Gendering Oil Through the Lens of Advertising Gender Roles in Oil Company Advertisements As a Mirror of Culture and of Social Change
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Gendering Oil through the Lens of Advertising Gender roles in oil company advertisements as a mirror of culture and of social change Pamela Vang Gendering Oil through the Lens of Advertising Gender roles in oil company advertisements as a mirror of culture and of social change Pamela Vang IEI, Language for Academic and Professional Purposes Linköpings universitet, SE-581 83 Linköping, Sweden Linköping 2021 © Pamela Vang, 2021 This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/. This book is a scientific text published at the non-commercial publisher Linköping University Electronic Press. The author has tried to get permissions to publish the images included in this report. However, due to the complexity raised by their number, the age of many of these and their sources, in particular the fact that many of the advertisements appeared in a variety of different periodicals and publications including The Economist, New Statesman and Scientific American as well as general newspapers, the copyright owners have not been found. If you are the copyright owner of any of the images included in this report, please contact [email protected]. I would like to take this opportunity to thank the staff at BP Archives, Warwick University, for the assistance they gave me in 2010 in my search for advertisements connected to BP and Shell. Publisher: Linköping University Electronic Press 2021 Editor: Edvin Erdtman ISBN 978-91-7929-030-6 (PDF) https://doi.org/10.3384/9789179290306 Cover by: Nico Franz from Pixabay Abstract This electronic book is a longitudinal investigation into the ways in which oil companies have adapted their advertising to both influence and appeal to their contemporary publics. Taking a dramaturgical approach, it examines the roles and attitudes attributed to the characters that populate the advertisements and with whom the intended audiences should identify. The analysis shows that despite the fact that society is striving towards increased gender equality, the general narrative of oil companies remains unchanged. The casting of the advertisements shows that oil and its derivatives are provided and developed by strong, heroic and competent men to ease and facilitate the lives of the weaker, dependent female population. Keywords: oil companies, advertising, identities, dramatic narrative, social change, gender Contents Introduction: Gendering Oil through the lens of advertising. 1 The female cast 2 a) The Independent Woman 2 b) The Sexualised Woman 6 c) Woman as a Homemaker 12 d) Working girls … 20 e) …and Representantes 24 f) Changing gender roles? 26 Portrait of an oil man 27 a) The Expert 29 i) Educators 31 ii) Innovators 37 iii) Entrepreneurs 41 b) The Adventurer 42 c) Manliness 47 “Casting”oil 50 References 54 Gendering Oil through the lens of advertising. Advertising is ubiquitous and exists in a multitude of forms. Its sole aim is to influence us to act in a specific way which is to the advantage of the advertiser. Thus, advertising constitutes a communicative act which builds upon a partnership in which the advertiser and the person viewing the advertisement enter into some form of “dialogue”. Emile Benveniste, has shown how an enunciation, an utterance, is an act through which a speaker (in this case, an advertiser) mobilizes language for his own use (Benveniste 1974:80). Thus, a successful advertisement must have a strong audience orientation and a clear sense of “recipient design” (Sacks et al., 1974). As Kenneth Burke (1945) has pointed out, the persausive aspect of rhetoric is to identify your interests with those of your audience, to adapt [your] practice to [your] addressee (William Hanks 1996:244) and to “altercast”, that is to project an identity “which is congruent with one’s own goals” upon the addressee (Weinstein & Deutschberger 1963:454). However, for advertisers, dialogue is not simply communication between themselves and the addressee but is a “living tripartite unity” (M.M.Bakhtin 1986:122) in which the surrounding world also plays a part. In other words, “[t]he word is a drama in which three characters participate” (ibid). Thus, for advertising to fulfil its purpose and persuade the addressee to respond in the desired manner, it must change and adapt in response to the world and to evolving contexts. As Umberto Eco has pointed out (1990:131), “ a message signifies only insofar as it is interpreted from the point of view of a given situation”. In other words, culture as well as context are central to dialogical relationships and therefore advertisements are a mirror of social change. Today, gender and the attribution of roles based on gender have become a focal point of discussion. How then has this been reflected in advertisements? The advertising of the oil industry which