Seminars
Consuming Maternal Archetypes
Presenter details and abstracts
- Professor Elizabeth C. Hirschman - Female Images in Popular Culture: Warriors, Monsters and Lovers
- Dr Lisa O'Malley - A Personal Reflection on and Analysis of the Experience of Pregnant Embodiment and Emphasised Femininity
- Kay Scorah - "Matricatures" – Talking myself out of a job
Title: Female Images in Popular Culture: Warriors, Monsters and Lovers
Presenter: Professor Elizabeth C. Hirschman, Rutgers School of Business, Rutgers University, New Brunswick, New Jersey, USA
Elizabeth C. Hirschman is Professor II of Marketing at the Rutgers School of Business, Rutgers University, New Brunswick, NJ. Her primary research interests include semiotics, brand theory, ethnicity and self-identity. Beth has published over 200 papers, articles and books in marketing, consumer behavior and the social sciences. She is Past President and Fellow of the Association for Consumer Research, and is one of the leading international scholars in her field.
Presentation:
Images of women have been present in human culture since our species first gained the ability to construct art approximately 60,000 to 30,000 years ago. Anthropologists, folklorists and psychologists – as well as consumer researchers and marketers – have all found ample value in studying (and deploying) female images as carriers of social meaning and as markers of the roles and statuses of women at various times and in various cultures.
This presentation looks at images of women in current Western popular culture and consists of a data set of two 'best women' compilations. The first is the list of the top ten Most Admired Women (in the US) in 2008. It includes Hilary Clinton, Sarah Palin, Oprah Winfrey, Condoleeza Rice, Michelle Obama, Margaret Thatcher, Laura Bush, Angelina Jolie, Madeline Albright and Ellen Degeneres. The second list consists of the winners of the Academy Award for Best Actress for the past ten years. This includes Gwyneth Paltrow for Shakespeare in Love, Hilary Swank for Boys Don't Cry, Julia Roberts for Erin Brockavich, Jennifer Connelly for A Beautiful Mind, Catherine Zeta Jones for Chicago, Charlize Theron for Monster, Hilary Swank for Million Dollar Baby, Reese Witherspoon for Walk the Line, Helen Mirren for The Queen, Marion Cotillard for La Vie en Rose, and Kate Winslet for The Reader.
My analysis employs Jungian Archetype Theory (see Hirschman, 2000, 'Heroes, Monsters and Messiahs'), and will discuss the various female meaning structures in which the persons/roles named above may be interpreted, for example, warrior, life giving mother, healing mother, destroying mother, fate, sorceress. Implications for women's expectations about themselves will be considered and suggestions for the use of female archetypes in marketing programs will also be discussed.
Title: A Personal Reflection on and Analysis of the Experience of Pregnant Embodiment and Emphasised Femininity
Presenter: Dr Lisa O'Malley, Department of Marketing, University of Limerick, Ireland
Dr Lisa O'Malley is a senior lecturer in marketing at the University of Limerick in Ireland. Her research interests cover the areas of marketing (particularly relationship marketing), consumption and identity. Lisa has over 80 publications in refereed journals and international conference proceedings, and her current research interests incorporate consumption and role transitions (particularly motherhood and consumption), and sustainable consumption including waste management and eco-tourism. Lisa is a member of an international research collective undertaking work on Mother, Identity and Consumption with colleagues from the UK, Sweden and the USA.
Presentation:
This presentation will offer an interesting juxtaposition to Seminar 2's fascinating presentation on 'Maternal Publics' by Imogen Tyler. Lisa explores the pregnant body at both a very personal as well as at a theoretical level, and as such she draws on her own personal experience as well as embodiment theory to explore the pregnant body in transition.
Pregnant bodies are sites of extraordinary flux. The most obvious changes are corporeal as bodies leak, flow, and are transfigured. In this way pregnant bodies exhibit an 'indifference to limits' (Shildrick, 2002), dissolving the boundaries between self and other and, ultimately, challenging established notions of subjectivity. However, pregnancy also bears witness to transformations in the 'imaginary body' (Gatens, 1999); a socially and historically specific body that impacts upon a body's orientation in space and its relationship to other bodies. One outcome of all this flux is that pregnancy has the potential to open up a space where some women enjoy relative freedom from the demands of 'emphasized femininity' (Bailey, 2001).
