Cronin Anne M. - Advertising and Consumer Citizenship

There has been a long-standing acknowledgement that advertising is a profoundly gendered domain within both popular culture and the academy in the Western world. There has also been a strong, steady stream of critical research, mainly but not exclusively feminist, which has highlighted and explored the linking of women with the realm of consumption. Western conceptions of citizenship have also come under feminist scrutiny, as scholars have shown that apparent gender neutrality associated with citizenship masks gender specificity and precipitates consequent inequalities. The Transformations series now welcomes Anne Cronins Advertising andConsumer Citizenship which cuts across these three domains to examine theoretically and concretely how Western European advertising works in the creation of gendered selfhood and citizenship.

This book demonstrates that, far from being outmoded or irrelevant, gender questions continue to be crucial in the study of contemporary culture and capitalism. In this study, this involves asking where and how gender emerges as a significant organising principle in the contemporary advertising world. Posing such questions carries Anne Cronin in fascinating trajectories, as she interrogates the gendering of the self constructed through advertising address, the differences between the modes of male-targeted and female-targeted advertising and the masculinist productivist orientation of some critical analyses of this crucial sphere. Advertising and Consumer Citizenship exemplifies the kind of detailed, theoretically informed studies which are required to understand the complex production and reproduction of gendered selves today.

This volume is also indicative of our commitment to produce a series which will offer critical feminist perspectives on transformations in many realms. This volume provides an analysis of the evolving forms of contemporary capitalism as manifested in advertising, together with a critical feminist perspective on the transformations of scholarly understanding of this field. Cronins study evokes a wariness about the promise of transformation embedded in the modes of both recent advertising itself and recent scholarship about it. In both realms ideas of interpretative flexibility and gender fluidity are to the fore, implying that conventions have been shaken, bina-risms suspended and restrictions lifted. Cronin warns that, nevertheless, advertising continues to be a profoundly gendered domain. This is a salutary warning for the Transformations series and its readers: promises and conceptualisations of transformations are not necessarily the harbingers of change; they need themselves to be interrogated.