Gender and Public Relations

Critical Perspectives on Voice, Image and Identity

Christine Daymon, Kristin Demetrious

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781136758638
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Business

Although there is a small body of feminist scholarship that problematizes gender in public relations, gender is a relatively undefined area of thinking in the field and there have been few serious studies of the socially constructed roles defining women and men in public relations.

This book is positioned within the critical public relations stream. Through the prism of 'gender and public relations', it examines not only the manipulatory, but also the emancipatory, subversive and transformatory potential of public relations for the construction of meaning. Its focus is on the dynamic interrelationships arising from public relations activities in society and the gendered, lived experiences of people working in the occupation of public relations. There are many previously unexplored areas within and through public relations which the book examines. These include:

• 
  
  

• the production of social meaning and power relations

• 
  
  

• advocacy and activist campaigns for social and political change

• 
  
  

• the negotiation of identity, diversity and cultural practice

• 
  
  

• celebrity, bodies, fashion and harassment in the workplace

• 
  
  

• notions of managing reputation and communicating policy.

In extending the field of inquiry, this edited collection highlights how gender is accomplished and transformed, and, thus how power is exercised and inequality (re)produced or challenged in public relations. The book will expand thinking about power relations and privilege for both women and men and how these are affected by the interplay of social, cultural and institutional practices.

Winner of the Outstanding Book PRide Award, awarded by the National Communication Association (NCA).

1 Surface effects

Public relations and the politics of gender

Kristin Demetrious

Gender conformity embedded unquestioningly as ‘common sense’ is a powerful but often unseen force within social structure that has played a central role in shaping the politics, direction and practice of public relations. Despite this, public relations scholarship and education pay limited attention to questions of gender and power, where they intersect and how the effects are expressed. This chapter uses a socio-cultural lens to understand both the dominant as well as divergent and emergent ways in which public relations as a discourse – that is, as a specific formation of language articulated to history, institutional authority and normative practices – culturally configures ‘gender’. It focuses on how socially constituted gendered identities are performed within contemporary public relations workplaces and how this anticipates cultural possibility (Butler 2008: xv). In particular, it focuses on how gender, power and sexual hierarchy are intertwined, and the ways in which fashion – as social practice – authorizes behaviour, rules and conventions to construct a set of dispositions that both imitates and promotes these cultures. These lines of inquiry engage theoretically with a view of gender, not just as a socially constructed category, but as a socially sexualized form of inequality.

According to Judith Butler: ‘sexual hierarchy produces and consolidates gender’ (2008: xii). For Catharine MacKinnon, an exploration of gender without this ‘obscures and legitimizes the way gender is imposed by force’ (MacKinnon 1987: 3). This nexus of the ‘social’ and ‘sexuality’ frames the discussion in two ways: first, in terms of the binding particularities of ‘difference’ between men and women in and through the construction of gender; and second, in terms of a wide cultural field of social processes articulated to this construction. Therefore, the ideals of gender promoted in public relations, and dynamic social processes and practices that create the ideals, will be explored as an imposition on subjects engaging with the politics of repression as a means of legitimizing and silencing discussion about sexual dominance and inequality. By questioning the configuration of women, men, bodies, representation and politics within public relations, gender is thus defined as a ‘set of free-floating attributes… performatively produced and compelled by the regulatory practices of gender coherence’ (Butler 2008: 34). Discarding fixed (essentialist) notions of ‘men’ and ‘women’, the research engages with ideas of subjects as individual ‘agents’ who interact within fluid and moving cultural fields of concealed relations of power linked to ideology and control. This trajectory allows for movement of, and the unlocking of, new understandings of public relations and its relationship to gender and the performance of social sexuality.

