Page 32 - Cultural Studies Volume 11

26 CULTURAL STUDIES

instigated by these advertisements depends on the link they establish between
two repressions—organic repression (a fundamental repression, ideologically
expressed as ‘we humans are not animals’) and a more culturally recent
repression concerning the housewife’s labour. I will discuss this link more
extensively below.
For now, it suffices to note that this conglomerate of the repressed returns. In
the realm of commodity culture, we can see the extent to which the contradictory
aspects of women’s cleaning work and its effects are displaced to and replicated
in constructions of appropriate feminine identity by examining advertisements for
feminine hygiene products. These products tend to make use of the exact same
rhetoric as the cleaning products discussed above. In television or print
advertisements for feminine hygiene products, a woman, usually in a floral or
white dress with a flared, lilting skirt, drifts through a garden or lounges on the
stairway of a flower-laden porch or patio. These liminal spaces, which bring
together an idyllic outdoors with an idyllically rendered domestic facade (often
photographed or filmed with an excessive soft focus) externalize the dichotomies
that advertisements for cleaning products tend to internalize and synthesize
within a domestic setting. Here, the dichotomous signifiers suggestively join at
the point inhabited by the woman’s body, articulating that body as analogous to
domestic space, a space in-between, ambiguous, dangerous, a space that must be
kept clean. Yet, as with domestic space, the ‘keeping clean’ involves, more than
anything else, a synthesizing of disparate values that women’s cultural position
has designated they represent.
In these advertisements, nature infuses the domestic setting as a woman’s
voice sings ‘Summer’s Eve brings back freshness anytime’. The layers of
allusive significations here—that invoke romance and sexuality with a coy, if
overly saccharine suggestiveness—belie the fact that Summer’s Eve is just
another domestic cleaning product. Significantly, they infer a link between
cleaning and sexuality which is related to the oppositions mobilized in the
advertisements. Finally, they emphasize that the agent of cleanliness, the woman/
wife, is also an object that must be cleaned. Her body, insistently figured as the
body, signifies the threat of both animality and sexuality. While her body must
signify these threats, they must also be tamed, domesticated, cleaned up. Indeed,
the figurative similarities in contemporary advertisements for these two types of
products has a literal connection in our culture: until the early 1960s, Lysol was
advertised both as a domestic cleaning product and a feminine hygiene product—
in the same solution, in the same bottle, and until the 1930s, often within the same
5
advertisement. For example, in a February 1923 magazine advertisement, two
parallel columns of text proclaim Lysol’s ‘parallel’ uses: on the left, its efficacy
in getting rid of the ‘millions of germs’ that multiply ‘in garbage cans…sinks,
toilet bowls, cellars, dark closets, and out-of-the-way corners’; on the right,
immediately opposite the text cited above, the copy notes its use ‘by
discriminating women for personal hygiene’. Other advertisements, singularly
promoting Lysol as a feminine hygiene product, approach the relationship