Gender is one of the most studied paradigms as it is the main paradigm that people use in determining how to act and interact with others. For this reason, it is important to look at the ways in which individuals receive messages about gender norms. Many researches have been carried out on the effects of TV commercials, but very few studies have been made at gender within commercials. This paper departs from all of these prior studies in that it purports to study the Nepalese TV advertisements as a kind of proscenium stage on which the discourse of gender is performed. To support the claim, I will be using Judith Butler’s notion of gender as performance and also the basic insights from various performance studies scholars like Schechner, Turner and so on. For this study, I have performed a content analysis on current prime-time commercials from four major Nepalese Television channels—NTV, Kantipur TV, Image Channel and Avenues Channel.
The term ‘performance’ does not have any fixed definition. Josheph Roach argues that “performance…though frequently makes reference to theatricality as the most fecund metaphor for the social dimension of cultural production, embraces a much wider range of human behaviors, including the most mundane of everyday actions.” This definition resists any fix definition unlike any other literary definitions. So, it can be said performance refers to a broad continuum of human actions. It is a mode of human behavior, an approach to experience.
As an academic discipline, Richard Schechner and his performance studies group are credited for starting the Performance Studies. They propounded the concept of environmental theater in which performance crossed the boundaries of stereotypical theatrical performance. Schechner writes: “Performance can take place everywhere, under a wide variety of circumstances and in the service of incredibly diverse panoply of objectives […]. Performances in the broad sense of the word were coexistent with the human condition” (Preface IX). He surveys everything from Shakespeare to environmental theater, urban happenings, cultural mimicry, gender and racial passing, the pig-kill dance in Popua New Guinea, and terrorism as a performance.
Victor Turner in the same vein relates performance with society. According to him, the society itself is performative. He writes, “A performance is not necessarily more meaningful than other events in one’s life, but it is more deliberately so; a performance is among other things a deliberate effort to represent, to say something about something (208). Judith Butler, on the other hand, relates performance with gender. For her, gender itself is performative, not natural. According to her, the very notion of an essence itself is social fabrication. In her seminal book Gender Trouble, Butler says, gender is not an identity but a discourse; it is “performative.” Gender is an act that constitutes “the identity it is purported to be” by repeated “bodily gestures, movements, and styles of various kinds” that signify the loss that culture renders unspeakable (Gender Trouble, 14).
Taking the basic insights from Derridian notion of iteration and Foucauldian notion of discourse, Butler writes: genders “is the repeated stylization of the body, a set of repeated acts within a highly rigid regularity frame that congeal over time to produce the appearance of substance, of a natural sort of being” (33). Butler argues that “gender is in no way a stable identity or a locus of agency from which various acts proceed; rather it is an identity tenuously constituted in time—an identity instituted through a stylized repetition of acts” (337). She further argues, “Gender is instituted through the stylization of bodily gestures, movements, and enactments of various kinds constitute an illusion of an abiding gendered self” (337). That means, according to her, “gender is constructed through specific corporeal acts” (338).
Butler sees the similarities between the gender performance and the theatrical performance. Like the actors who use the same script for a role, women/men in the society learn the same script which is already scripted for them before they come to the scene. Butler in this connection writes:
“The act that one does, the act that one performs, is, in a sense, an act that has been going on before one arrived on the scene. Hence gender is an act that has been rehearsed, much as a script that survives the particular actors who make use of it, but which requires individual actors in order to be actualized and reproduced as reality once again.” (343)
It means, the acts are rarely original .Someone has actor before another person comes to enact the roles. Gender roles are rehearsed like a play. And for any failure to effectively perform the gendered roles, the person becomes a subject to punishment. Butler writes, “…there are strict punishments for contesting the script by performing out of turn or through unwarranted improvisations” (347). I will be substantiating this claim of Butler through an example of TV ad of Shakti Oil.
