“Size Does Matter”: Portability, Control, and the Promotional Gendering of the Sony Watchman

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Abstract

In this paper, I analyze promotional materials for the Sony Watchman (1980-1995) to reveal how the device was discursively constructed in relation to public/private spatial binaries and gendered consumerism. Whereas the marketing for earlier models of portable televisions during the 1960s relied on new-frontierist rhetoric to align the technology with women’s liberation, adverts for the Watchman often construct the device as masculine. Adverts implied that the Watchman could act as a sort of technological phallus and overcome the limitations of a less than masculine body. In doing so, the Watchman could make its users cyborg-like masters of public space. Further, by stressing “control” as a unique element of user experience, marketing for the Watchman offered men the opportunity to reestablish their masculinity and reclaim social power by re-asserting consumer control over a medium (television) that has historically been constructed as feminine.

Author

• Jennifer Marie Hessler, U of Califorinia - Santa Barbara