Page 223 - Culture Media Language Working Papers in Cultural Studies

212 LANGUAGE

ad only has meaning in relation to this ‘outside’ knowledge of the ideology of
femininity. Even when it appears that ads are producing a new representation
(for example, ‘Dress to kill’), not merely reproducing an idea of femininity found
elsewhere, the signification is not completely autonomous but anchored by the
patriarchal and capitalist relations in which we as individuals already have a
history and which we already know about.
The signifier ‘woman’ always signifies woman: we recognize ourselves in any
representation of woman, however ‘original’, because we are always already
defined by our gender. Having recognized ourselves in the ad, we are then
‘freshly’ positioned as specific feminine subjects in an identification achieved
through a misrecognition of ourselves—the signifier ‘woman’ can never in fact
represent us as individual women. It is through this process of misrecognition
that ads are effective in producing and reproducing the particular ideological
modes in which we live.
The discourse of ads contradictorily places us both in relation to other
discourses and, more particularly, in relation to those economic and political
positions which, through feminist struggle, begin to challenge patriarchal
relations. If we are to sustain and further those material gains, we have also to
recognize ideological fields as a terrain for women’s struggle. As Coward
argues, ‘the struggle for power within discourses becomes an issue of political
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importance for the Women’s Movement’. To be able to engage politically at
that level we need first to understand the processes of signification which are at
work.
In ads, as elsewhere, femininity is contradictorily constructed. Ideologies of
‘motherhood’, ‘domesticity’, ‘beauty’, ‘sexuality’ and ‘feminine independence’,
as they are cut across by an ideology of the ‘free’ individual, are all separately
and sometimes jointly mobilized and constructed anew. In this extract, however,
I want only to consider some elements of an ideology of sexuality.
To make yourself passively attractive is, by the mid 1960s, to make yourself
specifically sexually attractive and available: as if, it is represented, the act of
beautifying yourself is already to engage in sexual relations—it is not just the
promise of it. This is always implicit: ‘Girls are coming back warm lipped’, says
Yardley. ‘So come out of the cold and into the warm. Be lit up. Alive. All girl.’
Or: ‘Lips are too sensitive to withstand the sensation of harsh lipstick contact and
much too important to expose to experimentation. Super Jewelfast 22 Special is a
new experience itself…Soft and gentle and kindness itself….’ (my emphasis). Or
you are perhaps prepared for sex: ‘Your lips have never looked this wet before’;
‘You’re getting warmer…three new bronzed lip-polishes wetter than wet. The
warmest colours you ever saw. Each one spiced with excitement.’
This ideology of sexuality in the ad context admits both to a passive, virginal
and innocent sexuality—waiting for men, typified by the image of a young
woman in long white robes and flowing blonde hair (‘A Clairol Summer
Blonde’)—and to an active experience of sexuality. However, the active
experience of sexuality only takes place in a fetishistic mode (in the Freudian