Gender and Agricultural Imagery: Pesticide Advertisements in the 21 st Century Agricultural Transition Margaret Koma

INTRODUCTION ► FIRST: Koma shows HOW, through petrochemical advertisements, the agriculture industry and its media agencies symbolically appropriate and conflate images of gender with agricultural values of currency in society in order to sustain and/or enhance competitive edge. ► SECOND: Koma analytically deconstructs the script in advertisements and show how gendered texts are artfully reconstituted in the marketplace as “commodity.”

MALE IMAGES, FEMALE IMAGES: REPRESENTATION IN THE AGRICULTUAL MEDIA ► Consumer culture is embedded in magazines and is both a product and a reproducer of social inequality ► Hegemonic notions of masculinity ► Dominant notions of femininity ► Normative notions of what women and men do on farms are symbolically tied to the technologies they use in their work ► In agriculture, gendered relationships stress male dominance, independence and the “taming of nature.” ► The social construction of the ideal farmer

HISTORICAL BACKGROUND ► At the end of WWII agricultural chemicals were discovered and created vast opportunities for capital accumulation and profit gaining which the advertising industry and magazines took much advantage ► By the mid-1970’s, the use of both fertilizers and pesticides peaked and reached an all time high ► Public concern over the state of the environment and the pollution due to the agricultural process peaked in the mid 1990’s

FINDINGS : Selling the Male Icon and Selling Petrochemicals ► 1970s: Advertisements mirror the image of the strong male controlling the agricultural environment. ► Brand names reflect a “nature as adversary” ethic, such as “Warrior”, “Prowl” ► Names in advertisements also showed a total absence of female imagery. ► Pictorial metaphors of this period also reflect the dominant male in opposition to the enemy/the plant pest ► Narratives evoke a similar sentiment, such as “You can give him a lickin’ with Counter” ► The theme of the 1970’s  farming environment = jungle  farmer = master  pesticide = weapon of control was ► The exploitation of the male attribute of control over nature becomes associated with a farmer’s success and also reveals the ideological construction of hegemonic masculinity in agriculture. ► Other social locators: class and race

FINDINGS: Commoditizing Female Culture…and Reproducing Ideology ► 1990s: pesticide advertisements reflect images that evoke a symbolic association of nature with culturally prescribed attributes of femininity.  FOR EXAMPLE, almost 40% of the advertisements have product names such as, “Accent”, “Partner”, and “Fusion” which connote gentleness ► movement of environmental concerns into the mainstream of social discourse ► The response of the pesticide industry to this shift in values was manifested in the changing representations chemical products in their advertisements ► Advertisements interweave the image of woman as nurturer, with images of pesticides as harmless and gentle ► gender is never constituted independent of race and class  complete erasure of non-white males ► The positioning of the white male suggests an omnipresent protector of women, families and the environment. ► The material and physical backdrops portray U.S. agriculture as middle-class

CONCLUSIONS The advertising industry plays an important role in the perpetuation of gender stereotypes in the farming world. The marginalization of women and other minority groups occurs through the denial of their participation and damages the image of women in U.S farming.