Underneath we’re angry: feminism and media politics in Britain in the late 1970s and early 1980s

Abstract

In the late 1970s, a billboard advertisement for Gigi underwear was installed at street level in various British cities. It depicted a woman in a trench coat walking on the street at night and looking defiantly at the camera. A second image portrays her unbuttoning her coat and revealing her underwear. A caption reads “Underneath they’re all Lovable.” This billboard evoked a wave of feminist opposition exemplified by Rosalind Coward’s essay “Underneath we’re angry” attacking the Gigi advertisement for being an invitation to rape women as well as photographic works by The Polysnappers condemning the ad. This article contextualizes the passionate resistance to the Gigi advert within the time’s feminist debates, which characterized media images as oppressive towards women, the discourse around the ideological functioning of advertisements, debates on “the sexual politics of representation,” the political role of photography, social historical events, and the political significance of the street.

Keywords:

• Advertising
• politics of representation
• photography
• feminism
• graffiti

Notes

1. The Advertising Standards Association was a self-regulatory body for print advertisements in the UK.

2. In 1982 the Advertising Standards Association, London, published Herself Appraised: The Treatment of Women in Advertisements, a survey of a national sample of women. The standards were developed following complaints that advertisements depicted women in an offensive manner, and the organization attempted to collect empirical knowledge on women’s opinion regarding this issue (see, The Advertising Standards Authority Annual Report 1982–1983, 5).

3. Coward’s disposition towards the relationship between feminism and media images underwent several shifts. Her piece on sexual violence in the special issue of Feminist Media Studies on “Sexuality” (Rosalind Coward 1982) takes a moderate stance towards sexualized images of women and suggests that it is necessary to differentiate between a pornographic and an erotic image. Coward further explored cultural manifestations of female pleasure and desire in her book Female Desires: How They are Sought Bought and Packaged (1984).

4. Spare Rib (1972–1993) was a women’s magazine written by and for women. It posed a feminist alternative to other women’s magazines sold on the newsstand and centered on various women’s experiences of patriarchy. The magazine also aimed to engage women otherwise not connected to the women’s movement and its ideas. Some women involved in Spare Rib previously worked in the underground press where they felt concerns regarding women’s rights were marginalized (see Beckett 2009, 226; Katie Campbell 1984, 17; Marsha Rowe 1982, 13–15).

5. In 2009, an American Apparel ad showing a half naked woman who looked under sixteen was banned in Britain by the ASA. Although the company insisted that she was twenty-three years old, the regulator ruled that the ad was “irresponsible” and could cause offense (see Joe Thomas 2010).

6. Dov Charney, it is claimed, walked around the company’s offices in his underwear, and sent female workers sexually explicit photographs. Charney was recently ousted by the company’s board following a series of sexual harassment lawsuits (see Sean Farrell 2014).

7. In 2012 American Apparel cooperated with GLAAD and produced gay rights equality t-shirts and portrayed a transgender model in its advertisements. The company operates according to a prolabor philosophy paying its factory workers twice the amount of minimum wage and covering health insurance (see, Seth Adam 2012; Christopher Palmeri (2005).

8. See, Iris Alonzo’s discussion on the controversial advertisement’s mission in Lauren Sherman (2014).

9. Similarly, Rosalind Coward’s Language and Materialism coauthored with John Ellis (1977) related to Marxist and post-structural theory.

10. Laura Mulvey applied a similar disposition in her critique of Allan Jones’s exhibition at the ICA, which included life size sculptures of women provocatively positioned as pieces of furniture (1973).

11. For further discussion on gender and advertising see Gillian Dyer (1982), Erving Goffman (1979), and Trevor Millum (1975).

12. See earlier critical accounts on advertisements in Raymond Williams, “Advertising: the Magic System,” which narrates a cultural history of advertisements in England between the seventeenth century and his time, examining the dynamic shifts in advertising within changes in culture and economy (1961, see the reprinted version of 1980).

13. The Arts Council of Great Britain was a central source of support for photography in the 1970s. Established in 1946 it was modeled on the Council for the Encouragement of Music and the Arts (CEMA) that operated during the Second World War and employed artists to raise national morale. The Arts Council operated in different regions in Great Britain and cooperated with government departments and local authorities to provide employment for artists and increase the accessibility of art to the public (see Anna Upchurch 2004, 203–208, 215). Photography in the 1970s was funded also by regional Arts Council organizations, trade unions, local education authorities, private sponsors, commercial exchanges, and galleries (Simon Watney 1986, 2).

14. Rosalind Coward’s dissertation, The Patriarchal Theory: Some Modes of Explanation of Kinship in the Social Sciences, examines the history of the theorization of sexuality and kinship between 1860 and 1930. See the University of Greenwich website, available at: http://gala.gre.ac.uk/8729/ and Cowards and Ellis (1977).

15. Cf. David Green and Joanna Lowry’s discussion on photographic indexicality (2003, 47–48, 58).

16. This work was exhibited in 1979 at Three Perspectives on Photography Recent British Photography at the London Hayward gallery.

17. This 1978 work was part of Who's Holding the Baby, a project that criticized the unavailability of state-funded nurseries for working-class women in Hackney. It also contested the limited portrayal of women in advertisements. See The Hackney Flashers Collective (1979, 80–83) and Heron (1980, 6–7).

18. Stickers reading “sexist crap,” “This degrades women,” and “This exploits women,” were often used to deface sexist billboards. See the photograph by Angela Phillips (Report/IFL), in Spare Rib “Reclaim the Night ’78,” (January 1978), 22–23.

19. See, Outwrite Women’s Newspaper, (December 31, 1984), cover page.

20. Outwrite Women’s Newspaper was run by a feminist collective and dedicated some of its early issues to anti-porn politics and actions by groups like Angry Women. It also addressed intersections between gender and internationalist, antiracism and anti-imperialism concerns (see Women’s Media Panel at Zine Fest 2009).

21. Starting in 1986 the British police demanded advance notice for marches and assumed the right to impose conditions on them (Home Office 2007, 8–9).

22. Most of Sutcliffe’s victims were prostitutes (see Jenkins 1992, 55–57).

23. From the late nineteenth century Soho developed into a sex industry and bohemian area (see John Eade 2000, 53–57; Walkowitz 2012, 295–296).

24. Posener mentioned that Angry Women was an ad hoc name adopted by individuals or women’s groups taking illegal actions like graffiti, criminal damage, attacking sex shops, and producing stickers to put on sexist books, records, or posters (see Posener 1982, 30).

25. Feminist punk is often identified in literature with the emergence of the “Riot Grrrl” movement in the 1990s in the US. This movement was exported to Britain and responded to sexism in the punk scene. Yet, earlier manifestation of punk feminist resistance prevailed in Britain in the 1970s (see LeBlanc 1999, 64).