Question 1:
Select one television advertisement and explain how gender is rhetorically constructed in that advertisement. Use theories from this week’s reading, as appropriate, to develop your explanation. If possible, please post a link to the commercial you selected.
Response 1:
The Super Bowl is one of the largest televised events in history, reaching hundreds of millions of people within just a few hours. With this massive reach, the advertisements featured during this event are especially important and usually reflect current cultural aspects such as food, toys, and beverages. During the 2018 Super Bowl, Coca-Cola aired a commercial titled “The Wonder of Us,” which featured gender in a new way that had not been televised much previously.
During the first ten seconds of the video, Coca-Cola (2018) states “There’s a coke for he, and she, and her, and me, and them” (00:00:10). Although this gender reference is exceedingly small and may seem insignificant to some people, people within the non-binary community found this gesture ginormous. Coca-Cola (2018) using “them” (00:00:10) as a pronoun gave non-binary people acknowledgement which in turn could not only validate them, but could make non-binary people seem more valid in the eyes of others who do not understand.
Anzaldúa used mestiza rhetoric to fight against cultural, sexual, and class boundaries which is exactly what I view Coca-Cola doing with this advertisement. Airing this during the most important televised event in America meant that it would reach people of all cultural backgrounds, sexualities, genders, and classes. Coca-Cola knew that there could be a negative backlash, but they still did it because it was something they felt strongly enough about. Although large companies like Coca-Cola do not always use their power in the correct ways, it is important to point out the rare moments when they actually use their power to make real, significant changes.
Although Coca-Cola seems to have included non-binary pronouns in their commercial as an act of gender equality, this could have been Coca-Cola using rhetoric as a marketing ploy. Coca-Cola could have been more inclusive because it could make them seem like a better company who support non-binary people and, in turn, persuading people to buy more of their products, making Coca-Cola more money. With a massive company like Coca-Cola, we will never know their true intentions and we can only hope for the best ones.
Reference:
Coca-Cola [Commercials Funny]. (2018, February 1). Coca cola super bowl commercial 2018 the wonder of us [Video]. YouTube.
Question 2:
Choose two rhetorical concepts from any of the following: Foucault, Derrida, Cixous, or Anzaldua (in this week’s readings). What early rhetorical theories seem most aligned with and divergent from these concepts? What does that say about our changing assumptions about rhetoric?
Response 2:
Anzaldua was never completely satisfied with writing in just one way using just one language which led her to which between them all while writing. According to Bizzell (2020), “She shifts from poetry to reportorial prose to autobiographical stream of consciousness to incantatory mythic chants to sketches and graphs and back again, weaving images from her multiple selves and from many others into a kind of tapestry or patchwork quilt of language” (p. 3228).
The act of switching between all these types of writings and languages is called mestiza rhetoric.
Mestiza rhetoric is beautiful and create a lot of freedom within rhetoric but diverges from early rhetorical theories. For example, when talking about Aristotle’s From Rhetoric, Bizzell (2020) stated that rhetoric study is used to accomplish persuasion (p. 415). Although Anzaldua uses Mestiza rhetoric to persuade people to fight against political oppression, she also uses it to create art across sexual, cultural, and class boundaries.
Cixous looked at rhetoric a little differently and used it to attack oppressive binaries in literature and developed a nonhierarchical writing practice called she called “feminine.” This way of using rhetoric completely diverges from early theories because historically, rhetoric was only used and taught to men, as women were usually not taught to read or write. According to Bizzell (2020), “one of her aims is to discover a form of writing that breaks with the norms of knowing, thinking, and writing that have been inherited from the Enlightenment” (p. 3087). This shows clearly that she was trying to use rhetoric differently in every way possible.
Looking at these two rhetorical theories, it is clear that rhetoric is always changing, even within the same year. Rhetoric means something completely different to each individual person and each individual person uses it completely differently according to their agenda. Rhetoric is not the same as it was yesterday, and it is especially different from 1000 years ago.
Reference:
Bizzell, P., Herzberg, B., & Reames, R. (Eds.). (2020). The rhetorical tradition: Readings from classical times to the present (3rd ed.). Bedford/St. Martin’s.
Each response must have a counter-response
that includes the following :
1. Please make sure that your paragraphs are only 3-5 sentences
2. When answering the DQs, these are graded posts in a graduate-level course, so I expect detail in these answers
a. Initial responses to DQs should be at least 2 paragraphs long, and each paragraph should consist of 3-5 sentences
b. Responses should also have at least one reference and a proper citation for that reference
c. Substantial posts come from adding context, so don’t simply rely on quoting a source when responding to the DQs
3. Speaking of references, please make sure that you are looking at the APA structuring for each one
4. Finally, substantial posts (your replies)
a. Your substantial posts need to be at least 1 full paragraph each
b. In that one paragraph, if you are not adding to the conversation (i.e. Hello Dr. Cooper, I completely agree with you. Thanks for your response.), you will not get credit for that post
Acknowledgements
