Posthuman Public Pedagogy: Advertising's Gendered Agency, Affectivity, and Matter

• In Event: 61.070 - Sheraton Roundtable 10 - Osgoode Ballroom
  In Roundtable Session: 61.070-3 - Putting PheMaterialisms Into Practice in Pedagogy and Curriculum

Abstract

This paper explores gender and advertising in London’s city-scape as a form of public pedagogy (Hickey Moody et al., 2010) that enculturates and normalises through intra-actions with diverse bodies in public space. We adopt a feminist posthuman lens that considers the very specific space-time-matterings (Barad, 2007) of how inter and intrasectionally (Lykke, 2010) coded bodies intra-act with advertising content in public spaces through billboards, print newspapers but also targeted social media algorithms on mobile phones. We consider the ‘thing power’ of the advertisements (Bennet, 2009) and their agential enactments in relation to material bodies.
Braidotti has argued (2013) a posthuman empirical project should be intent on experimenting with what contemporary bio-technologically mediated bodies are capable of doing. Feminist posthuman and new materialism approaches move us beyond a representational lens of discursive meaning, viewing and audience response to advertising. Instead we explore the agency and affectivity of advertisements and how they work as technologies in live space-time encounters with material bodies which also act back upon and shape the potentiality of the advertisement asking: (a) How are bodies becoming through their relationship with advertising images? (b) What do the adverts do to bodies and what to bodies do to the adverts as they are encountered in public spaces?

Our methodology included on-the-move interviewing walking in public spaces in the city and riding on public transport (Mcphie, et al., 2015). We took daily commuting journeys with 16 women all from different boroughs in London to explore the advertising participants’ encounter in their daily lives. We captured images of the women’s advertising encounters and recorded their views in interview transcripts We also worked with 22 girls in two London schools where we conducted focus groups and collaging workshops - a form of socially engaged arts based research methodology (Wang et al., 2017) to ”craft back” against regulatory sexism, sizeism, ageism, racism, ableism advertising content. The qualitative data informed a survey of 2012 women and men responding to advertising content featuring gendered bodies to find out if respondents felt represented and how they rated the ads..

A feminist posthuman and new materialism lens helps us to foreground the affective, material, spatial, temporal and discursive relations (Authors, 2018a) of advertising encounters moving beyond a representational reading of content, offering a multi-dimensional account of inter and intrasectional power dynamics. We found that advertisements in public space are non-consensual and create a must-look imperative in ways completely different from how advertising is experienced in private. Public advertising cannot be turned off, flipped over or ignored. Encounters with advertisements varied greatly depending on different embodied experiences and context; although senses of discomfort and ill-ease followed through encounters with a typology of adverts that territorialise women’s bodies through creating sensations of lack, shame and/or objectification.

This paper moves beyond a discursive and representational reading of advertising arguing advertising in action is a, sometimes coercive, form of posthuman public pedagogy that intra-acts with bodies in specific space and time contexts. Our analysis offers novel insights into posthuman distributed agential power relations of advertising encounters.

Authors

• Jessica Lenore Ringrose, University College London

• Kaitlyn Regehr, University of Kent

• Shiva Zarabadi, University College London