Response to Chapter 2, Practices of Looking

According to Sturken and Cartwright in chapter 2 of Practices of Looking, interpellation is a term that describes, "the way that images and media texts seem to call out to us, catching our attention" (50). The authors go on to say that, for this interpellation to be effective, "the viewer must implicitly understand himself or herself as being a member of a social group that shares codes and conventions through which the image becomes meaningful...to be interpellated by an image, then, is to know that the image is meant for me to understand, even if I feel my understanding is unique or goes against the grain of a meaning that seems to have been intended" (50).

When reading about interpellation, the first thing that came to mind was a project I did in my Rhetorical Theory and Applications course. I found several ads for food products in women's beauty magazines and compared them to one another, and one of the most intriguing was an ad for chewing gum as a meal substitute. As a woman, I was interpellated by this ad--it immediately affected me and spoke to me, but not in the way the marketers had hoped it would. Being a "woman" means belonging to a culture, and the stereotypical roles of this culture include: being desirable, being prized for our beauty over our intellect, being thin, and being health-conscious. These are all roles that society has taught women to try to abide by, so seeing an ad where next to nothing is advertised as a meal, the thought the advertisers wanted me to think was, "Great! Where can I buy some?" but instead I was disgusted that such a thing would be suggested to me. A stick of 5 calorie chewing gum should not be a meal substitute, so instead of wanting to buy this product, I was interpellated not to buy this product.

The visual shows an unrealistically attractive woman in an office setting, dressed in flashy clothes that are not work friendly, attacking a giant donut with a chair. The ad's text says, "survive a snack attack," and, "fight back with Trident Splash." This all implies that women will be more attractive, thinner, better dressed, and thus more desirable, if they choose to chew Trident rather than eat a meal. It also implies that women should not and cannot eat donuts, or anything similar. Other viewers of this ad may have been interpellated to buy the gum because they may have thought, when seeing the fierce female model in the ad, "That could be me!" However, I was interpellated in a completely different way. This is an example of the many ways someone can be interpellated by one advertisement, even though I would put myself and someone who was interpellated in another way in the same group, or "culture," as myself.