If we take a closer look at its content, leaving aside its commercial purpose, advertising is a "mirror" and a "mold" of our society, as advertisers and sociologists argue. Advertising reflects the dominant value of our society, but at the same time it shapes the way we perceive social reality.
Now, let’s look at our surroundings and ourselves.
Is our environment gendered?
One way to answer this question is to look at the advertising around you and me. In the digital world, subway stations become rare physical spaces where city dwellers can look at printed advertisements.
So, I visited several major metro stations in Shanghai to collect advertisements and highlight the connotations and assumptions these advertisements have about the society we live in:
How do these advertisements reflect and/or shape gender roles in the workplace, family, and everyday life?
Is the individual gendered?
One way to answer that question is to look at and listen to you and me.
I asked generous volunteers to anonymously show their favorite body part, to draw their self-portrait without any instructions, and to read some quotes from feminist works, such as The Second Sex by Simone de Beauvoir, in their dialect. The two-channel video project between the subway ads juxtaposes the scenes in which the male and female volunteers happened to have chosen the same part, and accompanies the original quotations with the distorted voices on the other side of the video channel to show a sense of irony:
Do our linguistic identity, gender identity, or other socially limited identities define what we should do? Is there any difference between you and me other than the physiological structures we are born with?
Please, question my questions, question our surroundings, and question you and me.
Supported by Diversity in Action from LEAD Program, NYU Shanghai
Click here for a feature article on my project and LEAD program.
