ABSTRACT
While postw'ar debates surrounding the cultural industries reflected a growing concern about how advanced technologies of simulation and replication often served to redefine political subjectivity in terms of economic interests, feminist and African-American critics of the 1970S extended these debates to consider how such technologies were deployed to produce subject positions consistent with patriarchal and Eurocentric interests. Such critics examined a wide array of cultural industries, but focused most intensely on the technologies of advertising, where the brevity of messages demanded highly stylized images to convey information quickly and the pervasive repetition of these images transformed style into stereotype. Operating on the assumption that media images played a crucial role in cultural perceptions of gendered and raced identities, such critics typically took one of two opposing positions: either advertising was inherently and irrevocably part of the machinery of social oppression or, if the conscious-
54 ness of industry executives could be raised and media images changed, then advertising itself could become an important tool in the struggle for liberty and justice for all. Significantly, advertisers seemed responsive to such arguments, and the 1970S saw an increasing number of media messages that replaced conventional images of women and African Americans with new ones that appeared to reflect more accurately their accomplishments and political gains.