can be traced back for over a century, provides some very interesting insights into these changes. However, first it is necessary to name and explain the “roles” played by the figures that populate the “dramas” played out in the advertisements. My nomenclature is based on Kenneth Burke’s (1945) “dramatistic” perspective and his Pentad (ibid:xv) and has five elements, the Act, (what took place in thought or deed), Scene (background situation) Agent (who) Agency (how) and Purpose. An advertisement is created by a Scripwriter, and is staged. To this end, it has a number of agents who all play different roles in the drama that unfolds and for whom I use the term actants. Actants can be “framed” and feature as participants in the advertisement as speaking actants or simply be a voice outside the frame. An actant can address the reader directly or address another participant staged within the frame who functions as the addressee or addressed agent in the dramaturgy. The intended audience or public for the advertising message, whether this be a reader or a viewer can also be referred to as the destinee and can be addressed by a character playing the role of informant. The role of a representant is to illustrate the benefits of the product or service being featured 1 The female cast Taking an American perspective, Suzanne Romaine (1999:253) has pointed out that in advertisements images of men tend to outnumber those of women by two to one. Moreover, despite the fact that women have 75% of the purchasing power, advertising, which is “one of the most important areas of public life in which gender is displayed in images as well as in language” (ibid: 251) tends to reflect a stereotypical and even mythological world in which men (usually white), are professionals1 while a woman’s place is in the home. Women shown outside the home are predominantly portrayed as secretaries or as young and beautiful fashion models, often with a Barbie doll figure (ibid: 253). Glen Mick (1987: 269) has also pointed out that advertising promotes role models that are sometimes anachronistic and caricatures normative and ideal lives that are statistically unrepresentative. Referring to Goffman’s (1979) findings, he states that in advertising, caricature is “evident in assorted hyper- ritualizations” of certain behaviours. From my studies of the advertisements of the oil companies, (Vang 2014) it has emerged that in line with Romaine’s findings, the characters that populate the advertisements of the oil companies are predominantly male, although here, the ratio of men to women is much closer to ten to one.2 This is less surprising if we consider that the oil industry has historically been the preserve of men and particularly, that of white American and European men. What is particularly interesting, however, is not so much the roles into which the female figures portrayed in the advertisements are cast but how the stereotypical representations of women have changed over time. These representations can be generally classified into five types, each one specific to a particular historical period. I will introduce these role typologies and briefly discuss them below. I will then trace the way in which their male counterparts are depicted before discussing the matter of rhetorical identification that this implies. a) The Independent Woman In the very early years of the advertising of the oil industry, women (Figure 1) were shown independently using the products derived from oil. Jules Chéret produced a well-known series of posters to advertise Saxoléine, a safety petroleum for the lamps that had begun to appear in the early 1850s, and which were one of the driving forces of the modern-day petroleum industry. The Chéret series shows elegant women lighting their lamps with this brand of safety petroleum. The women are typically portrayed as young and extremely feminine, and tend to wear highly elaborate clothes and hair-styles. Typically, they are portrayed in a graceful, almost ballet dancer-like pose while lighting their lamp, and like the young woman 1 Romaine (1999:253) states that one researcher found that 90% of the doctors portrayed in advertisements were male. 2 In the four series of Shell advertisements that I have studied from 1958, for example, consisting of 12, 6, 4, and 5 separate advertisements, only one had women as the actant participants. For Chevron, one advertisement featured a woman. In the case of the nine advertisements that BP published, one mentioned the Duchess of Kent who had launched a new company tanker, one mentioned the wife and daughter of a BP customer who was interviewed in Canada and actually named the 7-year old child, who was shown in the photograph, one included girls in a photograph from a mixed sex school in Australia, and one showed an African female learning to work a BP petrol pump. 2 in the example from 1894 shown here, accomplish the lighting of the lamp with great ease and elegance.