Document Type
Article
Abstract
This essay examines selected recent imagery from American advertising that evinces a "negative" sense of nature as hostile other - often portrayed as a persecuting and conquered female - and of humans as its/her master. Examples to be examined of nature as this "Bad Mother" include TV commercials, print advertisements, and a comic strip. I argue that these images spring from a fundamental ambivalence toward nature and that they assuage the anxiety aroused by such ambivalence through a fantasy that casts humans as gods. More specifically, I use the medieval Christian scholastic concept of 'aseity' to suggest that these media images co-opt for humans the perceived independence, or aseity, posited by theologians as one of the characteristics of God.
Repository Citation
Roach, Catherine M.. "Thinking Like a God: Nature Imagery in Advertising." Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture vol. 7, no. 2, 2007, pp. 1–17. https://digitalcommons.odu.edu/reconstruction/vol7/iss2/9
Included in
Advertising and Promotion Management Commons, Gender and Sexuality Commons, Nature and Society Relations Commons