Restricted accessResearch articleFirst published online 1999-07
Hidden Truth: Theories of Intellectual Work in the Advertising Copy of a Mass Communication Genre: A Multidisciplinary Perspective on the Lost Eden Scenario
Temporal Orientalism provides a tool for analyzing the advertising of a genre of mass-marketed paperbacks, which is the literature of a women's religious social movement. Through it, the Goddess movement advertises its message as liberatory feminist revelation, with historical claims proved by archaeology. Cover copy advertises what the author calls the lost Eden scenario, in which an imagined savage male Other despoils an imagined ancient matriarchy. The identity of this villainous male Other is withheld in the advertising, but revealed, “who-dunit” style, in the books: it is a racial identity. Hence, the advertising, like the books, reflects in its monotheism, its reliance on authority, its blame of an Orientalized Other, and so on, a Goddess religion that in many ways mirrors characteristics the authors describe as patriarchal when they criticize other religions.
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