Summary
Deng and Shi read perfume advertising through a tripartite critical framework — Hall’s representation theory, Barthes’s mythology, and Butler’s gender performativity — to argue that the genre systematically naturalizes a specific gender norm: white, heterosexual, bourgeois femininity and masculinity. A content analysis of 45 perfume commercials provides the empirical base: 95% white protagonists, 64% physical nudity, 73% direct sexual behavior or explicit sexual implication. The critical move is to name this naturalization “the false obvious” — ideology made to look like nature. A symptomatic reading of Dior’s Miss Dior and J’adore commercials shows how the absent content (actual scent function, real social contradictions) is as ideologically significant as what is shown. The conclusion, drawing on de Beauvoir and Butler, is that even “independent” femininity in these ads remains organized around the male gaze and heteronormative desire.
Key points
- Content analysis findings: of 45 randomly selected perfume commercials, 95% used white protagonists; 64% showed physical nudity; 73% contained direct sexual behavior or explicit sexual implications; intimate interactions were almost exclusively heterosexual.
- Hall’s representation theory: perfume ads construct gender through “systems of correspondences” — conceptual maps linked to sign-systems. Gender is not found but produced in the text.
- Barthes’s “false obvious”: myth naturalizes the contingent. The gender norms encoded in perfume ads appear self-evident, “natural” — their constructedness is concealed. Deng and Shi take this as the paper’s organizing concept.
- Symptomatic reading: what the ad deliberately omits — the actual function of perfume, the real social conflicts it promises to resolve — is read as diagnostic. Perfume “does not possess the direct functionality of elevating personal status,” so the ad substitutes fictional narrative.
- Mulvey’s male gaze: women in perfume commercials are constructed as objects of fetishistic scopophilia. Even the “independent woman” narrative (Miss Dior/Portman, J’adore/Theron) is organized for male visual pleasure.
- Butler’s performativity: the “goddess” figure in Dior ads is a “parody of heteronormative ideological gender norms” — gender identity reinforced through advertising’s repeated stylization of the body.
- De Beauvoir: “One is not born a woman, but rather becomes one” — the binary is economic, not natural. Advertising is one of the institutions that performs this becoming.
- The double bind of “independence”: the Miss Dior narrative of a woman who walks out on her wedding is framed as liberation, but the commercial’s visual logic (male gaze, heterosexual resolution) reinstalls the very norms it appears to transgress.
- Localization asymmetry: unlike other ad genres, perfume commercials actively resist localization — white Western models dominate even in non-Western target markets (Hall 1997 cited on casting choices).
- Ideological function of visual pleasure: audiences “vicariously indulge in the good life through the image alone” (Winship via Storey) — the fictional resolution compensates for real social contradictions without resolving them.
Claude’s notes
Strong on ideology critique, thinner on close formal reading compared to Leleń. The empirical base (45 commercials, content analysis) gives it a different argumentative register — useful for grounding claims that might otherwise feel impressionistic, but the sample methodology is not robustly described. The “false obvious” concept (Barthes laundered through Althusserian symptomatic reading) is the paper’s real contribution and is directly teachable. Note that Cultural and Religious Studies is published by David Publishing, a house with a poor reputation in bibliometric terms — it appears on several predatory-publisher watchlists. The theoretical frameworks (Hall, Barthes, Mulvey, Butler) are canonical and correctly applied, but cite this paper with awareness of its venue. Flag to students if assigning. The reading of Dior’s J’adore/Miss Dior commercials overlaps with Leleń’s analysis of the same texts, which creates a productive comparison: Leleń emphasizes narrative craft and literary allusion; Deng & Shi emphasize ideological reproduction and what the narrative conceals.