| Research Abstract |
This study approached the issue of racial boundaries by focusing on racial stereotypes, which I regard as representations of "races" that are confined within ideological boundaries. Stereotypes with racial markers serve to confirm, reproduce, and invent racial differences. This study was an attempt to better explain the white-minority relationship either explicitly or implicitly portrayed in advertising, by combining both qualitative and quantitative approaches. My research involves reviewing advertisements published in several mass-circulation American magazines from 1900s until WWII.
Racial boundaries exist not only on the superficial level of racial categories divided by skin color, but they often take more covert forms deeply rooted in human psychology of cognitive differentiation, which is eventually linked to social hierachy or Orientalism. In decoding advertisements and in statistical analysis, I have observed a number of dimensions in which minorities are confined by their role representation in advertising, either in terms of gender and age or by such attributes as facial expression, language. and clothes.
These boundaries are rigid in one sense and yet are flexible in another. We have to bear in mind that whites are the main target readership around the time period examined in this paper, while for minorities advertising served as a means of "Americanization" or becoming "white-like". The images attached to minorities seem to be mere projections of complex selves among whites, to which they could be transformed to "better" selves exhibiting higher social class, civilized lifestyles, sophistication, and good-looks, by purchasing these products. Precisely because of the possibility of changing themselves and fundamentally because of different selves existing within their selves, they need icons representing different positions and statuses in order to differentiate the self they aspire to from the self they want to deny.
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