Introduction

Gender is central to our understanding of racial and ethnic images in American advertising. Since the late nineteenth century, advertising has contributed to the ways Americans understand ideals of masculinity and femininity. These ideals, which remain consistent today, promote men as handsome, well groomed, fit, and usually authoritative, and women, whatever their jobs or achievements, remain largely defined by their beauty—youthful, symmetrical faces, full lips, straight noses, and styled hair. And these idealized gender representations are also steeped in race: they present white women and men as the central figures in the world of production and consumption. African Americans, Asian Americans, Latino/as and Native Americans have struggled against racial and gender representations in which they are subservient to whites and deemed non-consumers. Beginning in the 1960s and 1970s, an increase in agencies owned by people of color altered advertising's visual landscape and pushed white-owned agencies to expand their appeal to a diverse American population. Although dimensions of earlier gender ideals have changed over time--and the gendered representations of people of color have been transformed--there remain profound limits to the ways masculinity and femininity can be imagined in advertising.