION 106 1920 -1930's 109 1940's -1950's 114 1960's 121 1970's -1980's 127 1990's 132 CHAPTER 5 140 EYES WIDE SHUT 143 choice constructed 145 running with eves wide shut 155 it works so well 166 PRICE OF THE TICKET 168 CHAPTER 6 ..................•..................................•........................................... 176 TuRNING TOWARDS THE BODy 177 theory 180 the body 182 the marked body..................................................................................... 186 THE BODY, THE VEHICLE 193 IZ1!£i 199 bodies ofyouth 202 CHAPTER 7 207 My BODY My PLAYGROUND 208 marking the body: a practice 213 subject whole? 240 NOTES 248 2 For Puna and Pila Who changed my life simply by being a part ofit. 3 Introduction: from the writer I'm telling you stories, trust me. Jeanette Winterson, The Passion Woke up with a feeling ofemptiness again. Something is off. I'm not sure what it is; but it feels worse today. A general dis-ease has made a home in me. I feel like something is missing or lost. The power ofthis emptiness is intensified by its invisibility. The haunting sits with me, heavy, lighter at times, but always present. I feel its hunger. I need something to feed it -- for some odd reason I think a new shampoo might help. In these hauntings I am not alone; they are, I have discovered, very American. I imagine it to function like a cancer, slightly eating away at me. My students and friends echo this same sort ofemptiness. It is a real problem for many ofus in the middle-class. In the years that I have been wrestling with this emptiness and listening to the stories ofhow others I have met are dealing with theirs, I have begun to see a connection between this dis-ease and advertising. It is this connection that has led me to the works ofBerrnan, 4 Bocock, Ewen, Lears, and Slater. With their help I argue that advertising has altered our thinking and conditioned us to remain in a state of starvation for foods that do not actually nourish us. The following work sets out to explore this further while also seeking a few would-be answers. We all know advertising works; that it has the power to shift our sense ofdesire and to create and feed our insecurity. For most middle-class Americans proofofthis can be found by simply looking in our closets or around our homes. We all own products we do not need, that we found ridiculous and yet later they evolved into items we somehow had to have. Advertising, the siren ofconsumption has a voice comforting and sweet enough to lure us towards the rocks while simultaneously assuring us that the transformation it promises is really the transformation we desire. Advertising constructs our desires, offers us products to fill those constructions, and then nags us with still greater desires. Its tack is to always remind us that we are flawed, by constantly reminding us that we lack what can make us whole. It pushes us to note the emptiness ofdesire unfulfilled and to then fill the perceived void with products. The illusions that assure the sale empower the consumer, but only for a moment!. The victory fades in the face ofthe next advertising assault, which highlights how horribly behind, and, as a result, how disempowered we really are. The illusion has altered who we are, and in the process we have been seduced still further by it. 2 Advertising is on everything from billboards to children's clothing . The following sets out to understand how it is that so simple a concept -- the 5 need to sell product - has so successfully altered our perception ofthe world and, ultimately, ourselves, and how that perception might be possible to shift. I would like to thank the following people for walking this path with me, without their help and support this adventure's end would not have been possible. Thanks to my parents Jan and Mason Young, to my Tutu, Jean Jenkins, my brothers Puna and Pila, and to Terry Galpin, Fred Klemmer and Linda Leyden Ph.D. for their endless love, support and beliefin my ability. Thanks to Jack Burke N.D. and Don Hallock, without whom I might not have understood the connections between the body and mind so fully. A deep thanks to Dean Chadwin, who edited this text and endured my dyslexia and my attachment to commas. Thanks to my committee, David Stannard (Chair), Kathy Ferguson, Michael Shapiro, Floyd Matson and Bill Chapman for their time and guidance, and all the people who allowed me to ask them questions about their bodies and in return gave me stories about their lives. And finally, to the people who continued to make me laugh and encourage my creativity, all the while helping me to remember that there would be life after the Ph.D. Thank you Cyn Derosier, Kennan Ferguson Ph.D., James Benouis, Lani and Ira Bumett. 6 Introduction: for the reader Everyone ofmy writings has been furnished to me by a thousand different persons, a thousand different things. Goethe, in Reinventing Medicine When I began this paper, I imagined that I would pass through this journey quickly, that the process work was done, and just the typing remained. I could not have been more wrong. The process work had only just begun, and the typing proved to be the task by which the process displayed itself. I tell you ofthis journey because it has been reflected in the ways I have looked at the body, theory, and middle-class American culture as a whole. I discovered my voice changed somewhere in chapter five. No longer was it rational and critical; it was now rich with anger and sarcasm. I wanted to write: Ofcourse Americans can't locate themselves(s); ofcourse, eighteen- year-olds have to bum their identity into their skin; ofcourse, we did all ofthis to ourselves. I hated the life I had created where every conversation seemed to 3 be research . I hated that I had just handed over nine years ofmy life to academia and had only 250 pages to show for it. I got sick, my body went 7 crooked, and my mind clouded with the static ofthings left for another day. Most horrifYing, I was starting to become numb to what I had at one time been so interested in. This process had written itselfinto me. Like the scooter burn on my ankle, this project is etched into my skin, and deeper. It is etched into my very sense ofself(s). In one ofmy seemingly endless moaning sessions with my mom, I told her that my voice had changed and that I was considering going back to training waitresses how to greet new tables. I listened as she explained my work to me through me. The process I was going through was just like the one 1 had been writing about; being lost in it shifted the ways I could locate myselfin relationship to it, and, fittingly enough, my body had been the vehicle for this transformation. Ofcourse, my voice was different now. I was different now. I have been written on. 1had been fighting its markings and fighting what I told myselfwas the map. How nal've I was to believe I would be unmarked by this process; the irony was that the desire to be changed, to be branded by this choice, was why I began this adventure in first place. And here I was fighting, somehow expecting to be exempt from the kinds oftransformations I was writing about. This text deals with a similar struggle, the struggle to fight the markings ofmainstream consumptive American culture. It is grounded in an understanding ofadvertising as shackle. But it is rooted in transition: about how consumptive culture offers us boxes and how we seat ourselves into them. 8 These events mark us, often moving us to places we might not have moved ourselves. In this text I am looking at one ofthe engines that push us, willingly or not, into the spaces in which we then find ourselves trapped. In the end 1 am seeking to understand these engines well enough to disable their code and in doing so let in a bit offresh air and hopefully garner a new perspective on my own power in this struggle. I began this quest rather uneventfully, in conversation after a class on hegemony with one ofmy students. A bright woman named Maile who had, by all mainstream American standards, nothing to feel angst over, she is beautiful, young, intelligent, white and from the upper middle-class, and yet she struggled with a sense ofbeing both watched and controlled by the market place. Her struggle had pushed her to find relief from the expectations of perfection she understood capitalist society to hold over her.