ABSTRACT

Williams called advertising a ‘magic system’ (2000) with inordinate powers to persuade by tapping into our unconscious desires, promising us ‘the good life’ and all the things that go with it. As a genre, advertising is frequently discussed in negative terms both in public and academic discourses, and, given its commercial nature and objectives, it has rarely been considered as having any intrinsic value to audiences or having artistic or aesthetic value in its own right beyond giving meaning to the consumer items it sells (Gibbons, 2011). Many cultural studies and feminist scholars consider advertising media as ‘locations for exploring “sexualisation” while also enabling broader expressions of sexuality’ (Gill, 2009: 140). In this chapter I draw upon a conceptualisation of sex as a discursive technology and as a socially constructed idea, in the sense that meanings of sex and sexuality are produced within specific social, cultural, political and historical contexts (Burr, 1995), in order to explore the ways in which sex and sexuality are represented in advertising as reflections of sex within contemporary society (Foucault, 1986; Chronaki, 2014).