Nevertheless, it has been noted that the institutions of consumer culture increasingly encroach upon this space, demanding that pregnant women engage in body work pre- and postpartum, in order that they may better manage their pregnancies, produce healthy offspring, avoid many of the deleterious 'symptoms' of gestation, and reclaim their pre-pregnancy bodies, as rapidly as possible.
This presentation explores these issues by describing embodied experiences during and after pregnancy in an effort to understand the role of consumption in encouraging and supporting our attempts to temper the boundaries of our bodies and once more affirm and attain a sealed, controlled selfhood reflective of 'emphasized femininity'.
The aim of this discussion is to challenge traditional notions of pregnancy as a period of passivity and 'confinement' for women, by suggesting that, on the contrary, pregnant women foreground their experiences and mobilize consumption and commodities in the marketplace to achieve material, embodied ends.
Title: "Matricatures" – Talking myself out of a job
Presenter: Kay Scorah (business stategist and consultant, life and work coach, ex advertising executive, qualitative market researcher)
"I graduated from the University of London in 1976 with an upper 2nd in Biochemistry and 2 published papers in learned scientific journals. Having spent a year in the Max Planck Institut fur Biophysik in Frankfurt, I made the not so obvious move into market research and advertising. A pushy feminist loudmouth, by the age of 32 I had been on the board of directors of 2 London ad agencies (BBDO and Ted Bates). In 1989 I was an assistant producer of and contributor to the BBC series on advertising and society 'Washes Whiter'. For over 20 years now I have run my own business, and I must thank my loyal, tolerant and inspiring clients for helping me to lead a very interesting life. With them I have worked in Europe, the US and the Far East. In my quest to dissolve the boundaries between art, science and spirit for myself and my clients, I have studied acting at the Beverly Hills Playhouse, dance and theatre forms from contemporary to contact improvisation through Butoh to Bouffon and I have a teaching diploma from Yoga Therapy Ireland. I am proud to be on the board of the Corn Exchange Theatre Company, Dublin and Dance Theatre of Ireland, and was a judge in the 2008 Dublin Fringe Festival, a role which I am delighted to say I have been asked to play again this year. Against all odds, I have a fantastic grown up son, and a very tolerant husband."
Presentation:
For the last 35 years I have interviewed or watched interviews with, I estimate, 10,000 women, many of them mothers, in the UK, Ireland, Japan and North America. This extraordinary privilege has come about because I work with some of the world's largest manufacturers and service providers; companies like Procter and Gamble, Mars, Kelloggs, Philips and GE.
In those years we have seen some rather superficial changes in the portrayal of mothers in popular culture, and in the way advertisers talk to mothers. Yet some far more fundamental and important changes have taken place in the way that mothers talk both to each other and to their families. These changes have not been reflected in the portrayal of mothers in advertising, because advertisers continue to use research techniques which are simply variations on old experimental psychology tricks. Mothers know these tricks as well as they know when their children are pretending to be asleep, but they continue to play the game of talking as if they really have a relationship with their washing powder, or as if their brand of breakfast cereal really mattered, because it seems to keep the market researchers happy, and they don't care enough to point out how irrelevant it all is. They have other priorities, such as the small matter of raising children.
While the collection of data fails to ask the right questions in the right way, the quality of interpretation of that data has declined. As our mathematical education has been dumbed down, advertisers have become so dazzled by the latest Zodiac sign/Cosmo quiz style interpretation of research findings that they mistake these seductive caricatures of motherhood (what I call matricatures) such as 'Caring Pragmatist', 'Struggling Earth Mother', 'No-Nonsense Nurturer' for real people.
So advertisers go on talking to these imaginary friends of theirs, their matricatures, in a parallel universe, while the vast majority of real mothers get on with their lives. And Lidl, Aldi and the retailer brands ride roughshod over years of brand building with simple propositions that make perfect sense to most mums; "this product does the job as well as you need it to, and it will cost you less."