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Communication and culture professor Fern Johnson and student Jennifer Clark explore how gender stereotypes are used to sell products on television and in print. |
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Meet the Researchers:
A cultural perspective on communication
Interview with Professor Fern Johnson
Dr. Fern Johnson is fascinated by the way the manipulation of in advertising can target a product to a designated gender or racial audience. In a recent conversation, she discussed how advertising can create.
Why did you choose to study English, and particularly the relationship between culture and language?
I originally intended to be a high school English teacher, so I majored in English at the University of Minnesota. When I was an undergraduate, English certification in Minnesota also included certification in speech and drama. I took a number of courses in what was then called the theatre, speech, and communications department. One professor taught courses on language and society. I took a course with him and was fascinated by the material. He persuaded me to go to graduate school for my master's degree in communication at Northwestern University. So increasingly I moved away from English as the study of literature, into the study of language and communication. I ultimately completed a Ph.D. in the field of communication at the University of Minnesota.
People who are interested in the confluence of language and culture tend to come from lots of different fields, which I find very exciting. Take Clark, for example. I'm officially part of the English department, but I came through the path of communication studies. Professor Sarah Michaels is in education, and professors Michael Bamberg and Jaan Valsiner are psychologists.
I'm very happy to be affiliated again with an English department, because over the past 10 to 15 years the field has developed, both from the side of the study of literature, and from the side of the study of language and culture. There's much more fluidity now in textual analysis and understanding, everyday discourse, mediated discourse (language as used in the media), and the discourses of literature. So it's a very comfortable place for me to do my work and to have as my base for teaching.
Why do you think an understanding of the relationship between language and culture is important?
Language IS a cultural phenomenon-we start with that premise. Obviously we're all neurologically "wired" for language. But much of the rest of what happens with language-in-use is cultural.
The situation of the United States provides an interesting perspective on the relationship between communication and culture. From World War I until very recently, the U.S. has been essentially monolingual. I think it's easy, in a monolingual environment, not to think about the cultural nature of language. What really opened up the study of language and communication from a cultural perspective was the process of cultural diversification in the U.S., a process that increased significantly after the 1965 immigration reforms.
While not everyone studies language or communication first and foremost as a cultural process, we do at Clark. We think the cultural perspective on language is important because the society in which most of our students live is increasingly multi-cultural. An understanding of the impact of culture is critical for them in a liberal arts context. And because globalization happens in the context of very fierce localization, language becomes a key issue. In Massachusetts, for example, there has been an intense battle over how to teach elementary school children for whom English is not their first language.
Can you describe your primary area of research, and how you go about studying that?
In the last five or six years I've become increasingly interested in the relationship between language and culture as revealed in the media, particularly television and advertising. I'm working now on a book about it, and concurrently teaching a related course. I want to understand how advertising circulates cultural discourses. One of the topics we're talking about in class relates to gender and race and what I call verbal imaging in advertising-the words that are used in ads and contribute to ideology. Verbal images, and the way they function in the visual displays of advertising, can create a discourse of gender or race across very different kinds of advertising. So I'm looking beyond how a particular advertising campaign positions a particular product to learn more about how particular words and phrases circulate through the advertising and relate to larger culture.
So in these ads there's a play between words and images that's more than the sum of those individual components.
Yes, and in the study of advertising there's not been a lot of attention paid to the verbal elements in an ad that contains pictures.
The chapter I'm working on right now shows how discourse images have been used strategically to position advertisements for cigarettes to different racial groups, particularly menthol cigarettes targeted to African-Americans. The documents that have been released since the tobacco settlements are now public domain, and thousands of these documents are available online. It's very clear from those documents that menthol cigarettes have been targeted in a particular way to African Americans.
Why menthol cigarettes?
African Americans have a slightly higher rate of smoking than other racial groups. Also, they are perceived as responding to emerging trends. With the introduction of menthol cigarettes, advertisers could make decisions about how to segment their audience, that is, on whom particular kinds of advertising strategies and images should be focused. This strategy has persisted over a long period of time. It's a confirmed fact that tobacco companies have targeted African Americans for menthol cigarettes and that they have used particular strategies to do that. But more than that, millions of people who are not African Americans are exposed to the verbal and visual images that appear in racially targeted ads, and these images taken together contribute to racism.
