You will prepare and submit a term paper on Consumerism Promoted by Television Help Enforce Patriarchy. Your paper should be a minimum of 1500 words in length.

You will prepare and submit a term paper on Consumerism Promoted by Television Help Enforce Patriarchy. Your paper should be a minimum of 1500 words in length. Hall (2003, p.90) has observed that ideologies merge into and hide inside the taken for granted ‘naturalness’ or ‘commonsense’ and through this, racism and patriarchy begin to appear as ‘natural’. Hall (2003, p.91) in order to prove his point, has drawn attention to certain television shows which advocate racial harmony at the macro level but at the micro level, is “impregnated with unconscious racism,” depicting certain racist positions as normal, as part of commonsense. The slave figures in Gone With the Wind are cited by Hall (2003, p.92) as a stereotyped yet assumed ‘natural’ symbol of racism. Similarly, the female characters in this text have also been inferred to be satisfying the gender biases of the given society, namely the “mammy/Madonna/child triptych” (Wallace-Sanders, 2003, p.128). The author, Wallace-Sanders (2003, p.128) generalizes that almost all female images seen on television fit into these three roles perfectly.

But there have been opposing positions to this argument also. Reminding that all advertisements of Nike historically have been male narratives, Grow (2008) has named the evolution of women’s brands and corresponding advertisements focusing them as ante-narratives. Here, a gender discourse is earning space in a hitherto male textual discourse and this is only because of the spread of consumerism among women, aided by the purchasing capacity that they have earned which in turn was achieved by becoming part of the labor force.

Nike’s masculine brand image was considered normal as long as there were only male consumers but when a female consumer came into the picture, what was ‘normal’ turned out to be a bit less ‘normal’ (Grow, 2008). The female consumer could not associate with the images of masculinity and so the advertisements had to be fine-tuned with a newly revised notion of normalcy, argues Grow (2008). This viewpoint gives a positive edge to consumerism by depicting it as a pioneering social force in picking up the new value system evolved by gender discourses.