Wife/mother/daughter-in-law: multiple avatars of homemaker in 1990s Indian advertising

Abstract

This article analyses the role which advertising discourses play in the construction of a `New Indian Woman' in her multiple avatars of homemaker. Given the new economic climate of liberalization that has been sweeping over India, the urban Indian woman is now an important consumer who, for the first time, has choices available to her. Consequently, advertising now adroitly combines both ideologies of feminism and femininity within discourses of consumerism. The article also argues that advertising discourses and the construction of gender and women's subjectivities are all inherently interrelated, and that they administer and moderate each other. Adopting a modified Foucauldian approach in locating the subject, the woman is seen both as constituted and formed by discourse, as well as resisting it. Moving away from reception-based analyses, the article concentrates on the ideas that producers of media texts have about their targeted audience. It goes on to show how, interestingly enough, women's spaces of resistance are created by advertisers themselves, even if that may not be their primary aim. Finally, the article examines how these spaces of resistance have to be understood as part of the entire dominant social structure.