CEU Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2016
| Author | Snitselaar, Sara Jane |
|---|---|
| Title | More Than a Cardboard Babe: Promotional Modeling and the Shaping of Neoliberal Subjectivities |
| Summary | This thesis examines the narratives of promotional models or promo girls working for liquor marketing agencies in California’s San Francisco Bay Area in order to shed light on gendered and sexual embodiment and subjectivity in the neoliberal era. Drawing primarily from the work of Michel Foucault, it aims to de-exceptionalize agency, relocating it in the commodified spaces of everyday life carved out by neoliberalism. The thesis maps crucial aspects of what Lisa Duggan (2002) calls “the sexual politics of neoliberalism,” or in other words, the wide array of gendered and sexual subjectivities underpinning the alcohol industry’s structure and function. Following Pierre Bourdieu (1984), it explores the raced and classed dimensions of alcohol promotions, arguing that they create a habitus of alcohol consumption, and that promo girls’ gendered and sexual performances naturalize racial, class, gender, and sexual hierarchies. Borrowing insights from Lauren Berlant (2007), Adrienne Evans, and Sarah Riley (2014), it investigates promo girls’ embodied and subjective experiences, revealing the ways in which they agentically use neoliberal discourses about autonomy, personal responsibility and sexuality to constitute themselves as sexy and responsible subjects. Data is based on ethnographic interviews, critical analysis of marketing materials, participant observation, and importantly, is grounded in the notion that studying female subjectivity within the context of agency is “a political imperative for feminist research” (Evans & Riley 2014, 9). At the same time, the thesis acknowledges the force with which neoliberal discourses of autonomy and personal responsibility work to confound interpretations of what counts as agency in a landscape increasingly saturated by economic rationality and diminishing social protections. Overall, it attempts to illuminate the complicated, co-deterministic tension between structure and agency, and the mutually constitutive relationship between promo girls and neoliberal feminine subjects. Tracing a more complicated vision of agency adds to an understanding of women as active subjects engaging with available discourses about gender, sexuality, and work, rather than passive objects in need of saving. |
| Supervisor | Renkin, Hadley Zaun |
| Department | Gender Studies MA |
| Full text | https://www.etd.ceu.edu/2016/snitselaar_sara.pdf |
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