We find the performance of gender in Nepalese advertisements. The advertisement of Family Cooking Oil is one such example. The advertisement presents a family cast in gendered power relations where parents, husband and wife are assigned particular jobs that a patriarch family harbors. The wife is given the kitchen job while the other members of family are presented as lords or directors who can complain and chastise the wife. The wife is required to be in the desired discipline, which is imposed by males. For example, in the ad, the wife must possess or learn that act of cooking food which could meet the taste of the family. Her failure to do so is punishable. To make the advertisement more comprehensible, I present here he transcribed and translated version:
Mother: What a bad food you cooked? Don’t have the skill to cook tasty food?
Father: How long will you scold the Buhari? May be there is something wrong with oil.
Son: Don’t mind the mother’s words.
(The husband brings Family Working Oil from the market, the wife cooks in the oil and
serves)
Mother: Delicious how tasty food you cooked! Come Buhari lets have together.
The wife is badly scolded, for she fails to cook food to meet the taste of the family. She Mother-in-Laws scold represents the violence against women meted out by males. The wife sobs in grief. Her husband justifies the violence as he ways “Don’t mind mother’s words”. He however helps her to avert the violence by instructing her to cook food in Family Cooking Oil. When she follows this instruction, she is accepted in the family. Thus she is forcefully disciplined in the family. Here, the wife is a passive object who is silenced. In other words, TV commercials construct active and passive images.
Most of advertisements have a tendency to fit into and create any of the binary opposition like male active/female passive, male outdoor and female indoor, male earning/female spending etc. By creating such binary oppositions, the advertisements try to construct ideologies where one is preferred over the other. Most of the advertisements, in doing so, attach the negative attributes towards women characters. Professor Abhi Subedi in one of his articles that review the photographs of young women published in Nepali Newspaper writes that “in Nepal there are no such magazines that feature women’s bodies in any bold character” (18) and their passivity is so expressive in the photographs that “several of these young women in their efforts to show their bodylines in an expressive manner, look like sculpture” (8). And this passivity as explained by Prof. Subedi also applies on television advertisements. The advertisements peace the women in kitchen and presents her as a passive and domestic objects.
The advertisement of Shakti Oil displays the effect of male gaze in terms of producing images that portrays women as bearer of the look of men. The advertisement displays several characteristics that are typical to male gaze. Firstly, the female character barely speaks and looks at her characters and audience. The message it delivers is to silence women. The audio version of the advertisement reads like this:
Children: Shakti!
Children: What is Shakti?
(Six years ago, in the day when prospective bride had gone to look prospective bridegroom)
Mother: (to the girl) If you have to say anything, please speak.
Boy: What oil did you use to cook the food?
Girl: (Shyly) Shakti!
Children (Now) Jockingly: Mummy which oil do you use in cooking?
Shakti pure refined oil, our family, our shakti.
In the advertisement, the woman character is shown passive. She is silenced. The question of the would-be-husband ‘what oil did you cook the food’ to the would-be-wife is characteristic of gendering. The woman is taciturn who just replies “Shakti!” The latter part of the advertisement shows how she is, in the six years after marriage, still following the preferences her husband expresses at the time of their engagement.
The ultimate effect of frequent broadcasting of advertisement is in forming ideology in society. Media images in today’s world of mass communication, do have powerful impact in the psychology of audiences. This was the very reason why the scholars like Adorno and other hard-boiled Marxists like Gramsci rebuked the debilitating effect of media in capitalism. Helen Malson in her The Thin Women describes how the images of women in media contribute to describe production of gender:
One discourse that both converges and diverges from romantic discourse in its connection of the thin body is a “be more beautiful’ discourse promulgated in women’s magazines where physical beauty is frequently presented less as an aspirational ideal, more as a holy commandment. In these texts, beauty figures in a state of salvation achieved through ritualistically following the ‘step by step’ instructions, the day-to-day diets for beatification. (111)
Commercial’s affect of ideological formation is in society is also backed up by our TV culture. Television is a ‘medium’ and since it is a medium, it is also a message. Marshall Macluhan in his The Medium is Message says that medium itself is a message because it always effects and distorts the message it conveys. In today’s television culture, we watch TV everyday and it has become a part of our day-to-day life. In most of the houses, TV set is turned on all the day and audience never becomes aware of how TV images control them—consciously and unconsciously. The frequent broadcasting of the same type of commercials gradually forms and nurtures desired or intended ideologies.
