'Can't fail, can't show': The discourse of menstrual product advertisements.

摘要

From the time the first American tampon and sanitary napkin advertisements appeared in the 1920s, marketers and advertisers have been selling not only practical products to women, but also the correct way to be feminine. The information advertisers use to construct messages presents the ideology of menstruation. Advertising functions within ideology as a type of discourse, doing more than just marketing a product. In the reality created by the discourse of menstruation, women are tacitly taught, through subtle discipline, what constitutes proper womanhood and what does not. The locus of proper womanhood is the body, and this body is under constant pressure, through the discourse of menstruation, to function correctly and normally. I argue that advertising has framed women's menstrual products, and thus, their bodies, as dirty, shameful, and anxiety-causing.;In this paper I analyze the content and discourse of menstrual product ads throughout the 20th century and into the 21st in order to illuminate what these ads communicate about women, menstruation, and femininity. The paper works through issues of power, ideology, and subjectivity, and places advertising's role within the context of a larger discourse on gender and the body. Following this theoretical framework, I have done my own content analysis of a sampling of ads from throughout the 20th century in order to further elucidate themes running through the ads and show their historical staying power. I argue that the four main themes found in the ads are shame/secrecy, anxiety/comfort, hygiene, and convenience/freedom. Finally, I present the idea that ads of the 21st century reflect a postmodern society in which power, freedom, and proper feminine behavior are found in the subjugation of the body. Products today, more than ever, sell freedom as liberation from the body's functions. These ads in particular reflect the notion that the female body should be essentially shut down, silenced, disciplined, and normalized to be more like the standard, neutral and "correct" male body.