Contemporary workplaces appear normatively different from the male-dominated strongholds of the 1950s and 1960s: before the contraceptive pill became widely accepted, and before rights such as equal pay and equal opportunity were extensively progressed by second-wave feminists who mobilized in the 1970s to advocate ‘more nuanced and marginalised forms of disadvantage’ (Daymon and Demetrious 2010: 2). Indeed, MacKinnon argues that since the 1970s feminists have made visible a socially embedded pattern of abuse of women by men. She says, ‘In fact, it is the woman who has not been sexually abused who deviates’ (1987: 5). In accordance, MacKinnon discusses that ‘The pervasiveness of male sexual violence against women is therefore not denied, minimized, trivialized, eroticized, or excepted as marginal or episodic or placed to one side while more important matters discussed’ (1987: 5–6). Paradigmatically, and over time, views like these led to the challenging of long-held assumptions about women and men. They led to the creation of different meanings and knowledge bases and of shared understandings in society, some of which had significant and long-term legal, political, social and cultural implications. Based on this, these questions – how public relations discourse culturally constructs gendered identities, and how these are performed within diverse workplace settings – are contextually characterized by a general view that feminists have already done the ‘main work’ in relation to gender and inequality, and, as a result, today’s workplaces are qualitatively different. This view is further buttressed because social relations within them appear to be more relaxed and informal than in the past. For this reason, the chapter explores if and in what ways the constitution of gender in today’s public relations workplaces affects relations of power, and in particular if this produces and reinforces a sexualized relationship of inequality while at the same time discouraging diversity. Thus, the chapter will use an interdisciplinary lens to consider if, in recent times, gendered categories have been reconstituted by cultural conditions and what this means for hidden relations of power.

While not the only way of enforcing gender inequality, sexual harassment is a significant site for the production of meaning. According to Judith Butler, ‘sexual harassment is the paradigmatic allegory for the production of gender. Not all discrimination can be understood as harassment. The act of harassment may be one in which a person is “made” into a certain gender’ (2008: xiii).

Investigating gender, power and public relations, the study considers the public records and reporting of two cases of sexual harassment brought by public relations staff in Australia. The first occurred in 2010 when a female publicist for a major department store chain, David Jones, began civil action against its chief executive officer; the second took place in 2012 when a male parliamentary staffer in media relations made allegations against the Speaker of the House of Representatives. The testimony and the public reporting of these two cases contain descriptions of females and males and public relations workplaces that provide an opportunity to identify indicative patterns of gender construction for analysis. Hence the rights or wrongs of cases will not be analysed, but rather the media representation of them: what is signified, what absences occur and the public understandings of gender and public relations that might result from this. The powerful assumptions around gender in and towards ‘PR’ seen through these cases suggest ways sexual hierarchies are produced and reproduced that work against equality and diversity in public relations workplaces. In particular, these investigations open up the possibilities that, far from unbinding women from repressive regimes of the past, the normative boundaries in contemporary workplaces have been redrawn around gender and this category of inequality now includes gay men.

PR and the clothes-body complex

A little black dress, pencil skirt, blazer with patterned shirts, revealing cleavage, striped tie, tailored shirt, classic suit, luxury brand-name watch, accessorizing with technology, spray tan, manicured nails, teeth whitening, hair colour: what are the accepted norms of appearance for women and men in public relations workplaces? Interrelationships between the sexual harassment cases and the production of knowledge through the clothes-body complex or ‘fashion’ in public relations will also be investigated. The sexual harassment thesis is also understood through fashion as a culturally specific social practice in a ‘complex’ where sites of gender construction link to ideology, agency and rules of discourse. Jennifer Craik argues:

[F]ashion constitutes the arrangement of clothes and the adornment of the body to display certain body techniques and to highlight relations between the body and its social habitus. The body is not a given, but actively constructed through how it is used and projected. Clothes are an index of codes of display, restraint, self-control, and affect-transformation.

(Craik 1994: 10).

This view builds on Butler’s thesis that:

Gender ought not to be constructed as a stable identity or locus of agency from which various acts follow; rather, gender is an identity tenuously constituted in time, instituted in an exterior space through a stylized repetition of acts. The effect of gender is produced through the stylization of the body and, hence, must be understood as the mundane way in which bodily gestures, movements, and styles of various kinds constitute the illusion of an abiding gendered self.

(Butler 2008: 191; italics in the original)

To explore the notion of gender as a sexualized relationship to inequality in public relations, an empirical component to the study will consider fashion as grammar or rules which direct the development of professional identities. ‘Mundane’ textual samples sourced from internet blogs and other sites will be analysed as part of the process of investigating gender in public relations; in particular, those providing fashion and style advice for potential public relations practitioners about what to wear at interviews and within the job. As texts, these samples provide valuable insights into the assumptions underpinning the gendered boundaries in public relations workplaces that link to sexual harassment. They not only reveal the way relations are being constructed, but whether these relations are marked by uneven power relations and forms of subordination, as well as ways these relations may be imposed.

In summary, these lines of investigation reveal normative understandings in public relations, what happens when transgressions occur, and how public discussion of these can become woven into a broader understanding of occupational practice and workplaces. Significantly it is argued that in public relations a self-contradictory reality exists, paradoxically both obvious and obscured: on the one hand, the career pleasure promoted in public relations links to a controlling sexual hierarchy but, on the other, these very practices contribute to the loss of career opportunity and the delegitimization of the occupation. For public relations, resolving this self-contradictory stance on gender and its flow-on effects such as anxiety and confusion about body and appearance is an important dynamic in occupational reform. The conclusion considers the implications of this for ethics and public relations practice.

