🇩🇪 How does a Marxist lens alter our perspective on the Dove ad? 

🇩🇪 Whom does it benefit if the work or effort is accepted/successful/believed etc.? 

🇩🇪 Considering the big 7 concepts:

Gender studies and queer theory explores the issues in gender, sexuality and power. Since this inderdisplinary is so broad and touches on so many other prevalent theories (such as the feminist theory) it can be challenging to give it a definition that encapsulates it fairly. This theory examines the ways that historical, cultural, and social factors shape the role of gender and sexuality in different societies and analyses the expression of identity and gender/queer representation. 

As mentioned in OWL,  the influence of Gender Studies and Queer Theory is everywhere; even the ways we discuss and teach Gender Studies and Queer Theory are influenced by the sociatal heteronormative constructs. 

 

 

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1mvlLFSjyyJ9ipCQ-CI77I2vrWFOgoJEAI6rQGyuINlk/edit?usp=sharing

 

🍂Three tropes: Pastoral focuses on the dichotomy between urban and rural life and is deeply entrenched in Western culture. Wilderness focuses on how the wilderness is constructed, valued, and engaged, such as how it’s treated as a threat, a place of exile, or a place of sanctuary. Ecofeminism analyzes the interconnection of the oppression of women and nature, such as how femininity is equated with land—a fertile resource and is the property of man.

🌱With an Ecocritical lens, one could ask the following question: “How is nature empowered or oppressed in this work?” 

🍃The beginning of the ad depicts a somber room. As the women describe their physical feature, there is little warm light in the frame. Once strangers are asked to describe the same women, the frame started to acquire a warmer glow from the wide windows. More natural light was progressively let in as the descriptions went on. The ad, attempting to emulate a stark difference between the women's perspective of themselves and how other perceive them, showed a side-by-side comparison of the art created from each description. The woman began to feel happiness, while the frame began to lighten even more, and the camera panned over to the same room, but only the art hanging up and sunlight spilling through the vast windows. The settings suddenly shift to the outdoors, and one woman expresses that “they spend a lot of time analyzing and trying to fix things that aren’t quite right and should spend more time appreciating the things they do like”. Finally, a bright glow expanded across the screen and the words “you’re more beautiful than you think” were shown.   

🌳The usage of natural light from the physical world was significant when expressing and accentuating different tones within this text. The advertisement opens with a silhouette of Gil Zamora, the forensic artist, sitting in front of a glass paned window (0:01).  We then recognize the environment for the “Dove Real Beauty Sketches” social experiment, a large space illuminated entirely by natural light. 

 

🍀Natural light exposure is oppressed for the opening minute of the piece in order to generate darker and more dramatic visuals. Following that, filming techniques empower the environment’s natural light, with flashes of sunlight incorporated into the video (1:15, 1:20, 1:22) contrasting to the previous somber imagery. The advertisement’s tone transforms with shots of sunshine hitting the wooden floor (1:25), and movement of shadows created by the windowpanes serve to symbolize the passage of time. 

 

🌿Light and dark are found in nature, using them independently in the text can help enhance and support the emotions being expressed while also communicating with the audience through visual means. Even minor adjustments in lighting in an environment might have an unconscious effect on the audience’s emotions, forming connections between them and the advertisement. 

 

 

 By Emmanuel

 

Reader-Response Criticism started in the 1960’s in Germany and in the USA. The goal of Reader-Response Criticism is to emphasize the importance of the reader’s relationship to the text.

 

To quote from Purdue: ”Reader-Response theory shares common ground with some of the deconstructionists discussed in the Post-Structural area”. 

 

The famous person I choose is Wolfgang Iser who studied literature in Leipzig, Germany, and received a PHD in English. He and Hans-Robert Jauss developed in Constance, Germany, a school of reception theory which is a specific part of Reader-Response theory.

 

The question I choose is how does the interaction of text and reader create meaning?

 

Reader-Response theory highlights the importance of the readers opinion when reacting to a text. This theory also investigates the readers meaning and interpretation of the text.

 

Let us consider the Dove add. When the participants are confronted with describing their feature, which is a rather neutral question in contrast with asking what they like or dislike in their face, it is interesting to see how the participants are apologetic about minor items of their face.

 

It is an excellent example of how the response of someone who reads a text or hears a question is very influenced by their own opinion. In this case, their own perception of their beauty influences them while the question does not deal with beauty.

 

 

➳ Feminism is both a movement and an ideology that advocates for the political, economic, and personal equality of men and women in society. This ideology stems from the belief that humanity lives in a patriarchy which operates under the power of men. Women’s roles in society are dictated according to this hierarchy, where men are placed above women and women must therefore be marginalized, which may include less freedom and rights.

➳ Feminist criticism is a literary theory based on feminism. Purdue OWL defines it as “the ways in which literature (and other cultural productions) reinforce or undermine the economic, political, social, and psychological oppression of women.” Through this lens, we can expose potential misogynistic viewpoints in literature, and ultimately uplift the female voice in literature and media so that the values of one “sex” are not favoured over another.

➳ Elaine Showalter is an American writer and feminist; one of her most famous works is featured in the compilation Twentieth-Century Literary Theory, called Towards a Feminist Poetics (1970); it highlights how female stereotypes and sexism in literature by male authors are discussed more than the experiences women share with the public, thus continuing the cycle of underrepresentation.

➳ Showalter states that “one of the problems of the feminist critique is that it is male–orientated.” If we study stereotypes of women, the sexism of male critics, and the limited roles women play in literary history, we are not learning what women have felt and experienced, but only what men thought women should be. This is extremely poignant in the Dove advertisement, in which the male forensics artist is held at a higher level of authority over the women despite Dove frequently suggesting that their campaign is targeted towards women.

➳ For example, from 0:00 to 0:06, Gil Zamora is shown to be an integral aspect of this advertisement, and is positioned centrally, while all other individuals within this ad are positioned on either side of the camera shot. The advertisement also concludes with him presenting the resulting sketches, dictating the experience and reactions the women should have felt, rather than women defining their own experiences of the perception of beauty.

➳ Men occupy dominant roles within this ad, either as the forensic artist, or describing the features of the assumed fragile women at 1:19 and 1:23. The lack of submissive male representation may imply that the concept of beauty does not apply to men, and that men do not rely on the concepts of appearance to succeed in life, thus not ever feeling insecure or self-conscious. With less societal pressure, men can assume a higher level of power and even become the source of the pressure. 

➳ This power dynamic is also revealed in the dialogue from 2:15 to 2:20, as Florence states that her natural beauty impacts her choices, relationships, attitude, and success in the workforce. Dove suggests that only women are subject to this revelation based on the large proportion of women included in the campaign. This implies that the ideology of natural beauty applies more to women rather than  women and men, which is what should be represented in a feminist campaign. The power dynamic is thus reinforced by the idea of which sex should be more worried about their physical appearance, simply based on the assumption that women are more self-critical. How can we prove men are not as equally self-critical, and thus equally submissive?

Conclusion: Dove on feminism

➳ Dove may not be inherently undermining the feminism movement, however, the many historical male and female power imbalances present in this campaign represent an issue still yet to be resolved. Feminism only exists because of this power dynamic. Instead of taking a more traditional approach where feminism is promoted through empowering only females, a more modern approach may be to represent males and females equally. This would ensure that the power dynamic is balanced.

Main Question: How does the literary text, explicitly or allegorically, represent various aspects of colonial oppression?