Because Television advertisements transmit cultural ideas about gender, they help to socially construct gender. Commercials may affect the way that people think about their own gender, and contribute to the ongoing social stratification of genders in our society. While these advertisements are designed with the purpose of selling specific products, it is hard to deny the fact that the characters in this advertisements behave in ways that appear normal and make sense of viewers. They contain characters, events, and relationships that viewers will most likely deem as authentic. By relating to the characters within the commercials, individuals are able to make parallels between the televised world and their own lives. If gender roles within the commercials are perceived as realistic, an individual’s ideas about the ‘correct’ way of “doing gender” (West and Zimmerman, 1987) for him/herself and also other genders may be changed.
In most of the Nepalese television advertisements, male characters are portrayed more outside of home, while female characters are frequently shown in domestic settings, particularly the kitchen and bathroom. In these domestic settings female characters were more likely to be involved in housework and childcare than men. In the advertisement of “Surf Excel”, we can find an instance of it. In this ad, the mother-in-law instructs her daughter-in-law to wash the clothes full of stains. The mother-in-law, as in most of the traditional households, is shown to be a bit of conservative and as against her daughter-in-law. So, she is happy to make her buhari wash the clothes. On the other hand, the buhari is presented as a woman with the ample knowledge of household works. So, she buys Surf Excel to wash her clothes, which according to her, saves her time and labor. Through this ad, apart from the ostensible advertisement of the product, performance of gender has been carried out. It has been shown the woman needs to know every aspect of household works.
When men are shown performing domestic tasks, they are often depicted as incompetent, mostly meant to be the source of humor. The advertisement of Dabur Honey can be a suitable example here. In the advertisement, the exchange of role takes place between husband and the wife. The wife is to go to office and the husband along with this son to stay home and do household works. But he is shown to have no competence to work at home. He does not know how to cook, how to prepare tea and even the minor things that a man can easily do. These portrayals of failure and humor may reinforce traditional gender roles by implying that men are somehow ‘naturally’ ill-suited for certain types of work, and therefore those chores are best left to women.
Men, on the other hand, are portrayed in the workforce and shown that they are more competent in business roles, particularly those of higher power. Even when men are shown taking care of children, they are more likely to appear outside, are more likely to be shown with boys, and hardly ever depicted with an infant.
It shows how women and men are portrayed in commercial with stereotypical gender roles. And such depictions of women and men in commercials send the message that males and females should confine themselves to a more narrow set of traditionally defined activities, and promote inequality through exaggeration of difference between genders. These advertisements are telecasted thousands of times and the effect of the constant repetition of stereotyped roles is likely to be permanent. Despite the fictional nature of commercials and the intent solely to see a product, aspects of televised portrayals may be interpreted as in some way similar to real life.
Television commercials are capable of influencing viewer’s beliefs about what exists, what is normal, what is right and how they should behave within their gender. This cultural norming process is achieved through repetitive television images, which reinforce cultural messages that become accepted as mainstream thought. Children are most affected by the television advertisements. Because ad agencies know this, they use child artists in many ads. Even in this case, the children presented in the gendered roles. In an advertisement of Konka electronic products, a small girl child is presented who draws her dream house. She chooses rice cooker and refrigerator for her mother, television for her elder sister, video game for her brother and computer for her father. It clearly shows the gendering of electronic gadgets too. In the children’s eyes, mother always cooks, kitchen is the world of mother where as father always earns money, works in an office.
(Unedited draft...@Rajan Gautam, 2010.)
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