Fashioning gender in modernity

Historically, public relations, like other manifestations of capitalism and modernity, was profoundly anchored to culturally constructed understandings of gender as heteronormativity and linked to a discourse which privileged masculinist positions to the exclusion of others. In relation to earlier periods of modernity Robert Nelson observes that:

It was necessary … for men to appear standardised, mechanical, predictable, rational, and regular: they are the responsible organisers of society. Women meanwhile would be encouraged to retain all the aspirations to frivolous hedonism, leggy fancies, extravagant and irrationality, because these indulgences became signs of inferiority and powerlessness.

(Nelson 2011: 15)

Butler reveals other meanings in the complex power dynamic between men and women in modernity. The following quotation shows how ‘sexuality’ and ‘gender’ can be understood in two distinct ways: first, in a ‘sexist’ mode where an act of sexual submission, in effect, fulfils a woman; and second, in a ‘feminist’ mode where it is evidence of subordination.

There is thus a difference between sexist and feminist views on the relation between gender and sexuality: the sexist claims that a woman only exhibits her womanness in the act of heterosexual coitus in which her subordination becomes her pleasure (an essence emanates and is confirmed in the sexualized subordination of women); a feminist view argues that gender should be overthrown, eliminated, or rendered fatally ambiguous precisely because it is always a sign of subordination of women. The latter accepts the power of the former’s orthodox description, accepts that the former’s description already operates as powerful ideology, but seeks to oppose it.

(Butler 2008: xiv)

The views of Nelson and Butler suggest that the politics of repression, as social sexuality, manifests through a limited selection of options linked to powerful orthodoxies and gender conformity.

Is sexual submission essentialized and embedded within ideology in public relations thinking and practice? Edward Bernays’ book Propaganda (originally published in 1928) is to an extent a justification of the commo-dification of the ‘public’ and the rise of public relations counsel within the “unworkable fiction” of democracy (Lippmann 2010: 22), but it is also embedded within the ideology of heteronormativity. In some ways his works could be interpreted as progressive in respect to the status of women, as he anticipated a shift in gendered power relations. However, his thinking was limited in its scope, which extended only to legitimizing women enhancing men’s roles:

Just as women supplement men in private life, so they will supplement men in public life by concentrating their organized efforts on those objects which men are likely to ignore. There is a tremendous field for women as active protagonists of new ideas and new methods of political and social housekeeping.

(Bernays 2005: 133)

More broadly, Bernay’s work is of interest for its gendered depiction of the ‘crowd’ as female while the propagandist’s, or public relations counsel’s, power was ‘cool and manly’ (Miller 2005: 21). Constructing a gendered metaphoric representation of the “public” as essentially female within a masculinist discourse provided public relations counsel with the means by which their domination and subordination of the public could be naturalized as common sense. This suggests that power relations of gender were hegemonically concealed and performed so that ‘an expectation ends up producing the very phenomenon that it anticipates’ (Butler 2008: xv). Arguably, these gendered interpretations continued to underpin and shape public relations thinking and practice over the twentieth century.

Hegemony takes many subtle...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Routledge new directions in public relations and communication research
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Contributors
• Foreword
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: Gender and public relations: making meaning, challenging assumptions
• 1 Surface effects: public relations and the politics of gender
• 2 Caring about public relations and the gendered cultural intermediary role
• 3 Interrogating inequalities perpetuated in a feminized field: using Critical Race Theory and the intersectionality lens to render visible that which should not be disaggregated
• 4 Gendered performance and identity work in PR consulting relationships: a UK perspective
• 5 Mothers, bodies, and breasts: organizing strategies and tactics in women's activism
• 6 Celebrity, gender and reputation management at the BBC
• 7 Campaigning for ‘women, peace and security’: transnational advocacy networks at the United Nations Security Council
• 8 Gender, culture and power: competing discourses on the Philippine Reproductive Health Bill
• 9 ‘I want to voice out my opinion’: bringing migrant women into union work
• 10 ‘Mammography at age 40 to 49 saves lives; just not enough of them’: gendered political intersections in communicating breast cancer screening policy to publics
• 11 Ex-journos and promo girls: feminization and professionalization in the Australian public relations industry
• Index