I'm featuring in this chapter a case study that looks at some recent advertising by Benson and Hedges and Salem for menthol cigarettes. The case study examines the different ways in which ads for menthol cigarettes (which are also advertised to other racial groups) are both verbally and visually positioned differently when they are featuring black people than when they're featuring whites. The chapter also examines the ways in which these particular ads use already existing racial discourses in very subtle ways to associate verbal images with these cigarettes.
For example, take the case of a cigarette called "black label" (as opposed to "green label") version of a brand, The "black label" version is positioned using terms such as "mysteriously delicious," in contrast to the "green" version which is described as "refreshingly spirited." When you examine the array of the verbal images that accompany visual images, you see a strikingly racial discourse.
So to study these issues, you analyze the ads themselves in the context of the internal documentation that the agencies have written?
Yes.
Are there opportunities for undergrads to participate in research related to communication and culture?
Yes, students often become interested in a topic through a class and want to investigate it further. I'll work with them to shape an independent study project.
For example, Liz Olson, the captain of the swim team, is doing a senior honors thesis on gendered narratives of sport. Liz became interested in narrative analysis when taking Communication and Culture with me, and Discourse and Culture with Sarah Michaels. Liz conducted interviews to study differences between males and females in the way they construct personal narratives around their involvement in sport.
Senior Jennifer Clark is teasing out the role of gender in advertising for products that aren't gendered, like toothpaste. The strategy in advertising of "gendering" products is used to create audience segments. Advertisers create "his" and "her" versions of an ad even when it isn't really needed (for example, gender-identified decoration on the same little computer sold separately to young boys and girls), or use gender codes to essentially attach gendered meanings to products.
Karren Young '98, who majored in Communication and Culture at Clark and went on to graduate study at the Annenberg School for Communication, completed her senior honors thesis with me on gendered voices in commercials shown on children's television. We published an article together in Critical Studies in Media Communication.
These projects, whether specific to my personal research or not, all emanate from things that I'm very interested in.
Do you use inquiry-based learning methods in classes to help students become familiar with the nuances of communication?
Yes. I have students do a lot of field observations. For example, I suggest that they sit in on any public meetings they might have access to. One student did a fascinating project on a local town meeting. She was able to access the tapes from the meeting, which went on for several days. There was LOTS of discourse! The student did a fantastic analysis of gender discourse in the meeting, the ways in which the meeting topics were constructed, the different ways in which men and women developed those topics, or included or didn't include other people's prior commentary.
For one exercise in my Gender and Discourse seminar I ask students to examine front-page newspaper headlines in relation to gender. How are certain kinds of stories are positioned? How are the first paragraphs crafted? Last semester student Haley Tanner did a fascinating study in which she compared coverage of presidential candidates Carol Moseley Braun and Dennis Kucinich in the New York Times. Essentially, Tanner's paper was about the silencing of Braun: she just didn't exist in the news stories. In almost every case when Braun was mentioned, it would just be as someone who happened to participate in the debate. Kucinich might get a sentence about some position that he held on an issue. Now Haley is expanding her study to include coverage in the Los Angeles Times.
Sometimes I'll have my students conduct interviews. One of my favorite assignments is for us to work together in class to develop an interview on issues related to language and culture. Then each student individually will conduct the interview with a person of his or her choice who is bilingual, but whose first language is not English. Students interview an amazing array of people, and it's a great way for them to be exposed to a broad array of ideas, concepts, and experiences that we can then talk about in class. It's a good way to apply the theories relating to culture and communication. My students always learn a lot from doing it, and I always learn a lot from reading their papers.
Communication and Culture is one of the most popular majors here at Clark. Can you comment on this?
I think it's popular for two reasons. First, we draw a lot of students to Clark who are already interested in culture and cultural diversity. That's Clark's hallmark.
The second reason is that nationally there's a huge demand for programs in communication. At Clark we bill the Communication and Culture major as a liberal arts, non-professionally oriented program. But we still attract students because it's the closest we offer to a more conventional communication degree. And that's all right, because we feel that these students are going to get both an excellent liberal arts foundation, and an understanding, through courses and a required internship, of professional communications practice, whether it's public relations, advertising, corporate communications, or journalism, The liberal arts framework will give students a much better foundation for the practice of their professional area, and they can get an orientation to that through some courses at Clark, and the required internship.
So the emphasis on communication in a cultural context will help them reflect on their own work from a broader perspective.
Yes. It's going to position them better to understand how globalization has an impact on whatever they're doing. There isn't any communication field in which issues related to cultural diversity are not critical. It's a very exciting field.
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Additional Resources
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Fern Johnson |
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